| Thoughtful Opposition to Net Neutrality |
| Written by Dave Burstein |
Larry Spiwak and his colleague George Ford often go a little deeper than other D.C. pundits. On net neutrality, they ask whether government can run it well. "Reasona ble network management" if done sensibly eliminates just about all the serious objections. But will it be done sensibly? Folks including technologists Dave Clark and Dave Farber think if government gets involved, things will get mucked up. I'm more worried about corporate control, but know that regulation isn't perfect either. From Larry's testimony at the the New York City Council hearing:
"Those familiar with communications policy realize that the practice of regulation is imperfect. No intervention is exempt from the ugliness, no matter who is in charge. There is neither person nor computer smart enough to properly address all the relevant margins to an intervention, and the final set of rules and regulations are certain to be smothered in political ideology. This truth cannot be ignored; markets may occasionally fail, but regulation is always defective. As such, the headroom in the cost-benefit calculation must be very high for regulation to have much hope of success. ... there are sharks lurking below.For this reason, while we at the Phoenix Center have been avid (and indeed very public) supporters of the current post hoc adjudicative process at the Federal Communications Commission to enforce the FCC’s Internet Policy Statement, we have expressed severe reservations about the imposition of a “bright line” ex ante nondiscrimination rule. We do so not because we dogmatically think the market is “hypercompetitive” and there are a “thousand broadband flowers blooming”, but because [of] theory, empirics, and our professional experience. Spiwak goes on with thoughts of law professor Cass Sunshine.(“the strongest arguments for cost-benefit balancing are based not only on neoclassical economics, but also on an understanding of human cognition, on democratic considerations, and on an assessment of the real-world record of such balancing,” noting that cost-benefit analysis “can protect democratic processes” from interestgroups that are “pressing for regulation when the argument on its behalf is fragile.”) -------------- He goes on with projections of the harm likely from net neutrality if there is a massive congestion problem to solve. My belief, reported elsewhere, is that on the major U.S. wired networks, the congestion problem is minimal or easily resolved. The way to answer that is to look at the data, not what the lobbyists say. All data of the actual situation on broadband data very welcome, on or off the record. Precise numbers especially welcome. |
