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Should the Government Regulate Net Neutrality?
Net neutrality is the principle that says all information flowing across the Internet should be treated equally. But with more people streaming data-rich video and playing online games, the Internet faces congestion concerns. Should carriers be able to sell multi-tiered access to heavy users? Should sites that generate massive traffic -- like Google and Yahoo! -- pay extra fees? The U.S. Government is examining Net Neutrality and its financial, legal and social implications. Do we need federal intervention to ensure fairness, or is this an issue for the market to work out?
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Net neutrality.. no!
I am personally against network neutrality, since I believe there is information worth restricting (thus we pay to get it) or limiting (confidential or detailed information) in order to maintain privacy and discourage unethical manner (spamming, rude commenting) especially on the growing online society. I believe that net is “limited” for a reason. It is true that without network neutrality, Comcast and Google or Verizon and these other big companies may make money by just investing their company on the web. Shouldn’t they pay more or something?
But honestly, I am satisfied and will gladly continue to pay the price for my fast bandwidth in my house. And I was seriously mortified with my previous super, super slow internet access in my old apartment. If we are claiming that these companies are taking benefit from us, I would like to say that we ourselves gain benefit from their service too.
Just as mentioned by Hands Off the Internet in their article “Net Neutrality Will Increase Government Monitoring of Internet Traffic”, it says, “Net neutrality calls for the Federal government to enforce standards on how online data is transmitted. But to accomplish this, there would have to be a significant increase in federal monitoring of online traffic at all levels to ensure compliance, including both the public Internet and dedicated private networks.”
It may be unnatural but as we all know it, when there is freedom there is responsibility to bear as well. And who knows what will change out of security, privacy, intellectual property, and all these things when network neutrality is regulated? There are rooms to enhance all these, yet for now I do not think that regulating network neutrality is the perfect solution for a better online society.
What about supply and demand?
Do you feel that the rates you pay now are going to stay the same? You mentioned that you were ok with paying higher rates for your fast data service you have now. Are you willing to pay much higher pricing when Internet providers find that they can charge more for the services they provide?
The Internet is private property
The Internet is private property and the government should protect the owners' rights to it, not tell the owners what they can do with it. Period.
Please note for future
Please note for future comments that the internet was actually created by DARPA, a government-owned agency that created the groundwork for the internet as we know it today.
So, the government SHOULD actually own the internet, but they decided that it would be better to let the free market build the services, with as little regulation as possible so as to foster innovation.
Also; the companies that "own" the internet do not actually own the internet. They simply own the lines that connect us all. No one can own the internet, because it was/is constructed by all of mankind and goes beyond the idea of ownership.
You can't own information, you can only own the words on the screen.
Net neutrality is needed
Normally, I'm one to tell government to stay out of people's business. However, given the recent practices of ISPs throttling our connection speeds when we go over some arbitrary cap, I'm forced to conclude that they are greedy and cannot be trusted. Net neutrality would force all the ISPs to be dumb pipelines and restrict neither speed nor content online.
I charge forward recklessly, leaving chaos in my wake.
Governement stay away
My vote is for the government to keep their nose out of it. The government has its hands full and has some old problems it needs to take care of first. This is a task for the people to handle. If companies start charging more and if the American people do not approve; the answer is quite simple. Stop doing business with those companies. The American people run to the government way too much nowadays to fix our problems instead of us handling them ourselves. We ourselves can fix a lot of problems without any help. All we have to do is quit doing business with the corporate greed mongers. When their wallets start shriveling up because we quit doing business with them they will get the message that we are not screwing around anymore.
Net-neutrality framework on the Internet Model
AT&T opposes proposals to regulate its move to speed up certain services and slow down some other.
Business Corporations are highly skilled in drafting arguments as part of their lobbying exercise. Traditionally, large business corporations are known to devote time and resources to lobby for a policy framework most favourable to their own interests.
While it may be true that there are some micro-aspects of a company such as AT&T having to choose to prioritize services, there is a danger of such freedom leading to such situations - to throw names for a hypothetical illustration - as msn slowing down You Tube downloads or Google sending messages originating from yahoo.com to its spam folders.
There are several technical and non-technical aspects that make it impertive to strengthen a frame work for net-neutrality. Traditional opposition from Business is on the grounds that Net Neutrality regulations would pave way for Government intervention. Government intervention may not be the only way by which Net Neutrality could be achieved. The various aspects related to Net Neutrality need to be elaborately agreed upon and brought into force by evloution of standards and conventions by the Internet Community.
