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You're speaking, I believe, two two separate issues. An unhealthy monopoly is certainly a fair conversation to have in this context. Roads, however, are built and maintained (here in America) by tax dollars, not for-profit companies.
If we want to use our taxes for Internet infrastructure, that's also a fair conversation to have, but at present it's the private and public corporations who have invested time and money building this infrastructure, which is where I start wondering about the right to take control of someone's property.
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The same thing applies to telephone companies, which were eventually and rightly considered utilities. The Internet has become a necessary means of public communication, and the providers are frequently local monopolies. To give over control of information to private corporations is the second step to fascism. The first step has already been taken by the few owners of the mass media in the United States.
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You are forgetting that in most cases, these corporations have been given monopoly power by the government, guaranteeing them a profit. In return for this guarantee, they must accept some regulation by the government. It's not like another company can come along and put in their own infrastructure and compete with them.
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Net Neutrality is indeed a complex issue, and you are correct that the company's property is being used, and they have the right to charge for that. But the question is who do you charge?
Should your ISP be charging all the websites you surf to? In addition to you? I know that's an ad-absurdum argument, but it highlights the underlying issue. If my ISP wants more money because I'm filling their tubes with Netflix traffic, they should be charging ME more, not Netflix.
After saying all that though, I actually agree with the courts on this decision. The FCC was trying pussy-foot its way around the issue and court squashed them. Time for them to either man up and call ISPs common carriers or GTFO and let the market have free reign.
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As I mentioned, I haven't read up on the facts, but what you're saying was my gut feeling of what was going on. Not the court saying, "net neutrality bad, very bad" but rather them striking down a sloppy implementation of a law that was probably cobbled together by the FCC in a roomful of special interest groups.
That's one of the reasons I haven't been too worked up beyond philosophical curiosity. My feeling is that no one has as of yet made a serious effort to decide this issue one way or the other.
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Christopher Duncan wrote: striking down a sloppy implementation of a law that was probably cobbled together by the FCC in a roomful of special interest groups.
That's exactly correct.
Christopher Duncan wrote: no one has as of yet made a serious effort to decide this issue one way or the other.
The Verizons, AT&T's, and Comcast's are greasing plenty of palms to keep it this way, too. Unfortunately.
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I think you said the magic word with "monopoly." Certainly an extenuating circumstance.
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There would not be confidentiality in writing if you take the position that mail is owned by whomever owns the mailbox.
Christopher Duncan wrote: from a more pragmatic perspective it seems to me that the wires I get to use in order to interact with the Internet, at least in America, belong to companies.
They're not owned by the companies, regardless of those claims.
If each company had to run it's own wire into your house, you could claim that it's "theirs".
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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I have DSL so the wire actually does run right up to my house. Unless, you know, the deer have chewed it up again. 
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Yes, it runs to your door but you don't have a cable per ISP.
If you can change ISP freely, without them having having to add new wiring, then the cable does not really belong to whatever ISP you are currently with. So they can't have 100% claim over it, and because of that, they should not be allowed to do just what they want with it.
If we have to start changing ISP to access some websites, that is going to be hell for us, even though we are already paying for the access.
And in any case, totally free market tend to go wrong in most cases, because of greed or whatever other human defects… So a certain level of regulation seems necessary. We just have to find how much regulation is reasonble, and how much starts to be too much like communism (or whatever opposite of free market you may think of)…
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As far as I can tell, the ruling is not a ruling on net neutrality per se but whether or not the net neutrality rules recently imposed are applicable to a company who is in the business of providing a computer tranmission network is not classified as common carrier according to the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
The problem was that the lawmakers of 1996 regarded the transmission of voice data to be deemed worthy of common carrier status and that the transmission of computer data as not worthy of common carrier status. This was incredibly shortsighted corrupt.
Seems like the solution would be to classify the companies that provide internet services as common carriers.
AmIright?
modified 15-Jan-14 14:11pm.
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If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.-John Q. Adams
You must accept one of two basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone in the universe. And either way, the implications are staggering.-Wernher von Braun
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.-Albert Einstein
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In a lot of cases the companies are, e.g. service provided by telcos, but I'm sure their lawyers have found sufficient wiggle room.
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Christopher Duncan wrote: how sovereign the property of a company is, as well as its business practices (providing it doesn't break any laws).
Christopher Duncan wrote: telling a company how to run its business strikes me as unfair to the company.
And therein lies the paradox.
The government (supposedly) enacts laws to protect the general population. Let's say you and I were the only makers of corn flakes (and let's assume the public needs to eat corn flakes in order to survive). Assuming a box of cereal cost $1.50 to manufacture and ship, we could privately agree to sell a box of cereal for no less than $5.50. This would ensure we rake in a very healthy profit, without incurring the wrath of the public who has no idea it really costs only $1.50 to make a box of the stuff.
