The Department of the Internet

The Wall Street Journal ^ | November 10, 2014 | Andy Kessler

[abb]

Get ready for the Department of Broadband. On Monday, President Obama called on the Federal Communications Commission to reclassify the Internet as a public utility—like water or electricity—under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. The goal: “to protect net neutrality,” Mr. Obama said in a White House YouTube video, an ironic venue for announcing a monumentally bad idea that could strangle the Internet.

For years the FCC has been inching toward imposing net-neutrality rules, which are sold as a way to ban Internet service providers from discriminating against content providers. In reality such rules would dictate what ISPs like Comcast and Verizon can charge for their services.

But the Internet cannot function as a public utility. First, public utilities don’t serve the public; they serve themselves, usually by maneuvering through Byzantine regulations that they helped craft. Utilities are about tariffs, rate bases, price caps and other chokeholds that kill real price discovery and almost guarantee the misallocation of resources.

The beauty of competition is that you get network neutrality for free. AT&T cut long-distance rates in the 1980s when MCI and Sprint started competing fiercely. Calling from San Francisco to New York became cheaper than calling from San Francisco to San Jose, because California tariff prices were still highly regulated. The same thing happened to international rates once Skype offered voice and video connections free online. And it is no surprise that AT&T hurried to offer its own gigabit Internet connection in Austin, Texas, as soon as Google Fiber showed up.

With no competition to stimulate investment, capabilities will wither. Eventually a federal bureaucracy will be needed to help allocate the scarce broadband resources. In that vaguely neutral world, everybody gets access to the same resources. Well, except for the government—it of course will need special, superfast access.

[Pajamajan]

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[jwalsh07]

There is no argument for government control of the internet unless you are a socialist yearning for government to monitor your every communication online. Exactly what problem do you think government can cure?