What do people here (esp. libertarians) think about (inter)net neutrality?
Seems to me that net neutrality is a great boon to spammers and porn downloaders. People might not like it so much if they discovered that, without net neutrality, they could pay an extra dollar a month and increase their download speed while browsing by a factor of ten.
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.
Net neutrality is a bunch of different issues that get incorrectly lumped together.
The first issue is prioritizing traffic based on endpoints. An example of that is where ISP A contacts example.com and offers to speed up its customers’ connections to example.com, in exchange for money. The problem is that example.com isn’t a customer of ISP A, but of a competing ISP. The full graph of business relationships is
The end user pays ISP A to use its portion of the network, example.com pays ISP B to use its portion of the network, and they split the cost of the link that connects the two ISP’s networks. If ISP A goes after example.com, then it’s trying to bill its competitor’s customers. This is probably in violation of its peering agreement with ISP B, and it would cause a total nightmare for anyone trying to run a web site, as they would have to negotiate with every ISP instead of just the one they get their connectivity from. So with respect to traffic endpoints, net neutrality is extremely important.
The second issue is prioritizing traffic based on type. This is reasonable and sometimes necessary, because some protocols such as telephony only use a small amount of bandwidth but are badly disrupted if they don’t get any for a fraction of a second, while other protocols like ftp use tons of bandwidth but can be paused for several seconds without disrupting anything. The problem there is that protocol prioritization is more often used as a cover story for anti-competitive behavior; eg, ISP A wants to drive ISP B out of business, so they configure their network so that ISP A’s expensive VoIP service gets high priority, ISP B’s VoIP service gets low priority, and everything else gets medium priority. You end up with telephone companies setting the priority on VoIP services that directly compete with their own voice services, cable television setting the priority on streaming video services that directly compete with their own television services, and so on.
Phil, things like cables and phone lines going to houses are “natural monopolies” in that it costs so much to install them that competitors probably can never get started. In fact, if the technology to deliver video over phone lines were available or anticipated when cable TV was building out in the 70s, the owner of the phone lines (pre-breakup AT&T) could probably have stopped the new cable TV companies from ever getting off the ground (by using the fact that AT&T has already paid for its pipe to the home to lowball the new companies). In other words, the probable reason we have two data pipes going into most homes in the U.S. rather than just one is that the first data pipe (the phone line) was not at that time of the introduction of the second pipe technically able to carry the new kind of data (video).
It is desirable that these duopolists (the owners of the phone lines and the cable-TV cables going to the home) are not able to use their natural duopoly as a wedge to enter markets for data services like search engines, online travel agencies, online stores, etc, in the way that Microsoft used their ownership of DOS to lever their way into dominance of markets like word processors and web browsers.
One way to do that is to draw a line at the level of “IP connectivity” and impose a regulation that say that the duopolists are in the business of selling this IP connectivity (and if they like, levels below IP connectivity like raw copper) but cannot enter the market (or prefer partners who are in the market) of selling services that ride on top of IP connectivity and depend on IP connectivity to deliver value to the residential consumer.
This proposal has the advantage that up to now on the internet companies that provide IP connectivity have mostly stayed out of most of the markets that depend on IP connectivity to deliver value to the residential consumer.
It is possible to enshrine such a separation into law and regulations without letting one cable-internet user on a local network (or whatever they call them) shared by a whole block of houses hog up most of the bandwidth of the local network. I.e., there is nothing incompatible here with contracts that impose a monthly cap on bytes received.
And even if spam filtering is made an exception to the separation, so that both connectivity providers (cable-internet and DSL providers) and Google can offer spam filtering, that does not mean that spammer get a free license to spam. What we want is to prevent Verizon or Comcast from making it impossible or more difficult for the Joe Consumer to go to Expedia than to go to Travelocity (or the Comcast Travel Store) -- or more difficult for him to go to Windows Live Search than to Google Search—and we can do that while still allowing Verizon and Comcast to cut off recalictrant spammers (or requiring Joe Consumer to get his email from a email provider that does not happen to be a duopolist who will cut off recalitrant spammers).
Bob Frankston has been eloquent on this issue for at least 10 years now.
Phil, things like cables and phone lines going to houses are “natural monopolies” in that it costs so much to install them that competitors probably can never get started.
How does that square with the fact that in places without government-granted monopolies, there are often more than one provider? My apartment building has two separate cable companies, in addition to Verizon fiber. Is there a general argument for how rental houses often end up with two or more separate cable boxes from more than one provider in areas without government suppression of competition, while still holding that it can’t happen in the general case?
Installing wires requires digging up roads, using utility poles and leaving utility boxes on other peoples’ property. You need permission from local government to do that, period. In some places, the local governments only give one company permission to do that. That’s a government granted monopoly. In other places, they give permission to more than one company, so that they can compete with each other. That’s a government granted oligarchy. But whether there’s one pre-existing cable company or five, if you want to start a new cable company, you need government permission, and you probably won’t get it. It’s nothing like a free market.
And it’s worth noting that a gentlemen’s agreement to not compete too hard is profitable for all parties in a heavily restricted market. Ergo, the government-granted oligopoly is only superior to the monopoly insofar as you expect business executives to be irrational enough to not cooperate in the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma.
There are other alternatives as well. There’s a company here that provides high speed broadband to businesses via a network of roof mounted microwave transmitters. Businesses use them because they offer better value than paying a local cable company to hook a building up. My parents in rural England had a number of options for broadband despite no cable companies operating in the area, including DSL and a wireless relay from a satellite uplink.
I’m not a libertarian. I am in favor of net neutrality for the following reasons:
Setting up different speeds for different sources of data means that somewhere along the line, either a person or a program is going to see what sites or downloads the customer is trying to access. Anything that gives someone an excuse to spy on browsing is to be discouraged.
Net neutrality keeps the barrier to entry on the Internet low. If it’s necessary to pay extra fees to ISPs to make your site tolerably fast to access, then financially disadvantaged people who have something to offer on their websites will lose out on the part of their audience that is not patient enough to wait for the slower load times.
Saying that no sites will get slower than they already are without net neutrality is not a convincing argument, because speed in computers is judged relatively. The computer my family had when I was five was a fast computer then. It is not just slower than the computers that are new now, it’s no longer a fast computer, period, even if we assume that it hasn’t deteriorated by an absolute measure in the last fifteen years. As such, I would rather everything be the same (absolutely slower) speed than have some things get (absolutely) faster.
Saying that consumers will be able to choose net-neutral ISPs is not a convincing argument, because in many places, there are not multiple ISPs competing for business. I cannot get my Internet from anyone other than Comcast; if Comcast becomes non-neutral, I cannot take my business elsewhere unless I want to do without the Internet at home altogether.
Net neutrality keeps the barrier to entry on the Internet low. If it’s necessary to pay extra fees to ISPs to make your site tolerably fast to access, then financially disadvantaged people who have something to offer on their websites will lose out on the part of their audience that is not patient enough to wait for the slower load times.
