Net Neutrality Explained Via Professor Hazlett’s Great Book: The Political Spectrum

RUSH: I got another note also from somebody who said, “You know, you’ve explained net neutrality a couple, three times, but I think you better do it again because now they’re protesting at Ajit Pai’s house.” He’s the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. And they’re protesting at his house.

And of course all of the Millennials and all the tech bloggers are all caught up in this believing that net neutrality is equality and fairness and sameness and does not allow the evil cable companies and the evil internet service providers to gouge you and to overcharge you. And nothing could be further from the truth.

I had a great interview with Professor Thomas Hazlett, my friend from the old Sacramento days who has written a book. I would really recommend, and I’ve recommended it two or three times, his book, The Political Spectrum, Thomas W. Hazlett. In fact, it’s written for laymen in its verbiage, thereby easy to understand, and it’s a history of the regulation of the telecommunications industry.

And what it demonstrates — and he was great in the interview in The Limbaugh Letter and I’m gonna excerpt some of it during the program today. He’s just excellent in pointing out the history of regulation of the entire spectrum, wireless, FM, AM, television, police band, air traffic control, you name it. The regulation retarded — do you realize that we could have had cellular communications in the fifties? FM radio was delayed 20 years because of the power of AM broadcasters to shelve it, influencing regulators. The history of the telecommunications industry is the history of regulating it and impeding it. And net neutrality is an often-used misnamed term that’s designed to make everybody think that no one user, no one provider, no one company will have any more access to the internet than any other.

One of the best analogies I could give you on this — and I’m gonna get back to Roy Moore in a minute. I never lose my place. The pro-net neutrality people have come up to analogies to try to help people understand what they think they’re trying to propose. And they use Federal Express and Amazon as their illustration. And they say FedEx delivers Amazon’s packages, and they’re all treated the same. No package gets any preferential treatment. FedEx gets the packages, they deliver them.

Nothing could be further from the truth! Whether you’re talking about Amazon or Shmazon, you can choose your delivery speed, you can choose how many days, weeks, you can choose the kind of delivery you want, do you want ground, do you care if it doesn’t take a month, do you want it tomorrow, do you want it in two days. All of that depends on how much you are willing to pay.

And the providers of both retail products and those who deliver them will accept any form of payment based on the services they offer to give you that package when you want it. If you want to pay the least, then you can buy FedEx ground or UPS ground or whatever and have it delivered in three weeks. If you want to pay, you can have it delivered the next day. If you want to pay a little less than that, you can have it arrive in two days.

There’s all kinds of flexibility and it’s based on what people are willing to pay. All packages are not treated the same. All Amazon, all FedEx, all UPS packages are not treated the same. I can’t believe they used this as an example because it’s so easily blown to smithereens. Well, instead of Amazon, think of Amazon as your internet service provider, and instead of FedEx, think of the internet itself as delivering the product.

If you want the fastest internet you can go out and ask if your provider provides gigabit Ethernet. And if he does and you find out what it costs and you want to buy it then you damn well expect that your download speeds with gonna be gigabit ethernet. You’re paying for it. If you don’t care how fast your internet speeds are, you can go el cheapo.

See, this is the real rub. What the tech bloggers and the left don’t like is that there are options and that there is a freedom in the marketplace and that people can choose superior service if they’re willing to pay for it. And if somebody’s willing to pay for superior service, the providers had better provide it. But if everybody’s treated the same — the only way everybody can be treated the same is if there is a massive regulatory agency that is watching and controlling and inspecting virtually every aspect of the internet every day. And they’re looking for violators, because they want to punish them.

It is impossible for there to be sameness and equality when it comes to the transfer of data, for example, or for the internet, which is what we’re talking about here, but there are other mass forms of communication, too, that would come into effect. But it’s typical of the left. If you want the government running the internet, if you want the government policing and in charge of every aspect of internet, then by golly, by gosh, support net neutrality.

Net neutrality is misnamed. There’s nothing “neutral” about it. The government controls it. The government regulates it. If you like government regulation, if you like how government regulation retards things, slows things down, gums things up, causes mistakes to be made, then by all means support net neutrality.

It does not mean that certain people are gonna be given preferential treatment. It means that you will be able to buy whatever service you want and the provider will provide it. And if the provider doesn’t provide what you’re paying for, then you have recourse to cancel, get out of it, go somewhere else. It is regulation that would turn the internet — look, the internet has grown like wild, and it has grown precisely because it has not been regulated.

It really isn’t a complicated thing at all. What complicates this is another misnamed political project, net neutrality. I mean, who could be opposed to neutrality? That means nobody is given any preferential treatment, and isn’t that what we’re all about? Nobody is special, nobody gets anything better or faster than anybody else, and that’s what we call fairness, and that’s what we call equality, and that’s what we call happiness, and that’s what we call sustainability, and whatever other cockamamie thing we use to describe it.

