"The new policy is a big political victory for Google and other Web content providers whose business model depends on free-loading off the huge capital investments in broadband made by others."
Anyone who could write that either is not in possession of the facts, or has chosen to disregard the facts. Lies and inaccuracies do not a cogent argument make.
Unless I'm misunderstanding, and your point was to claim that free-market arguments must be based on lies?
How is there any freeloading going on? Where can you get free bandwidth? Oh that's right.. you can't. You have to have agreements with people to connect to their network. It is like you have have an agreement with bob and i have an agreement with bob, but you're saying that I'm freeloading off of you -- even though nobody is going against any preexisting agreement.
Pointing out that another party isn't arguing in good faith isn't unfair. The case for net neutrality is pretty clear cut and doesn't need to be laid out in full every time someone posts an article, especially from a useless rag like the Wall Street Journal.
Google pays for internet connection to their servers. Google's users pay for their own internet connections, in order to have access to websites (such as Google). Calling Google a free-loader when not only is it already paying for what it uses, but when its existence itself contributes substantially to the value of connecting to the internet is beyond wildly inaccurate and wandering into either delusion or dishonesty.
It'd be like getting three paragraphs into a scientific paper and finding a reference to creationism as "a scientific theory with strong support"; it undermines the credibility of the article so badly that it's not unreasonable to question the value of reading further.
First, Google "probably" doesn't buy bandwidth on a level playing field with the rest of the market (people have tried to suss this out of their financial disclosures, but it's also common sense).
Second, Google buys a specific kind of bandwidth. Last mile costs dominate over backbone costs.
Finally, and from a political perspective most simply: they're AT&T's circuits, AT&T's DSLAMs, AT&T's routers, and AT&T's operating expenditures. They should be able to do with them what they want.
On that last point, even though I support net neutrality, I sympathize pretty strongly with the argument. At what point does the government get to say "your business is so important that we're going to start regulating how you price it even though you operate in a competitive market"?
I want to say clearly that I agree with you that Google isn't in fact "freeloading", and I think the argument the op-ed makes for that claim is dubious. But I don't think you can declare, cut-and-dry, that it's a bad-faith argument.
However much Google is paying, one has to assume that it's "enough" in some sense, in that someone is selling it to them on a voluntary basis. Last mile costs to reach customers would, presumably, be paid for by the customer's subscription fees. If a company is losing money selling internet access to customers I don't see how the failure of their pricing structure is Google's fault.
Also, large amounts of infrastructure were created back when AT&T was a government-backed national monopoly, and even today one would have to be extremely charitable to describe the US telecommunications market as "competitive". Not to mention that there's a strong argument to be made that access to communication is so vitally important to society (in the sense of having very large positive externalities) as to justify government intervention, but that's a largely separate issue.
I like market solutions as much as anyone else but in a market that's already, and perhaps inherently, deeply dysfunctional it's not obvious that "less regulation" means better overall results. Markets and economies do not exist to be decorative or to promote political goals, they exist to create value for society, a point that seems to be lost on many people on all sides of the political spectrum.
Anyway, I'm not claiming that it's clearly an argument in bad faith--it probably isn't. What I'm claiming is that the statement is sufficiently absurd to cast doubt on the reasoning of the entire article, and having since read the entire article I saw little to persuade me otherwise.
Last mile costs do indeed dominate. But, last I checked, I pay for that in the form of a monthly fee to my ISP to provide service to my apartment. So nobody's "freeloading" here.
As for why neutrality is a good thing, well, the simple argument is that I've paid $X/mo. for a particular service. That service is an Internet connection at a certain speed and up to a certain amount of data transferred. Not "an Internet connection unless I use Skype or watch lots of Youtube videos, in which case it gets throttled -- sorry, 'quality-ensured' -- down to a trickle".
And that's as it should be, because that's what fosters innovation: if new and interesting uses for an Internet connection have to contend with throttling and degradation imposed by companies which are already being paid to provide the bandwidth, well, it seems to me that there won't be nearly so much innovation.