This seems to be an argument that people who have something they want to say that nobody wants to pay to hear should be subsidized by people who have something to say that they are either willing to pay to make available or have found others who are willing to pay them to hear (usually through the intermediary of paid adverts under current Internet business models). Is that your actual position or do would you not support that argument? If you do not support this interpretation where do you see the distinction?
If I parse your long sentence correctly, I think I disagree with your interpretation. If no one wants to pay to hear something, that could be for any of several reasons, but the one I had in mind was lack of information about the message or the speaker (e.g. “Hey, do you want to buy a book? It’s only fifty cents!” “What book?” “I’m not going to tell you. It could be the latest John Scalzi, or it could be Volume Four of an outdated botanical encyclopedia, or it could be sheet music for the ocarina, or it could be a coffee table volume about those giant cow art projects in Kansas City.”). Browsing unknown websites is a gamble with time already; making it a gamble with money too will make it less appealing and fewer people will be able to get large audiences. New content providers already have difficulty attracting attention.
I see that as a feature rather than a bug though. Spam is a problem in large part because the cost of sending it is extremely low, much lower per mail for the spammer than the cost to the recipient in wasted time. If someone has some information that they want to share that they believe will be of value to others then an up-front investment is a measure of how valuable they really think it will be. If the primary value of sharing the information is the pleasure of hearing the sound of your own voice (as seems to be the case for a significant percentage of the Internet) or as an attempt to steal other people’s time for personal profit (as in the case of spam) then I think a higher barrier to entry is a good thing.
It seems to me that filtering out information that I don’t want is at least as big a problem on the Internet as finding information I do want.
If someone has some information that they want to share that they believe will be of value to others then an up-front investment is a measure of how valuable they really think it will be.
People already have to spend time and effort to provide the information, which constitutes a concrete investment indicating how valuable they think it is. Many also pay for web hosting. Why would additional costs in money serve any purpose other than to introduce a selection bias in favor of people who have more money?
Also, it wouldn’t help with spam at all and I have no idea why you think it would.
If different types of traffic can be given differing priorities or charged at different rates then I think creative solutions to the spam problems are more likely to be discovered. If some kind of blanket legislation is introduced prohibiting any kind of differentiation between types of traffic then I’m inclined to think we will see less optimal allocation of resources. Even differentiating between high-bandwidth/high-latency usage like movie downloads vs. medium-bandwidth/low-latency usage like online gaming will be restricted. I have no faith in lawmakers to craft legislation that will not hamper future technological innovations.
If different types of traffic can be given differing priorities or charged at different rates then I think creative solutions to the spam problems are more likely to be discovered.
You may recall that net neutrality is currently being debated, there is no current legal barrier to adjusting priorities for types of traffic. Spam has been a problem for quite a while now and no such solutions have been found.
The general rule of thumb when it comes to “creative solutions to the spam problem” is “it won’t work”.
I don’t think it’s true to say that no creative solutions to spam have been found. Spam filters are probably the most successful real world example of applying Bayesian techniques. The battle against spam is an ongoing struggle—we have solutions now to the original problems but the spammers keep evolving new attacks. Legislation will tend to reduce the options of the anti-spammers who have to follow the law and give an advantage to the spammers who ignore it.
Any legislation will limit options and hamper innovation and technological progress. That’s what legislation invariably does in all fields.
I don’t think it’s true to say that no creative solutions to spam have been found.
Bayesian filtering at the user end is the only exception to the rule of thumb I’m aware of. The only other anti-spam actions I’ve heard of with any success are distinctly non-creative variations on cutting the hydra’s heads off, such as blocking individual spam sources.
Any legislation will limit options and hamper innovation and technological progress. That’s what legislation invariably does in all fields.
“Invariably”? Do you have any evidence for this assertion?
Legislation can increase one groups’ options by taking away options from another group. It can’t globally increase options. Legislation is just rules about what actions are permitted and what actions are not permitted so it can’t create new options, it can only take them away or trade them off between different groups. Fewer options means reducing the space of allowed innovations and so hampers techological progress. If you want evidence I direct you to the field of economics.
As I said in another comment this discussion is straying into general politics territory and I’m not sure I want to start down that road. We still haven’t decided as a community how to deal with that particular mindkiller.
You’ve defined “options” in a manner that is zero-sum at best and serves mostly to beg the question raised. Even so, consider: what about government uniquely allows it to limit options? Imagine one man owns 90% of the property in a town and uses his influence to financially ruin anyone who does something he doesn’t like, limiting their potential options (a net negative). A government steps in and forbids him from this behavior, thereby limiting his options but restoring everyone else in the town’s options (a net positive).
You could of course define only physical force, or threat thereof, as limiting options, but even in that case a state-run police force is clearly restoring more options than it removes.
As I said in another comment this discussion is straying into general politics territory and I’m not sure I want to start down that road. We still haven’t decided as a community how to deal with that particular mindkiller.
Agreed, and I wouldn’t have gotten into it on anything but an Open Thread (wherein it seems relatively harmless).
what about government uniquely allows it to limit options?
A monopoly on the use of force.
A government steps in and forbids him from this behavior, thereby limiting his options but restoring everyone else in the town’s options (a net positive).
Assuming the validity of the example for the sake of argument, this kind of situation is what I meant when I said that legislation can only move options from one group to another. The example I had in mind was anti-discrimination laws—the government removes the option from an employer to discriminate on the basis of race/sex/religion and thus increases the options available to the employee who was discriminated against. That’s one of the best cases I can think of for the argument that the change is a net positive but I don’t think it’s a watertight case.
In the case of legislation limiting economic activity I think it’s hard to argue that reducing options can ever be an encouragement to innovation and technological progress, although it can potentially redirect it in politically favoured directions. The only economically sound arguments for legislation I’ve seen stem from attempts to internalize negative externalities and while in theory such legislation can be justified, real world examples are often less clearly beneficial.
Agreed, and I wouldn’t have gotten into it on anything but an Open Thread (wherein it seems relatively harmless).
As long as it stays civil it should be harmless, political discussions have a tendency to rapidly degenerate though...
In the case of legislation limiting economic activity I think it’s hard to argue that reducing options can ever be an encouragement to innovation and technological progress, although it can potentially redirect it in politically favoured directions.
Hmmm… spending tax money to directly fund basic research doesn’t count? (If you have to, assume that the people whose money was taxed would have spent it on something generally unrelated to technological progress—say, tobacco cultivation and consumption.)
In theory, eliminating or discouraging options that result in not creating progress should result in more progress...
It would count as an example of redirecting innovation and technological progress in politically favoured directions. I would argue that very little money is spent on something unrelated to technological progress—all industries, the tobacco industry included, drive technological progress in their pursuit of greater profits. The technologies that get developed will tend to be technologies that help satisfy the public’s actual wants and needs rather than those that the political class thinks are more important or those that have the best lobbyists.
