The Truth About ‘Net Neutrality’
24th May 2014
It would be helpful for the Energy and Commerce and future proceedings to address what are faulty premises of net neutrality:
- “Market failures” matter, government failures do not exist.
- Infrastructure companies and content companies are naturally and inherently at odds.
- Infrastructure companies should not control content; however, content companies, special interests and regulatory bureaucracies like FCC should control infrastructure.
- Compulsory net neutrality spawns openness; Market impulses do not.
- Infrastructure companies’ interest lies in withholding rather than selling access. Therefore network competition requires political or regulatory force to exist.
- Discrimination is bad, and non-discrimination exists; Net neutrality is not itself a form of discrimination or of picking sides
- Communications flows (video, information, voice, future innovations like holograms) are maximized by preventing property rights in infrastructure.
- Networks best exist as passive husks; they cannot be a competitive unit. Only the movement of bits from point A to point B on an existing network counts as competition.
- Wall Street, rivals, advertisers, shareholders, consumers and the media are passive and cannot react to inefficient network management
- Capital markets cannot be engaged to generate new infrastructure.
- Neutrality is the highest value: User ownership of grids; liberalization of non-telecom network industries to enable wide-scale, cross-industry infrastructure consortia; “splintering” into and out of the public net by private carriers–all have no role to play on tomorrow’s Internet and may safely be ignored.
Government monopoly worked so well for mail service, telephone service, electrical service, trash service, and trash service, not to mention health care for veterans, that we need to extend crony capitalism regulation to Internet service as well. After all, what could go wrong?