Imagine a town that has all sorts of gasoline
pipelines running by it but only one gas pump. Rationing is inevitable.
So are price controls.
Everyone gets equal amounts, except of course first
responders like police and ambulances, which should get all the gas
they want. And, well, so should the mayor. And if you can make a good
business case that you work 60 miles away, you can file paperwork and
perhaps pull some strings for more gas. How about those kids
hot-rodding around town who can't drive 55? They get last dibs, and
maybe we can sneak in some gas thinner to slow down their engines and
not waste gas.
You can do all that and constantly update the gas
neutrality rules -- or you can just open another gas station across the
street. Or one on each corner.
The trick to an open and innovative Internet is not sneaky technical fixes nor more rules and regulations and bureaucracies to enforce them. The Internet will only expand based on competitive principles, not socialist diktat.
This is the essence of the Ed Markey's (D., Mass.)
Orwellian-named Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008, which would
foist network neutrality on the wild and woolly Internet. The Federal
Communications Commission is holding a public hearing today at Harvard
Law School in Cambridge, Mass., to build the case for the ill-conceived
idea of preventing, as Mr. Markey's bill would, network operators from
using technologies that may favor one application over another.
It's a bad idea because the only thing Mr. Markey's
bill will preserve is mediocrity via the lack of competition, and full
employment for regulators micromanaging a business whose very
innovation comes from the lack of rules. With net neutrality, there
will be no new competition and no incentives for build outs. Bandwidth
speeds will stagnate, and new services will wither from bandwidth
starvation.
The idea of network neutrality is that all of our
Internet packets are equal, and that the spirit of the Internet and its
ability to create wonderful new applications like Google, MySpace and
Facebook is predicated on open (albeit limited) access for all. Yet,
despite an overabundance of bandwidth pulsing throughout the U.S., we
are still stuck with rationing to our homes. Haven't we learned that
advancing technology is never served by arbitrary rules to divvy up
scarce resources? Look at the dearth of good cell phone applications.
Rules make incumbents lazy.