There are two different aspects that I wish to emphaize. One is that a Net Neutrality framework is imperative. The other aspect is that the need for such a framework ought not to be exploited by those who want to "regulate" the Internet.
An effective Net Neutrality framework has to emerge, without compromising on the present Internet Model which is a user-centric, community model.
All the arguments that I see against Net Neutrality are arguments that attempt to scare the proponents o the concept of Net Neutrality that say that Net Neutrality would mean complex legislations, which in turn would lead to higher legal costs and higher cost of access to the user !!! It is a very imaginative argument that propogates an anti-NN campaign, equating NN with an Internet of Legislation.
In the Internet Model Net Neutality can be established and managed with least interference from Governments.
Net neutrality can't exist yet, the FCC has already blown it away
As long as the FCC gives Comcast and other bad actors reserved markets, that no one else can compete in, then there will be no market forces to force them to comply with good faith operations.
I live in Portland, and no one other than Quest who offers low, or no speed, services is allowed to compete in the market. Just 2 miles south of the city, Verizon offers rural users 50Mb down and 20 Mb up speeds,all the while Comcast trumpets their fiber optic networks while giving customers 6Mb and 8 Mb down speeds, and up speeds not much better than DSL.
Comcast burns off more resources on line trying to "manage" its customers than the customers are allowed to use themselves. Comcast is trying to turn net traffic sharing with other ISP's into a profit center in the name of "managing" their network traffic.
Quite litterally the government is already regulating out the net neutrality, by giving Comcast free reign in a false regulatory economy created by FCC regulations and restrictions for any others to compete in the market.
I find it astounding, that a market the size of the city of Portland, is allowed to be the sole domain of Comcast. All the while Comcast has a marketing team for determining the least amount of services for the maximum prices. This should have been an open market years ago.
Comcast cries network congestion, with a user density many times higher than the rural towns to the south, yet can't or won't convert the revenues into services as other companies have with less of a user base. What is ironic, is that Comcast could clear the congestion by providing the higher speeds, and less "management" by Comcast marketing. Internet data flow agreements were not designed to be turned into profit centers for the ISP's. Comcast is already charging their customers more than they need to for the inferior services they provide, even withiout having to layer on top of that, some contrived "management" of its users.
Comcast will always seek to provide the least for the most revenue. They are a bad corporate actor in American business. They will never do anything in good faith, and they will never seek to provide services based on merit.
Until the Comcast markets are opened up to real competition, by the FCC revoking their "exclusive" regulatory territories, then there cannot be any semblance of anything like net neutrality. The government needs to open the territories to competition. At least for the city of Portland they do. It is the government regulation that has already created this sad state of affairs. As long as the government regulation has kept this in place, it requires government regulation to fix it.
Net neutrality is a stalking horse for government controlled internet
The groups pushing for net neutrality are just using that concept as a way to gain acceptance for the idea of removing private corporations' control of the Internet's infrastructure. At heart these groups are really statists ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statist ). They think that government( a liberal government only) control of the Internet is the only acceptable method of managing what they are pushing as a utility necessary to human rights.
I subscribe to the Cato Institutes take on this - keep government's fingers out of the pie or we will have a real mess on our hands. http://www.opposingviews.com/arguments/beware-the-unintended-consequences-of-regulation
we already suffer from FCC intervention
Why would the CATO institute ignore the premise that the FCC has already breached the public trust by handing out territorial exclusives to many of the companies?
This isn't about government regulation, that horse has already been beaten. The "exclusive" territorial regulations need to be repealed, and competition needs to be made available to the customer. Until then, can groups like CATO stop giving out misdirected recommendations.
Even many of the republicans see what is broken about the "regulations" the FCC has put in place.
We already have a government regulation created mess on our hands.
Beware of any Single Power, not just the Government
I think it's wise to consider the wisdom of getting the government involved in traditionally private business dealings. The end result usually is less free, less efficient, and -- as you said -- a real mess.
Freedom and efficiency are the results of good choices and a strong market. It's not government that makes something bad, it's the lack of consumer choice and consumer influence that occurs when government gets involved that makes it bad. All the power is held by that single entity.
The single entity can also be an insurance company used by your employer, a cartel of oil companies that behave as one, a cell phone company that locks you into a long contract -- these create the same limits on freedom and efficiency as government control can.
I support Network Neutrality on broadband because I see the competitive landscape continue to contract. AT&T just bought SBC, Comcast took over Insight and wants even more, both Telcos and CableCos go lawsuit-happy whenever a 3rd-party wants to intrude onto "their" territory, and they even fight each-other for trying to reach one-another's customers. About a fourth of us have only Cable as a provider choice, about a fourth of us has DSL or FIOS, about a fourth of us fortunately have both to choose between, and about a fourth of us has no provider at all.