I figured you would claim that—please justify it. How does my (contrived, but not impossible) scenario not result in a global net negative in terms of options available? How is someone exercising non-physical power and influence to limit someone else’s options different from physical force in terms of practical end results?
Also note that property rights are backed by threat of force from the state. Does the existence of property rights constitute a net loss in options for society and, if so, would it be better to repeal them?
How does my (contrived, but not impossible) scenario not result in a global net negative in terms of options available?
I didn’t originally claim that governments alone have the power to limit options. My original claim was that legislation cannot globally increase available options. What is unique about states (unique in practice if not in theory) is that their geographical scope and monopoly on the use of force gives them vastly greater power to limit options than other entities, power that they have a strong inclination to exercise at every opportunity. I’m not aware of any individuals in history who have had anything approaching the power of a modern state to restrict the options of others without using physical force. It is much easier for the victim in your example to move to another town than it is for most people to escape the reach of states.
I stand by the claim that legislation can only reduce or redistribute options and not create them. I also believe that states are far more capable of meaningfully restricting options than individuals so long as they maintain a monopoly on the use of force. I never intended to imply a claim that non-state actors cannot also restrict options, and can sometimes do so without the use of force and I’m not going to try and defend that straw man.
Does the existence of property rights constitute a net loss in options for society and, if so, would it be better to repeal them?
I believe societies work better with property rights (though I have serious doubts about intellectual property rights being a net benefit). I believe the benefit comes from reducing the number of occasions when conflicts of interest can only be resolved by resorting to violence. If everyone can agree to a framework in advance for resolving disputes without violence then there is a net benefit to be gained. I think it is unclear whether this results in a net loss in options for society since the greater prosperity property rights make possible leads to new options that may not have existed before. Certainly individuals lose options in the short term but a rational agent may make that choice in order to reap the perceived future benefits. For individuals it`s akin to a hedging strategy—giving up some potential gains (stealing from others) in order to reduce the risk of catastrophic losses (being killed by others).
If you want to pursue a similar argument to justify net neutrality legislation (or any piece of proposed new legislation) then I believe you’d need to make a case that the introduction of such legislation would lead to such an improvement in prosperity that it would more than make up for the lost opportunities it prevents. I think that is a difficult case to make for most legislation.
My original claim was that legislation cannot globally increase available options.
Well, no, because you’ve defined options such that a global increase appears to be essentially impossible.
I’m not aware of any individuals in history who have had anything approaching the power of a modern state to restrict the options of others without using physical force.
A large, modern, state such as the USA federal government, yes. Beyond that, a large corporation has more power to restrict people than, say, a small township’s government, including that it’s easier to move to a new town than escape a global corporation. There are a lot more ways to coerce people than physical force; bribery is pretty effective, too.
I never intended to imply a claim that non-state actors cannot also restrict options, and can sometimes do so without the use of force and I’m not going to try and defend that straw man.
So you do agree that by intervening with force to prevent a non-state actor from restricting options, the state can increase global options vs. non-interference?
I believe the benefit comes from reducing the number of occasions when conflicts of interest can only be resolved by resorting to violence. If everyone can agree to a framework in advance for resolving disputes without violence then there is a net benefit to be gained.
Governmental actions, including enforcing property rights, are in the end backed up with threat of violence, as always. You’ve not removed the violence inherent in the system, merely hidden it.
I think it is unclear whether this results in a net loss in options for society since the greater prosperity property rights make possible leads to new options that may not have existed before.
Of course it restricts options—there’s nothing you can do in a society with property rights that wouldn’t also be possible in a society without property rights, it’s just less likely to occur without government-imposed restrictions.
Ergo, an example wherein government acting to reduce individual options has causally lead to a greater chance of success and more innovation.
Furthermore, your defense of property rights is pretty much exactly the same logic that defends any government intervention at all. You’ve drawn an arbitrary line, and the fact that plenty of societies far on the wrong side of your line have prospered suggests that it isn’t immediately obvious that your placement of the line is the correct one.
If you want to pursue a similar argument to justify net neutrality legislation (or any piece of proposed new legislation) then I believe you’d need to make a case that the introduction of such legislation would lead to such an improvement in prosperity that it would more than make up for the lost opportunities it prevents. I think that is a difficult case to make for most legislation.
The arguments in favor of net neutrality are well known, and persuasive mostly because:
The telecom market is not a free market in any conceivable way
The telecom companies have a history of not doing a good job
At least one company has floated trial balloons about exactly the sort of absurdity that net neutrality is intended to prevent
The stuff it intends to prevent is antithetical to the design of the internet and pretty objectively bad for anyone who isn’t a bloated, inefficient telecom monopolist, and there’s evidence that the chance of it happening is nontrivial; ergo, the burden of proof is substantially shifted to those arguing that the negative side-effects (e.g., collateral damage to legitimate packet QOS) are bad enough to be not worth it. I’ve yet to see any persuasive arguments along these lines, especially from informed, respected people in the technology field.
The only reason I can see to oppose net neutrality is a (in my opinion, unjustifiably) large prior probability for the proposition “legislation X is ipso facto bad” for all X.
you’ve defined options such that a global increase appears to be essentially impossible.
I don’t believe I’ve defined options in any particularly unusual way. What specifically do you take issue with? There is a sense in which options can globally increase—economic growth and technological progress can globally increase options (giving people the option to do things that were not possible before). Institutions that tend to encourage such progress within a society are valuable. Legislation that limits options requires very compelling evidence that it will encourage such progress to be justified in my opinion—when in doubt, err on the side of not restricting options would be my default position.
Beyond that, a large corporation has more power to restrict people than, say, a small township’s government, including that it’s easier to move to a new town than escape a global corporation. There are a lot more ways to coerce people than physical force; bribery is pretty effective, too.
Bribery is not coercion, it’s an economic exchange. It differs from other economic exchanges in that it generally involves a non state actor exchanging money or other goods for favourable treatment under the coercive powers of a representative of the state. I can not think of an example of being restricted by a corporation except when they have acted in concert with the state and have had the backing of the state’s threat of force. I don’t really know what you mean by ‘escaping’ a global corporation—what kind of escape do you have in mind beyond terminating a contract?
So you do agree that by intervening with force to prevent a non-state actor from restricting options, the state can increase global options vs. non-interference?
If a state intervenes with force to prevent the use of force by a non-state actor (the police intervening in a mugging for example) then it is creating an environment that is more conducive to productive economic activity and so allows for a global increase in options. I think the set of actions a non state actor can take to reduce options that do not involve force that the state can beneficially interfere in is either empty or very small though. I’m also not convinced that a state is the only institution that can play this beneficial role, though there are limited historical examples of alternatives.
