Piffey

ArsTechnica has an excellent write-up asking the question of whether or not government supervision is the worst thing that can happen to a communications network. The article parallels the telegraph with today’s Internet and begins with a quote from Charles A. Sumner that sounds much like our own protests on where the Internet is headed:

“This glorious invention was vouchsafed to mankind,” he wrote, “that we might salute and converse with one another respectively stationed at remote and isolated points for a nominal sum.”

But instead, he continued, “A wicked monopoly has seized hold of this beneficent capacity and design, and made it tributary, by exorbitant tariffs, to a most miserly and despicable greed.”

It continues by paralleling Scott Cleland’s recent NPR piece that has a great quote about forced network neutrality as a compromise of freedoms:

“At the core, the FCC’s proposed pre-emptive ‘net neutrality’ regulations to preserve an ‘open Internet’ are not at all about promoting freedom but exactly the opposite. Freedom is not a zero sum game, where taking it away from some gives more to others. Taking away freedoms of some takes away freedom from all.”

I don’t agree with Cleland and see his specific slant of freedom as giving far too much liberty to the provider while removing options and freedoms from us, the consumers, who will be forced to patronize a monopolized market with intense restrictions. The network neutrality regulations being put in place just ensure that creativity and innovation can continue without a single group cornering and controlling the market — eliminating progress. Allowing a single company to determine what websites their customers can visit is nothing other than censorship and the worst kind: consumer censorship. It would cut off entire networks from being visited, eliminating chunks of ideas and narrowing the vast scope of information and thought that the Internet provides. Greed would eventually find our doorstep and the cost of access, like it has begun to lately, would rise considerably.

The article continues through a history of the Western Union telegraph company, showing how the monopolized network was used to sway a presidential election and force press agents to join the Associated Press, what was then essentially a journalist cartel. Messages would be censored and monitored if they came from certain individuals and Western Union’s specific political slant was then enforced through the manipulation of their network and its access. When summoned to a hearing the President of Western Union responded with:

“The mere fact of monopoly proves nothing,” he declared. “The only question to be considered is, whether those who control its affairs administer them properly and in the interest, first, of the owners of the property, and second, of the public.”

This is something I would agree with if I knew better. It sounds very valiant and Theodore Roosevelt-esque where one reigning moralist can keep a nation in the right. However, even if those values did align with my own, a regulation that protected the intellectual products of everyone and not just a single group will always be best.

The author, Matthew Lasar, ends with questions I couldn’t phrase any better:

In many ways this story is far field from our contemporary debates about network management, file sharing, and the perils of protocol discrimination. But the main questions seem to remain the same—to what degree will we let Western Union then and ISPs now pick winners and losers on our communications backbone? And when do government regulations grow so onerous that they discourage network investment and innovation?

(From ArsTechnica)

There is a fine line to pick between regulation and the preservation of neutrality. As long as we preserve an Internet of unrestricted access then we can preserve and foster innovation. The digital legislation we need to pursue is not one of eliminating the bad users but allowing them to exist without discrimination.