It seems you are conflating net neutrality (ISPs should not discriminate based on packet characteristics, including origin) with the concept that users should pay for the resources they use.
For one thing, spammers usually use botnets so no change there, average users would bear the cost one way or another. Unless you are advocating depriorization of all email traffic, ISPs have no way other than spam filters to differentiate what counts as spam. I see no connection to the net neutrality debate, or the pay-per-usage model.
As for porn-downloaders, I take it you mean people with high bandwidth needs, which includes all sorts of downloaders. (I really don’t see why you would emphasise porn here, even if you’re trying to evoke feelings of moral resentment, LW would seem the unlikeliest of places that this would have any efect.) I never had a problem with bandwidth usage caps, as long as they are explicit. Then carriers can compete on what they set these limits to and I can choose based on my needs. Nothing to do with net neutrality as far as I can see.
As for my libertarian view on net neutrality: When the governments allow for true competition between ISPs, they can drop all net neutrality provisions as far as I care. But then again, in a truly competitive market, I doubt we would be having a net neutrality issue to begin with.
| As for my libertarian view on net neutrality: When the governments allow for true competition between ISPs, they can drop all net neutrality provisions as far as I care.
Do you believe that true competition can exist in a free market where the economics of scale are as big as in the ISP market? If net neutrality isn’t enforced, a big ISP could squash a small new ISP by demanding a lot of money for peering. They are much less likely to try something like this against a big ISP, who has a lot more bargaining power.
(I am Assuming “true competition” means at least low barriers to entry.)
The arguments against monopolies in a free market apply, here. A big ISP which set out to squash little ISPs would run up its own costs trying, thereby losing to other big ISPs which didn’t do this. If there was only one big ISP, they’d eventually fail if they kept this up, since it would be in the interest of all the little ISPs to peer with each other, and they’d eventually have most of the market, collectively. Economies of scale can be really useful, but unless your firm is able to use force, much of the savings will go to the consumers through competition.
Of course, in the real world, we’re awash in force, so perhaps this isn’t very useful. :(
A big ISP which set out to squash little ISPs would run up its own costs trying, thereby losing to other big ISPs which didn’t do this. If there was only one big ISP, they’d eventually fail if they kept this up, since it would be in the interest of all the little ISPs to peer with each other, and they’d eventually have most of the market, collectively.
But in the meantime, very many small ISPs would go out of business trying to compete before they collectively pull down the big ISP, which likely has other advantages beyond competing on price, such as having a lot of friends and influence among the set of people who could possibly invest funding into a new ISP.
At some point people are going to realize that getting into the ISP market is a recipe for disaster, and if this happens before the big ISP runs out of slack, competition dries up and the big ISP gets to continue being a monopoly.
So yes, if you assume that significant numbers of people will make irrational decisions and take large personal losses starting businesses that are very likely to fail it might work out, but I’m not sure that’s justified.
Honestly, most of the arguments about why monopolies would never survive in a truly free market are glaring examples of how irrational hard-line free market ideas are, usually because people turn the idea of an unregulated market itself into a terminal value and then start rationalizing why it will obviously produce ideal results.
Check out the startup market sometime. Most startups fail, yet there always seems to be money for new ones, because every now and then there’s a Google. You seem to be assuming that people won’t do what they’re actually doing.
Technology startups generally have relatively low entry costs and aren’t trying to jump into an established market with substantial network effect and force out an entrenched larger player.
How many startups do you see trying to, say, go toe-to-toe with Microsoft in the desktop OS or office suite market, and how successful are those?
It’s a fallacy to point to the lack of direct competition from startups in the desktop OS or office suite market and claim that as proof that natural monopolies exist. Companies that dominate an industry for a period often lose their dominance when new technologies come along that make their dominance irrelevant.
Companies that dominated telecommunications when fixed land lines were the only game in town now compete against cellular phone networks and Internet telephony. Microsoft’s dominance in the desktop OS space is becoming less and less relevant as more of people’s day to day computing needs move into the cloud. Google Docs is a potential challenger to Office in the future and has its roots partly in a startup (Writely).