But it isn’t the real world. How about the government regulating airline travel speeds? Yep. We’re only gonna allow jets to fly 300 miles an hour because some people can’t afford to fly at 700 miles an hour or six. The people that are in charge of promoting ridding the telecommunications industry of these Obama-era rules — would you like to know what net neutrality, what it’s based on? It’s based on something called Title II, U.S. Code Title II, 1934 telecommunications law.

There wasn’t an internet in 1934. There wasn’t television commercially available in 1934. And yet that’s the series of regulations and laws that Obama put in place to have them apply to modern-day communications technology. And it’s absurd. And the reason Obama and the Democrats and the left is all for it is precisely because it puts the government in charge of it. The government regulates it. And I’m gonna give you some examples today, Professor Hazlett from his interview. You’ll be stunned at the slow pace of technological innovation because of regulation.

The internet, remember when it first started, when people really, really got into it? I’m talking about being able to browse websites, the first browser was Mosaic, then Netscape came along with theirs, and everything was free. Newspapers published websites with the exact content of their published editions and more. Everything came online. Everything, data and information being added, and nobody was charging anything for it, which was their big mistake.

They created the idea that if it’s on the internet, it’s free. Now they’re having to charge for it, put things behind pay walls, they’re having trouble because of so many years. But the point is, it wasn’t regulated and look how fast it grew. And look how fast the tech improved. And look how widespread available it became. And when it became so powerful, when it became so widespread, when it became of age and had demonstrable influence, that’s when the left wants to get their grubby, crusty paws on it and start regulating it for their political benefit.

It’s not about your provider shutting down data speeds to you while speeding them up for some corporate customer. If you want to pay for it, you’ll be able to get it, just like in anything else in a free market. And if you can’t afford what you want now, you work harder and maybe someday you will be able to. But there’s always gonna be an option, until the government gets involved.

RUSH: I just want to give you one example here to go along with the net neutrality discussion or explanation that I offered in the first half hour of the program. The left is pushing net neutrality ’cause they want the government to regulate the internet on the premise that the private sector is mean, it’s unfair, it overcharges, it kills its customers, it puts its customers at risk, all of the typical bromides you get from the left.

So they want the government regulating it just like they want the government regulating health care. If you like Obamacare, if you like the government in charge of all that they’re in charge of, then you ought to welcome net neutrality. But I’m telling you, if you like being able to purchase what you want, when you want it, if you like technological innovation, if you want things continuing to improve and innovate, modernize, and get cheaper along the way, then you must oppose net neutrality.

It’s misnamed. It has nothing to do with what the left actually wants. And I’m gonna give you an example of government regulation retarding and practically stopping technological innovation. The example I’m gonna use comes from professional Hazlett’s book, and it’s about cellular. Think back, your own life. What is your first memory of either seeing a cell phone or actually having one? I’ll tell you mine. It was 1985 or ’86. And I was in Sacramento.

I was at a Sacramento Kings basketball game. And I forget the cell provider that we had back then, but the sponsor — and I happened to run into this guy, and he was telling me about the latest thing, cellular phones. And he had one with him. And he was able to call whoever he wanted. I was able to hear it, make the call. I was dazzled. I said, “No kidding.”

The thing is, he had this giant brick in his pocket that was the battery. And he said he had another battery that was in his car. And I said, “Well, how long does this last?” He said, “Well, you really shouldn’t use it when it’s not attached to the battery.” But he just wanted to demo it. It wasn’t even on the market yet. He was just demoing this for me. I said, “Man, I gotta have one of these. I gotta have it, I gotta have it.”

What I didn’t know — and this was 1985 or ’86, folks. Cellular telephone communications, cellular communications technology was announced by the FCC in 1945. There was an article in the Saturday Evening Post. In 1945, the big announcement of the invention, discovery, whatever you want to call it, of cellular technology, which uses, of course, wireless spectrum, radio frequencies. It took until the 1980s for the government to license operators to use cellular communications.

AM radio stations are licensed. Television stations are licensed by the FCC. And the owners and operators of those stations have to pass every five or 10 years, I don’t know what it is now, license renewal exam basically on how well they’re serving the community. It’s almost become pro forma now, but the point is the government’s in charge of it, the licensing. So the inventors of cellular couldn’t do anything with it until the government licensed it! And the minute it was discovered, all other forms of communication, particularly land line telephones, began pressuring the government and regulators to squash it.

They didn’t want the competition. This is not unnatural. It’s the same thing that happened to FM radio. FM radio was invented 25 years before the first FM radio was sold. A consortium of AM radio station owners put pressure on the federal government to shelve the entire FM technology, which it did. Lobbyists and people of influence, the special interests in communications succeeded in burying two innovative forms of communication technology to the benefit of current, or at the time, operators, which in these cases were AM radio and land line telephones. But wait. There’s more after this.

