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Comment by sili | Hacker News Reader

I believe in a democracy+capitalism gov't has to be as large as necessary and no larger. We cannot always say that gov't has to be small, it has certain duties one of which is to make sure, through legal means, that the system does not destroy itself. Once we agree that net neutrality is required for healthy capitalism, what possible ways are there to guarantee it other than a meaningful amount of regulation. It is in the same vein as regulation needed to prevent monopolies.

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Ideally, the market would just take care of it.

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.

Just like how the market prevented crap like Enron? Just like how the market punishes companies that dump toxic chemicals into waterways?

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.

There's a reason I said "Ideally." I don't think it would work that way, hence my support of Net Neutrality. But I still like to think long and hard about restricting market forces, and so I'd almost rather wait until the market is proven unable to handle it before enacting legislation, rather than doing it pre-emptively.

What's that even mean?

"Ideally, grapefruit would just take care of it."

Exactly what I said. In a perfect world, nobody would buy internet service from a company that's not a dumb pipe, because this [1] wouldn't be in a consumer's best interest as opposed to a competing company that's a dumb pipe. And if things worked the way they were supposed to, if the industry colluded to cause this to happen, we could either break it up, or new players would enter the market, and people would flock to them, putting pressure on the other companies to stop being restrictive.

But there's a reason for the first word of my statement.

[1]: http://i.imgur.com/5RrWm.png

"we could either break it up".. aka, the market not handling things at all, and government intervention being necessary.

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?

I will define "market" for you. A "market" is a set of human beings interacting with each other freely, voluntarily, and without coercion.

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.

Please see my response to jbooth.

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