Libertarians make the case: net neutrality is unconstitutional
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
And yes, I'm using libertarians with quote because a real libertarian would have thought a bit more than just "The constitution is the supreme rule!!!" and more about every right involved and how to maximize everyone liberty.
It is -and should be- an all or nothing kind of proposition I think.
I don't want to protect corporate rights over peoples' rights. I want all rights protected in accordance with the non-aggression principle. I don't want you using the power of government to beat down your enemies.
Civil rights were something the government had to step in to protect. I think that net neutrality might be the same kind of thing.
I am not a libertarian and find this argument very unconvincing. Also, my emotional brain tends to impute racism towards those politicians who have advanced it. But it's not an illogical argument.
So in that spirit I'd say: if you think the government should step in to guarantee neutrality, you're not a pure libertarian. You don't need the scare quotes.
The idea that it harms their right to associate freely with the people they chose seems like a misnomer as well. It seems like it does the opposite. It says you are not allowed to turn AWAY customers based on race. Is that phrase or right in the constitution somewhere? I am embarrassingly ignorant in those areas.
Obviously I agree with you on this, but after years of having to confront smart people on HN who disagree with me fundamentally on issues like this, I'm trying to keep a more open mind.
The moment someone can supply an objective, verifiable, scientifically valid proof that formal discrimination would have ended on its own, then I'll consider it. Otherwise, it sounds like after-the-fact rationalizing from people who were part of the problem and ashamed of themselves (as they should be). Ideology and academic hand-waving about the principles of some Invisible Hand moving society forward simply did nothing. The hands that broke the shackles were very visible, covered in dirt sweat and blood, and very pragmatic.
In general, I steer clear of ideological decisions with hand-wave philosophies which hold their conclusions to be self-evident. I see a lot of this in economic discussions, too. My challenge is for these ridiculous vapid ideologies to come with formal justification that doesn't involve circular reasoning or false premises.
But then you look at the last 20 years and you wonder whether quickly changing legislative reality is a good thing to want.
How could you do this for any counter-factual of a government policy? Is criticism of the PATRIOT Act stupid if someone cannot provide an objective, verifiable, scientifically valid proof that we wouldn't have been attacked without it?
So, no, criticisms of the Patriot Act backed by data are not stupid, especially if the criticism is up front and says "we believe this to be true."
For some reason, with newer media, the simple principle of "no meddling in private communications/publishing" gets lost. So we have the FCC, censoring broadcast media, and used via licensing and ownership rules to extract 'favors' for the political classes. And we have people who are ostensibly in favor of free speech inviting this censorious, political-establishment-subservient agency into Internet regulation. No, thank you.
There's no need to tame the Internet to be safe and 'neutral'/neutered like regulated broadcast TV. It's working just fine without the FCC's enlightened approach, which historically has included set-asides for certain favored classes of programming [1], moral crusades, and other benefits for the politically-connected [2].
[1] http://reason.com/blog/2008/06/17/the-fccs-obsolete-quotas
[2] http://reason.com/archives/2008/06/12/the-central-committee-...
Net Neutrality! All bits are equal!
...Well except we want our VOIP calls to be clear so maybe they need priority.
...And there's this new distance medical imaging tech that should have priority because lives are at stake.
...Oh, your industry/business wants help getting an exception written into the law? I'm in Congress, I can help you, pay me.
For some reason, with newer media, the simple principle of
"no meddling in private communications/publishing" gets
lost.
It's working just fine without the FCC's enlightened
approach
I am also in an area with competition, which probably plays a role.
A penny taken off the monthly cost of Internet access by fiat is a penny subsidy granted to Internet service customers.
In a competitive market for Internet service, providers can't gouge customers because they'd lose to competitors that didn't.
You are making a stronger argument against local service cable, copper loop and RF monopolies than you are against the libertarian opposition to net neutrality.
When the market fails to provide a fix, the government should step in to keep the public from being at the mercy of greedy monopolies.
And if things are a little expensive, a little limited by private contracts, a little abused by current providers? The march of consumer demand and technology will fix that in a few years.
I've been a Time-Warner customer, and Comcast, and AT&T, and RCN, and Sonic.net. I've hit throttling -- typically for peak total usage, rather than specific applications. But so what? A regulation from the FCC can't make more bandwidth. It can't keep up with even a year or two's needs in flexible new policies to handle changing traffic/application mixes. A competitive market with differentiated services, new technology, and new entrants can keep up.
Way too much defeatism is inherent in the idea that the cable-DSL duopoly is all we'll ever have. That defeatism can be a self-fulfilling prophesy: encumber the industry with national pricing & transit regulations, tell everyone "we've made it so these two safe government-approved choices are all you'll ever need", and you might make that so -- just as the FCC stagnated things for decades with its power-concentrating telephony and broadcast industry regulations.
Twenty years ago, we didn't have a broadband duopoly. We had a zero-opoly. So even a duopoly is an improvement. And it won't last. It's too easy to incrementally string more wires or deploy new wireless technologies, to precisely those customers who chafe under any current limits.