You’ve drawn an arbitrary line, and the fact that plenty of societies far on the wrong side of your line have prospered suggests that it isn’t immediately obvious that your placement of the line is the correct one.
I’d disagree that the line is arbitrary. It’s certainly less arbitrary than the standard generally applied when deciding what laws to pass. It’s not immediately obvious that it’s the right place it’s true. That’s why I consider the large amount of evidence that demonstrate greater economic growth and prosperity in societies that are closer to the line to be one of the key insights from modern economics.
Ironically the argument you are making here is almost exactly a mirror image of my argument against net-neutrality legislation. The fact that the Internet exists as it does without any current legislation suggests that it isn’t immediately obvious that your desire to move the line is the correct one. There seems to me to be little evidence that would suggest that in this one special case legislation would be beneficial to outweigh the large amounts of evidence that restrictive legislation is generally a net negative and a barrier to innovation.
This addresses the “options” point but not the “hamper innovation” point. The obvious (but arguable) counter-example to the “hamper innovation” point is patent law, in which the government legislates a property right into existence and gives it to an inventor in exchange for the details of an invention.
ETA: Patent law is said to foster* innovation in two ways—it protects an inventor’s investment of time and energy, and it encourages inventors to make details public, which allows others to build on the work. These others can then patent their own work and obtain licenses to use the previously patented components.
* phrasing weakened after reading reply. Was: “Patent law fosters innovation...”
True, patent law is intended to promote innovation. There’s quite a lot of evidence that it has the opposite effect but I agree it’s not immediately obvious that it doesn’t work and there is not yet a consensus that it is a failure. The standard argument you give in favour of patent law is at least superficially plausible.
I let automatic programs filter most of my spam, and the small trickle that gets through seems a small price to pay for the fact that I can have my creative projects on the Internet for free, without having to pay a premium to eliminate a special opportunity cost for potential readers. According to my stats, they are not utterly valueless wastes of space—I have some people who are willing to invest time in viewing my content—but I don’t doubt for a moment that I’d lose most, if not all, of my audience if they were obliged money (that didn’t even make its way to me, the creator of the content).
People drop or refrain from picking up new sites over very little provocation—I stopped reading Dr. McNinja when I started using an RSS feed instead of bookmarks to read my webcomics. Dr. McNinja didn’t become more inconvenient to read when I made this switch; I could have kept the bookmark—it simply didn’t get more convenient along with everything else. I didn’t care about it quite enough to keep it on my radar when it would have taken ten seconds of conscious effort three times a week—not even money and the hassle of providing money over the Internet. I can’t think of any (individual) website that I would pay even a trivial extra amount of money to visit.
The situation you describe is the one that currently exists without any net neutrality legislation though.
I’m suspicious of net neutrality because it uses the threat of imagined or potential future problems to push for more legislation and more government involvement in a market that seems to have worked pretty well without significant regulation so far. This is a general tactic for pushing increased government involvement in many different areas.
The actions that have so far been taken that would be prohibited by net-neutrality legislation mostly seem to be about throttling bittorrent traffic. I’d much rather see a focus on eliminating existing government sponsored monopolies in the provision of broadband access and allow the market to sort out the allocation of bandwidth. I am very doubtful that any kind of legislation will produce an optimal allocation of resources.
The fact that something seems to have worked pretty well without significant regulation so far could mean that it will continue to do so, or it could mean that it’s been lucky and taking no new precautions will cause it to stop working pretty well. I don’t have any antivirus software on my Mac; if more people start finding it an appealing challenge to infect Macs with viruses, though, it would be stupid for me to assume that this will be safe forever. More companies are starting to show interest in behaviors that will lead to biased net access. Regulation will almost certainly not yield optimal allocation of resources; it will, however, prevent certain kinds of abuses and inequalities.
I guess this comes down to politics ultimately. I have more faith that good solutions will be worked out by negotiation between the competing interests (Google tends to counter-balance the cable companies, consumers have options even though they tend to be limited by government sponsored monopolies for broadband provision) than by congress being captured by whoever has the most powerful lobbyists at the time the laws are passed. I take the fact that things are ok at the moment as reasonable evidence that a good solution is possible without legislation. Certainly bad solutions are possible both with and without legislation, I just tend to think they are much more likely with legislation than without.
This may or may not have to do with the fact that I am not paid by the hour. My stipend depends on grading papers and doing adequately in school, but if I can accomplish that in ten hours a week, I don’t get paid any less than if I accomplish it in forty. Time I spend on Less Wrong isn’t time I could be spending earning money, because I have enough on my plate that getting an outside job would be foolish of me.
Also, one cent is not just one cent here. If my computer had a coin slot, I’d probably drop in a penny for lifetime access to Less Wrong. But spending time (not happily) wrestling with the transaction itself, and running the risk that something will go wrong and the access to the site won’t come immediately after the penny has departed from my end, and wasting brainpower trying to decide whether the site is worth a penny when for all I know it could be gone next week or deteriorate tremendously in quality—that would be too big an intrusion, and that’s what it looks like when you have to pay for website access.
Additionally, coughing up any amount of money just to access a site sets up an incentive structure I don’t care for. If people tolerate a pricetag for the main contents of websites—not just extra things like bonus or premium content, or physical objects from Cafépress, or donations as gratitude or charity—then there is less reason not to attach a pricetag. I visit more than enough different websites (thanks to Stumbleupon) to make a difference in my budget over the course of a month if I had to pay a penny each to see them all.
In a nutshell: I can’t trade time alone directly for money; I can’t trade cash alone directly for website access; and I do not wish to universalize the maxim that paying for website access would endorse.
The telecommunications market in the United States is so ridiculously far from an idealized free market in so many ways that I don’t see why you’d expect a libertarian perspective to be insightful.
The only sensible free market perspective on anything related to telecommunications has to pretty much start with “tear down the entire current system and start over”.
Obviously we would do things differently if starting over from scratch, but that isn’t going to happen, and it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t think about the incremental steps we should take. And I don’t think we should ignore economics when thinking about what those incremental steps should be.
However, the typical libertarian response is roughly “move closer to a free market”, which does not necessarily give better results from all starting points. In the case of a market that is by its nature far from a perfectly competitive one, that’s been heavily distorted by previous government interference, has several entrenched players, &c., there’s every reason to believe that naively reducing regulation will lead toward a local minimum.
Look up Tim Lee from the Cato Institute. I think he has written on this topic. I think the standard libertarian position on net neutrality is that it’s no good. Personally, I don’t have the technical knowledge to really comment, though once at what might be called a libertarian boot camp, I came up with the slogan “surf at your own speed” in an exercise to come up with promotions for net nonneutrality.
Toward the end (i think) they get into the issue. I can’t remember what Raymond says, but IIRC, he takes a nonneutrality position while not sound like the standard libertarian position. It’s an interesting podcast throughout, however, and you should listen to the whole thing. All of you.
