House Democrats Shelve Net Neutrality Proposal

crimeandpunishment writes "A compromise on net neutrality appears to be as likely as Google and China becoming BFFs. House Democrats have pulled the plug on efforts to work out a compromise among phone, cable, and Internet companies. House Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, who shelved the proposal late on Wednesday in the face of Republican opposition, said, 'If Congress can't act, the FCC must,' and called this development 'a loss for consumers.' Internet companies and public interest groups say the new regulations are needed to keep phone and cable companies from playing favorites with traffic, while those companies insist they need flexibility so high-bandwidth applications don't slow down their systems." The net neutrality debate seems to have fallen victim to the extreme polarization evident in the larger political culture.

Comments

Re:I'll Say It Again ...

[dpilot]

While conservatives may dislike "Net Neutrality" for the reasons you state, I believe they have another reason - an undying faith in "the free market and the ability of players in the free market to come to an optimal solution for all." In other words, "Free market players need to have the maximum flexibility to arrive at market solutions which both maximize profits and deliver optimal solutions." Note that I keep using quotation marks in the prior sentence, and in this case it's not a misuse of "quotation marks," rather it's expressing a position that sounds really neat, but doesn't work that well in practice.

First off, the "free market" really isn't so free, it's loaded with large players. There have been studies indicating that when 4 or 5 major players have captured something like 80% of the market, it no longer acts like a "free market." According to those studies, even without overt collusion, a market dominated by a few large players starts to act as if there is price-fixing and market restriction happing, just by normal corporate behavior.

Second, the "free market" never developed anything like the internet, and they had over a decade of failure at it. CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, The Source, etc are all ashes of the market failure. The only reason AOL has anything like survived is because of the proprietary players it best embraced the internet. The normal corporate behavior these days is to "own the pie" rather than work with others to create a much bigger pie. Oddly enough, they continue to do that even when the cooperative pie is so much bigger that their share is bigger than their full ownership of a private pie.

Finally, I don't think conservatives understand that sometimes we do better if our actions are limited. They have complete distrust of the limiting agency - ie, the government, and do understand that sometimes their own decisions can be bad, but fail to see that sometimes, the "free market" will fail to correct them, and they fail to appreciate the damage done, while waiting for the marketplace to correct things.