Net Neutrality: What’s fair? What pays?
Posted on February 18, 2011 at 6.52 pm
Q. What are your thoughts on the issue of Network Neutrality? Specifically, do you believe it should be enforced, and to what degree should the regulation extend. I understand that you would definitely not go as far as some supporters of it, wanting the internet to be turned into a government-provided liberty, or at least a government-granted monopoly, but do you believe some restrictions should be placed on companies like Comcast to ensure equal handling of data, or even restrictions placed on the overarching search engine known as Google, to ensure the fair presentation of information? I thank you for your attention to this topic. — lonelysamurai, from tumblr.
A. As you’ve guessed, I don’t support net neutrality laws. In fact, I don’t support regulation of the internet in general, despite all the disgusting stuff on it which I don’t think should exist.
Here’s the thing: the entire concept behind net neutrality is a giant boogeyman. Let’s consider how many websites the government has shut down. Wait, first, let’s actually consider how many websites the government has shut down by accident:
84,000.
Yes, really:
The US Government has yet again shuttered several domain names this week. The Department of Justice and Homeland Security’s ICE office proudly announced that they had seized domains related to counterfeit goods and child pornography. What they failed to mention, however, is that one of the targeted domains belongs to a free DNS provider, and that 84,000 websites were wrongfully accused of links to child pornography crimes.
Fun, fun — because there’s nothing like the government falsely and unexpectedly accusing you of child pornography in public to start the day off right. Also consider the Big Brother style graphic (or some variation of it) they like to throw up there when they steal a site:
Now let’s consider the last time you had to call Comcast because they weren’t handling data equally. Oh…there wasn’t one. You see, net neutrality doesn’t need be the subject of legislation because it’s not a problem. What’s the expression? — “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
But let’s suppose that this wasn’t just a boogey man the government is probably using to get its hands on our freest remaining means of communication and commerce (but I digress). Let’s suppose companies actually did decide to charge more for different types of data, or even exclude some types of data altogether.
Suppose, in an example which hits close to home, that Verizon decides those libertarians are going down! — and all of the sudden I can’t access any of my websites on my home computer. What will I do? I’ll switch to Comcast or a smaller, local ISP. I’m pretty sure that these other companies, especially the smaller ones, would more than welcome hordes of disenfranchised libertarians…or at least their money, which spends as well as anyone else’s.
Or let’s suppose Google decides it has a personal vendetta against anyone who likes Ron Paul. Hello, Bing! I somehow doubt Mr. Gates’ legions will turn away the supporters of the fundraising-record-breaking candidate from 2008.
On a related note, consider what happened with Wikileaks, which actually was in danger of being taken down (…by the government, not the internet companies, but it’s the most famous example of which I’m aware). Mirror sites sprung up all over the place. It would have been nigh impossible to get that information off the internet. In short, if there’s a demand for the data, it will probably find a way to get through to the people who want it.
It’s also important to consider what is a “fair” presentation of the information — and who should make that decision. Is it fair for Google to rank low traffic child pornography prevention websites above the high traffic actual sites? Or would it be more fair to put them the other way around? And how do you even know for sure how they’re doing it now since the Google algorithms are kept secret? And would you really want the government to make decisions about something like that? We don’t know what kind of people Google hires — but we do know about the government’s standards.
My point is this: Data discrimination by private companies isn’t really a problem we have now, and I find it difficult to view this massive government grasp at power as anything more altruistic than that. We don’t have a net neutrality problem, and even if we did, this is one issue on which I can say with absolute confidence that the market can take care of it. I’m typically not a defender of corporations given their oft corrupt relationships with the government, but I think we can all agree on what they like: Money. Blocking data people are willing to pay to see or share simply does not pay.
Well, it pays if the government is paying you to do it, but that’s another story.
For more libertarian thoughts on this subject, see here, here, and here.
I have to disagree with your position on net neutrality. Even now ISPs are attempting to sell “access to their customers” to outside parties such as content providers where they will slow down or alter the data streams originating from these content providers to the hosts of subscribers. Additionally, blocking certain types of traffic is another demonstrable and fundamental violation of network neutrality principles.
If this type of behavior were to occur on the public telephone network, I believe the problem would be a great deal more obvious to the end user, the public and the government. In fact, there are laws regulating telephone service to prevent precisely this sort of thing.
From my point of view, I make little distinction between the public telephone network and the public internet. They are both public networks and they both require service providers that are paid by subscribers. Why one party can do things that the other cannot does not make sense to me. But would you agree that it would be wrong for your phone company to bill your grandmother for calling you? I expect you would. What if it were some form of entertainment that you are paying for being blocked or limited from calling your phone unless they paid the phone company?
Your boogeyman argument is essentially saying “no one has done anything yet!” But you’re wrong. Comcast has been caught blocking and limiting access to their subscribers from the outside and the FCC got on their case about it. It has happened and will continue to happen until law is on the books to stop it.
Actually, if the phone company tried to block my grandmother from calling me (I assume you meant to say that, not “bill”), I would be upset, certainly, and try to persuade them to stop. However, if they didn’t, I’d simply switch to another phone company.
Now, if they’d given me service not mentioning that she would be blocked and then proceeded to block her, that would be a breach of contract and there would be grounds to get the law involved, of course. So I might support legislation, for instance, saying that web providers would have to specifically list for clients what they’d be blocking at the time of the sale of internet service, though I suspect that wouldn’t even be necessary — you could likely win a case even without such precautions under current contract law.
In short, I don’t object to ISPs blocking content; I can just take my business elsewhere. I do object to them selling complete access to the internet and then not providing it. But that’s simple fraud and breach of contract; we probably don’t need new laws to fix it.