Is that reasonable grounds for regulation? History seems to think so; we've been enforcing common-carrier status on various related fields for quite a while now, and it doesn't seem to have caused floods of lawsuits or hampered innovation or infrastructure as the free-market argument says it should. And it should of course be noted that the cozy relationship AT&T had with the government (which regulated the hell out of it for many years) made it profitable enough to sink huge amounts of money into R&D, giving us Bell Labs, etc., further putting the lie to the free-market argument.
And, of course, that's without getting into things like subsidies provided to telecommunications companies to get them to build out infrastructure (since one consistent claim is that there's just not enough bandwidth to go around, this is particularly relevant) -- so far as I can tell, they've yet to hold up their end of that bargain, but I think the people who've had to foot the bill for them have a right to expect them to.
"an Internet connection unless I use Skype or watch lots of Youtube videos, in which case it gets throttled -- sorry, 'quality-ensured' -- down to a trickle"
I'd love if I could get an internet connection like this, provided it was substantially cheaper. Now you may think this is silly as why don't I just buy a lower data cap. The problem is I live with people with whom it is very hard to enforce any sane usage policy on. We go over our cap regularly. Now if I could "outsource" the enforcement to the ISP that would be different.
I think the main point of the op-ed is, in essence, that it is dangerous to allow government regulators to become the traffic cop of the Internet.
That is the free-market case. You can disagree with it, but that doesn't mean it is based on lies (though the Google reference is a cheap shot).
It is a philosophical disagreement: one either has faith in centralized authority being benign and protective or one is skeptical of that premise. The free-market view is skeptical and doesn't just assume that government regulation will wind up being benign. Once established, the only limit to such authority is . . . nothing more than the discretion of the regulators themselves (what has the FCC done to warrant placing faith in its future decisions in this manner?).
Government mandates tend to morph over time and they are backed by institutional power as to which individuals are often powerless to resist. There is no gain in freedom when a society cedes control in ever-larger amounts to a central authority without proper checks on such authority. Again, anyone is free to disagree. But this is a principled position that reasonable people can adopt, and it has nothing to do with being a shill for AT&T or any other telco.
Remember, what government can regulate, it can also tax. Will that be a benign outcome if some future administration starts to tax the hell out of Internet-based transactions? What principled argument is left once it is ceded that this is the government's domain to do with it what it will (whether on behalf of some lobbying group or not), even if this means stepping on the property rights of companies or individuals.
I realize I am going against the grain here when it comes to what is obviously a tidal wave of emotional support for this initiative within this community. But what spirit of comity exists when it cannot even be conceded that reasonable minds can differ on such an issue?
Sure it's possible. It's also possible the $894,379 AT&T gave him last year has something to do with it. This was the most AT&T gave to any single individual while their overall payout to legislators was $9.4M total.
McCain on the 96 Telecom Act:
“It is nothing less than an elaborate influence-peddling scheme in which both parties conspire to stay in office by selling the country to the highest bidder,”
AT&T is also a huge contributor in Dem politics, and a client of David Axelrod's former firm. But besides that, what you're implying is also tripped up by post hoc ergo propter hoc: It would make just as much sense for AT&T to donate to McCain because of his position as it would for McCain to take a strong anti-neutrality position because of the donation.
Given the political ideas behind net neutrality --- ideas I support, by the way --- I lean towards the former interpretation. Net neutrality is an activist regulatory posture.
If it were someone other than Sen. McCain I'd be more willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. He was previously involved in an influence peddling scheme (Keating Five) and I can't quite figure out how his public position on lobbying matches the reality that he does indeed take lobbyist money. Something just doesn't add up for me.
Nothing new here. Be skeptical of politicians who constantly talk about how they are above influence from lobbyists. It's a good way to cover your tracks. It's called Double Think and it works really well.
-sarcasm-
I, for one, support net neutrality. I can't wait for the people who brought us the amazing FCC to regulate the hell out of the internet. Maybe while they're at it they could stop me from getting rick-rolled so much...
-/sarcasm-
I'm skeptical of politicians...which is exactly why I support the concept of net neutrality but I could never support letting the US Government enforce it.
