General
Net Neutrality: Shouldn’t We Be Wanting Less Regulation?
The Technology Liberation Front:
Today, Tyler Cowen posted some cautious, but surprising words about his stance on the net regulation issue:
I favor net neutrality in the current environment. Without neutrality, Comcast and Verizon would use differential pricing schemes to extract more revenue and thus diminish some forms of Net output, including Google, Amazon, ebay, and possibly blogs. … If the cable and telecom companies had no legally-backed monopoly powers, I would not favor legally enforced net neutrality. “Let the market decide” would be a good answer.
You should read his whole post for more of his argument. But I wonder: If a lack of competition is caused by a government-backed monopoly power, as Cowen suggests, wouldn’t removing the regulations that create that power be the preferred course of action? Shouldn’t adding a new layer of “legally enforced net neutrality” regulation be our last, hopeless recourse? And aren’t we headed in a generally pro-competitive direction? Even putting aside the tremendous growth in competition over the past 25 years, don’t steps like the COPE Act’s streamlining of franchising help to continue to eliminate the very government-imposed barriers to entry that create market power?
Tech Liberation Front is a great site and has been all over this issue. Great site, bookmark it if you’re interested.
I’ve talked about this, but I think it’s important to keep hammering this point: In this debate, the proponents of net neutrality laws are the ones pushing more regulation, and the evil corporate telecoms are the ones wanting more freedom.
Most proponents of NN worry that evil telecoms will be evil capitalist pigs. My response? Of course they will, that’s why their CEO’s get the big bucks! Repeat after me… Increase Shareholder Value. That means your 401k, your pension, mutual fund all increase with telecom stock. But in America you can’t get more money without providing more value. That means they must constantly be looking and searching for new ways to make a buck. If they don’t, their competitors will.
That means finding new products and services they think you will buy. It’s called capitalism, and it’s a very good thing.
The real difference between me and your average NN Proponent … I trust the free market. They don’t.
See BizzyBlog’s latest.
Previously:
Eric Schmidt (google)
Logic
House committee passes HR5417
Showdown
Competition for the enduser
Exhibit A
Keep the Feds Out of the Internet
Discussion
Comments are disallowed for this post.
Some interesting points raised in this posting. I actually work for a company that has been working with Hands Off the Internet, so I’ve been reading up on the net neutrality issue a lot. I think you raise some great points about the benefits of free competition. No matter how you feel about the players involved, there is one side that clearly wants more regulation and one that wants more competition.
[...] Previously: Shouldn’t we be wanting less regulation? Eric Schmidt (google) Logic House committee passes HR5417 Showdown Competition for the enduser Exhibit A Keep the Feds Out of the Internet Filed under: General, Tech by — Dave @ 2:07 pm [...]
[...] Net Neutrality: Shouldn’t We Be Wanting Less Regulation? Most proponents of NN worry that evil telecoms will be evil capitalist pigs. My response? Of course they will, that’s why their CEO’s get the big bucks! Repeat after me… Increase Shareholder Value. That means your 401k, your pension, mutual fund all increase with telecom stock. But in America you can’t get more money without providing more value. That means they must constantly be looking and searching for new ways to make a buck. If they don’t, their competitors will. [...]
[...] mind tooting my own horn now and then, and this is exactly what I was talking about way back when I realized that net neutrality was not what everyone said it was. What Cringely just now realized is that there is no net neutrality hasn’t been for a long [...]