RUSH: We’ll get to the phones here just shortly, but I want to give you the bare essential details of the cellular story just to understand what can happen when the government starts regulating the internet. It’s trying to even now, and they want to get their entire mitts — well, this government doesn’t. The Obama government, the left wants to. This is Trump getting rid of what Obama was trying. This is Trump and Ajit Pai at the FCC getting rid of the first planted roots, if you will, of the blossoms that would lead to government regulation and control of the internet.

So cellular announced by the FCC in 1945. It didn’t hit the market ’til 1985. It was 40 years, the commercial market. Now, when the cellular technology finally got out, it’s just amazing what happened. Cellular was never thought, by regulators, by the government people in charge, it was never thought to be mass market. It was thought to be for walkie-talkies in the military and law enforcement. But the regulators never thought it would have mass market application.

The FCC assumed that cellular would be a plaything for the rich, it’d be very limited. In 1980, a McKenzie & Company study commissioned by AT&T said that there would be fewer than a million wireless subscribers in the U.S. by the year 2000. And this study by McKenzie was used to suppress the technology and keep it from the market. Well, by the year 2000, there were over 109 million wireless subscribers, well more than the “fewer than a million” that AT&T predicted.

So that’s what the old Ma Bell monopoly, AT&T, thought that it was not gonna have popular application, something strictly for the rich, and that’s what the old regulators thought. So they went very slow. When this wireless technology was finally unleashed, it became obvious the market was far too complex for regulators to manage. At the same time, the regulators didn’t have the interest in managing cellular where people talked to one another. They wanted to control broadcasting, which is commercial and where there is money changing hands, where one broadcasts and one listens.

But with person to person communications, they didn’t see any value in that. They thought that had already been handled with land line phones, and that’s all there was ever gonna be needed. And if you needed in-the-air communications for airplanes and things like that, that already existed. But person to person, they weren’t even thinking about consumers. By the 1980s there was beginning to be serious deregulation, not just the U.S., but around the world. And with deregulation came competition, and that’s when cellular finally hit the marketplace, when it was deregulated, when the regulators figured there’s no reason for us to police this ’cause nobody’s gonna want it.

Bureaucrats are not visionaries. Barack Obama and his merry band of bureaucrats are not visionaries. They are pessimists. They deter new ideas. It is said that we conservatives are the ones that don’t innovate and don’t modernize, that we want to conserve the old-fashioned ways. Wrongo! It is the left that deters new ideas, particularly innovative technological ideas. I’m talking about not the inventors. I’m talking about liberal government regulators who exist to protect existing industries. Because you know who really is purchased when a new technology comes is members of Congress. They’re the first people that are bought.

And if you want that to continue to grow, if you want Obamaism to be in charge of what you can and can’t do and where you can and can’t do it and how much you can or can’t pay for it on the internet, then by all means support net neutrality. But it isn’t neutral. It isn’t innovative. It isn’t creative. And it’s gonna end up being expensive as hell for mediocrity.

Who cares if you have to pay more to view Youtube or Facebook?
The services like Youtube or Facebook or even Freerepublic you will be paying extra for will go to help Comcast better their customer service. People who can’t afford the internet don’t need to be on it.

Are you for real? It already costs 200 bucks a month. It is disgusting how expensive it is for internet. You do know that in Korea for example, they have faster internet then we do and they pay about 20 dollars a month for the best of the best. We pay the highest in the World for the internet because they don’t count it as a utility. Our country is so stupid with regards to internet and many other things that we get gauged over.

I have to disagree. ISPs will simply offer price add ons. You pay for “basic” Internet, but if you want to do streaming videos like Netflix... another monthly fee....watch sports streaming another monthly fee. Deals maybe cut... use Hulu instead of Netflix... save a few bucks a month. If you buy say 50 megabytes of service what difference should it make to the ISP what content you watch? ISPs in many areas are concentrated oligopolies where local units of government have extended franchises and are effectively blocking the entry of new competitors. In an ideal market where ISPs would actually compete without artificial constraints this wide open concept might work. But if your choice of ISP is either X or Y where both are virtually monopolies and there are barriers to other competitors neither provider has any incentive to offer better service and would just use the end of net neutrality as a means to price gouge consumers with “ package” deals.

Are you for real? It already costs 200 bucks a month.

Is that internet only or is that a cable, telephone and internet bundle?

You can get a T1 line for $200 a month that will run multiple gigabit connections at the same time.

It is impossible for there to be sameness and equality when it comes to the transfer of data...

Why not?

There's no reason that an ISP can't treat every packet the same.They're doing it now.

That's what you're paying them for; to deliver the content you request at the contracted speed.

What they want is to to decide which packets have priority even though you want them all treated the same.

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