Since net neutrality does not seem to be in the economic best interest of the ISPs and wireless carriers, government is likely the only way to enforce it.
In the presence of real competition, network discrimination wouldn't be in the best interests of many ISPs, because they'd shed customers over it. Customer turnover is a huge issue for ISPs.
Better the devil I know (corporate greed) than the devil I don't (lobbyist driven re-election hungry politicians)
In the same way, the government has exactly zero economic interest in a correctly regulated network. Over time, laws have a way of favoring those who are connected over those who are not... Goldman Sachs springs to mind as an example of just such behavior.
Government always has an interest in regulating bad behavior... Some parts of the internet show bad behavior, but they are punishing the whole lot just to enforce a few.
People are wholey very good creatures. But there are times when a person can become evil and that is what the government is for...
How does it have an interest in regulating bad behavior? How do people in government benefit from such regulation?
In practice, it seems government has an interest in threatening regulation in order to extract concessions (campaign contributions) from regulated groups. There is little connection between the well-being of society and the incentives facing politicians.
I consider government "the devil I know" at least compared to corporations like Verizon and Comcast. I may have little say in the functioning of American government, but I have precisely zero say in the operations of large corporations. It seems self-defeating to abandon the only measure of societal control all citizens have equal access to, because of some cynicism of politics.
Your purchasing decision probably means more to Verizon or Comcast than your vote does to an average bureaucrat. "Large" corporations are dwarfed in size by the US government, which is the largest corporation in the world.
I support the concept of a neutral network and a fair playing ground on the internet for all. I also think the government and the FCC isn't an institution that can provide it. How is that inconsistent? What evidence is there that the US Government can magically regulate this very chaotic environment?
They regulate the radio waves. There's money to be made there but it's a total disaster and a near monopoly to boot.
They regulate the wireless spectrum...and the US has, hands down, the worst cellular network of any first world country. (I'll admit that this isn't all the US' fault, but they contribute to the problem)
What makes you think turning over the reigns of network priority will be any different?
I'm not going to be very popular for saying this however to be honest net neutrality is not currently a problem. So why fix it? Even if John McCain's stated reasons for introducing this bill are completely idiotic and ignorant, to me what the FCC is introducing seems like unnecessary legislation.
If net neutrality becomes a problem, the market will react people will stop using ISP X, if all the ISPs do it then the government should intervene but it is not currently a problem.
I don't live in the US though so if I'm missing something please tell me.
"If net neutrality becomes a problem, the market will react people will stop using ISP X"
Any of the networks your information travels through may decide to de-prioritize traffic to a site you visit. Your ISP is probably only in control of the first few hops.
But that does not negate the competitive principle that he articulated. Many, perhaps most of the products we buy involve a chain (or tree) of producers, all keeping each other honest by the competitive principle. In the making and selling of the pencil, one company mines the graphite, another shapes it into the final form, a third makes it immediately available to the public, and there may be many in between. Similarly for the other components of the pencil - the wood, the rubber, the metal, the paint. It's a vast cooperative effort, and most of it is not directly connected to the final customer.
One thing you're missing is that for the most part there is no substantial competitive market for broadband internet in the USA. For many people, their choices are "put up with what the ISP offers" or "use dial-up".
As for the necessity, the whole thing was sparked because of stuff that telecom executives actually talked about, so it's not completely speculative, just somewhat preemptive.
People will talk about all sorts of things. If they talk about it but don't do it, then that's evidence that the talk is impotent, and that's even more reason not to regulate.
The relative lack of competition introduces many problems aside from net nonneutrality (which is currently a "vaporware" problem, like Duke Nukem Forever). One problem is relatively high prices and relatively low bandwidth compared to what appears technically feasible (judging by other countries). Net neutrality regulation will not kill this bird, but one stone stands a good chance of killing many birds: de-regulating the cable providers, ending their local monopolies. Provision of cable television is one of the many examples of a non-free market in the US. Other examples are medicine and banking, and in America today our major crises are in... yup, medicine and banking. Computer manufacturing is highly deregulated, as I think is clothing and (for the most part) food (though there are some subsidies and protection for certain items, like sugar and corn). There isn't, so far as I know, a computer crisis, or a clothing crisis, or a famine. The main computer crisis I remember was the Y2K bug, and that is famous for being a non-spectacular crisis, if it was a real crisis at all.