“Thomas Hazlett of George Mason University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about a number of key issues in telecommunications and telecommunication policy including net neutrality, FCC policy, and the state of antitrust. Hazlett argues for an emergent, Hayekian approach to policy toward the internet rather than trying to design it from the top down and for an increased use of exchangeable property rights in allocating spectrum.”
Why do you think it should be free? And why would that offset the inefficiencies inherent in a massive public system?
Is there any evidence that massive systems are efficient no matter who is running them? Government-run utilities don’t seem to do worse, and the USA health care system is demonstrably less efficient than many countries’ public systems.
Can you give an example? All the government run utilities that come to mind are disasters. There are probably examples of government run utilities that are efficient but I’m having trouble thinking of any.
My local town provides unusually good garbage collection service. An attempt by the borough council to save money by hiring private contractors for garbage collection was met by many, many outraged people showing up to the council meeting to protest.
Efficient implies cost-effective: government run garbage collection might be a reasonably high quality service but come at an unreasonably high price. It sounds like cost concerns were the motivation for the change in your example.
What do people here (esp. libertarians) think about (inter)net neutrality?
Seems to me that net neutrality is a great boon to spammers and porn downloaders. People might not like it so much if they discovered that, without net neutrality, they could pay an extra dollar a month and increase their download speed while browsing by a factor of ten.
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.
Net neutrality is a bunch of different issues that get incorrectly lumped together.
The first issue is prioritizing traffic based on endpoints. An example of that is where ISP A contacts example.com and offers to speed up its customers’ connections to example.com, in exchange for money. The problem is that example.com isn’t a customer of ISP A, but of a competing ISP. The full graph of business relationships is
End user—ISP A—ISP B—example.com
The end user pays ISP A to use its portion of the network, example.com pays ISP B to use its portion of the network, and they split the cost of the link that connects the two ISP’s networks. If ISP A goes after example.com, then it’s trying to bill its competitor’s customers. This is probably in violation of its peering agreement with ISP B, and it would cause a total nightmare for anyone trying to run a web site, as they would have to negotiate with every ISP instead of just the one they get their connectivity from. So with respect to traffic endpoints, net neutrality is extremely important.
The second issue is prioritizing traffic based on type. This is reasonable and sometimes necessary, because some protocols such as telephony only use a small amount of bandwidth but are badly disrupted if they don’t get any for a fraction of a second, while other protocols like ftp use tons of bandwidth but can be paused for several seconds without disrupting anything. The problem there is that protocol prioritization is more often used as a cover story for anti-competitive behavior; eg, ISP A wants to drive ISP B out of business, so they configure their network so that ISP A’s expensive VoIP service gets high priority, ISP B’s VoIP service gets low priority, and everything else gets medium priority. You end up with telephone companies setting the priority on VoIP services that directly compete with their own voice services, cable television setting the priority on streaming video services that directly compete with their own television services, and so on.
Phil, things like cables and phone lines going to houses are “natural monopolies” in that it costs so much to install them that competitors probably can never get started. In fact, if the technology to deliver video over phone lines were available or anticipated when cable TV was building out in the 70s, the owner of the phone lines (pre-breakup AT&T) could probably have stopped the new cable TV companies from ever getting off the ground (by using the fact that AT&T has already paid for its pipe to the home to lowball the new companies). In other words, the probable reason we have two data pipes going into most homes in the U.S. rather than just one is that the first data pipe (the phone line) was not at that time of the introduction of the second pipe technically able to carry the new kind of data (video).
It is desirable that these duopolists (the owners of the phone lines and the cable-TV cables going to the home) are not able to use their natural duopoly as a wedge to enter markets for data services like search engines, online travel agencies, online stores, etc, in the way that Microsoft used their ownership of DOS to lever their way into dominance of markets like word processors and web browsers.
One way to do that is to draw a line at the level of “IP connectivity” and impose a regulation that say that the duopolists are in the business of selling this IP connectivity (and if they like, levels below IP connectivity like raw copper) but cannot enter the market (or prefer partners who are in the market) of selling services that ride on top of IP connectivity and depend on IP connectivity to deliver value to the residential consumer.
This proposal has the advantage that up to now on the internet companies that provide IP connectivity have mostly stayed out of most of the markets that depend on IP connectivity to deliver value to the residential consumer.
It is possible to enshrine such a separation into law and regulations without letting one cable-internet user on a local network (or whatever they call them) shared by a whole block of houses hog up most of the bandwidth of the local network. I.e., there is nothing incompatible here with contracts that impose a monthly cap on bytes received.
And even if spam filtering is made an exception to the separation, so that both connectivity providers (cable-internet and DSL providers) and Google can offer spam filtering, that does not mean that spammer get a free license to spam. What we want is to prevent Verizon or Comcast from making it impossible or more difficult for the Joe Consumer to go to Expedia than to go to Travelocity (or the Comcast Travel Store) -- or more difficult for him to go to Windows Live Search than to Google Search—and we can do that while still allowing Verizon and Comcast to cut off recalictrant spammers (or requiring Joe Consumer to get his email from a email provider that does not happen to be a duopolist who will cut off recalitrant spammers).
Bob Frankston has been eloquent on this issue for at least 10 years now.
How does that square with the fact that in places without government-granted monopolies, there are often more than one provider? My apartment building has two separate cable companies, in addition to Verizon fiber. Is there a general argument for how rental houses often end up with two or more separate cable boxes from more than one provider in areas without government suppression of competition, while still holding that it can’t happen in the general case?
Installing wires requires digging up roads, using utility poles and leaving utility boxes on other peoples’ property. You need permission from local government to do that, period. In some places, the local governments only give one company permission to do that. That’s a government granted monopoly. In other places, they give permission to more than one company, so that they can compete with each other. That’s a government granted oligarchy. But whether there’s one pre-existing cable company or five, if you want to start a new cable company, you need government permission, and you probably won’t get it. It’s nothing like a free market.
And it’s worth noting that a gentlemen’s agreement to not compete too hard is profitable for all parties in a heavily restricted market. Ergo, the government-granted oligopoly is only superior to the monopoly insofar as you expect business executives to be irrational enough to not cooperate in the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma.
You mean oligopoly
Yep, it’s the bankers that are a government granted oligarchy.
There are other alternatives as well. There’s a company here that provides high speed broadband to businesses via a network of roof mounted microwave transmitters. Businesses use them because they offer better value than paying a local cable company to hook a building up. My parents in rural England had a number of options for broadband despite no cable companies operating in the area, including DSL and a wireless relay from a satellite uplink.
I’m not a libertarian. I am in favor of net neutrality for the following reasons:
Setting up different speeds for different sources of data means that somewhere along the line, either a person or a program is going to see what sites or downloads the customer is trying to access. Anything that gives someone an excuse to spy on browsing is to be discouraged.
