When do the Christian Coalition and MoveOn agree? When it comes to restoring Net Neutrality.
This post was motivated by another fantastic Bill Moyers show. Here’s what I learned:
– Cable and Phone companies control our access to the internet. It’s a duopoly.
– In 2002, the FCC ruled that net neutrality laws don’t apply to cable-based service.
– In Aug 2005, the FCC replaced net neutrality RULES with PRINCIPLES. Telephone company executives gained the right to charge for access based on content.
– In June 2007, the House refused to reinstate Net Neutrality.
– Cable/Phone companies want customers to pay for faster access. This sucks, because small users can be forced into slower connections. Legally, they can already decide which websites get fast access. They can censor, as Western Union did when they had a telegraph monopoly, or as the railroad barons did in the shipping industry.
– In 2006-2007, phone companies received tax breaks and price deregulations in exchange for building us a fiber optic network (over 100x faster than copper wire). They took the money and never built it.
– The phone companies didn’t get off their ass until Lafayette Louisiana sold bonds and began building their own network – for price and pride. Cable and Phone companies lobbied like crazy and mired them in lawsuits.
– Cable/Phone companies spend $40 million / year lobbying state capitols, and over $75 million / year on Washington. Some states have passed laws FORBIDDING municipalities from building their own fiber optic networks. Cable/Phone preserve their duopoly with great anti-regulation slogans. (See disinformation technique #4)
– Clinton’s Telecommunications act of 1996 is what allowed massive media conglomeration.
– The National Association of Broadcaster is a corporate lackey that convinced Congress to cut back on supporting local, low-power radio, and lobbied the FCC to get rid of it entirely.
author Eric Klinenberg: “I think what Congress and the FCC understand all too well at this point is that the more open and public and democratic a hearing this issue gets, the less support there is for media consolidation. And so the danger is that Congress and the FCC will rush legislation through before anyone has a chance to really participate. I look for the FCC to be rushing to get legislation passed without a democratic process. I’m very concerned about that. It happened in 2003. There’s every sign that it’s about to happen again. . . . In 2003, the FCC said it would do these kinds of hearings. They started. They then aborted the hearings once it became clear that the message, no more consolidation, was not what the then chairman Michael Powell wanted to hear. And then the commission ignored the public input altogether when it came time to crafting legislation. They got reprimanded by the courts. The order got remanded. It’s now back in play. And the question now is whether these kinds of hearings are democracy for show or whether they’re democracy for real. . . . sadly it looks like the FCC has been working in the interest of the small number of companies its charged with regulating.”
As with most things, I disagree with virtually everyone out there on this (it seems anyway), because I don’t go for net neutrality. What if a law was passed saying that telephone companies couldn’t charge people more for long distance than they could for calling next door? What if a law was passed saying that businesses who, for example, need more water to run their business absolutely could not pay more to get access to more water?
That would be ridiculous, because it’s obvious that if, for instance, a car wash needs more water, they should be able to have access to more water (and charged more for it) than a diner or some other type of business or a personal residence. That’s the free market. If companies are overcharging, people will go to a different Internet provider.
If companies are not allowed to charge different rates for different customers (as virtually every other other business is allowed to), small companies won’t ever be able to enter the market and will be less able to compete, and large companies won’t develop new infrastructure. There’s a reason that large companies like Google are against this legislation– they don’t want to have to cut into their profits to pay Time Warner or Comcast or anyone’s internet provider, despite the fact that they make huge profits from all those Internet customers. Everyone is focusing on the remote (in a free market) possibility that everyone’s monthly Internet costs will rise, and not on the fact that, if Google were having to pay Time Warner each year for the Internet customers that TW provides to Google, my costs might actually go down since my cost to Time Warner would then be subsidized by Google or Yahoo or whoever.
There’s also a reason that the far left and the Christian right are for this type of legislation– those two factions love government regulation above almost all else. The fact is that the net neutrality law, as it stands, would give the FCC regulation over the Internet, which it does not have now, and allow it to control and regulate many aspects of the Internet in the United States, including content. The next legislation could then be for Internet taxes or fines for certain Internet content. This reason– voting for this legislation is admitting that the federal government has the power and authority to regulate the Internet and all that entails– is why Ron Paul is against net neutrality.
I am NO FAN of cable or phone companies, and I do disagree with many of the laws they lobby for and I think the government helps protect them with pseudo-monopolies and of course passing laws such as the one you mention about not allowing local cities to build their own Internet networks (which was just being debated in the NC General Assembly, by the way), but in this case, I don’t think that it is best to step in at the moment and say the FCC can regulate any and all aspects of the Internet and make the Internet similar to television in that way.
Thanks for another great comment. I’m certainly less studied than Dr. Paul on the issue of Common Carriage. Knowing what I do, however, I disagree with him. I’m sure there’s more to be said, but here’s the part of the program that convinced me:
RICK KARR: In those days, Western Union had a monopoly over telegraph wires. The company gave the associated press a big break on fees but charged other news organizations a lot more to keep them off the wires.
TIMOTHY WU: And they used that monopoly, they used it to favor political parties they liked, they used it to favor political candidates they wanted to destroy.
RICK KARR: So how did that instance of discrimination get broken?
TIMOTHY WU: Eventually the government intervened with something called “common carriage.” Thought is- they said the telegraph is no different than an inn keeper, no different than a port, no different than a train, it has to carry everybody’s stuff equally.
RICK KARR: So this idea of common carriage, the idea is that as long as I can pay, you have to take my business.
TIMOTHY WU: Right, correct, that’s the idea. You have to pay, and then we don’t discriminate as who you are. And government since the 16th century have felt that certain parts of the economy, ports, canals, roads, trains, inn keepers, have to deal with all customers equally, that that’s important for the health of the country. And I think we have the same situation: The port and canals of the eighteenth century are the Internet in the 21st century, and that’s why we need to re-learn those lessons.
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I disagree with Dr. Paul, but I’d still trust him to do it his way. Perhaps he’d prefer to wait until a monopoly got out of control before regulating.
I can understand the arguments for net neutrality, and they do make
sense. However, I don’t think that the proposed solution (regulation
under the FCC) is the answer.
A big concern of mine is that companies would be able to invest more
in infrastructure for the Internet (like Verizon is doing right now
with fiber optics) if they could, for instance, charge Google for the
bandwidth of theirs that Google uses and makes money from. More
widespread fiber optics would really help people in a fundamental way
in the same way that net neutrality might– it’s about six times
faster than cable, and that would really help small businesses, those
who work at home over the Internet, etc. Anyway, here’s a nice article
I found supporting net neutrality from a libertarian point of view:
www.freepress.net/news/15089
It is an interesting issue!
Thanks for the link. You may be interested to know there are law suits against phone companies, because they HAVE BEEN PAID to build a nation-wide fiberoptic network six years ago. The mandate for infra structure improvement was part of a deal that involved them getting tax breaks and being allowed to raise prices.
The documentary explains that the gov’t doesn’t seem to care about enforcing the contract, but a few advocates are taking them to court. It’s covered in the first part of the documentary.
Very interesting, but not surprising. Companies are always willing to
take and the government seems to always be willing to give. That may
explain a bit more why Verizon is spending billions on Fios. It is
difficult to theorize how things could/should work in a free market,
when we really don’t have a free market at all. Unfortunately, Milton
Friedman isn’t around to weigh in on the subject, either. I’ll have to
watch the documentary!