Nationalize the internet

Second, this article argues that the government should have a try at running the internet since the private sector ostensibly failed. The irony is that the situation today is exactly a product of government mismanagement. A vital infrastructure is underdeveloped, overpriced and operated by a duopoly - where exactly was the US Government when this happened? Where was the antitrust authority? Where was a liberal President of eight years, a man deified by the likes of the Daily Dot, who took on health insurance companies? Did the Congress deign to investigate this issue? And did the voters "vote them out" for failing to do that, as the author suggests?

Of course not. People tend to have a job, a life and a hobby - they can only care about a limited set of issues. And an increase in broadband pricing or a change in ISP product set is not one of those. They can get riled up, short term, but probably won't be able to sustain pressure, as is the case with the second amendment or healthcare. This is why the government officials have for so long neglected this issue, and this why the nationalized internet bureaucracy will have the same relationship with third party contractors (that ISPs will become) as FCC does.

I am not an expert on broadband legislation, but it seems like a better solution would be encouraging investment into small scale ISPs. A federal legislation that ensures backbone access, major tax cuts for investors, a lot of red tape for ISPs trying to get above city-wide coverage, things like that. If you have 2-3 ISPs per town and tens of those in a large city the net neutrality issue goes away.

edit:spelling

Here (Ontario) we had one telephone company and one cable company prior to deregulation. The telephone company (Bell Canada) was very tightly regulated. While telephone service wasn't necessarily the least expensive in the world, it was very reliable and at least ten years ahead of what was being offered in the US. By virtue of their rapid conversion to a fullly digital network, made possible by their partnership with Nortel, services like ISDN, the precursor to DSL, were reltively cheap and readaily available.

I knew people in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s that could not, for no amount of money, get anything faster than dial-up. Local telecom providers, of which there were many, were all using obsolete equipment and had terrible infrastructure. At the same time in Ontario anyone could get dual-channel ISDN for around $50/mo.

After deregulation here there was a little bit of competition, but then, like the US, the market quickly stabilized into a live and let live state where nobody wants to compete with anyone else for fear of retribution. Cellular service packages are suspiciously identical in terms of features and pricing.

Since they're de-regulated there's little we can do. We can't force them to fix their pricing. We can't force them to compete. We can't tell them to do a damned thing they don't already want to do.

Now Bell Canada is too busy being a media company, it owns a bunch of television stations, to care about anything other than profit. There was an opportunity there to keep them regulated and have a neutral, non-discriminatory network provider, but that ship has long since sailed.

It’s easy to imagine the Internet facing a different class of threats, from a united front of spooks, rights-holders-groups, and moralists. I can’t imagine the open uncensored web surviving long, unless it had some kind of mini constitution of its own.

This said, the future under private companies doesn’t look great either. ISPs are uncompetitive, exploitative, and anti-consumer, and the corporations who act as censors (Google, Apple, Facebook) have increasing skin in the rights-holder-group game, and are happy to build censorship machines for lobbyists, spies, and other authoritarians.

Maybe it’s worth thinking about what such a “Constitution for the Internet” might be now, before it completely disappears. (And perhaps while TBL and Vint Cerf have some fight left in them for a roadshow)!