36 comments
[ 393 ms ] story [ 946 ms ] thread"The new policy is a big political victory for Google and other Web content providers whose business model depends on free-loading off the huge capital investments in broadband made by others."
Anyone who could write that either is not in possession of the facts, or has chosen to disregard the facts. Lies and inaccuracies do not a cogent argument make.
Unless I'm misunderstanding, and your point was to claim that free-market arguments must be based on lies?
I'm likely to agree with the argument you come up with. I'm just pointing out: you haven't come up with anything yet.
It'd be like getting three paragraphs into a scientific paper and finding a reference to creationism as "a scientific theory with strong support"; it undermines the credibility of the article so badly that it's not unreasonable to question the value of reading further.
Second, Google buys a specific kind of bandwidth. Last mile costs dominate over backbone costs.
Finally, and from a political perspective most simply: they're AT&T's circuits, AT&T's DSLAMs, AT&T's routers, and AT&T's operating expenditures. They should be able to do with them what they want.
On that last point, even though I support net neutrality, I sympathize pretty strongly with the argument. At what point does the government get to say "your business is so important that we're going to start regulating how you price it even though you operate in a competitive market"?
I want to say clearly that I agree with you that Google isn't in fact "freeloading", and I think the argument the op-ed makes for that claim is dubious. But I don't think you can declare, cut-and-dry, that it's a bad-faith argument.
Also, large amounts of infrastructure were created back when AT&T was a government-backed national monopoly, and even today one would have to be extremely charitable to describe the US telecommunications market as "competitive". Not to mention that there's a strong argument to be made that access to communication is so vitally important to society (in the sense of having very large positive externalities) as to justify government intervention, but that's a largely separate issue.
I like market solutions as much as anyone else but in a market that's already, and perhaps inherently, deeply dysfunctional it's not obvious that "less regulation" means better overall results. Markets and economies do not exist to be decorative or to promote political goals, they exist to create value for society, a point that seems to be lost on many people on all sides of the political spectrum.
Anyway, I'm not claiming that it's clearly an argument in bad faith--it probably isn't. What I'm claiming is that the statement is sufficiently absurd to cast doubt on the reasoning of the entire article, and having since read the entire article I saw little to persuade me otherwise.
As for why neutrality is a good thing, well, the simple argument is that I've paid $X/mo. for a particular service. That service is an Internet connection at a certain speed and up to a certain amount of data transferred. Not "an Internet connection unless I use Skype or watch lots of Youtube videos, in which case it gets throttled -- sorry, 'quality-ensured' -- down to a trickle".
And that's as it should be, because that's what fosters innovation: if new and interesting uses for an Internet connection have to contend with throttling and degradation imposed by companies which are already being paid to provide the bandwidth, well, it seems to me that there won't be nearly so much innovation.
Is that reasonable grounds for regulation? History seems to think so; we've been enforcing common-carrier status on various related fields for quite a while now, and it doesn't seem to have caused floods of lawsuits or hampered innovation or infrastructure as the free-market argument says it should. And it should of course be noted that the cozy relationship AT&T had with the government (which regulated the hell out of it for many years) made it profitable enough to sink huge amounts of money into R&D, giving us Bell Labs, etc., further putting the lie to the free-market argument.
And, of course, that's without getting into things like subsidies provided to telecommunications companies to get them to build out infrastructure (since one consistent claim is that there's just not enough bandwidth to go around, this is particularly relevant) -- so far as I can tell, they've yet to hold up their end of that bargain, but I think the people who've had to foot the bill for them have a right to expect them to.
I'd love if I could get an internet connection like this, provided it was substantially cheaper. Now you may think this is silly as why don't I just buy a lower data cap. The problem is I live with people with whom it is very hard to enforce any sane usage policy on. We go over our cap regularly. Now if I could "outsource" the enforcement to the ISP that would be different.
