{"id":23491,"date":"2010-11-15T20:20:00","date_gmt":"2010-11-16T03:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nmpolitics.net\/index\/?p=23491"},"modified":"2010-11-16T17:46:09","modified_gmt":"2010-11-17T00:46:09","slug":"a-campaign-rally-by-any-other-name%e2%80%a6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/2010\/11\/a-campaign-rally-by-any-other-name%e2%80%a6\/","title":{"rendered":"A campaign rally by any other name\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Ev Ehrlich<\/p><\/div>\n

The election has come and gone, but on Tuesday evening, Albuquerque\u2019s Journal Theater\u00a0will host New Mexico\u2019s biggest campaign rally of the year.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0rally, 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\u00a0regulatory offices in American government.<\/p>\n

No, Commissioner Copps isn\u2019t running for anything. He\u2019s coming to town to breathe some new life into the discredited cause of net neutrality<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Free Press\u00a0says the rally\u2019s purpose is to \u201csave the Internet.\u201d But it\u2019s reasonable to ask \u2013 save it from what? The connection you have at home continues to get faster, cheaper, and gets you access to more diverse content.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

What\u00a0Free Press and Commissioner Copps\u00a0really want is to regulate the Internet, and to micromanage Internet service providers as if they were subsidized telephone companies.<\/p>\n

What is net neutrality?<\/h3>\n

Mr. Copps is not coming to town to solicit your opinion or mine; he\u2019ll be here to campaign for net neutrality. And just what is that?<\/p>\n

Copps and The Free Press throw around words like \u201copen\u201d and tell ghost stories about big companies, but what they mean by \u201cnet neutrality\u201d is this \u2013 everything that travels on the Internet should move under the same terms, speeds and conditions. It\u2019s 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 \u201cbetter\u201d products, but not its \u201cgood\u201d or \u201cbest.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t 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?<\/p>\n

Competition is the answer<\/h3>\n

Ultimately, competition is the answer to making the Internet work. Some things can\u2019t travel at the same speed as everything else, like an ambulance in traffic, or an overnight package versus regular mail.<\/p>\n

But \u201cnet neutrality\u201d advocates, like The Free Press, keep pushing for \u201cneutrality.\u201d Why? Whom does it help? It helps the Big Websites, whose traffic clogs up the network \u2013 YouTube, for example, uses more bandwidth than the\u00a0entire Internet\u00a0did a decade ago.<\/p>\n

But they don\u2019t have to pay for the congestion they cause. Instead, you do, through slower service. Think of it this way \u2013 having rules that stop some websites from buying \u201cspecial treatment\u201d \u2013 like an uninterruptible \u201cfast lane\u201d \u2013 on the Internet would be like telling newspapers that they can\u2019t accept advertising, because advertisers would get \u201cspecial treatment\u201d in the newspaper. But that would only mean that the price of\u00a0your newspaper would go up, and there would be less of interest to you in the paper, if you clip grocery coupons or read ads.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s 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\u00a0Bell monopoly. But it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

After all, unlike the telephone networks of Bell System days that were granted monopolies\u00a0by the government, today\u2019s broadband networks were built by private companies using their own capital at their own risk.<\/p>\n

More, unnecessary regulation<\/h3>\n

More, unnecessary regulation would interfere with network operators\u2019 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 \u2013 that\u2019s how we\u2019ll get advanced Internet-based services in education and health care, and give small businesses communications options that were once only available to huge companies.<\/p>\n

Government stepping in with rules that \u201ceverything must be the same\u201d won\u2019t get us any closer to those important innovations.<\/p>\n

The theme Free Press has given its Tuesday night rally is \u201cSave the Internet.\u201d \u00a0Perhaps the best way to\u00a0save the Internet is to tell the interest groups like Free Press and their regulatory allies to keep their hands off something that\u2019s working well for all of\u00a0us.<\/p>\n

Dr. Ev Ehrlich<\/em><\/a> 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\u2019s leading experts on economic analysis and business development.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The election has come and gone, but on Tuesday evening, Albuquerque\u2019s Journal Theater will host New Mexico\u2019s biggest campaign rally of the year. It’s about breathing some new life into the discredited cause of net neutrality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1834,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1192,16],"tags":[116],"class_list":["post-23491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-guest-columns","tag-washington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1834"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23491\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}