“The day after the FCC’s net neutrality vote, Washington was downright frigid. I’d spoken at three events about the ruling, mentioning at each that the order could be overturned in court. I was tired and ready to go home,” Geoffrey A. Manne writes for Wired. “I could see my Uber at the corner when I felt a hand on my arm. The woman’s face was anxious. ‘I heard your talk,’ she said.’If net neutrality is overturned, will I still be able to Skype with my son in Turkey?'”
“The question reveals the problem with the supposed four million comments submitted in support of net neutrality. Almost no one really gets it,” Manne writes. “Fewer still understand Title II, the regulatory tool the FCC just invoked to impose its conception of net neutrality on the Internet.”
“Some internet engineers and innovators do get it. Mark Cuban rightly calls the uncertainty created by Title II a ‘Whac-a-Mole environment,’ driven by political whims,” Manne writes. “And telecom lawyers? They love it: whatever happens, the inevitable litigation will mean a decade’s worth of job security. As I’ve said in technically detailed comments, academic coalition letters, papers, and even here at Wired, while ‘net neutrality’ sounds like a good idea, it isn’t. And reclassifying the internet under Title II, an antiquated set of laws repurposed in the 1930s for Ma Bell, is the worst way to regulate dynamic digital services.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The shortsightedness, be it feigned or real, coupled with a seemingly insatiable lust for power and control emanating from Washington D.C. is a recipe for disaster after disaster.
As we wrote over eight years ago: We usually prefer the government to be hands-off wherever possible, Laissez-faire, except in cases where the free market obviously cannot adequately self-regulate (antitrust, for just one example). Regulations are static and the marketplace is fluid, so extensive regulations can have unintended, unforeseen results down the road.
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