I normally pay no attention to legislative news because, as Michael Corleone said, politics and crime are the same thing. Inordinately fixating on the schemes of social deviants does not reside in the realm of the sane. But since the issue of net neutrality has some personal impact as a software engineer, I have some level of interest in it.
Gary North has some good thoughts on it.
What if an Internet Service Provider wants to charge Comcast or Netflix more money, because it’s hogging the available bandwidth? The FCC says no.
This is the fundamental law of economics: “At zero price, there is more demand than supply.” The FCC denies that this law exists. So, it wants to slow everyone down by making sure that the big boys don’t get charged more.
Here is the law of bandwidth: “Bandwidth gets cheaper.” So, the growing pie will keep us all well-fed. If buyers are sellers of bandwidth want to negotiate, so what?
The telecom industry is, at many levels, very free from artificial regulation*, but by its very category, corporations—ISPs included—are regulated and enjoy artificial regulation in their favor. We don’t know what ISPs, both large and small, would be like if they didn’t benefit from government’s helping hand. The best we have are guesses and conjectures, some better than others.
I’ve heard that net neutrality is to ensure that “all information is treated equally,” which is a sentiment of beautiful nonsense. No one in the history of humanity in forever has treated all information equally. It’s impossible, and passing a law is not going to change fundamental human preference and behavior.
* I say “artificial regulation” because everything is essentially regulated, i.e., I buy one thing and not another when I go to the grocery store. What matters is who is doing the regulating and how they are doing it. Using the “artificial” qualifier is a way to conceptually separate a non-market, invasive regulation, as opposed to a market-based, spontaneous-occurring regulation that happens in the absence of central planning.