Schmidt makes great arguments for why government should not meddle with newspapers. Unfortunately the same arguments could be made to say government should not meddle w/ ISP's who charge web services for premium pipes.
That's a mirror in many ways of the argument for net neutrality regulations. Neutrality advocates want to regulate one layer of providers -- the pipes -- for the way they intervene between content/service providers and audiences, siphoning revenue from the endpoints. the absence of intervention, they say, value is collected by the undeserving network tollkeepers, not the deserving novel internet services. Only by intervening to curtail the midpoints' chokehold, will we get the competitive and quality network services we need.
Does that help illustrate the contradiction?
Net-neutrality rules are meant to ensure that the ISP will keep a level playing field for all business passing through it. Google has kept the playing field perfectly level for all news shops, it's just that the field has become very bad for all of them.
The FTC's trial balloons around taxing aggregators, enforcing new 'hot news' rights, or subsidizing news producers are also motivated by the desire to provide a 'level playing field' for newsgatherers and story-originators, where a near-monopoly like Google, or thinly-staffed all-cut-and-paste-no-research aggregators, can't capture all the value news media create.
Once you invite committees and congresspeople to set rules to reallocate the revenues from an activity, where do you stop? (Even if economist/philosopher-kings can tell the difference between the right places to intervene, and the wrong ones, can our political system?)
If the FCC can ban certain service packages in the public interest, why can't the FTC force republishers to buy distribution rights from traditional media in the public interest?
Google wants its pot-of-gold to be protected from meddling network operators by new rulemaking. Why can't the newspapers ask for their pot-of-gold to be protected from Google by new rulemaking?
One of the merits of each case must be their practicality, and at least to me, net neutrality seems relatively straightforward compared to newspaper regulation. It is more-or-less the default state of the internet today, I believe, while newspaper regs appear harder to craft.
Regulators could fail to discern the right vs. wrong places to intervene, as you say, but that's all the more reason we ought to point them out.
> [...] then yes, that 'neutrality' enforcement is about curtailing the ISP's revenues [...]
But is that really what it's _about_? I think it is a result, but the aim isn't to affect their revenues, the aim is to ensure fair competition, by preventing the ISPs from abusing the monopoly that the public have granted them (exclusive frequencies, cabling, etc). That is, I see it as an anti-monopolistic measure.
> The FTC's trial balloons [...] are also motivated by the desire to provide a 'level playing field' for newsgatherers and story-originators, where a near-monopoly like Google, or thinly-staffed all-cut-and-paste-no-research aggregators, can't capture all the value news media create.
You point out and I agree that Google is a near-monopolist, but that fact doesn't automatically make these measures anti-monopolistic in spirit. They are measures that would regulate any provider of aggregation.
Wouldn't implementing such rules suggest that we see aggregators as simply parasitic? And if that's the case, why can't we just let the newspapers be protected under good old copyright (another public-approved monopoly)? No need to demand a tax on aggregation, just disallow the crawler access to your site.
> Once you invite committees and congresspeople to set rules to reallocate the revenues from an activity, where do you stop?
Sorry, I think that's a slippery-slope argument.
Btw, wrt net-neutrality: the government started meddling with this from day one, by licensing frequencies, handing out cabling contracts, etc. So the way I see it, net-neutrality is not a market-intervention, it is a band-aid to another market-intervention.
> If the FCC can ban certain service packages in the public interest, why can't the FTC force republishers to buy distribution rights from traditional media in the public interest?
I think they could. The question then is, are both in the public interest?
> Google wants its pot-of-gold to be protected from meddling network operators by new rulemaking. Why can't the newspapers ask for their pot-of-gold to be protected from Google by new rulemaking?
Yeah, there's too much legislation that just seems designed to protect someone's pot of gold. I like the other point better: what's in the long-term public interest?
Ack. The U.S. government is already talking about an internet "kill" switch. If they owned the infra as you suggest they wouldn't have talked about it...