Very cool article. As someone who's very much for small gov't, net neutrality has been a really hard issue for me, personally, as it's making another law to ensure more freedom? Those two concepts are kind of hard to fit together sometimes.
For example, there's cases where cities have been forced to remove their free wifi networks.
The technology exists now to make (slow, but) free wifi mesh networks among citizens. If anyone can make An internet, then who cares if The internet is no longer neutral?
But more people seem to be behind net neutrality, so it's more likely to get passed...
Really? What do you think guarantees freedom, if not the rule of law?
The FCC that would enforce "neutrality" also enforces "indecency" rules and has in the past required a minute-for-minute accounting and balance of political expression -- the "fairness doctrine". There is reason to doubt whether neutrality laws would be freedom-promoting or welfare-promoting, in the long run.
How well did "rail neutrality" work, in the long run? See:
edit: Thinking more about this, ISPs would just bury this information in the EULA in obtuse legalese so that normal users would ignore it or at least have a hard time understanding it. Then they would be in the letter of the law, but not the spirit and they would still get away with stuff. Though it would help in places like taking the ISPs to court (as right now what happens on their network is essentially a blackbox and when there's a problem they can just shift the blame to someone outside of their network and there's little you can do to prove/disprove that).
Laws are far from the only way to restrict what is sold to the public. Large corporations can leverage their market share to shut down competition in other areas. In order to maintain a healthy market place, you have to ensure that a market is not completely controlled by a few large corporations.
Maybe. But if so, that's an argument for antitrust enforcement, not net-neutrality type-and-price-of-service regulations.
As the example of regulatory capture in many industries should make clear, regulations often turn out giving an advantage to the few large operators who can play at Washington rulemaking games -- with large staffs of lobbyists and big donations at election time -- no matter what the regulators' initial rationale.
I'm not saying I don't agree with Net Neutrality, because I do, I'm just torn about _why_ I agree with it.
But governments are run by individuals, so saying that they aren't allowed to pass such-and-such a regulation means interfering with the individual's ability to run their government the way they see fit.
The notion of "absolute freedom" suffers a stack overflow if you actually try and think about it. Any action whatsoever, not merely government regulation, reduces the freedom of some people and increases it for others.
Yep. But this isn't neccessarily about 'absolute,' it's about "minimal as possible," at least in my eyes. As I said to someone below, I prefer to fix problems after the fact, rather than before, but I feel like this will almost certainly be a problem, so why not just cut to the chase?
EDIT: Holy crap, everyone. Please refer to my two responses just below about the reason I said "Ideally." This statement is in response to "what possible ways are there to guarantee it other than a meaningful amount of regulation." So I gave one.
So, to say that "the market" will take care of something is equivalent to saying that a set of human beings interacting with each other freely, voluntarily, and without coercion will take care of it.
I'm sorry but the idea that the market will solve every problem the world could ever dream of is a ridiculously out-of-touch-with-reality idea. Though the idea that Congress can come up with laws to solve even one problem without creating side-effects is equally naive.
The 'market' can be gamed, and there are plenty of people that make a career out of it. As long as you can bury the truth in bureaucratic nonsense and hide behind diffusion of responsibility you can get away with practically anything.
"Ideally, grapefruit would just take care of it."
But there's a reason for the first word of my statement.
There's a whole set of well-defined problems in which everyone following their individual interests, the "invisible hand" so to speak, lead to a clearly terrible situation -- monopolies, prisoners dilemmas (collusion), tragedy of the commons (pollution, resource extraction, public education)..
Talking about how "ideally the market would take care of those problem" is just silly, the market will categorically not care about those problems -- it's not an intelligent force, just a sum of individual actions.
I hate my health insurance company, cable company and cell phone company -- what are my options here in this supposedly free market, start my own multi billion dollar nation-spanning infrastructure?