the smedley log - suburban scrawl

Net neutrality: kicked out of the House

I posted a little bit on net neutrality over at Philly Future yesterday. In that post I quoted two main sources. One was an opinion piece from yesterday’s Inquirer. The other piece was from Asymptomatic, in which Owen makes a sensible plea.

Then I had some other, more visceral, thoughts.

Failure to pass a binding net neutrality bill doesn’t necessarily mean big broadband (as I like to call the ISP’s lobbying against enforcement) will start cutting off access to sites that don’t meet their favor. Sure they could, but there’s no way to know for sure that they will, right?

I mean, leaving your door unlocked when you go on vacation doesn’t necessarily mean someone will walk in and steal all your cherished household possessions while you’re gone. Someone might break in, but it’s far from a certainty.

Now if you hang a sign outside that tells everyone the door’s open for whichever unscrupulous person might wish to invade, well, the likelihood goes up a little bit.

Which isn’t to suggest that a burglar and an broadband company pose comparable threats (though sometimes I’m not sure which one is done more of a disservice by the comparison).

People arguing against net neutrality enforcement tend to spin the same tired line about free markets knowing best. As it pertains to public interest, this idea is a myth. What free markets know best is how to chase the almighty dollar – a practice which will, at some point, inevitably fly in the face of net neutrality.

Observing that smidgen of public trust is the price big broadband should pay for the right to make billions off of a publicly-pioneered network.

(But this is just off-the-cuff pronouncement; for a more evenly-weighted take, read the Philly Future piece along with the several others linked to it.)

It seems to me that your analogy doesn’t go quite far enough. In this case, in order to be a burglar you have to get your burglar’s license from the government.

As for the part about free markets, I think they might actually “know best”, but we will never know. The communications industry is so far from anything resembling a free market that the little bits of nonsense here and there about deregulation or not regulating completely miss the point. And all public posturing aside, the communications industry doesn’t really want free markets, they want to use the power of the state to ensure their continued profitability. (sorry, I’ll quit with the Libertarian rant now.)

I should have attacked the free market point a little differently.

I’m not a fan of the strict free market, but that’s probably okay, because, as you suggest, there isn’t anything resembling a free market, either in telecommunications or elsewhere in our economy. The markets are always being manipulated, whether they’re “deregulated” or not.

I guess if I had to clean it up, I’d say that I don’t believe strict free market ideals necessarily serve public interest, and they fall especially short when practiced arbitrarily in the poor excuse for a free market economy we have here. (At this point, I’m imagining some personification of our economy showing up on a commercial and starting out with, “I’m not a real free market econonmy, but I play one on TV…”)

I should have taken more words to make my point, and I knew the analogy was lacking something, but that’s what I usually end up with when I have 10 minutes to write at five in the morning.

Ummm, as I sit here using my Comcast account, I am perhaps not real entitled to harp on them, but can’t see the free market flying for them seeing as they were working so hard to get the “Keystone Zone” money. I just don’t have the right crayons to color these people innocent.

In Owen’s article, the Cox Interactive/Craigslist example, even though that’s not technically Comcast, it could easily and quickly go there. Industry creep makes me ill – remember not needing to find a Wawa for a free ATM. Remember when that 1st major bank chain pulled it locally (which I’m sure was happening in a lot of other “locally”s around the same time). A lot of the competitors were very “Well, I never..”, then once they saw the chain wasn’t really taking a hit then they were doing you a favor by charging you “a lower” ATM fee than the competitor, etc. So – as time goes on and chinks in the system, either a la Cox or the legislative “sneak ins” crawl through, if the outrage doesn’t creep up high enough then that’s just like opening the floodgates.

And no, it’s not paranoia when everyone’s out to get you.

[…] There have been some great posts from the Philly area on the topic of net neutrality below are a few samples pulled from a query using Philly Future's wonderful search tool. The Smedley Log […]

“Ummm, as I sit here using my Comcast account, I am perhaps not real entitled to harp on them …”
-of course you are, Ellen. I can harp, even though Verizon is enabling me to do it (of course there’s money involved in me being allowed, so it’s not like they’re doing me a favor or anything like that).

But the point is to harp away, if you please. That’s the whole point of any argument for free expression, isn’t it?