This is about net neutrality, which I totally support, just to get that out in front. I've been on/using the internet for..12 years now? Practically forever if you think about it. What I do..what I've always done, is watching the internet culture and community grow. So I know what's at stake.
But it's not about net neutrality at the same time. In fact, I'd be willing to say this is more about health care than anything. (You'll see why) So, our favorite whipping boy lately, Mike McCurry, came out with a further...whatever you want to call it, here. But what he doesn't realize, is that when it comes to free and open markets, government isn't the enemy. It's our best friend.
But I am worried about this. This is not and cannot be a partisan issue. Some bloggers have acknowledged this. You can be a good Democrat or progressive and believe that we will be better off if the market decides who gets to control content on the web instead of the FCC deciding who are the winners and losers. (And before you jump and say, yeah but the big telcos will decide, take a look at their balance sheets, share prices and what the Wall Street analysts are saying about whether they are smart to invest billions that it will take to bring the Internet up to snuff. We Clintonistas believed we could make it smart for business to do the right thing. That's what we are trying to get the network operators to do now.)
First things first. There's a common misconception around the blogosphere (and I think McCurry is making the same mistake) about the FCC ruling last year that people are saying endangers net neutrality. That decision does not mean what you think it means.
What that decision was, is that it allowed telcos to not have to offer the raw lines to other ISPs for what's called "Piggy-backed" services. There are still some of these services around (AOL Broadband for one, as well, Speakeasy is still a very popular one). This is what McCurry is talking about, I believe, when he mentioned giving the telcos the reason to spend the billions to build new lines...why should they build new lines, if only to have to allow other companies to use them at cost?
This is a trickier argument. I disagreed with the FCC's ruling, if only that most of those lines are taxpayer subsidised. At the same time, I have no problem with if the telcos spend the money, WITHOUT government subsidy, and put down their own new lines. They can do whatever the hell they want with them, as long as they're not given monopoly status with it.
But Net Neutrality has absolutly NOTHING to do with this. Nothing at all. McCurry, as a spokesman for the telcos, is trying to piggy-back something else onto the whole Fibre to the Curb issue.
And that's where what he's talking about gets very murky, almost to the point of obvious deception. The only reason to get rid of Net Neutrality, is in fact not to increase the power of the free and open market, but to do an end-run around it. Instead of consumers choosing what services they consume, ending Net Neutrality would serve to give those either run directly by the telco, or those that are allied with the telco, a distinct advantage. This is a serious problem. This is giving the telco's carte blanche permission to violate both the spirit and fact of anti-trust laws.
Mind you, those supporting Net Neutrality, we're hardly "communists" or anything like that. In fact, most of us tend to be supporting Net Neutrality not to attack the free market, but to encourage it to greater things. The example is brought up about certain services that are time related. There's no problem with giving VoIP packets a boost to the front of the line, in front of say, e-mail or web browsing packets, things were a fraction of a second hardly matter. Where the problem occurs, is when you boost say Vonage's packets but not Skype's (Or in more reality, the latest open source VoIP solution).
The big fallacy that's made, is the idea that government regulation is the only regulation. And that government beauacracy is the only beauacracy. This is a common mistake. And it's false. Corporations do more than government every day to limit your choice and subvert the free market. That's their job, in fact. For those of us that DO believe in the free market, we need strong stands by a central governement to create, and enforce the rules needed to ensure that we, as citizens have maximum choice to both consume and produce.
Especially in this information age.