On Net Neutrality

Given the vote by the FCC on net neutrality, the obvious next move is to sell off all roads to private corporations. These corporations would turn them all into toll roads and would be able to make their own rules. So, for example, The "American Road Corporation" could make a rule limiting all imported cars on its roads to the right lane only and a maximum speed of 35 mph.

Now, you might conclude this is absurd, and you would be right. But it is essentially what the FCC did today.

The correct solution is for the network itself to be controlled by various different levels of government, federal, state and municipalities and they would charge everyone for access to the network. This is, coincidentally, how roads work. Some are federal, we tend to call then Interstates; some are state roads, some are controlled by counties and other by the local municipality. Of course, the physical task of building and maintaining these roads is done by public contractors.

Content providers could provide content to the network to which all subscribers would have access. Some access providers might charge for access to their content, like Netflix. Others, like Facebook, might show ads as part of the content, and normal companies would allow access to their websites for free as a way to reduce their costs of processing billing, etc.

The fundamental problem, from my experience in the US, is that very few people are able to see the basic principles involved. Because cable companies decided to piggy back internet traffic on their coax cables, people just assumed, without thought, that it made sense for a cable company to provide internet access.

If it were suggested that every car manufacturer build their own unique road system, that would immediately be seen as absurd because no one wants 27 different roads running past their front door.

But when it comes to digital transportation, people are willing to accept that solution because no one bothers to analyze the basic problem.

The cable companies also allow telephone traffic over those same cables, but those phone services are controlled by regulations relating to phone companies. So what is the difference between the phone traffic being regulated and the internet traffic being regulated. The answer is none, but because people lack the intellect to break the problem down into its constituent parts, they fail to see the problem

The obvious solution is for government agencies to control access to the network.

If you analyze what a cable company does the answer is nothing at all. I discuss this in more detail below. It takes content created by others, aggregates it and supplies it to consumers. Those consumers have no choice in which cable company they use because that decision is usually done by each municipality. So why should a cable company get paid for providing a consumer access to, say HBO? Shouldn't that transaction be solely between HBO and the consumer? Obviously, if each consumer has to have a separate relationship with every content provider, both the consumer and the content provider would be swamped with paperwork, even if most of it was digital. Therefore, Aggregators would arise who would bundle content into packages and act as an intermediary. They would replace what is done today by the Cable companies. Of course, logic dictates that Cable companies would morph into Aggregators. When I was a boy, it was common to buy meat from a butcher, milk from a dairy, groceries from a grocery and medicines from a pharmacist. But today, we have Aggregators like Kroger, Publix, Stop & Shop, etc. where you can buy everything in one place so the notion of Aggregators is not foreign to us.

If government purchased all the physical infrastructure, content providers would then have direct access to all consumers. Anyone who supports free markets can't possibly be opposed to that. The only conceivable objection is that you want to stifle competition by putting local monopolies in charge of consumers' access to content.

Returning to the role of Cable companies, it's obvious that, at one time they did perform useful work. What they did was to put cable into the ground, or more likely strung on poles so as to make the environment look bad and make the cable vulnerable to storms. They then pushed content from content providers over those cables to consumers. The advantage to consumers was twofold. They had access to far more content than that available on over the air (OTA) broadcasts. The other advantage was, at least in theory, more reliable service. This did require a HUGE investment by these companies, and they need to be compensated for this investment.

But it's worth examining why this happened. Clearly, in any society which was governed by the people and for the people, government would have seen this cable as essential infrastructure and would have worked with private contractors to ensure common standards and universal availability. But we don't live in such a society. Our government agencies have no foresight and so, even now, decades later, there are still many places where cable is not available since the cable companies, being businesses are faced with diminishing returns as they service more remote and sparsely populated areas. It's worth noting that the same happened with electrification in the US and eventually, the government had to step in and say that if you were generating and selling power, you had to make it available to everyone.