Net Neutrality is a deceptive term designed to convince non-technical people that the government is on their side,…for a change.
Net Neutrality is a form of fascism. Fascism differs from Communism in one relevant particular: Communism stresses government ownership of all means of production, Fascism leaves production in private hands, but attempts to control it in every way as though they owned it.
The argument goes that cable and phone companies should not be permitted to decide what you can see and what you can’t. And if that was the truth of the issue, then I’d be all for Net Neutrality. But the truth is more subtle than that.
When we say “what you can see”, we aren’t talking about news sites, blogs, conservative/liberal, religious/secular content. Net Neutrality has no bearing at all on the OPINION of any content. What it attempts to regulate is the SOURCE and SPEED of that content. I don’t mean the SOURCE “or” SPEED, but the SOURCE AND SPEED.
If Comcast or Bellsouth (cable internet companies) offers a subscription movie service that competes with Amazon Prime, Hulu, VidAngel or some other service, then Comcast wants to give priority to those customers watching movies/shows on the Comcast movie service over the Hulu or Amazon service. This is done through a technology called QoS or Quality of Service. If you have a fancy home router, you probably have the same ability as Comcast, just with coarser-grained controls. Gamers typically up the priority of the UDP protocol or Gaming protocols to have less choppy gaming experiences. Users that stream audio/video often could prioritize that traffic over, say, incremental, cloud-based backups that are less time sensitive. Who wants a choppy viewing experience, right?
And virtually all content in question is Video. No one cares about web pages loaded over the HTTP or HTTPS protocols. No web pages are affected by Net Neutrality. Web pages are so small compared to video content that no one would ever notice if their Quality of Service settings were one way versus another. If Comcast set browsing traffic to top priority or to dead last, it just wouldn’t affect anyone’s browsing experience. Why? Because web pages are just too small to matter. A couple tenths of a second loading the 45 resources that your web page references isn’t going to be noticeable.
But Net Neutrality advocates also gloss over the difference between CABLE and PHONE companies. Why? Because knowing the difference is going to cause conservative minds to object to the generalization. Conservatives tend to be sticklers for “the principle of the thing”; and there is a principle in question.
If you have DSL internet, your data is being downloaded over a copper wire that was installed by your phone company, probably when the original builders built the house. It was first installed as a phone line. DSL is a technology that uses the phone line to transmit a second frequency on the same line that your phones use. The two signals don’t interfere with each other, but you still have to add a line-filter on each of your phones to avoid line-static coming from your always-on internet service.
Here is an important point: Someone living in a dusty cowboy town in rural Montana didn’t pay more for their phone line than the guy across the street from the Bell Labs headquarters in Cincinnati. Why? Because the laying down of copper wire by the phone company was heavily subsidized by the government. Still today, everyone’s phone bill includes a line-item to subsidize some rural person’s phone line. If Ma Bell laid down 45 miles of copper to service 3 houses out in the woods, it will take 100 years to recover the costs of that line installation. If market forces alone were to dictate line-install priorities, people in rural communities would have had no land-line phone service for the past 70 years!
Today’s cell-phone tower installation is a much more market-driven process, with the first and fastest towers and switching equipment serving the largest markets by population density. You may not like that, but it’s the only way Verizon and AT&T can afford to roll out that service to more rural communities. And by the time it makes it there, it tends to be much cheaper than its initial debut in New York, Chicago and LA.
Why did the government assert itself in the rollout of access to land-line phones but not cell phone towers? Because the government’s only interest was in assuring access to government services, such as police, ambulance and fire. Since those services are maintained through taxation, it was not constitutional to charge people for services they could not access. Phone lines made that possible.
Cable companies are much different. Whereas DSL internet comes over the phone lines, subsidized by tax payers; the coaxial cable that serves cable internet users was paid for exclusively by your cable company (Comcast in my case). They had to fork over the cash ahead of time to run coaxial cable, and install signal boosters and other equipment in your neighborhood with the hopes that they could lure enough customers away from their older, slower internet, at a higher price, to adopt cable internet service. Still today, cable internet is as solid and high-performing internet as you can find.
