the reason the government is involved is because the internet is a utility and must treat all comers the same. If they're toll Lanes on the internet it will stifle growth and give those with big bucks the advantage over smaller companies and leave the consumer paying more. More for a service that costs several times what people in other countries pay and delivers a far slower service to US customers than what foregin countries provide their citizens. I pay $47.00 a month for the slowest service available 10mb/s and it rarely ever gets close to being 10mb/s.
We need net neutrality to keep the US competitive to the world around us.
I left this reply to Jessica, edited for clarity:
“[T]he internet is a utility” is an arbitrary assertion, driven by entitlement and greed of “consumers” and political cronies and the power lust of politicians, to justify monopolistic control by government. And that’s the point: net neutrality is a means to an end. Utilities are government enforced monopolies. Utilitization of the internet is likely the goal of net neutrality statists. But it is unjust and economically stupid to grant certain ISP companies monopoly status over certain regions, like electric companies, thus giving complete control of the internet to the government. These monopolies are beholden to the political class. It’s bad enough when it comes to electric utilities. It’s particularly dangerous when it comes to the internet, because who controls the internet controls a huge slice of the intellectual life of the country.
Collectivism is the moral escape hatch whenever one wants to justify running roughshod over other people’s lives, property, and rights. Countries don’t “provide” anything. A country is a society of individuals and individual associations. Individual producers and groups of individual producers (companies) offer and provide through investment, work, and trade. To say “the country provides” is to invite aggressive government coercion into private lives and the commandeering by the political class of private property. Citizens of a moral country don’t permit that. Collectivism holds that the center of moral concern is the group, not the individual. Collectivists speak of the group not as as collection of sovereign individuals but as an entity separate from and superior over the individual. The ISPs aren’t “the country.” They’re mere individual associations, of no consequence if “the country” wants to “provide” some good or service or “utility.” Who is “the country”? Anyone who claims to be—in this case, Jessica. Who is not the “country”? The owners and investors of the ISPs. That’s the collectivist gimmick.
It’s true that net neutrality stifles investment and thus innovation. It’s wrong to think government regulators are consumer welfare-driven and absurd to think ISP companies are out to gouge their own customers. The exact opposite is true: Regulators are beholden to politicians, political factions, and special interests. Private companies must ultimately satisfy customers. A government that forces ISPs to “treat all comers the same” is itself violating that principle where it truly counts—equal protection of the law. What happens when a single customer starts eating up vast amounts of an ISP’s capacity, to the detriment of the rest of an ISP’s customers? That’s what Comcast faced about 10 years ago. An ISP must be free, as a matter of law and morality, to charge the “data hog” more to, for example, finance increased capacity to meet the demand—or restrict its usage to protect its other customers’ access to the network. An ISP must be free, as a matter of moral right and law, to prioritize its users and manage its network capacity utilization. It must be free to evolve its network and respond as markets change and evolve, not as bureaucrats dictate. A net neutrality straight jacket cripples its ability to do so, thus crippling innovation. [In fact, as Andrea O'Sullivan points out at Reason, Obama’s 2015 “Open Internet {net neutrality} Order” didn’t actually forbid ISP’s from treating different traffic differently. It put the FCC in charge of dictating those differing treatments. In other words, “net neutrality” is not about net neutrality. It’s about government control]
ISP’s are vital parts of the internet. We should be thankful for their massive and continuing investments to keep up with consumer demand, innovative content, and constantly changing markets, and provide the superhighway for all of the internet content. Who will make these investments when their “reward” will be to turn control over to government bureaucrats and keep their networks dumb and stupid? At the very least, government controls will stifle would-be competitors, large as well as small who might otherwise be able to fill a market niche ignored by the big ISP guys. The government-imposed inability of ISP’s to manage their own private networks by their own judgment for the benefit of their customers and profit is the real threat to innovation and competitive pricing. Their rights should be protected as much as consumers and the Netflixes of the world, and all should be free to contract voluntarily to mutual advantage—or not—and none should be able to use the government as the hired gun to gain special economic advantages at the expense of others. If the Apples, Netflixes, and Googles don’t like what the existing ISPs offer, they are free to start their own. They can certainly afford it.
Related Reading:
NET NEUTRALITY VS. INTERNET FREEDOM—Alex Epstein
Note to Net Neutralityists: Be Careful What You Wish For
Why ‘Net Neutrality’ Drives the Left Crazy—Tunku Varadarajan for the Wall street Journal
Related Viewing:
NET NEUTRALITY NEUTERS THE INTERNET—Interview with Steve Simpson, the Ayn Rand Institute’s director of legal studies.
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