Comments on: Metaphors, Just-So Stories, and Worst Case Scenarios

By: Barry

Barry — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 23:33:05 +0000

Julian: ‘The internet really is sui generis’.

There needs to be a law that people who say that are banned from using economic analysis on it

By: Timon

Timon — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 09:42:04 +0000

This is such a sad and unnecessary distraction. Does anyone really doubt that as long as there are only one or two hyper-regulated and politicized pipes able to connect users to the network there will or could ever be anything copasetic to either Julian’s or Ezra’s versions of freedom and access? Fortunately, in less than two years there will be an unlocking of the current 700 MHz band – which could give Wi-Fi hotspots a range of 20 miles, and restore the old days of independent ISPs, or 24-hour streaming Hollywood craplets from Verizon, if you prefer. Unfortunately this incredible potential is about to be re-monopolized without a peep from anyone:

Results 1 – 10 of about 1,600 from ezraklein.typepad.com for “net neutrality”. (0.44 seconds)
Your search – “700 mhz” site:ezraklein.typepad.com – did not match any documents.
Your search – “700 mhz” site juliansanchez.com – did not match any documents.

There is no reason that a healthy chunk of unregulated spectrum (for Julian), or Public Domain spectrum (for Ezra) couldn’t change the “road” metaphor to a “waterway” one, with easy coexistence among different size vessels. “Net neutrality” is extremely bloggable (big evil corporations versus head-in-the-clouds brats) but it is less than nothing on the scale of threats to digital rights or freedoms when compared to the robberies congress has underway as we type. They are planning to sell this huge asset off to the same incumbents who have gotten us here. This is like the 3rd Congress selling perpetual rights to enter NY harbor to ten shipping companies, on the grounds that they had ten wharves. I’ll leave out mandatory EFI and DRM encumbrances, which your representatives are designing to turn your computer into a glorified TV, and which no one but telco executives and entertainment lawyers are even aware of. It is barely even worth having a position on net neutrality compared to these issues.

By: Sandy

Sandy — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 07:54:56 +0000

In regard to your two things to keep in mind, Julian:

1) As Grant points out, existing truth-in-advertising law’s records have been less than stellar. As heavily regulated (and hence open to rent-seeking/lobbying/etc.) as the telecom market is, I don’t see that changing for the benefit of the consumer any time soon.

2) Given the regulation in #1, my position on net neutrality is based solely around my understanding of the competitiveness of the broadband market. If we passed real telecom deregulation that included stricter AT&T-like rules for local monopolies that basically said, “your game is over and it’s payback time for the subsidized infrastructure,” I’d be happy to let it slide.

By: Julian Sanchez

Julian Sanchez — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 01:46:55 +0000

Informational requirements are actually one sort of regulation I typically have very little problem with. You want to require ISP disclosure of whatever their routing protocol is? Fine, I’ll buy the T-shirt.

By: Grant Gould

Grant Gould — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 01:28:37 +0000

Truth-in-advertising hasn’t worked so far, with ISPs just now admitting to the hard limits they’ve capped on “unlimited” access for years, with dozens of discussion boards devoted to debating whether or not particular protocols are already being kneecapped (or “traffic-shaped”) by which ISPs in which regions. There is simply no transparency in ISP traffic management today, and I can’t think of a single reason to expect that there will be more tomorrow than there is today.

Which is, to me, the real worry in non-neutrality. Guaranteed full transparency of who is slowing down what traffic relative to which competitors at what times, I would agree in an instant that net neutrality is an unnecessary silliness. But there not even the hope of a promise of a glimmer of such transparency.

And far worse things can breed in in the lightless world of traffic management. It is quite plausible that an ISP could decide what services to prioritize or punish based on non-economic criteria. If Comcast added a second latency to the load time of an anti-Comcast blog — which human factors experts tell us is more than enough time to seriously change a user’s impression of a site — it would be difficult if not impossible to notice that anything untoward was happening.

In the absence of transparency, it is simply implausible to suggest that market mechanisms will help substantially. Find a story about where transparency will come from — and why it hasn’t shown up yet — and then you’ll have an argument.

By: Ezra

Ezra — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 22:20:05 +0000

I fear you’re missing my point here. The issue isn’t whether they can or do compete on those metrics, it’s whether we want them to. As example, we made a decision awhile back that the government should build most of the roads, and it shouldn’t be for individual businesses to construct their own roadways, or bargain with pavers to build them. Thus, when choosing pizza places, we don’t have to worry about whether Two Amys was able to afford a leveling firm.

The decision here is whether we want everyone to have equal bandwidth access. It’s a policy judgment based on whether we think it would be beneficial to have groups competing on who can buy more bandwidth, and whether or not pizza places already have phone line issues is neither here nor there in answering it.