Luskin on “Net Neutrality” — Bullseye! (Update: WaPo Agrees, with Caution)

From time to time, your humble servant has to admit that he doesn’t know it all (it’s easy once you get used to it).

The issue of “net neutrality” is one of them. I began leaning in the direction of neutrality until some people who are smarter than me on the topic started weighing in: NixGuy (link is to his latest, with previous posts indexed at the bottom); a Cisco VP; Steve Forbes; The Wall Street Journal, on serveral occasions; and now, last but by no means least, Don Luskin last Friday at Smart Money online:

Hands Off My Net

….. The Internet has been the greatest engine of economic growth the world has ever seen.

Now, for the first time, the continued expansion of the Internet is at risk. We’re about to kill the goose that lays the golden global eggs.

How? By regulating it.

Ever since the Department of Defense turned over the Internet for public use, it’s been a free-for-all. The result has been innovation on unprecedented scale and at unprecedented speed. But now there’s a move among a coterie of powerful business interests, lobbyists and politicians to change all that — to shut down the free-for-all, and turn the Internet into a government-controlled mediocrity.

Who can imagine what miracles the next 10 years of the Internet will bring? But now it’s all being put at risk.

The crisis has been triggered by the prospect of telephone and cable operators investing tens of billions of dollars to build the Internet of the future. With the technology they’re talking about investing in, the Internet will be able to bring high-definition images and sounds into your home, on demand. Not just movies and TV shows whenever you want them, but also “virtual meetings” with dazzlingly real telepresence that will replace the common phone call — and may end up replacing in-person meetings, too.

And who knows what other amazing innovations will come from that kind of capability? That’s why they’re called “innovations.” If I could tell you what they’ll be, they wouldn’t be innovations, now would they?

But whatever might possibly come from this new technology in the future, nothing will actually happen if the telephone and cable operators won’t put billions of dollars at risk here and now to get it done.

One way they can earn a profit is by charging different Internet users different fees depending on the kind of service they get.

….. The same thing happens right now. You pay more for DSL service than you do for dial-up service. And your network controls other elements of your usage, too. For example, your DSL service probably gives you a fast downlink speed and a slower uplink speed, because you probably receive more information from the Internet than you contribute.

Yet a group of today’s biggest providers of online content have banded together with consumer groups, lobbyists, and political-influence organizations to strip the telcos and cable operators of the ability to control how their own networks will be managed and priced. They want the network operators to spend billions to create a regulated public utility that they can’t control and may not profit from.

The interests pushing for this regulation have given it the Orwellian name “net neutrality.” They say that if the telcos and cable operators control their own next-generation networks, they’ll “discriminate” against certain users of the network. They say that the network operators need to make their next-generation network available to everyone on the same basis and at the same price, no matter how the network is to be used.

But “discriminate” is just the lobbyists’ word for “compete.”

And just what would be wrong with that?

Nothing, if you ask me. I like competition. I like the idea of being able to get something from Verizon that Microsoft wants me only to get from Microsoft.

Luskin’s piece moves me to be enthusiasically against “net neutrality,” as long as the hands-off approach is coupled with vigilance on the part of the FTC and the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division.
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UPDATE: The Washington Post agrees:

The weakest aspect of the neutrality case is that the dangers it alleges are speculative. It seems unlikely that broadband providers will degrade Web services that people want and far more likely that they will use non-neutrality to charge for upgrading services that depend on fast and reliable delivery, such as streaming high-definition video or relaying data from heart monitors. If this proves wrong, the government should step in. But it should not burden the Internet with preemptive regulation.