Most of us are stuck with a single provider -- the single power.
Network Neutrality isn't a government take-over. It's a check-and-balance against abuse by a monopolistic power. The moment it threatens to grow to become a take-over, I'll be on your side of this argument.
Given the choice to leave the protection of our Internet freedoms in the hands of a single and powerful for-profit company -- or have it double-checked by a government by, for, and of the people -- I'm okay with some reasonable Network Neutrality.provisions.
Government Regulation is CONTROL, good or bad.
You make some very good points about the monopolistic nature of telecommunications companies in today's landscape but I would have to disagree with you on the precept that increased government regulation and control over a market is a good thing and that the issue wont fix itself in very short order.
I worked for one of the larger split offs of Ma Bell for quite a few years and saw the effects of how the imposed regulations by the government completely tied the company down, limited it's ability to operate on a reasonable scale and therefore limited it's ability to innovate and keep pace with it's emerging competition, the cable industry. While companies like Comcast, Charter and Cox Communications where able to leverage their networks in way that allowed them to grow and offer better services to their customer base, Telco's were forced to lease their networks to their competitors, were not allowed to make a reasonable profit from said leases and suffered financially. The regulations imposed on them required that any technology they develop internally and deploy, even on the smallest scale, had to shared with and also leased to their lessees in such a way as to allow them to sell the service at the same price as the owner of the network therefore limiting their ability to see the fruits of their innovation and slowing the entire process down. Would you bother spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing a technology that you're forced to share with everyone and that you wont be able to make a reasonable profit from to at least realize a return on your sizable investment within a reasonable amount of time?
The intentions of the Government were good, like they always are *smile*, but misguided in the end, like they almost always are.
Today there are alternatives available to more people than I think you realize and those alternatives are increasing exponentially every time I turn around. WiMax for instance is spreading across the country like wildfire and, using basically existing cell tower technology with a little kick, allow for thousands of wireless connections at broadband speed from one single cell site with a theoretical range of 100 miles.
At my home, and keep in mind I live in a fairly rural area, I have cable, DSL, satellite and wireless WiMax available to me. I have 4 choices of methods from which to get access to the Internet. Not all are equal but the advancement of technology will most certainly improve upon the trailing tech, DSL and satellite, and offer even more in the near future.
Government intervention and control is most certainly NOT the answer.
"Network Neutrality isn't a government take-over. It's a check-and-balance against abuse by a monopolistic power. The moment it threatens to grow to become a take-over, I'll be on your side of this argument."
Any regulation levied on a private entity by the US Government IS government control. By the time you realize that it has grown into a Government takeover, do you think by switching sides at that point that it still wont be too late to do anything about it?
I don't know about you but I'll err on the side of caution with the realization that the free market WILL work as long as WE allow it to.
The Wrong Solutions for the Right Reasons
I agree that you should be wary of concentration of power in either the government or in business. You use the example that cell phone companies collude to lock people into long contracts - ok, some of them do - but there are alternatives: MetroPCS, Boost Mobile, TracFone, NET10, etc. It just may be that most people prefer to be locked into contracts because of better service and devices. Nobody is forced to contract with Verizon, AT&T, or Sprint. But with net neutrality people will be forced to comply.
As far as Comcast, Verizon, etc go - it's not like everyone in their garage can start a company and roll out fiber to millions of customers - there are huge barriers to entry, and it follows that there aren't going to be hundreds of competitors to choose from - but you do have choices, and government regulation of net neutrality doesn't automatically mean dozens of new service providers are going to sprout up from nowhere. I think it's more likely that regulation here will have adverse effects. Can I say for certain? No. But the burden of proof is on those trying to force compliance.
You say you're ok with "some reasonable Network Neutrality provisions." That's a very subjective statement. Everybody is ok with reasonable provisions - but differ widely on the definition of reasonable.
An economic study on Net Neutrality and what ISPs will do.
I found this study that was done by H. Kenneth Cheng(University of Florida), Subhajyoti Bandyopadhyay(University of Florida), and Hong Guo(University of Notre Dame) that states that if Net Neutrality is appealed that ISPs will have little to no incentive to expand their networks. This is based on the idea of supply and demand. ISPs stand to make more money for the same infrastructure only because of the amount of congestion that would be caused by not expanding the infrastructure.
Here is the link. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=959944