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Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Net Neutrality and Economic Reality

The FCC is likely to move to rescind the Obama era regulation of the internet which was named "net neutrality".  Under the name of supposed equality, the government moved in to try to control how internet resources are used rather than letting the market do that function.  From the beginning of the internet until 2015, market forces had done a fine job in allotting internet resources, but the left found yet another job that the government bureaucrats absolutely had to do, and they set up Net Neutrality which, among other things, regulated internet service providers.

Today, the left and the media is portraying the end of Net Neutrality as an assault on democracy and freedom.  It is neither.  Service providers are not about to degrade the service obtained by users and these people claim.  In fact, we are likely to see speeds continue to rise.  Think about it and you will see why.  The big internet service providers like Comcast, Charter and Verizon have been under assault as a result of a phenomenon known as "cord cutting".  In other words, individual users have been stopping their cable TV services and just getting content online.  The providers have been rescued from major revenue losses due to their high speed internet connections.  Users may not still get cable TV, but they want high speed internet as a replacement.  The revenue from the internet connection services has been rising to make up for the losses due to cord cutting.  The opponents of ending Net Neutrality say that the ISPs will slow down internet connections for most people if the government is not regulating this stuff.  How many of the cord cutters will keep their internet connections with the service providers if the speed is suddenly cut and the service degraded?  A company like Comcast or Verizon would see its customer base collapse were it to suddenly restrict the quality of the connection.  That fact, more than anything else, will keep these companies from slowing connection speed.

For some reason, people on the left never seem to understand that the market is a potent force for keeping an efficient distribution of services in place.  One would hope that at some point, these folks could learn about reality, but that may be just an idle hope.

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