That the provision of Internet services should be a public utility

lannan13

Contention 1: Unregulated Market is better than a Regulated market for the internet.

In the current system, the internet has always been free and open. We can see that Entrapenuers have been free to do as they please and they have set reasonable prises and entry fees for the consumer. We can see that without a great amount of high internet regulation by the federal government that the internet has thrived in the current situation. Without this regulation that this resolution is purposing we can see that the internet has thrived “"due in large part to private investment and market-driven innovation, broadband in America has improved considerably in the last decade. More Americans are online at faster speeds than ever before." [1] So we can see that the net neutrallity will kill inovation and it does this by ending and placing a cap on speeding up the internet. [2] This is done by getting rid of the right for providers like Comcast and such to speed up the connection to websites of their cliants and this is something that destroys our very foundation of the Free Market as it does not permit for companies to use this to increase speed as this increasement of speed leads to innovation as the clients clamour for faster and faster internet connection and it’s for this reason alone that the US has the fastest internet in the world, but Net Neutrality is threatening to change all of that. Under Net Neutrality the government will limit how much broadband and brandwith the companies get and this hurts the market, because now the market cannot charge for scarce resources. As economist Milton Friedman argues in his book Capitalism and Freedom, we can see that if we abolish these price controls we permit the market to show us the scarce resources and these resources cost more, but with these controls it limits the company’s fixture to this issue and once again harming the economy.

Let’s look at DSL for example. We can see here that when this wasn’t regualted that it spiked in growth and developement, but when regulations occured it stagnated dragmatically, BUT when they were removed it took off. [3] FiberBroadband Community, an internet provided in the Great Lakes region reported that under net neutrality that they would be forced to move ALL of their customers to a more expensive plan and this would hurt the business as it would cost them more, but the price for the internet would have to stay the same. Plus they are forced to keep their company running on the same expensive plan which destroys innovation as they no longer are needed to innovate to get the edge in the market since everyone has to provide the same connection plans. [6]

Contention 2: Status Quo Antitrust laws solve issue.

The main concern now with Net Neutrality issue is that the Internet providers are monopolizing the industry and colluding against the public, but this is simply not so. For 100’s of years the Sherman Anti-Trust Law has been breaking up monopolies all across the country sticking to the issue that Milton Friedman gave in “Capitalism and Freedom” that generally monopolizes are bad, but that of a Public monopoly is worse. What this debate of net neutrality practically is misconcieved as is that the internet providers have that of a bottleneck like connection of the internet and can switch off connection and access to certain sites. Now here’s the kicker, under the current laws under Section 2 of the Sherman Bill we can see that such a practice would be illegal. [4]

So we can clearly see that we do not need more regulation. The FCC commissioner Robert McDowell backed this up by stating that, “in the almost nine years since [net neutrality] fears were first sewn, net regulation lobbyists can point to fewer than a handful of cases of alleged misconduct, out of an infinite number of Internet communications. All those cases were resolved in favor of consumers under current law.” [5]

Sources

1. (FCC, Connecting America: The National Broadband Plan 19 (Mar. 16, 2010) [http://www.broadband.gov/download-plan/])

2. (http://www.usnews.com/opinion/economic-intelligence/2014/04/25/new-fcc-ruling-kills-net-neutrality-and-broadband-innovation)

3. Thomas Hazlett and Joshua Wright, The Law and Economics of Net Neutrality (2012)

4. (http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=51)

5. (In re Preserving the Open Internet Broadband Indus. Practices, 25 FCC Rcd. 17,905 (2010)

6. (file:///C:/Users/dreeves/Downloads/Primer%202014.pdf)