Net neutrality keeps the barrier to entry on the Internet low. If it’s necessary to pay extra fees to ISPs to make your site tolerably fast to access, then financially disadvantaged people who have something to offer on their websites will lose out on the part of their audience that is not patient enough to wait for the slower load times.
Saying that no sites will get slower than they already are without net neutrality is not a convincing argument, because speed in computers is judged relatively. The computer my family had when I was five was a fast computer then. It is not just slower than the computers that are new now, it’s no longer a fast computer, period, even if we assume that it hasn’t deteriorated by an absolute measure in the last fifteen years. As such, I would rather everything be the same (absolutely slower) speed than have some things get (absolutely) faster.
Saying that consumers will be able to choose net-neutral ISPs is not a convincing argument, because in many places, there are not multiple ISPs competing for business. I cannot get my Internet from anyone other than Comcast; if Comcast becomes non-neutral, I cannot take my business elsewhere unless I want to do without the Internet at home altogether.
This seems to be an argument that people who have something they want to say that nobody wants to pay to hear should be subsidized by people who have something to say that they are either willing to pay to make available or have found others who are willing to pay them to hear (usually through the intermediary of paid adverts under current Internet business models). Is that your actual position or do would you not support that argument? If you do not support this interpretation where do you see the distinction?
If I parse your long sentence correctly, I think I disagree with your interpretation. If no one wants to pay to hear something, that could be for any of several reasons, but the one I had in mind was lack of information about the message or the speaker (e.g. “Hey, do you want to buy a book? It’s only fifty cents!” “What book?” “I’m not going to tell you. It could be the latest John Scalzi, or it could be Volume Four of an outdated botanical encyclopedia, or it could be sheet music for the ocarina, or it could be a coffee table volume about those giant cow art projects in Kansas City.”). Browsing unknown websites is a gamble with time already; making it a gamble with money too will make it less appealing and fewer people will be able to get large audiences. New content providers already have difficulty attracting attention.
I see that as a feature rather than a bug though. Spam is a problem in large part because the cost of sending it is extremely low, much lower per mail for the spammer than the cost to the recipient in wasted time. If someone has some information that they want to share that they believe will be of value to others then an up-front investment is a measure of how valuable they really think it will be. If the primary value of sharing the information is the pleasure of hearing the sound of your own voice (as seems to be the case for a significant percentage of the Internet) or as an attempt to steal other people’s time for personal profit (as in the case of spam) then I think a higher barrier to entry is a good thing.
It seems to me that filtering out information that I don’t want is at least as big a problem on the Internet as finding information I do want.
People already have to spend time and effort to provide the information, which constitutes a concrete investment indicating how valuable they think it is. Many also pay for web hosting. Why would additional costs in money serve any purpose other than to introduce a selection bias in favor of people who have more money?
Also, it wouldn’t help with spam at all and I have no idea why you think it would.
If different types of traffic can be given differing priorities or charged at different rates then I think creative solutions to the spam problems are more likely to be discovered. If some kind of blanket legislation is introduced prohibiting any kind of differentiation between types of traffic then I’m inclined to think we will see less optimal allocation of resources. Even differentiating between high-bandwidth/high-latency usage like movie downloads vs. medium-bandwidth/low-latency usage like online gaming will be restricted. I have no faith in lawmakers to craft legislation that will not hamper future technological innovations.
You may recall that net neutrality is currently being debated, there is no current legal barrier to adjusting priorities for types of traffic. Spam has been a problem for quite a while now and no such solutions have been found.
The general rule of thumb when it comes to “creative solutions to the spam problem” is “it won’t work”.
I don’t think it’s true to say that no creative solutions to spam have been found. Spam filters are probably the most successful real world example of applying Bayesian techniques. The battle against spam is an ongoing struggle—we have solutions now to the original problems but the spammers keep evolving new attacks. Legislation will tend to reduce the options of the anti-spammers who have to follow the law and give an advantage to the spammers who ignore it.
Any legislation will limit options and hamper innovation and technological progress. That’s what legislation invariably does in all fields.
Bayesian filtering at the user end is the only exception to the rule of thumb I’m aware of. The only other anti-spam actions I’ve heard of with any success are distinctly non-creative variations on cutting the hydra’s heads off, such as blocking individual spam sources.
“Invariably”? Do you have any evidence for this assertion?
Legislation can increase one groups’ options by taking away options from another group. It can’t globally increase options. Legislation is just rules about what actions are permitted and what actions are not permitted so it can’t create new options, it can only take them away or trade them off between different groups. Fewer options means reducing the space of allowed innovations and so hampers techological progress. If you want evidence I direct you to the field of economics.
As I said in another comment this discussion is straying into general politics territory and I’m not sure I want to start down that road. We still haven’t decided as a community how to deal with that particular mindkiller.
You’ve defined “options” in a manner that is zero-sum at best and serves mostly to beg the question raised. Even so, consider: what about government uniquely allows it to limit options? Imagine one man owns 90% of the property in a town and uses his influence to financially ruin anyone who does something he doesn’t like, limiting their potential options (a net negative). A government steps in and forbids him from this behavior, thereby limiting his options but restoring everyone else in the town’s options (a net positive).
You could of course define only physical force, or threat thereof, as limiting options, but even in that case a state-run police force is clearly restoring more options than it removes.
Agreed, and I wouldn’t have gotten into it on anything but an Open Thread (wherein it seems relatively harmless).
A monopoly on the use of force.
Assuming the validity of the example for the sake of argument, this kind of situation is what I meant when I said that legislation can only move options from one group to another. The example I had in mind was anti-discrimination laws—the government removes the option from an employer to discriminate on the basis of race/sex/religion and thus increases the options available to the employee who was discriminated against. That’s one of the best cases I can think of for the argument that the change is a net positive but I don’t think it’s a watertight case.
In the case of legislation limiting economic activity I think it’s hard to argue that reducing options can ever be an encouragement to innovation and technological progress, although it can potentially redirect it in politically favoured directions. The only economically sound arguments for legislation I’ve seen stem from attempts to internalize negative externalities and while in theory such legislation can be justified, real world examples are often less clearly beneficial.
As long as it stays civil it should be harmless, political discussions have a tendency to rapidly degenerate though...
Hmmm… spending tax money to directly fund basic research doesn’t count? (If you have to, assume that the people whose money was taxed would have spent it on something generally unrelated to technological progress—say, tobacco cultivation and consumption.)
In theory, eliminating or discouraging options that result in not creating progress should result in more progress...
It would count as an example of redirecting innovation and technological progress in politically favoured directions. I would argue that very little money is spent on something unrelated to technological progress—all industries, the tobacco industry included, drive technological progress in their pursuit of greater profits. The technologies that get developed will tend to be technologies that help satisfy the public’s actual wants and needs rather than those that the political class thinks are more important or those that have the best lobbyists.
