The Forgotten Interest in Net Neutrality

This is very troubling. Give me bandwidth! You know that right and left wing are equally willing to use the government to abuse the people, just for different things, but this is a right winger suggesting the use of eminent domain to condemn the telephone lines? Better to simply revoke the monopoly status and give anyone else the right to use the same public easements that the current companies have. Because the one thing worse than a government granted monopoly is a government run monopoly.



Ladies and Gentlemen, both sides in the net neutrality debate are engaging in rent seeking behavior. The content providers want to use the wires at for free. The telephone and internet companies want to skim some fees off them.



The person being forgotten in the war is the consumer. I have digital broadband through the cable company which usually exceeds the 10 Megabits that the author above laments ever achieving. I pay the monthly fees gladly. But I pay those fees with the expectation that whatever content I might choose will all be delivered to me at that same speed, whether it's news, static text pages, or huge media files. If it's a 100 Megabyte media file, I should have a clue that it's going to take longer to get to download than a static 2 kilobyte text file. But the ISP has been paid to deliver that content to me. I paid them. The bill is already paid, and for them to attempt to extort more money from the content provider can only raise the fees the content providers would have to charge me. The online content providers don't pay such fees, the users do.



Now were someone to propose an ISP where the access is free but the costs are paid by the content providers, or through advertising riders, that would be quite reasonable. However, such business models have been tried and found to have limited success at best. Indeed, such providers tend to be some of the largest sources of spam around, as spam-meisters are always shifting the costs of their operations onto others, shifting the costs of access as well is no large jump. If you are using such a service, particularly for email, it should be no news to you that the majority of your outgoing emails get automatically tagged as spam, as the filters at your destination are well aware that these providers are the source of a large proportion of the world's spam (My bet for the first verified message from outer space? "Hot Andromedan Grrllz! Go to uww(universe wide web).pr0n.com!")



But with consumers willingly paying the bills of bringing the content from the providers to themselves, neutrality of content is precisely what we are paying for. Whatever that content is, it should have precisely the same priority as any other data. For the ISPs to attempt to extort more money from the content providers (and by extension, from their own consumers who have already paid for this access) is a violation of our contract with them. I know I didn't sign up with my provider for internet access with preferred content providers, I signed up for the entire internet, at equal access priority, all dependent upon what I choose to look for, and I suspect you did the same. If ever that deal changes, I'll find a different internet provider. I suppose I'm siding with the content providers, but only because doing so coincides with my support for the free market and consumer choices and the fact that the bill for access has already been paid, and so would you ISP extortionists please go away? If the content providers have to raise their prices because my ISP is charging them extra, I'll find another ISP provider. The government's role should be limited to making certain that my choices are not artificially restricted.