A Rock & A Hard Place

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, in an order Tuesday, overturned the FCC's August 2008 ruling forcing Comcast to abandon its network management efforts aimed at users of the BitTorrent P-to-P (peer-to-peer) service and other applications. The FCC lacked "any statutorily mandated responsibility" to enforce network neutrality rules, wrote Judge David Tatel.

 -PC World

The denizens of the Internet have been caught between a rock and a hard place, with the usual political schisms developing in the small space betwixt. The FCC would seek to regulate the Internet in such a manner that would gurantee Net Neutrality and force Internet service providers into the role of a utility. At the same time, the ISPs would like to be free to shape the Internet as they see fit to benefit their users or perhaps more importantly, their bottom line. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any good "third option". The Laws of the Internet will either end up in the hands of the telecom companies or in the hands of the government.

The rock is simple.  No one really wants the government to have influence on the internet.  However, if the government does not enforce the principles of Net Neutrality, then who?  

The hard place is perhaps less obvious. You see, the opponents of Net Neutrality—the telecoms and those they've confused or bought—will tell you that the government doesn't need to regulate the internet in anyway because market forces will correct any abuses by the telecoms.  Of course!  Why didn't I think of that?  The problem with this idea is that the market doesn't really affect the telecoms in what one would call a "free" way.  

Lets return to my beverage analogy for a moment.  The government does not in any direct way regulate the production and sale of coffee makers, and the threshold for becoming a coffee maker manufacturer is relatively low.  If Mr. Coffee wanted to build coffee makers that only made coffee in the mornings and only French Vanilla at that, they certainly could.  In fact, even if every coffee manufacturer decided to make the exact same type of restricted coffee maker at the same time, they could.  Everyone who wanted the freedom to make whatever coffee they wanted whenever they wanted it, could simply go out and build their own damn machine and sell it to other like-minded individuals.  Free market, bitches!  But what if in order to get a coffee maker to work it had to run a hose all the way back to the manufacturer's Super-Central-Mega-Coffeelator-9000?  What if the coffee manufacturer owned that hose?  Would you and your like-minded friends be able to raise the funds to buy and operate the Super-Central-Mega-Coffeelator-9000 and then lay and maintain hoses to each of your homes, on top of the cost of the coffee machines themselves?  No?  Well.  Then you'll take your French Vanilla and you'll like it!

The Internet Service Providers own the copper cables that lead from your house to the Super-Central-Mega-Intertrons-9000 that let you connect to the rest of the internet.  If your ISP decides tomorrow that they're going to let you watch video online, as long as it was produced by one of the networks they own or their parent company owns, what exactly are you going to do about it?  Now imagine that all ISPs decide to implement restrictions like this all at once, as if by conspiracyMAGIC!  What are you going to do about it?   Go back to dial up?  Ban the internet from your household?  Are you going to spend the billions of dollars to lay your own line to the nearest internet backbone and pay the licensing fee to its owner?  Are you going to complain about it dinner parties?  Are you going to vote for the politician that promises to give you the real unfettered internet back?  And we're back to the rock…

At the end of the day this comes down to a simple question: When it comes to leaving your internet access as unfettered as Tiger Woods at Mardi Gras, who do you trust more, the telecoms or the government.  It's not happy choice to have to make but it's fairly obviously the only one being offered at the moment.  I still believe that the internet is the closest thing to true democracy humanity has ever created.  It should be a basic right and it should be vigorously protected.  For my part, I will begrudgingly back the FCC and their efforts to regulate the telecoms.  With the monopolies that the telecoms hold unlikely to be broken anytime soon, the government is more accountable to the will of the people in this regard than the corporations are.  An FCC regulated internet won't be perfect, but until the technology exists to offer high speed internet without the massively expensive infrastructure, it will be a hell of a lot better than an internet run by Comcast and Time Warner Cable.