The same competition that got us this far is still working, and doesn't require a bossy Washington DC agency staffed by censors and political-party hack lawyers to save us from ourselves.
You seem to think that essentially any role the government has in a market economy is going to be negative for consumers overall, and that is patently false.
In your analogy to a printing press, you've misplaced the Internet layer. Time Warner is not the "printing press", Hacker News is the printing press. Time Warner is UPS--shipping the pamphlets, periodicals, and books to the end users.
And in case you didn't know, shipping companies ARE regulated by the federal government in how they are allowed to decide what to carry. There is a set of rules called "common carrier" that specifies how shipping companies may advertise their rates, accept or decline customers, etc.
It's a legal system that dates back, in the U.S. at least, to before the railroads, when stage coaches and barges were the best means of getting pamphlets from one town to another. The goal of common carrier law is ensure that members of the public are treated fairly--so that UPS does not sign a side-deal with Barnes and Noble to "accidentally" deliver all of Amazon's books 4 days late.
This impetus for fair delivery is what is behind the push for net neutrality. Understand that without regulatory protection, it would be legal for Time Warner to (for example) sign a deal with Microsoft by which TW would deny passage of Linux files across the TW network. Or Verizon could sign a deal with Apple to block access to Google Play.
Now--the opponents to net neutrality make a very good point that generally speaking these sorts of things have not actually happened. So one could argue that a compelling need for net neutrality has not yet been demonstrated. But your analogy is flawed.
But I suggest that friends of free speech, and against government censorship, should adopt an expansive definition of 'speech' and 'press': everything that's part of the communication creation-delivery process.
Quibbling about definitions and analogies with regard to fundamental rights helps those who want to grow and abuse their power. The FCC does censor. It enforces wiretap requirements. It has, through licensing and ownership rules, created market concentration in other media industries, and preferentially rewarded politically-connected entities. Its board members and staffers are the same kind of congressional-staff/lobbyist/political-partisan lawyers who draft things like SOPA/PIPA for big donors.
Yes, I know there are federal shipping regulations too: and they're also unnecessary and abusive, benefiting large incumbents no matter their initial supposed pro-competition rationales. They are another example of how neutrality regulation will, no matter its initial form, be perverted over time by the political process.
Let Time-Warner or Verizon try such blatantly discriminatory policies. They will be ridiculed, consumers will choose other providers, a blossoming of circumvention technologies will arise. Bits are bits, the Internet works, and it doesn't need an overbearing big brother at the FCC to protect it from such trifling (and still almost entirely hypothetical) provider-meddling.
A similar case to net neutrality has already been ruled in the past, always from wikipedia:
* The first case to use the idea was the Supreme Court's judgment in United States v. Terminal Railroad Association, 224 U.S. 383 (1912). A group of railroads controlling all railway bridges and switching yards into and out of St. Louis prevented competing railway companies from offering transportation to and through that destination. The court held it to be an illegal restraint of trade.
* Associated Press v. United States, 326 U.S. 1 (1945), in which the Supreme Court found that the Associated Press bylaws which limited membership and therefore access to copyrighted news services violated the Sherman Act.
* In Lorain Journal Co. v. United States, 342 U.S. 143, 146-49 (1951), the Lorain Journal was the only local business doing news and advertisements in town. The case was that refusing to place an ad for the customers of a small radio station was a Sherman Act violation. In the end, the court accepted an offer to simply accept the advertisements.
If you hold a facility that can't be easily duplicated you are not really allowed to do as you please with it but you need to offer service to everybody equally or you'll violate the Sherman Act[2].
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_facilities_doctrine [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act
Why preemptively invite the censorship-friendly, wiretap-friendly, incumbent-protecting FCC to start regulating even before there's any problem?
If the US ever adopts a national website blacklist like China, Australia, the UK, and others, it would probably be the same FCC 'network neutrality' regulators who'd monitor ISP compliance. After all, how can the network be truly 'neutral' if it carries illegal information?
It doesn't seem good for the free market (which is captured by a monopolist), not good for the competition, not good for the consumer, not good for the public good, not good for technological advancement and not good for business itself since new discoveries create new economies.
In essence, ignoring network neutrality is a net loss for everyone except the incumbents. Somehow they also managed to make you believe that it's for your own good, and without any theoretical or practical basis.
Whether the US adopts a blacklist is a matter of policy regarding criminal activities rather than its economic policy. What I believe is right or wrong in this case doesn't change the fact that, violating network neutrality for economic reasons is a huge fallacy.
Personally I believe these blacklists are useless. I'm also not completely sure why you think that carrying 'illegal information' makes the network not neutral... Does it stop carrying legal information afterwards?
Imagine a world where each street is owned by a company. Then they start deciding who is allowed to drive which road. People who pay for the premium package don't have to stop at red lights, and right of way. Freetards aren't allowed between 08am and 12am. Only bicycles with UEFI are permitted.
