Internet Censorship

“The Net Neutrality Coup”

December 21, 2010

Pat Dollard - The Federal Communications Commission has voted to impose the controversial “Net Neutrality” regulations on the Internet, by a vote of 3-2. It was a partisan vote, three Democrats against two Republicans.

“Controversial” isn’t really the right word for Net Neutrality. “Reviled” would be more appropriate. As a Fox News op-ed from Americans For Prosperity president Phil Kerpen points out, the regulations have no support in Congress, the American people are in open revolt against government power grabs, every single one of the 95 candidates who pledged to support Net Neutrality were defeated in the last elections, and the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has already ruled against it.

This is yet another example of profit through regulation. One of Net Neutrality’s key features is the control of internet resource allocation, supposedly intended to prevent Internet providers from “unfairly” allocating extra bandwidth to causes they favor, or organizations who pay for the privilege. (Bandwidth as a commodity? The horror! Everyone knows bandwidth is the collective property of the people and their glorious workers’ Party!) This excuse is a transparent lie, as there has never been a single legitimate case of a “net neutrality violation” advanced for consideration in the United States.

In practice, government regulation of bandwidth allocation is a burden smaller Internet providers cannot absorb as easily as larger companies, in much the same way minimum wage laws hurt smaller businesses more than giant corporations. Smaller companies flexibly allocate resources to take advantage of opportunities, which has the happy effect of reducing cost to all consumers. You can have easy access to your cousin’s cat-blogging site because Amazon.com pays extra for high speed, and there’s bandwidth to spare. Net Neutrality forces all traffic to be treated equally, which is both ludicrous and guaranteed to dramatically increase costs to low end consumers… to say nothing of heavy compliance costs, which Internet providers will pass along to their customers.

If implemented, these regulations will turn Internet access into an infuriating metaphor for the superiority of free-market capitalism over calcified socialist mediocrity. Your Internet experience will both increase in cost and degrade in quality. Much of the fantastic power of a broadband connection comes from the way providers shift bandwidth around to meet requests for access. Their systems provide more power to high-bandwidth requests, taking power away from someone who’s playing with Facebook or sending the occasional email, and giving it to users who want to download movies or software. This is done so smoothly and seamlessly that most users barely even notice. You’ll most certainly notice when Net Neutrality kicks in, and the government starts regulating bandwidth allocation.

This hurts small entrepreneurs most, because a large provider can more easily absorb the cost of being forced to treat all traffic equally. Let’s say the government passed a rule that all lunches must be prepared in five minutes or less. Small family restaurants would be ruined, but McDonald’s can already meet such a requirement, or sustain the cost of whatever manpower and infrastructure is needed to do so. Such mandated service also illustrates the job and opportunity-killing aspects of Net Neutrality, because in this example, it would be impossible to open a restaurant serving gourmet food, as it would take too long to prepare. Mandating a uniform level of service, like all other price controls, guarantees mediocrity, because it destroys the opportunity to profit from excellence.

A while back, comedian Jon Stewart mocked opposition to Net Neutrality by complaining that toothpaste companies would buy up all the bandwidth, and he wouldn’t be able to watch the Hamster Dance online. This little joke perfectly encapsulates the larger truth of the situation. If you want to watch the Hamster Dance in real-time streaming high definition, Mr. Stewart, you can bloody well pay for it, just like the toothpaste companies… and the fact that the toothpaste companies are paying for premium access makes Hamster Dance levels of bandwidth available to everyone at reasonable rates. When will liberals learn that the free market creates, while government control rations and destroys?

There is also a strong ideological component to this power grab, because it is an attempt to ration media… and the Left’s favored outlets already have huge stockpiles of information access. For all the silly whining about Fox News, the Left still dominates television and newspapers. The worst threats to its media dominance come from the internet and radio, which has its own “Fairness Doctrine” threats to watch out for. Net Neutrality threatens the business models of upstart Internet operations, which suits the interests of dinosaur media companies just fine. Dinosaurs hate the sight of tiny mammals bearing hordes of offspring, destined to replace them on the evolutionary ladder.

Three people on a five-person panel just voted to seize control of these complicated issues. The incoming Republican Congress has already promised action. It should be one of the first things they address in 2011, followed by the removal of the people who voted for this electronic coup. They no longer understand their purpose. For that matter, the FCC itself is beginning to develop some decidedly reptilian characteristics.

