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May. 22, 2008
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

EDITORIAL: Keep Congress away from the Internet

So-called 'net neutrality' an excuse for federal regulation

If you head down to the post office and drop a letter in the slot with a -- wait while we check our calendar, here -- 42-cent stamp on it, the post office will generally deliver that "first class" letter anywhere in the country in less than a week.

If you're willing to pay considerably more for "Priority" or "Express" delivery, you can get your missive there considerably faster. Does this "discriminate" against the lowly first-class or bulk-mailed letter? Sure. The carriers treat the different classes of letter differently, as instructed.

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Do we need a new government bureaucracy to stop this from happening? Um ... no. In fact, the current postal rate structure was developed by a quasi-government body in the first place, though in response to free-market competitors such as FedEx and UPS.

Now, as the Internet matures, it has occurred to some Internet Service Providers that they, too, could finance the provision of faster delivery for some services by offering special "express" connections to Web sites whose hosts are willing to pay extra to have customers "delivered to their door" without the time delays common in today's lower-capacity networks.

We don't need to ask how congressional nanny-staters -- who believe anything that's not mandatory should be regulated or banned -- have responded. Once the catchy phrase -- "net neutrality" -- was found, the rest was second nature.

Several bills -- described as "good net neutrality bills" by The New York Times -- now circulate in Congress. "One in the House ... would give the job of preserving net neutrality to the Federal Communications Commission," the Timesmen enthused in an editorial Monday. "A Senate bill ... takes a similar approach. This month, John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan, and Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, introduced a bill that would allow the Justice Department to bring antitrust actions against ISPs that violate net neutrality."

Wow! Not enough criminals? Make up new crimes!

In fact, such "net neutrality" regulation would be both unnecessary and harmful, warns James L. Gattuso of the Heritage Foundation. Delivering movies and TV shows over the Internet will use vastly more bandwidth than current e-mail and Web-browsing functions. But, "By actively managing traffic flow, network owners could use scarce Internet capacity more efficiently," Mr. Gattuso argues, while "at the same time, traffic fees could spur some much-needed investment in broadband networks."

If ISPs were to use their discretion to block or hinder delivery of some signals -- which has hardly ever happened -- consumers could merely move to another provider. Meantime, "Imposing a new, separate set of rules on the Internet would invite endless uncertainty and litigation," Mr. Gattuso warns. "Inevitably, regulators would be drawn into years-long, lobbyist-driven policy quagmires as to whether this or that action is allowed or banned and what prices can be charged."

The FCC is an outfit pretty much out of a job and should be quickly put out of its misery. Instead, these control-happy anti-capitalist legislators believe they've found a whole new fertile field for government regulation -- the Internet!

"Net neutrality" is a solution in search of a problem. The Internet has delivered magnificent new opportunities to Americans precisely because it has been left free to develop with minimal government interference. Let's leave it that way.

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Please enter your name Name: Please enter your email Email: Please enter a comment COMMENTS : (word count limit is 300) You have reached the maximum number of words allowed Current Word Count: NLV Resident wrote on May 24, 2008 07:34 AM: Over the past 10 years, it has become increasingly difficult to "search" the web without having wean your way through the commercial sites first. The statement that a user can simply change his or her ISP is like saying someone can choose his or her power company or natural gas company. Oh, wait. I guess a user could pay the fees for cable or DSL hookups and then pay an ADDITIONAL fee to subscribe to a different ISP, but will the cable or phone company allow that? I don't want government getting involved, either, but I also don't want my internet provider to limit the internet based on fees charged. KD wrote on May 22, 2008 07:21 PM: I can't believe I am saying this, but I totally agree with John F. What you have to understand about the Internet and ISPs is that there are "backbone" carriers, like AT&T that provide the bandwidth that is resold to individual ISPs. Moving to "another ISP" does nothing to supply net neutrality if AT&T decides that YOUR bits are not as important as the "Large Corporation Paying Them LOTS of Money" bits. And as for "If ISPs were to use their discretion to block or hinder delivery of some signals -- which has hardly ever happened" means that the editor that wrote this does not read tech news. The reason that net neutrality is back in the news, after being kicked around in Congress for a decade, is BECAUSE Comcast has been throttling bandwidth for a certain class of users. "ISPs have been throttling BitTorrent traffic for almost two years now. Most ISPs simply limit the available bandwidth for BitTorrent traffic, but Comcast takes it one step further, and prevents their customers from seeding. And Comcast is not alone in this, Canadian ISPs Cogeco and Rogers use similar methods on a smaller scale." So if you are transferring totally legal large files, maybe research data or architectural drawings, be prepared to suffer a shutdown in transfer speed. This is particularly egregious because most ISP contracts are for "unlimited" downloads. I am certainly in the camp of the less government, the better; but when the government has created a monopoly they should also control that monopoly to make it fair and transparent to all people using it. timinator wrote on May 22, 2008 12:33 PM: Foot in the door? Camel's nose? Slippery slope? All that and more. There's nothing more inspiring than watching bureaucrats searching for the latest crisis du jour to justify their fascist intervention into the free market. (The following is sung to the tune of the Zombies' "Tell Her No") No, no...no, no...no, no...no, no...no, no, no, no, no... and wrote on May 22, 2008 11:56 AM: AND IF I READ ONE MORE POST FROM HELEN WELLS I AM AN IDIOT!!! dennis1944 wrote on May 22, 2008 11:37 AM: Believe this: ANYTHING the government touches, they will F**K UP, but good. They can't even run the country properly. Why are we trillions in debt? The pols like to spend money they don't have. This is hardly responsible behavior. Vote 'em all out! John F wrote on May 22, 2008 08:04 AM: Hang on just a minute folks. Net neutrality is not about the government regulating internet content. Net neutrality is about private industry regulating internet content. Do you all understand the way the internet works? Imagine you want to find a recipe for chocloate chip cookies. So you go to Google and write "chocolate chip cookie recipe" in your search line. Google then searches the world for recipes and reports back to you based on the recipes they find, citing the most popular sites first. Internet service providers (ISPs) are the companies that allow you to connect to the internet. They provide the cable or the phone line or the satellite link-up that allows your home computer to gain access to the worldwide web. What these companies want to do is charge businesses for allowing their content through. So say you want that chocolate chip cookie recipe and you go to Google and Google returns the list of recipes. Your ISP, however, wants to keep you from getting that list of recipes. They want you to get recipes only from the people that have paid them for the privilege of sending it along. Imagine that you own a small business that sells recipes. What happens if Cox communications tells businesses that if they want their business name to come up when a customer searches for "chocolate chip cookies" the business will have to cough up $10,000 per year? Are you going to stay in business? Don't believe the people like those at the Heritage Foundation when they talk of "managing traffic flow" on the internet. What they really mean when they talk about managing traffic flow is limiting your access to information and small business access to markets. Government intervention in this case will save consumers literally billions. Lawrence Hyde wrote on May 22, 2008 07:19 AM: Anything and I mean ANYTHING the government gets involved with will be either destroyed or become so expensive that no one but the people in government can use it. That means all government be it the smallest town or the biggest national. Helen Weils wrote on May 22, 2008 06:51 AM: If you believe that Bill Clinton did not have sex with that woman, Monica Lewinsky...You might be an idiot. If you believe BO was not aware of the things His pastor was preaching...you might be an idiot. If you believe that the government can rund somehitng better than Private industry like health care, the post office or the internet...You ARE an idiot! Mike L. wrote on May 22, 2008 06:46 AM: Google and other internet companies should move offshore and ignore greedy politicians.