I figured you would claim that—please justify it. How does my (contrived, but not impossible) scenario not result in a global net negative in terms of options available? How is someone exercising non-physical power and influence to limit someone else’s options different from physical force in terms of practical end results?
Also note that property rights are backed by threat of force from the state. Does the existence of property rights constitute a net loss in options for society and, if so, would it be better to repeal them?
I didn’t originally claim that governments alone have the power to limit options. My original claim was that legislation cannot globally increase available options. What is unique about states (unique in practice if not in theory) is that their geographical scope and monopoly on the use of force gives them vastly greater power to limit options than other entities, power that they have a strong inclination to exercise at every opportunity. I’m not aware of any individuals in history who have had anything approaching the power of a modern state to restrict the options of others without using physical force. It is much easier for the victim in your example to move to another town than it is for most people to escape the reach of states.
I stand by the claim that legislation can only reduce or redistribute options and not create them. I also believe that states are far more capable of meaningfully restricting options than individuals so long as they maintain a monopoly on the use of force. I never intended to imply a claim that non-state actors cannot also restrict options, and can sometimes do so without the use of force and I’m not going to try and defend that straw man.
I believe societies work better with property rights (though I have serious doubts about intellectual property rights being a net benefit). I believe the benefit comes from reducing the number of occasions when conflicts of interest can only be resolved by resorting to violence. If everyone can agree to a framework in advance for resolving disputes without violence then there is a net benefit to be gained. I think it is unclear whether this results in a net loss in options for society since the greater prosperity property rights make possible leads to new options that may not have existed before. Certainly individuals lose options in the short term but a rational agent may make that choice in order to reap the perceived future benefits. For individuals it`s akin to a hedging strategy—giving up some potential gains (stealing from others) in order to reduce the risk of catastrophic losses (being killed by others).
If you want to pursue a similar argument to justify net neutrality legislation (or any piece of proposed new legislation) then I believe you’d need to make a case that the introduction of such legislation would lead to such an improvement in prosperity that it would more than make up for the lost opportunities it prevents. I think that is a difficult case to make for most legislation.
Well, no, because you’ve defined options such that a global increase appears to be essentially impossible.
A large, modern, state such as the USA federal government, yes. Beyond that, a large corporation has more power to restrict people than, say, a small township’s government, including that it’s easier to move to a new town than escape a global corporation. There are a lot more ways to coerce people than physical force; bribery is pretty effective, too.
So you do agree that by intervening with force to prevent a non-state actor from restricting options, the state can increase global options vs. non-interference?
Governmental actions, including enforcing property rights, are in the end backed up with threat of violence, as always. You’ve not removed the violence inherent in the system, merely hidden it.
Of course it restricts options—there’s nothing you can do in a society with property rights that wouldn’t also be possible in a society without property rights, it’s just less likely to occur without government-imposed restrictions.
Ergo, an example wherein government acting to reduce individual options has causally lead to a greater chance of success and more innovation.
Furthermore, your defense of property rights is pretty much exactly the same logic that defends any government intervention at all. You’ve drawn an arbitrary line, and the fact that plenty of societies far on the wrong side of your line have prospered suggests that it isn’t immediately obvious that your placement of the line is the correct one.
The arguments in favor of net neutrality are well known, and persuasive mostly because:
The telecom market is not a free market in any conceivable way
The telecom companies have a history of not doing a good job
At least one company has floated trial balloons about exactly the sort of absurdity that net neutrality is intended to prevent
The stuff it intends to prevent is antithetical to the design of the internet and pretty objectively bad for anyone who isn’t a bloated, inefficient telecom monopolist, and there’s evidence that the chance of it happening is nontrivial; ergo, the burden of proof is substantially shifted to those arguing that the negative side-effects (e.g., collateral damage to legitimate packet QOS) are bad enough to be not worth it. I’ve yet to see any persuasive arguments along these lines, especially from informed, respected people in the technology field.
The only reason I can see to oppose net neutrality is a (in my opinion, unjustifiably) large prior probability for the proposition “legislation X is ipso facto bad” for all X.
I don’t believe I’ve defined options in any particularly unusual way. What specifically do you take issue with? There is a sense in which options can globally increase—economic growth and technological progress can globally increase options (giving people the option to do things that were not possible before). Institutions that tend to encourage such progress within a society are valuable. Legislation that limits options requires very compelling evidence that it will encourage such progress to be justified in my opinion—when in doubt, err on the side of not restricting options would be my default position.
Bribery is not coercion, it’s an economic exchange. It differs from other economic exchanges in that it generally involves a non state actor exchanging money or other goods for favourable treatment under the coercive powers of a representative of the state. I can not think of an example of being restricted by a corporation except when they have acted in concert with the state and have had the backing of the state’s threat of force. I don’t really know what you mean by ‘escaping’ a global corporation—what kind of escape do you have in mind beyond terminating a contract?
If a state intervenes with force to prevent the use of force by a non-state actor (the police intervening in a mugging for example) then it is creating an environment that is more conducive to productive economic activity and so allows for a global increase in options. I think the set of actions a non state actor can take to reduce options that do not involve force that the state can beneficially interfere in is either empty or very small though. I’m also not convinced that a state is the only institution that can play this beneficial role, though there are limited historical examples of alternatives.
I’d disagree that the line is arbitrary. It’s certainly less arbitrary than the standard generally applied when deciding what laws to pass. It’s not immediately obvious that it’s the right place it’s true. That’s why I consider the large amount of evidence that demonstrate greater economic growth and prosperity in societies that are closer to the line to be one of the key insights from modern economics.
Ironically the argument you are making here is almost exactly a mirror image of my argument against net-neutrality legislation. The fact that the Internet exists as it does without any current legislation suggests that it isn’t immediately obvious that your desire to move the line is the correct one. There seems to me to be little evidence that would suggest that in this one special case legislation would be beneficial to outweigh the large amounts of evidence that restrictive legislation is generally a net negative and a barrier to innovation.
This addresses the “options” point but not the “hamper innovation” point. The obvious (but arguable) counter-example to the “hamper innovation” point is patent law, in which the government legislates a property right into existence and gives it to an inventor in exchange for the details of an invention.
ETA: Patent law is said to foster* innovation in two ways—it protects an inventor’s investment of time and energy, and it encourages inventors to make details public, which allows others to build on the work. These others can then patent their own work and obtain licenses to use the previously patented components.
* phrasing weakened after reading reply. Was: “Patent law fosters innovation...”
True, patent law is intended to promote innovation. There’s quite a lot of evidence that it has the opposite effect but I agree it’s not immediately obvious that it doesn’t work and there is not yet a consensus that it is a failure. The standard argument you give in favour of patent law is at least superficially plausible.