The Internet Splits in Two

December 22, 2010

The Daily Beast - Consider that in the 2008 election both sides were struggling to reach so-called low information voters. What happens when access to information becomes even more restricted? Where your ability to become informed is based upon your ability to pay? That’s the world we’re heading into. The first 15 years of the Internet, where it was all about peace and love and freedom, are drawing to a close.

The ultimate irony is that we are creating an information age where some of us—many of us—will get less information instead of more.

In his terrific new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Columbia University professor Tim Wu describes the way every new communication platform starts out with a phase where there is openness and innovation, and where lots of amateurs (now we call many of them “hackers”) try out different things and spout lots of utopian rhetoric about making the world a better place.

Then, about 15 years in, things start to close down and become more centralized. The new platform becomes dominated by a small number of companies in the hands of powerful visionaries with an urge for empire-building. This also happened in telegraph, movies, radio, telephone—and now it’s happening to the Internet.

Steve Jobs is building an empire around selling music, movies, and news to people who own iPhones and iPads. Mark Zuckerberg is building an empire around the gathering and selling of the personal data of a half a billion people.

Now the carriers get their slice of the action. A lot of people hate the carriers, but try, for a moment, to see the world through their eyes. For 15 years they have sat around watching hundreds of billions of dollars of market value get created on the end of their wires (Google, eBay, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, Facebook) while all they get is a puny monthly subscriber fee.

The carriers won’t say this publicly, but I’m sure they resent being denied a share of the wealth being created on the platform that they’ve been so kind as to build and maintain for the rest of us. What they also won’t say publicly, or at least not in this blunt a fashion, is: If you want us to keep building out more bandwidth, then start sharing the loot. Otherwise you can go build your own high-speed network.

Obnoxious? Certainly. But also persuasive. The FCC’s compromise probably represents the best deal anyone could get.

What this means for society remains to be seen. But I’m pretty sure those of us who have been around for Phase One of the Internet are going to look back on these last 15 years as the good old days.

The Leftwing Group Behind the FCC’s Internet Power Grab

December 22, 2010

NoonanForNevada.com - From John Fund at the Wall Street Journal:

The net neutrality vision for government regulation of the Internet began with the work of Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded the liberal lobby Free Press in 2002…

…Mr. McChesney and his Free Press group have had astonishing influence. Mr. Genachowski’s press secretary at the FCC, Jen Howard, used to handle media relations at Free Press. The FCC’s chief diversity officer, Mark Lloyd, co-authored a Free Press report calling for regulation of political talk radio.

Free Press has been funded by a network of liberal foundations that helped the lobby invent the purported problem that net neutrality is supposed to solve. They then fashioned a political strategy similar to the one employed by activists behind the political speech restrictions of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform bill…

To be fair to the left, a lot of left wing bloggers and other New Media types have taken exception to this FCC action, but this is still a left wing operation: the hard left is attempting to take over the internet as a means to an end. The left is highly annoyed at the success of the New Media, and especially its conservative wing. On the left, they figure we on the right are just a bunch of ignorant fear- and hate-mongers who deform debate; for them, getting rid of us merely allows real (in their minds) debate leading to the only acceptable outcome: a socialist America.

And like true socialists, they won’t stop until we force them to stop. It doesn’t matter that the courts have said they can’t do this; it doesn’t matter that there is a bi-partisan consensus in Congress that the FCC has no authority in this area. For people of the left, the only thing which matters is results -- and, in this case, the result they want is control. From this first step, they’ll continue to grind their way through the liberty of the internet until dissenting voices are stifled by corporations unwilling to cross an overbearing government.

The New Media has breathed new life in to American politics -- we are on the verge of attaining real reform in our nation. Not just holding the line against further liberal encroachment, but of actually rolling it back and re-instituting Constitutional government. The left -- especially its leadership -- sees this. They know that if they can’t get rid of us and impose socialism now, then they won’t ever be able to; and as conservative and libertarian reforms take hold, there will be little chance that anyone in the future will want to try the socialist model a second time.

And, so, the fight is on -- pressure must be kept up on the new Congress to undo this FCC action. Legislation must be introduced to protect the free-wheeling nature of the internet and the New Media -- even, if necessary, a Constitutional amendment. In the war of ideas, the side which can’t get it’s ideas out there loses -- so, this battle over the FCC is now central to our times.