That is the free-market case. You can disagree with it, but that doesn't mean it is based on lies (though the Google reference is a cheap shot).
It is a philosophical disagreement: one either has faith in centralized authority being benign and protective or one is skeptical of that premise. The free-market view is skeptical and doesn't just assume that government regulation will wind up being benign. Once established, the only limit to such authority is . . . nothing more than the discretion of the regulators themselves (what has the FCC done to warrant placing faith in its future decisions in this manner?).
Government mandates tend to morph over time and they are backed by institutional power as to which individuals are often powerless to resist. There is no gain in freedom when a society cedes control in ever-larger amounts to a central authority without proper checks on such authority. Again, anyone is free to disagree. But this is a principled position that reasonable people can adopt, and it has nothing to do with being a shill for AT&T or any other telco.
Remember, what government can regulate, it can also tax. Will that be a benign outcome if some future administration starts to tax the hell out of Internet-based transactions? What principled argument is left once it is ceded that this is the government's domain to do with it what it will (whether on behalf of some lobbying group or not), even if this means stepping on the property rights of companies or individuals.
I realize I am going against the grain here when it comes to what is obviously a tidal wave of emotional support for this initiative within this community. But what spirit of comity exists when it cannot even be conceded that reasonable minds can differ on such an issue?
McCain on the 96 Telecom Act:
“It is nothing less than an elaborate influence-peddling scheme in which both parties conspire to stay in office by selling the country to the highest bidder,”
Certainly looks like it.
Given the political ideas behind net neutrality --- ideas I support, by the way --- I lean towards the former interpretation. Net neutrality is an activist regulatory posture.
http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs
I'm skeptical of politicians...which is exactly why I support the concept of net neutrality but I could never support letting the US Government enforce it.
Large, entrenched corporations only support "free markets" insofar as it makes convenient political cover for "let us do what we want".
In the same way, the government has exactly zero economic interest in a correctly regulated network. Over time, laws have a way of favoring those who are connected over those who are not... Goldman Sachs springs to mind as an example of just such behavior.
People are wholey very good creatures. But there are times when a person can become evil and that is what the government is for...
In practice, it seems government has an interest in threatening regulation in order to extract concessions (campaign contributions) from regulated groups. There is little connection between the well-being of society and the incentives facing politicians.
I support the concept of a neutral network and a fair playing ground on the internet for all. I also think the government and the FCC isn't an institution that can provide it. How is that inconsistent? What evidence is there that the US Government can magically regulate this very chaotic environment?
They regulate the radio waves. There's money to be made there but it's a total disaster and a near monopoly to boot.
They regulate the wireless spectrum...and the US has, hands down, the worst cellular network of any first world country. (I'll admit that this isn't all the US' fault, but they contribute to the problem)
What makes you think turning over the reigns of network priority will be any different?
If net neutrality becomes a problem, the market will react people will stop using ISP X, if all the ISPs do it then the government should intervene but it is not currently a problem.
I don't live in the US though so if I'm missing something please tell me.
Any of the networks your information travels through may decide to de-prioritize traffic to a site you visit. Your ISP is probably only in control of the first few hops.
As for the necessity, the whole thing was sparked because of stuff that telecom executives actually talked about, so it's not completely speculative, just somewhat preemptive.
The relative lack of competition introduces many problems aside from net nonneutrality (which is currently a "vaporware" problem, like Duke Nukem Forever). One problem is relatively high prices and relatively low bandwidth compared to what appears technically feasible (judging by other countries). Net neutrality regulation will not kill this bird, but one stone stands a good chance of killing many birds: de-regulating the cable providers, ending their local monopolies. Provision of cable television is one of the many examples of a non-free market in the US. Other examples are medicine and banking, and in America today our major crises are in... yup, medicine and banking. Computer manufacturing is highly deregulated, as I think is clothing and (for the most part) food (though there are some subsidies and protection for certain items, like sugar and corn). There isn't, so far as I know, a computer crisis, or a clothing crisis, or a famine. The main computer crisis I remember was the Y2K bug, and that is famous for being a non-spectacular crisis, if it was a real crisis at all.