Ev Ehrlich
The election has come and gone, but on Tuesday evening, Albuquerque’s Journal Theater will host New Mexico’s biggest campaign rally of the year.
The rally, hosted in part by the interest group The Free Press, stars Michael Copps, a member of the Federal Communications Commission, one of the most powerful regulatory offices in American government.
No, Commissioner Copps isn’t running for anything. He’s coming to town to breathe some new life into the discredited cause of net neutrality.
The Free Press says the rally’s purpose is to “save the Internet.” But it’s reasonable to ask – save it from what? The connection you have at home continues to get faster, cheaper, and gets you access to more diverse content.
What Free Press and Commissioner Copps really want is to regulate the Internet, and to micromanage Internet service providers as if they were subsidized telephone companies.
What is net neutrality?
Mr. Copps is not coming to town to solicit your opinion or mine; he’ll be here to campaign for net neutrality. And just what is that?
Copps and The Free Press throw around words like “open” and tell ghost stories about big companies, but what they mean by “net neutrality” is this – everything that travels on the Internet should move under the same terms, speeds and conditions. It’s like saying that everybody has to drive at 55 on the highway, whether they prefer 50 in the right lane or 70 in the left, or that Sears can make its “better” products, but not its “good” or “best.”
For the Internet, that means that a signal allowing a doctor to do a remote diagnosis, or that allows you to move your retirement funds, or that lets you see a live sports event or make an uninterrupted video call to your child or parents has to wait for someone to finish downloading a video of a cat playing the xylophone.
It doesn’t mean that your cable, phone or wireless company can censor what you see, or that Comcast, for example, can show you NBC programs but make it impossible to see CBS, ABC, or other ones. There are already plenty of laws to stop that kind of behavior. Moreover, who would be so foolish as to buy that service? In fact, why would anyone be so foolish as to try to offer it?
Competition is the answer
Ultimately, competition is the answer to making the Internet work. Some things can’t travel at the same speed as everything else, like an ambulance in traffic, or an overnight package versus regular mail.
But “net neutrality” advocates, like The Free Press, keep pushing for “neutrality.” Why? Whom does it help? It helps the Big Websites, whose traffic clogs up the network – YouTube, for example, uses more bandwidth than the entire Internet did a decade ago.
But they don’t have to pay for the congestion they cause. Instead, you do, through slower service. Think of it this way – having rules that stop some websites from buying “special treatment” – like an uninterruptible “fast lane” – on the Internet would be like telling newspapers that they can’t accept advertising, because advertisers would get “special treatment” in the newspaper. But that would only mean that the price of your newspaper would go up, and there would be less of interest to you in the paper, if you clip grocery coupons or read ads.
What’s even more frightening is that, in their efforts to impose these regulations, the FCC has said it wants the same powers over the Internet that they had over the phone system in the days of the Ma Bell monopoly. But it’s hard to see how that kind of widespread regulatory authority would do anything other than put a chill on essential private investment in broadband networks.
After all, unlike the telephone networks of Bell System days that were granted monopolies by the government, today’s broadband networks were built by private companies using their own capital at their own risk.
More, unnecessary regulation
More, unnecessary regulation would interfere with network operators’ ability to manage their own networks. Because, like traffic on the city streets, traffic on the Internet has to be managed in order to get everything to where it wants to go. Companies need the latitude to manage those networks – that’s how we’ll get advanced Internet-based services in education and health care, and give small businesses communications options that were once only available to huge companies.
Government stepping in with rules that “everything must be the same” won’t get us any closer to those important innovations.
The theme Free Press has given its Tuesday night rally is “Save the Internet.” Perhaps the best way to save the Internet is to tell the interest groups like Free Press and their regulatory allies to keep their hands off something that’s working well for all of us.
Dr. Ev Ehrlich is an economist and technology policy expert, serving as president of ESC Company. Dr. Ehrlich served in the Clinton administration as undersecretary of commerce, and is one of the nation’s leading experts on economic analysis and business development.