Excerpt of the Day: Don Luskin Updates the ‘Net Neutrality’ Non-Arguments

In the later stages of his most recent Smart Money column:

Companies such as AT&T and Verizon Communications have been licking their lips in anticipation of providing their own bandwidth-intensive products over their new networks — products such as high-definition pay-per-view movies on demand, and high-definition video-phone calls.

In other words, the telecom companies want to use their new networks as a way of going into competition with today’s content providers.Google, Microsoft, Amazon, eBay and others are plenty scared. So they want regulations that will force the telecom companies to make the new networks available to them on the same economic basis that they use their own networks themselves. In other words, Google wants a law that says that Verizon can’t charge Google more to use Verizon’s network than Verizon itself pays.

Is that fair? If I pay my own money to build a road, I can darn well drive on that road for free, any time I want. Does that mean I have to let everyone else drive on my road for free, too? According to the doctrine of “net neutrality,” that’s just what it means.

I think I should have the right to ask whatever price I please to let you drive on my road. For that matter, if I simply don’t want you driving on my road at all, I think I have the right to simply tell you stay out.

Of course, the telecom companies are in this to make money, so they aren’t going to tell any content providers to stay out — their customers wouldn’t stand for it. For the same reason, they’re not going to be able to charge excessive prices, either.

But today’s e-tailers and content providers don’t want any competition from the telecom companies. So they’re claiming the ability to prohibit access to the new networks, and to charge unregulated fees, would be a form of “discrimination” — and that it would interfere with “freedom of speech.”

Isn’t it funny how entrenched business giants can come up with language that makes it sound like they’re a repressed minority group when they want to preserve their profits against new competition?

If the Democrats pass “net neutrality” legislation, then the future profits of the telecom companies become the future profits of the e-tailers and content providers. No wonder the telecom sector has fallen out of bed since the election, even as the stock market overall has risen to new highs.

And no wonder that the tech sector — which contains the e-tailers and the content providers — has gained by almost the same amount that the telecom sector has lost.

The “net neutrality” debate is at bottom an argument between two sets of very rich companies. Two underappreciated concepts known as “freedom” and “property rights” persuasivly argue against doing anything beyond leaving the current situation alone, while ensuring that that both the telecoms AND the e-tailers don’t engage in monopolistic or anticompetitive behavior.