I let automatic programs filter most of my spam, and the small trickle that gets through seems a small price to pay for the fact that I can have my creative projects on the Internet for free, without having to pay a premium to eliminate a special opportunity cost for potential readers. According to my stats, they are not utterly valueless wastes of space—I have some people who are willing to invest time in viewing my content—but I don’t doubt for a moment that I’d lose most, if not all, of my audience if they were obliged money (that didn’t even make its way to me, the creator of the content).
People drop or refrain from picking up new sites over very little provocation—I stopped reading Dr. McNinja when I started using an RSS feed instead of bookmarks to read my webcomics. Dr. McNinja didn’t become more inconvenient to read when I made this switch; I could have kept the bookmark—it simply didn’t get more convenient along with everything else. I didn’t care about it quite enough to keep it on my radar when it would have taken ten seconds of conscious effort three times a week—not even money and the hassle of providing money over the Internet. I can’t think of any (individual) website that I would pay even a trivial extra amount of money to visit.
The situation you describe is the one that currently exists without any net neutrality legislation though.
I’m suspicious of net neutrality because it uses the threat of imagined or potential future problems to push for more legislation and more government involvement in a market that seems to have worked pretty well without significant regulation so far. This is a general tactic for pushing increased government involvement in many different areas.
The actions that have so far been taken that would be prohibited by net-neutrality legislation mostly seem to be about throttling bittorrent traffic. I’d much rather see a focus on eliminating existing government sponsored monopolies in the provision of broadband access and allow the market to sort out the allocation of bandwidth. I am very doubtful that any kind of legislation will produce an optimal allocation of resources.
The fact that something seems to have worked pretty well without significant regulation so far could mean that it will continue to do so, or it could mean that it’s been lucky and taking no new precautions will cause it to stop working pretty well. I don’t have any antivirus software on my Mac; if more people start finding it an appealing challenge to infect Macs with viruses, though, it would be stupid for me to assume that this will be safe forever. More companies are starting to show interest in behaviors that will lead to biased net access. Regulation will almost certainly not yield optimal allocation of resources; it will, however, prevent certain kinds of abuses and inequalities.
I guess this comes down to politics ultimately. I have more faith that good solutions will be worked out by negotiation between the competing interests (Google tends to counter-balance the cable companies, consumers have options even though they tend to be limited by government sponsored monopolies for broadband provision) than by congress being captured by whoever has the most powerful lobbyists at the time the laws are passed. I take the fact that things are ok at the moment as reasonable evidence that a good solution is possible without legislation. Certainly bad solutions are possible both with and without legislation, I just tend to think they are much more likely with legislation than without.
I must have misread, lifetime access to lesswrong isn’t worth one cent, but you’ll voluntarily spend hours of time on it?
This may or may not have to do with the fact that I am not paid by the hour. My stipend depends on grading papers and doing adequately in school, but if I can accomplish that in ten hours a week, I don’t get paid any less than if I accomplish it in forty. Time I spend on Less Wrong isn’t time I could be spending earning money, because I have enough on my plate that getting an outside job would be foolish of me.
Also, one cent is not just one cent here. If my computer had a coin slot, I’d probably drop in a penny for lifetime access to Less Wrong. But spending time (not happily) wrestling with the transaction itself, and running the risk that something will go wrong and the access to the site won’t come immediately after the penny has departed from my end, and wasting brainpower trying to decide whether the site is worth a penny when for all I know it could be gone next week or deteriorate tremendously in quality—that would be too big an intrusion, and that’s what it looks like when you have to pay for website access.
Additionally, coughing up any amount of money just to access a site sets up an incentive structure I don’t care for. If people tolerate a pricetag for the main contents of websites—not just extra things like bonus or premium content, or physical objects from Cafépress, or donations as gratitude or charity—then there is less reason not to attach a pricetag. I visit more than enough different websites (thanks to Stumbleupon) to make a difference in my budget over the course of a month if I had to pay a penny each to see them all.
In a nutshell: I can’t trade time alone directly for money; I can’t trade cash alone directly for website access; and I do not wish to universalize the maxim that paying for website access would endorse.
The telecommunications market in the United States is so ridiculously far from an idealized free market in so many ways that I don’t see why you’d expect a libertarian perspective to be insightful.
The only sensible free market perspective on anything related to telecommunications has to pretty much start with “tear down the entire current system and start over”.
Obviously we would do things differently if starting over from scratch, but that isn’t going to happen, and it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t think about the incremental steps we should take. And I don’t think we should ignore economics when thinking about what those incremental steps should be.
Of course not.
However, the typical libertarian response is roughly “move closer to a free market”, which does not necessarily give better results from all starting points. In the case of a market that is by its nature far from a perfectly competitive one, that’s been heavily distorted by previous government interference, has several entrenched players, &c., there’s every reason to believe that naively reducing regulation will lead toward a local minimum.
Look up Tim Lee from the Cato Institute. I think he has written on this topic. I think the standard libertarian position on net neutrality is that it’s no good. Personally, I don’t have the technical knowledge to really comment, though once at what might be called a libertarian boot camp, I came up with the slogan “surf at your own speed” in an exercise to come up with promotions for net nonneutrality.
Also, see this podcast: http://www.econtalk.org//archives/2009/01/eric_raymond_on.html
Toward the end (i think) they get into the issue. I can’t remember what Raymond says, but IIRC, he takes a nonneutrality position while not sound like the standard libertarian position. It’s an interesting podcast throughout, however, and you should listen to the whole thing. All of you.
edit: It was Tim Lee, not Tim Butler: http://www.cato.org/people/timothy-lee
For a libertarian perspective on these issues see:
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2008/11/hazlett_on_tele.html
“Thomas Hazlett of George Mason University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about a number of key issues in telecommunications and telecommunication policy including net neutrality, FCC policy, and the state of antitrust. Hazlett argues for an emergent, Hayekian approach to policy toward the internet rather than trying to design it from the top down and for an increased use of exchangeable property rights in allocating spectrum.”
Internet should be as free as streets. Internet cables, switches, retransmitters, etc. should be considered public space.
Applause light. Why do you think it should be free? And why would that offset the inefficiencies inherent in a massive public system?
This is what I’m talking about.
The reverse statement is not absurd.
Is there any evidence that massive systems are efficient no matter who is running them? Government-run utilities don’t seem to do worse, and the USA health care system is demonstrably less efficient than many countries’ public systems.
Can you give an example? All the government run utilities that come to mind are disasters. There are probably examples of government run utilities that are efficient but I’m having trouble thinking of any.
My local town provides unusually good garbage collection service. An attempt by the borough council to save money by hiring private contractors for garbage collection was met by many, many outraged people showing up to the council meeting to protest.
Efficient implies cost-effective: government run garbage collection might be a reasonably high quality service but come at an unreasonably high price. It sounds like cost concerns were the motivation for the change in your example.
The protesters made it very clear that they preferred to pay more for the higher level of service.
But since this is a government run monopoly they don’t have that choice as individuals so instead they have to take political action.