Now, someone with fiber-channel just choked. In Utah, where I live, several cities bought into the government/private cooperative called Utopia. I opposed it before rollout, and I oppose it today on the grounds that it would stifle technology development and the government ought not to be in competition with private business (picking winners and losers). Many Internet Service Providers were wiped out by cities adopting Utopia at the municipal level. The hopes of super-high-speed internet was tantalizing…but the price, unbelievable! Utopia was advertised to be just $8 per month. Today, about 8 years later, users are paying between $35 and $55. And their speeds can reach 250mbit/sec and 1000mbit/sec respectively. Comcast connections in my neighborhood have been clocked at 276mbit/sec. Faster than the slowest fiber, but slower than the 1000mbit/sec.
Next year, however, Comcast is rolling out DOCSIS 3.1 that will enable speeds as high as 10,000mbit/sec or 10Gbps! That’s 10x what the Utopia folks are getting today! We had to wait a little longer for it, but the market solved the problem without government interference or blanket municipal adoption wiping out competition! That’s what free markets do. Meanwhile, some cities are having huge financial issues with Utopia because operational costs are so much higher than bureaucrats and politicians had speculated.
At this point, the difference between 100 Mbit and 1000 Mbit is irrelevant in most cases. This is because many switches, laptops, smart televisions, desktop computers, smart phones, etc., still only support 100 Mbit communication. If 5000 Mbit were rolled out today, less than .1% of devices could make use of it. Thus, the cable companies are still ahead of the curve.
In 2005, I became a Comcast subscriber paying $55 for 2 Megabit internet. Today, I pay $65 and get 267 Megabit internet most of the time. Comcast has consistently upped my speed without notice, and only once has upped my bill by $5. The other cost increase was a house-move and service upgrade.
But I digress. Back to Net Neutrality.
If you’re watching a Comcast-purchased movie over your Comcast internet on your smart TV, and suddenly you lose connectivity, who do you call? Comcast of course. If you are watching a VidAngel movie on your Comcast internet and it goes down, who do you call? Hmmm.. Not sure. Both I suppose. But VidAngel, Hulu, YouTube, Amazon, Netflix or Apple TV will probably blame a connectivity issue on Comcast. Comcast will be burdened with tracking down why the VidAngel movie service isn’t performing well over their network. The situation will never be reversed! VidAngel will never be burdened with tracking down performance issues for a Comcast movie. Is this fair? Both offer a video service, but just one owns and operates the coaxial cable network that is Comcast. An extra degree of support is placed on Comcast that is not placed on VidAngel.
In my opinion, Comcast should be permitted to give priority to their own movie service because they own the network over which they are broadcasting. To force Comcast to de-prioritize their own traffic in order to make room for their competitors, when their competitors paid nothing for the network, and pay nothing to maintain it is not freedom. It is fascism. Wealth redistribution from Comcast stock owners (401k, Roth IRA holders), to tech startups is not a government function.
Imagine the government required that you open your fancy new riding lawn mower to all your neighbors, and you have no higher priority in using it than they do. You wouldn’t stand for it. You paid for it, you maintain it. To let anyone at all use it is an act of charity. But to revoke priority from the one who paid for it and maintains it is just wrong. If you’d known ahead of time what the government would rule, you wouldn’t have bought the lawnmower at all!
Comcast sold internet service, which implies the carrying of all content that goes over the internet. Since that time, speeds and technology have made it possible to stream movies over internet connections. This is a new market that Comcast foresaw. Now that it’s here, the Government is pushing to control the internet in new ways, not just at Comcast’s expense, but at ours! Do you really believe Government bureaucrats care if you occasionally get a “buffering…” pause in your movie? Do you trust the government to act in good faith, or do you, like me, suspect that the leftist and crony-capitalists that are pushing for “Net Neutrality”, really want more control over the one venue that has disrupted their control of information over the last 20 years: the Internet? Their regulatory powers will only grow. Net Neutrality will, in my opinion, lead to real censorship in the future. It was never about freedom or “neutrality”.
Net Neutrality advocates have a narrow window of time in which to press their case. Just as broadband speeds have hugely outgrown the demands of users surfing web pages, so it will shortly outpace the demands of streaming movies. Even multiple 4K displays will not be able to eat all the bandwidth being supplied by internet providers. Each 4K stream only consumes about 25Mbit/sec of bandwidth. In the next few years, internet customers will have 1000-5000Mbit/sec internet and the argument behind Net Neutrality will fall apart. Don’t give in to permanent government regulation over the internet for a temporary problem the market is already in the process of solving.
Tel Jiberish 