Court Upholds Internet Deregulation

Internet Voting writes "Big telecom companies seem to have won big with the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling upholding FCC's ruling deregulating the Internet. Opponents argued that telecoms could now deny third parties access to their telecommunications lines and eliminating competition. From the story: "In its September 2005 ruling, the FCC relieved telephone companies of decades-old regulations that required them to grant competing Internet service providers 'nondiscriminatory' access to their wirelines in order to reach consumers.""

Comments

Fine... pay the government back, then.

[glindsey]

You want to deny everybody else access to the wires you laid on public easements, using grants, subsidies, and tax breaks given to you by the government? Fine. Pay all of the back leasing costs and taxes that were handed to you so you could establish your geo-monopolies everywhere. Sounds fair to me.

Re:Fine... pay the government back, then.

[krunk7]

Look, it's simple: either you believe in the free market, in which case deregulation is a good thing as it will open up the market that regulation is currently closing off, or you believe in fascism. It's that simple.

Yeah! that's telling them! Your either Good or Evil, Capitalist of Communist, good with God or a baby eater!

Don't be a dunce. There's no such thing as complete deregulation except in anarchy. In any system of government, local, federal, you name it any system of government there is regulation. And there is enforcement of regulations. That's what government is. For example, "You may not use monopoly status to leverage competition in other markets." This is a regulation that maintains free and equal competition, the very core of Adam Smith's capitalism.

I love how many self proclaimed capitalists and free market advocates fail to understand their founders work.
Here's some quote's from Smith that clearly outline his feelings on keeping big business in check:

• Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.
• People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
• As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.
• The rate of profit... is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin.
• The subjects of every state ought to contribute toward the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state ....[As Henry Home (Lord Kames) has written, a goal of taxation should be to] 'remedy inequality of riches as much as possible, by relieving the poor and burdening the rich.
• Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters.
• We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations [that is, unions or colluding organizations] of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual price.

And my personal favorite:

"Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters."

So yeah, buddy, I'm a Capitalist with a capital C. I advocate free and fair markets. And I, like the father of capitalist theory and the invisible hand, am not so dense as to think that deregulation, for the simple fact of being deregulation, is a good thing.

But you keep drinking that cool aid.

Re:I can't wait!

[bmwm3nut]

It hit me then that the openness of the internet is under attack from many different vectors, not just on the net neutrality front.

Yes, you're right, however, I don't fear the loss off "free" communication like the internet currently provides. If we do get to a stage where only Hotmail users can talk to other Hotmail users, or only Comcast customers can see Comcastnet, or whatever, it will be just like the bad old days of AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe, even local BBSes. While the "internet" or whatever we call the "internet" today may turn into a walled garden, I'm sure there will be something out there (yet to be invented) that will allow us unfettered access. As first it will be only nerd friendly (like the early days of the internet), but it will catch on. Even look at how much "freedom" the Chinese have with the internet and that's with the totalitarian government doing it's best to curtail it. For example, look at where we are with wireless mesh networking. If something happened that made the internet not free, you can bet there will be even more research into mesh networking and then you don't even have to worry about the telecom layer, you (the user) control it all.