Sunday, February 19, 2006

From Lawrence Lessig "the fiction zone that DC has become"

Lawrence Lessig:
Broadband is infrastructure — like highways, if not railroads. If you rely upon “markets” alone to provide
infrastructure, you’ll get less of it, and at a higher price. (See, e.g., the United States, today.)

"…when the Internet first reached beyond research facilities to the masses, it did so on regulated lines — telephone lines. Had the telephone companies been free of the “heavy hand” of government regulation, it’s quite clear what they would have done — they would have killed it, just as they did when Paul Baran first proposed the idea in 1964. It was precisely because they were not free to kill it, because the “heavy hand[ed]” regulation required them to act neutrally, that the Internet was able to happen, and then flourish.

So Waltzman’s wrong about the Internet’s past. But he’s certainly right about what a mandated net neutrality requirement would be. It would certainly be a “complete step backward for the Internet” — back to the time when we were world leaders in Internet penetration, and competition kept prices low and services high. Today, in the world where the duopoly increasingly talks about returning us to the world where innovation is as the network owners says, broadband in the US sucks. We are somewhere between 12th and 19th in the world, depending upon whose scale you use. As the Wall Street Journal reported two months ago, broadband in the US is “slow and expensive.” Verizon’s entry-level broadband is $14.95 for 786 kbs. That about $20 per megabit. In FRANCE, for $36/m, you get 20 megabits/s — or about $1.80 per megabit.

How did France get it so good? By following the rules the US passed in 1996, but that telecoms never really followed (and cable companies didn’t have to follow): “strict unbundling.” That’s the same in Japan — fierce competition induced by “heavy handed” regulation producing a faster, cheaper Internet. Now of course, no one is pushing “open access” anymore. Net neutrality is a thin and light substitute for the strategy that has worked in France and Japan. But it is regulation, no doubt.

So while it is true that we have had both:

(a) common carrier like regulation applied to the Internet, and
(b) basically no effective regulation applied to the Internet

and it is true that we have had both:

(c) fast, fierce competition to provide Internet service and
(d) just about the worst broadband service of the developed world

it is not true that we had (c) when we had (b).

We had (c) when we had (a), and we have (d) now that we have (b).

But in the world where the President has the inherent authority to wiretap telephones, who would be surprised if facts didn’t matter much. "

Here are a few other problems markets didn't and don't solve:

Slavery, Health Care, Retirement Security

Nothing will ever stop people from believing that markets solve them.

In America slavery finally required a civil war, which the slaveholders lost. That was followed by a terrorist campaign that the slaveholders won. Followed, nearly a century later by a civil rights struggle that at times has encompassed both civil disobedience and civil insurrection.

As recently as the end of the sixties the US government refused to insure suburban developments that were open to non-whites. Discrimination against minority farmers in Federal Programs continued until the Clinton administration.

Maybe we're wasting our time arguing the pros and cons of reparations for slavery. Maybe we should be talking about reparations from Plessy versus Ferguson to the 1967 voting rights act. Al Ingram

http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003290.shtml

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con·cept: From Lawrence Lessig "the fiction zone that DC has become"