Neutering Net Neutrality

Welcome to my first appearance here on the Nutmeg Media Blog. Greg asked me to provide a different angle to the usual posting on the blog: the political one.

I asked Greg for a bit of direction on the first post ad he pointed me to ‘Net Neutrality’. Thanks. My first posting gets to be over a proposal that is off the mainstream radar, and is full of exaggerations and misapprehensions.

Some of you may have seen the video that musician Moby did.

And news stories that can’t seem to get the details straight are causing problems too. CNET tells you that Moby went to Capitol Hill to lobby Congress and urge them to pass the Net Neutrality provisions, and then they give you quotes from Moby saying that “the current system works fine”. The average reader probably views this as a contradiction. Either Moby got it wrong or CNET got it wrong.

It’s tough to tell because we only know the context of the quote given. What Moby means is that the current way that the internet operates is how it should be. But as business evolves they will begin to restrict access to the internet. Net Neutrality will prevent them from stepping over those bounds.

But there’s hardly room for that on the page, I guess.

Net Neutrality is basically the concept that no one person controls the content or existence of the internet. Providers offer you internet access and don’t restrict what that access provides.

And why would they? If you use Yahoo! Email, then you’re not going to subscribe to an internet service that prohibits the use of it.

What is REALLY interesting to me here is the way the rhetoric changed because of how the Congress changed. Before the election the rhetoric was just like every other issue and invoked the word “Bush” as often as possible. But, now that Democrats are running two out of the three theaters, people are out of places to point their fingers. Or are they?

There’s still big business, our friend, our enemy. They give us lower prices on our preferred goods, and they shut down Ol’ Granny’s Sewing shop down on Old Main Street.

But who here is under the impression that four companies – AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Time Warner - supply the internet connection to everyone alive? There’s NetZero, there’s AOL, there’s your local cable provider which doesn’t quite ever seem to have a coverage area that extends to where you happen to live, just to name a few. What do these people have to say about it?

Everyone is worried about what happens if AT&T decides that Yahoo can pay it millions of dollars and so it gets through to your computer faster, but JohnsDowntownMilwaukeeShoeShop.com can’t pay so it might get through but probably won’t.
But AOL or some other business will standup and inform you that “they offer you half the internet for $50, and we offer you all of it for $25”. Tough choice?

And your ISP has been determining how fast your connection is based on how much you can pay since Al Gore invented fire.

Why shouldn’t we let a company go ahead and try to do this and let them find out how fast it’s customer’s jump ship to a competitor? My gut feeling is that those companies understand this is the dumbest idea since one Congressman decided we ought to charge postage for emails.

Besides, hasn’t the internet historically been the industry that has been most responsive to consumer input/criticism/innovation? If the internet really is the last frontier of a truly freemarket in terms of consumer influence then why should its philanderers think this round will be any different?

This is a classic "hands off", "government free", choose your slogan, scenario.

However one caveat where I'm going to cite opinion neutrality. Letting companies restrict your access could result in decreased technological innovation. Where would the incentive be? All the innovations would be for those willing to pay the highest cost, while the rest of us might as well go back to using an abacus, writing on stone tablets, and going to our small wooden frame schools in a horse drawn buggy where everyone from ages 2-25 is learning the same thing.

Plus, I don't want to pay any more for my internet than I already do.

Yours Truly,
PoliTech