Technological innovation has a way of undermining monopolies that are not protected by government regulation. Sometimes it even manages to undermine protected monopolies—the process of updating legislation to maintain profitable monopoly privileges in the face of technological change is fortunately slow enough that the rent seeking entities can be beaten by faster moving companies.
It seems you are conflating net neutrality (ISPs should not discriminate based on packet characteristics, including origin) with the concept that users should pay for the resources they use.
For one thing, spammers usually use botnets so no change there, average users would bear the cost one way or another. Unless you are advocating depriorization of all email traffic, ISPs have no way other than spam filters to differentiate what counts as spam. I see no connection to the net neutrality debate, or the pay-per-usage model.
As for porn-downloaders, I take it you mean people with high bandwidth needs, which includes all sorts of downloaders. (I really don’t see why you would emphasise porn here, even if you’re trying to evoke feelings of moral resentment, LW would seem the unlikeliest of places that this would have any efect.) I never had a problem with bandwidth usage caps, as long as they are explicit. Then carriers can compete on what they set these limits to and I can choose based on my needs. Nothing to do with net neutrality as far as I can see.
As for my libertarian view on net neutrality: When the governments allow for true competition between ISPs, they can drop all net neutrality provisions as far as I care. But then again, in a truly competitive market, I doubt we would be having a net neutrality issue to begin with.
| As for my libertarian view on net neutrality: When the governments allow for true competition between ISPs, they can drop all net neutrality provisions as far as I care.
Do you believe that true competition can exist in a free market where the economics of scale are as big as in the ISP market? If net neutrality isn’t enforced, a big ISP could squash a small new ISP by demanding a lot of money for peering. They are much less likely to try something like this against a big ISP, who has a lot more bargaining power.
(I am Assuming “true competition” means at least low barriers to entry.)
The arguments against monopolies in a free market apply, here. A big ISP which set out to squash little ISPs would run up its own costs trying, thereby losing to other big ISPs which didn’t do this. If there was only one big ISP, they’d eventually fail if they kept this up, since it would be in the interest of all the little ISPs to peer with each other, and they’d eventually have most of the market, collectively. Economies of scale can be really useful, but unless your firm is able to use force, much of the savings will go to the consumers through competition.
Of course, in the real world, we’re awash in force, so perhaps this isn’t very useful. :(
But in the meantime, very many small ISPs would go out of business trying to compete before they collectively pull down the big ISP, which likely has other advantages beyond competing on price, such as having a lot of friends and influence among the set of people who could possibly invest funding into a new ISP.
At some point people are going to realize that getting into the ISP market is a recipe for disaster, and if this happens before the big ISP runs out of slack, competition dries up and the big ISP gets to continue being a monopoly.
So yes, if you assume that significant numbers of people will make irrational decisions and take large personal losses starting businesses that are very likely to fail it might work out, but I’m not sure that’s justified.
Honestly, most of the arguments about why monopolies would never survive in a truly free market are glaring examples of how irrational hard-line free market ideas are, usually because people turn the idea of an unregulated market itself into a terminal value and then start rationalizing why it will obviously produce ideal results.
Check out the startup market sometime. Most startups fail, yet there always seems to be money for new ones, because every now and then there’s a Google. You seem to be assuming that people won’t do what they’re actually doing.
Technology startups generally have relatively low entry costs and aren’t trying to jump into an established market with substantial network effect and force out an entrenched larger player.
How many startups do you see trying to, say, go toe-to-toe with Microsoft in the desktop OS or office suite market, and how successful are those?
It’s a fallacy to point to the lack of direct competition from startups in the desktop OS or office suite market and claim that as proof that natural monopolies exist. Companies that dominate an industry for a period often lose their dominance when new technologies come along that make their dominance irrelevant.
Companies that dominated telecommunications when fixed land lines were the only game in town now compete against cellular phone networks and Internet telephony. Microsoft’s dominance in the desktop OS space is becoming less and less relevant as more of people’s day to day computing needs move into the cloud. Google Docs is a potential challenger to Office in the future and has its roots partly in a startup (Writely).
Technological innovation has a way of undermining monopolies that are not protected by government regulation. Sometimes it even manages to undermine protected monopolies—the process of updating legislation to maintain profitable monopoly privileges in the face of technological change is fortunately slow enough that the rent seeking entities can be beaten by faster moving companies.