California Conservative

An open letter to my friends from Instapundit to proteinwisdom, from QandO to The Corner. I want to bring to your attention the issue of net neutrality, which you may have heard in your travels.

In a nutshell, the concept of a network neutrality mandate is that all bits on the Internet must be treated identically, by law. It has become something of a hot-button because one of the telcos said some impolitic things that set off the conspiracy theorists and got the attention of Congress.

While “neutrality” sounds benign, the proposed legislation would give the FCC powers that it currently does not have. Be clear, there is no neutrality legislation in place and we are doing just fine. And the best is always yet to come.

More importantly, from a technical and economic perspective, I am inspired by innovation and experimentation and the free markets which enable such. A neutrality mandate would give the federal gov’t regulatory powers to decide right and wrong at the router level. It would become illegal to build the better network, unless you are willing to give it away.

You should not be surprised that the loudest advocates of ‘net neutrality are those on the far left, including MyDD, MoveOn and Craig Newmark (lovely guy but hardened socialist). Their arguments are very much in line with things like McCain-Feingold and the old Fairness Doctrine.

It is also being sold as “fear the big bad corporations”. I don’t have any particular affection for any of the companies involved here, but I do know that customers know best. Some customers might indeed say, I will pay more for better video. Alternatively, the market may say “we like it the way it is”, which is neutrality de facto. In either case, we don’t need Congress or the FCC to make the call.

The history of the Internet has told us we should imagine the unimagined. Let’s preserve the absence of inhibition that has gotten us this far. Keep it libertarian. No new laws.

(Put another way: think about what the FCC does in the name of “decency”. Now expand it to private bits on private networks. That’s “neutrality”.)

Some reading:

Me, natch:
http://www.onlyrepublican.com/orinsf/net_neutrality
_and_municipal_wifi/

Martin Geddes describes why “neutrality” is ill-defined, unenforceable and naïve:
http://www.telepocalypse.net/archives/000905.html

Mark Cuban says “Hell yes, I’ll pay for faster packets”:
http://www.blogmaverick.com/entry/1234000267073488/

A new organization called Hands Off the Internet, to whom I am reaching out:
http://handsoff.org

Cross-posted at The Only Republican in San Francisco

——

Update: Adam over at PFF lays it out clearly that the “Save the Internet” campaign translates to “Regulate it More”

UPDATE: (4/27)
Key House Panel Defeats Net Neutrality

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 26th, 2006 at 11:44 am and is filed under 1st Amendment, Author: Matt S., Capitalism, FCC, Internet, Technology, Washington, DC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.