I was told why this would not be a problem: under libertarian property theory, ownership is initially established over a resource by using it. Thus, land becomes owned by the first person to start making use of it. This ownership only extends to that which is being used.
This means that most land is only owned at the surface, and as far enough down as is necessary to provide support for the surface land. Thus, I am free to TUNNEL UNDER THE ROADS, as long as I go deep enough and do it in a way that does not cause damage to the roads. I can thus tunnel my way under the enclosing roads out to someplace where I am welcome.
edit: up voting you to counter a ridiculous down vote.
A basic functional system of transportation sufficient to enable (but not optimize) commerce seems like something that could reasonably require a government to operate.
Compare: "What if someone bought all the movie theaters, and then prohibited the showing of movies?!?" The thing is, people who buy theaters buy them because they want to show movies. People who run roads want them to be used.
Sure, you could have a few eccentrics with destructive rules. They will not thrive.
There may be innovative rules that appear eccentric at first, but turn out to offer offsetting benefits in allocation-of-limited-capacity-to-most-productive-uses. This is why competitive realms so often result in better results than those with a single, governmental/monopolistic owner: there are creative ways to re-slice a problem that never occur to a committee, or politically-sclerotic bureaucracy/legislature, or a comfortable incumbent. But a smaller entity -- individual or corporate team -- facing more directly the upside/downside of their decisions, can innovate.
(Taking your enclosure question at face value: most fans of strong property rights and marketizing-almost-everything still believe in various kinds of common-law carve outs. You can trespass to rescue someone in distress; a tradition of allowed use creates an implied right-of-way/easement for continued use; etc. So you're no more likely to be 'encircled' by sustenance-denying monopolists in the extreme-market solution, than you are in a system where government zoning, eminent-domain, and redevelopment sometimes does the same thing to the politically-weak. Both have some corner-case risk, both have traditional checks. Which converges on useful arrangements more quickly, more often should be the question... rather than concocted extreme cases.)
As someone pointed out in the comments below the article, this seems like a path the ISPs really don't want to go down. If you equate all packets running through your network to your speech, then you're implicitly making yourself responsible for their contents. This is hardly in their best interests, considering the amount of pirated content, [everyone's favorite boogeyman] kiddy-porn, and God-knows-what-else running down their pipes every day.
That would make your ISP the de facto government for your online activities. A government that is potentially very invasive, inspecting your every data package, limiting your access to certain sites and dictating what kind of content you can download at full speed.
How is that libertarian?
A libertarian would say, people should be free to make and enforce promises among themselves, and the government should constrain itself to those roles that can't be performed by markets.
Libertarians by and large don't believe in "antitrust". The market is, a libertarian would reason, inevitably more powerful than any temporarily dominant firm. If a cartel of ISPs emerged from a free-market approach to Internet governance, that cartel would either (a) be an optimal solution to the requirements of Internet users or (b) eventually worked around and eventually replaced by alternate offerings in the market.
Unregulated and unprotected - The ISP is free to "curate" the content they deliver to customers as they see fit. However, customers may also hold the ISP responsible for their content, for example by initiating civil litigation if pornography is delivered.
Regulated and protected - ISPs cannot be held legally responsible for the content they deliver, but they must deliver all content requested by customers, in accordance with published tiers of service and rate cards.
In a free market the consumers hold the power. An ISP that didn't restrict Internet usage or tier what it offered would become in-demand, and would profit and succeed more than the others. In other words, the market would correct itself towards those ISPs that espoused the principles of staying neutral. If that didn't happen, then net neutrality isn't a big enough concern to drive the average consumer's purchase.
It's a simplified generalization, but take from it what you will.
Am I missing something fundamental in your point?
The First Amendment says nothing about markets or competition. If Congress thinks it can address improve the telecom markets, great. But the idea that the 1st amend doesn’t apply because some market is suboptimal is a non-sequitur.
Allowing market forces to work solves the original problem, and does not create laws limiting freedom and innovation in the company.
Service providers should not be allowed to use local monopolies to harm competition in other markets or to form cartels in them, but legislated "neutrality" doesn't seem like the right way to ensure that.
You're free to get a leased line that is private and just yours, but you will pay significantly more for that. The Internet lends itself so obviously to packetization and shared wires that it takes an extreme case to justify using a private network rather than sharing a public one.
There needs to be regulation to stop (say) the DSL company from impacting VOIP traffic. But a completely unregulated network will lead to the torrenters destroying the VOIP traffic just as fast.
Maybe we should do what they did in the UK, and require the owners of the physical layer to the homes to lease lines and space in their switching centers at a reasonable price to independent ISPs. Then there would actually be a competitive market for ISPs, and then we could let market forces provide net neutrality for those who want a neutral ISP.
In a democracy, the people hold the power through their votes, not consumers through their (very unevenly distributed) wallets. Those are very different choices made for very different reasons.
What are the implications for the level and type of discussion here at HN?
I think these impressions come in part from which threads you choose to join. If you restricted yourself to threads about Airbnb and Uber, you'd be forgiven for assuming that this was a Cato board.