I plead guilty only to the charge of not making my main point clear: Free markets allocate resources way more efficiently than a government central-planning committee can.
Progressives love attaching warm and fuzzy feel good names like "Net Neutrality" on their statist projects in order to mask their true intent: Taming the digital wild west known as the internet.
Here's the Net Neutrality Problem in a Nutshell
The story goes that Level 3 Communications, which handles Netflix’s Internet traffic, says that, all of a sudden, Comcast started demanding more money to accept said traffic.
The problem is that there really doesn’t seem to be an easy way out of this mess. Clearly streaming media is taking over the world, but there’s one problem: bandwidth isn’t free, and that’s Comcast’s biggest complaint. If you want Comcast to carry this or that stream, then you can’t expect Comcast to do so at a loss, right?
Granted, I’ve no idea how much it costs Comcast to run and maintain a broadband network, but I recognize that they’re in business to make money. (Nicholas Deleon – Crunchgear)The point here is that the content providers, the infrastructure people and the ISPs will work it out; they always have. Nobody wants to make customers mad, since mad customers take their money elsewhere. That concept is foreign to a monopolistic government bureaucrat.
With the Net Neutrality decision, the Federal Government has picked winners and losers. Here are a few headlines following internet FCC's power grab:
StockMarketsReview.com: FCC Decision Disappoints Comcast
MarketWatch: Netflix Jumps
So government poobahs who have no idea what they're monkeying with end up swinging markets and stifling technology.
A WSJ article asks, "Is This the Peak for Netflix?" The peak, if it has happened, has nothing to do with the FCC decision and everything to do with competition from the likes of Apple TV, Amazon, Roku, Boxee and Google TV.
Technology and the markets move fast, government needs to get the hell out of the way and stop blocking innovation and competition.
More reading:
Net Neutrality and the TV Wars
CATO - The FCC Should Not Regulate the Internet
