[clue-talk] Net neutrality

[Matt Gushee]

Jed S. Baer wrote:

>> But I wonder what you're all hearing about this issue. How worried 
>> should we be?
> 
> That depends upon your starting premises. Do you start out from the
> premise that the companies who own the wires/fiber have property rights?
> To what extent do you think the government should be able to abrogate such
> rights?

Important questions, certainly. One factual point that needs to be 
considered relative to this (and I'm not up to date here) is, how much 
of the Internet is privately owned today?

> Doesn't ownership imply control?

Descriptively, prescriptively, or both?

> Let's say you own a large piece of property, and you've put in a private
> road, from one side to the other.

Ooh, it's that libertarian archetype, the Little Guy with a Piece of 
Land. One of these days I will have to make time to thoroughly 
deconstruct that analogy and its many abuses, but for now I have barely 
time to address the matter at hand.

> This route happens to be the easiest, most convenient, fastest route from
> point A to point B, on either side of your property.

You conveniently gloss over the question of what the alternatives are. 
Is there a public highway, or perhaps just a public right-of-way with 
nothing built on it (and do we have to cross any rivers?). Or do *all* 
routes, convenient or not, pass through someone's private property?

> type of vehicle, etc. Should the government be able to tell you it's
> unfair for you to restrict your premium road to only your traffic?

In general, no.

By the way, how did your entrepreneur get all that land in the first 
place? By homesteading in uninhabited territory? By killing the Indians 
who lived there before? By inheriting it from Dad? Through shrewd but 
ethical business deals? Through unethical business deals? Did he bribe a 
few legislators? Did he have an inside tip that in the near future, a 
lot of people were going to want to transport goods from point A to point B?

What I'm trying to suggest is that your argument is valid *if we accept* 
a guy with a piece of land as the starting point. But it's not the right 
starting point--it's not a natural condition. Very few of us are born 
owning land or any other sort of property; we have to acquire it 
somehow. And I submit that a good society attempts to ensure that people 
(or corporations, which is what we're actually talking about here--and 
yes, by all means let's discuss the 14th amendment and its 
(mis)interpretation some day when we both have time) only acquire 
property through legal and ethical means; and that those who are found 
post facto to have acquired property wrongfully are effectively penalized.

> There are many issues here, in the vein of regulated monopolies and public
> utilities. IMHO, they all come down to the question of how much the state
> should abrogate property rights for the sake of the "common good".

I agree that property rights vs. the common good is the core of the 
argument. I take issue with your quotation marks, though. Just because 
the common good is intangible and vaguely defined doesn't mean it's 
imaginary.

Um ... I have to get to bed, so let me wrap this up. I think what may be 
at stake here is a very important part of the common good, specifically 
access to information. The Internet as we know it is a wide-open forum 
... it's like a humongous 24-hour flea market/town meeting. Almost 
anyone can start a Web site to promote their ideas or products. And 
though having a site doesn't guarantee that you will ever have an 
audience ... you have a chance. Isn't that what America is supposed to 
be all about: little guys having a chance to succeed?

And from the reader/consumer's point of view: where else can you go 
these days to find out what's really going on in the world? You're not 
going to learn much from 9news or the Denver Post--or even the New York 
Times. And without an informed citizenry, where are we?

Now, you could argue that even if there were a fee system that enabled 
large content providers to gain a larger share of the bandwidth, it 
doesn't actually prevent anyone from doing anything. You and I can still 
have our blogs, and anyone can still read them if they care to.

But to me that misses the point. Unfortunately, most people will take 
the path of least resistance. And if the only *easily* available 
information is an infotainment 'product' from 
Disney/Fox/ClearChannel/Time-Warner or some other large media company, 
then that's what your neighbors are likely consuming. And the more their 
thought is limited to what the corporate powers-to-be want them to think 
about, the less we resemble a democracy.

Surely that's not what you want to happen.

-- 
Matt Gushee
The Reluctant Geek: http://matt.gushee.net/rg/