The FTC has laws against price fixing and collusion by manufacturers of products to prevent exactly this kind of thing from happening, ostensibly to protect the average Joe. For this reason, even though you and I may feel the government shouldn't interfere with the way we do business, we would be breaking the law.
This is obviously an extremely simplistic example.
- Deregulation of services in the 80s was intended to give more freedom (and therefore theoretically increase healthy competition) between providers of services, by reducing the influence of government in overseeing pricing.
- On the flip side (and more recently), Apple has balked at the feds for appointing Mike Bromwich to investigate allegations of the company's alleged violation of anti-trust laws. Apple's management feels Bromwich is interfering with the company's day-to-day operations by requiring that he be permitted to conduct lengthy meetings with their top brass on an ongoing basis.
/ravi
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Collin Jasnoch wrote: Yeah... If you believed that BS I got a bridge for you.
I agree with you.
The abysmal drop of the QOS of the banking, telco and airline industries (in the US) are prime examples of how this (supposedly) well-intentioned deregulation has hindered rather than helped the public.
/ravi
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Ravi Bhavnani wrote: On the flip side (and more recently), Apple has balked at the feds for appointing Mike Bromwich to investigate allegations of the company's alleged violation of anti-trust laws.
Not defending Apple nor commenting on the verdict (I didn't follow the case very closely) but I do find it curious that Apple's e-book market share is TINY compared to Amazon's (who BTW instigated the DOJ investigation). Seems like the monopoly (Amazon) used the US DOJ & anti-trust laws against an upstart (Apple) to protects its own business model. No?
Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. ~ George Washington
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That's certainly possible. There's so much that goes on behind the scenes in big business that the public doesn't get to see. 
/ravi
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It's the Golden Rule, man. Whoever has the gold gets to make the rules.
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"Apple's management feels Bromwich is interfering with the company's day-to-day operations by requiring that he be permitted to conduct lengthy meetings with their top brass on an ongoing basis."
This is a red herring. As long as there is due process a company needs to comply. I cant get out of a speeding ticket because it took time for the police officer time to write out a citation can I?
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Your thinking makes sense, but the basic problem here is that wires to your house and the right-of-way granted to lay those wires are severely limited resources, and of those two things the latter belongs to the government, not the companies. It is impossible to have true competition between Internet access providers for the same reason it is impossible to have true competition between telephone, electricity, water, or natural gas providers: such competition requires the absurd and impossible scenario where dozens or hundreds of different companies have, say, their own networks of pipes running natural gas through the city, each one with 100% coverage so that you as a homeowner have the option to turn on whichever one you want to buy from. Can't work. The channels are thereby limited to an extremely low number, making delivery of these things a natural monopoly.
Economic and political theory in practice has for quite some time recognized not only a right, but a need to regulate naturally monopolistic markets and the companies in them, partly because otherwise the lack of a free market would put consumers at the mercy of the providers, and partly because in such cases the resources that are limited here are considered to belong to the people and their government anyway. The government was the one who granted (for instance) Comcast the right to put their wires on poles or underground across everybody's private and public property (including property of people who aren't even subscribers) in order to get their services to their customers. There's no reason to expect that a license to exclusively use a public right-of-way for profit ought to be free from interference or regulation. In other words, the wires may belong to the provider, but not the property they sit on, or the poles they are attached to, or the roads that get dug up when repairs are needed. Those things are being conditionally given to them, with the implicit recognition that this excludes other companies from using them for the same thing. There is no reasonable expectation that you can use up limited public resources without the public having any say in how you do so.
The ideal solution to this would, in theory, be that the so-called "information superhighway" is maintained just like actual superhighways, that is, treated as public infrastructure, built and paid for by the public just like roads are. It's actually even occurred to me that this would, in the United States, be a potentially good fit for the future of the mission of the U.S. Postal Service, having as they do the mission to deliver information and also owning physical property in every single town that could provide the basis for network switching centers. But I've become much more hesitant toward the government solution since it has become clear just how eager the government is to use any means at its disposal to monitor all its own citizens' communications and activities.
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Public infrastructure probably makes sense in this case, but there's waaaay too much money for these corporations to give up without a fight.
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I don't agree and the reason is that if not regulated in some way there's a lot of greed involved and the big companies get together and decide how much they want to fix the price at no matter how fair it is to the consumer. You will probably say if you don't want to pay the price don't order the service but if all the companies set the price who are you going to go to for internet service?
To me it's just like the Internet Sales Tax fiasco, it's not about being fair for the "Brick and Mortar" stores it's about more taxes for an already bloated government that instead of balancing the budget has to find a way to bilk more money out of the public.
Another example is, remember when antifreeze used to be ~$1/gal? Someone bought up all the antifreeze which drove the price up and they made a killing and the price has never come down since.
Sorry this turned into a rant didn't it?
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