The petty statists at the FCC have wrapped the FCC's bureaucratic tentacles around the internet. This is just the beginning...What is the problem this "solution" is supposed to solve?
Supposedly it will deal with
"...bandwidth hogging sites such as Netflix." Such language in a free-market with unlimited bandwith potential is not only ignorant, it is especially disturbing coming from a government bureaucrat. Such interventions pervert the natural market incentives and spark inane arguments over who hogs more bandwidth and whether every child has a “right” to surf YouTube all day.
It's about power and controlWhat this FCC Beer Hall Putsch really does is establish a precedent. It's about the Federal Government establishing primacy over the internet. More regulations on content and speech control will follow. Further on down the road is the government parceling out internet access and speech "rights."
How the internet worksNet Neutrality is a hard subject to grasp. It is further befogged by those who discuss the internet as if it were a shared commons with constrained capacity. It is not. It is an agglomeration of competing operators, scalable infrastructure, ISPs and content providers.
Think of it as a network of toll roads (the backbone), that truckloads of products (content providers) use to deliver content to stores all over the US (ISP's).
We customers go to an ISP to get our YouTube and blogs, just like we go to Walmart to buy shotgun shells and DVDs. ISPs and content providers pay the backbone operators for the bandwidth they use. They then pass the cost on to us. It's a great system, but some people just cannot stand the fact that market forces drive pricing.
"Usage-based pricing is a clear positive for cable, telecom, and wireless providers, but it also might be a concern for Netflix," said MF Global analyst Paul Gallant. "Depending on where the tiers were set, usage-based pricing on wire line broadband could end up deterring some people from dropping cable for over-the-top video."
A group of pointy-headed government bureaucrats cannot better determine what customers want than the free market can. Remove the regulations and let each ISP come up with their own pricing plan. That’s how cell phones work. It’s also how cable tv works. If I don't like Verizon I can switch over to Sprint, and I don't need a government nanny holding my hand.
Government should not be favoring one industry over another. If internet demand grows, companies operating on the free market will build more capacity because they want to make more money off of us consumers. It’s a fair deal. We want more internet, and they risk their capital to build it, recouping their investment when they bring it on line and sell it to us. If it kills cable tv in the process, who cares? It's a free marketplace--let the best technology win.
Our government does not understand the free marketAn FCC official said in a statement that it would be a "cop on the beat" for "arbitrary, anti-consumer, or anti-competitive tiered pricing plans."
What a moron. What company could make money with "arbitrary" or “anti-consumer” pricing? Has this imbecilic statist never heard of Walmart, Amazon, or Priceline.com? They would go broke if they were stupid enough to do what this FCC bureaucrat suggests! This is one more reason why government has no business intervening in the free market. These petty dictators don’t even understand basic economic fundamentals.
And "Anticompetitive?" Look no further than the US government. They routinely snuff competition in the energy market (ethanol and wind subsidies, import tariffs on foreign ethanol), automobile and transportation market (battery powered car and Amtrack subsidies), and now they are intervening in the competition between video stores, on-line video providers and cable tv.
This ruling retards the advance of consumer technologyLook at what a lack of government regulation has done to the music industry and cell phones. We can now listen to whatever we want whenever we want, indy bands can build an on-line fan base without expensive promoters, and we can talk to anyone in the world while paying less for phone service than out parents and grandparents did.
One day, if government gets out of the way, we will all have fiber running to our house, and the possibilities are limitless. Phone service, tv, movies, live streaming video teleconferencing for the average family.
John Nolte explains what the entertainment future would look like:
What I also see is a world in which absolutely EVERYTHING, every television show, movie, music video, what have you, is made available for mass consumption online. Because there’s no distribution costs beyond converting to the digital file necessary for streaming, we could see, for example, complete episodes of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show made available.
With very little upfront investment, anything and everything ever committed to film or video could find itself monetized again. And of course all of it would be available in the best sound and picture quality available.
And for the consumer? Well, that’s the best part. No more video collections clogging up the living room. For X-amount of dollars per month everything ever put on video will be one click away. For a monthly fee, sites like Netflix or Amazon will store your video collections for you.
Unfortunately, many Americans are more interested in professional ball sports or the Kardashians than they are in their freedoms. Perhaps we could get their attention by giving them a glimpse of what their entertainment future could look like if the government would just get out of the way
Further Reading:
John Nolte - The Future of Home VideoSource-Report - The Internet BackbonePolitico - Net NeutralityRobert M McDowell - FCC's Threat to Internet FreedomWaPo – FCC Market Meddling
