Ciaran Laval responded to my criticism of his post regarding Net Neutrality in the previous article’s comments. Ciaran opposes the coming proposed Pia-change in the FCC Internet regulation. There is lots to talk about. See which of us you agree with.
I still am not sure Ciaran has read through the FCC document to which the media is reacting. He quotes a point from the FCC’s Myth vs Fact sheet, an accompanying document. I strongly suggest you read it. Ciaran’s one chosen ‘myth’ from 14:
Broadband providers will charge you a premium if you want to reach certain online content.
What are they saying? Is this the idea that the ISP’s will charge you more to access Netflix or Hulu? Has anyone ever seen their ISP make such an offer or place such a limit on your service? No. It has never happened.
Ciaran continues quoting from Myth vs Fact:
This didn’t happen before the Obama Administration’s 2015 heavy-handed Internet regulations, and it won’t happen after they are repealed.
Ciaran calls the last part a statement of hope. But, consider. The fact is it did not happen before Obama started trying to put the Internet under government control. But, is the ‘won’t happen’ with a return to a free market Internet just wishful thinking? Or is there something to base it on?
What we know…
There is a saying, “The only thing we learn from history is we don’t learn from history.” That is a paraphrase of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ‘s comment, “We learn from history that we do not learn from history.” In a longer comment he said, “What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
A more telling quote of Hegel’s I like is, “To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.”
The quotes don’t mean we can’t learn from history. There are people that do learn from history. We have 6,000+ years of written history. We know what freedom, the free market, and competitive commerce generate. Humans haven’t changed in any significant way in all that time.
So, the forces that keep the Internet growing and prices dropping as speed and quality improved before 2015 will still be in place. So, the ‘hope’ is a well-founded belief and a very probable result.
We also know that government regulation drives up prices, unfairly. The ‘unfairly’ being that because rich and poor have different spending patterns government regulation will affect those groups differently.
A 2016 study of government regulation on prices by Dustin Chambers, Professor of Economics, Salisbury University, titled: How Do Federal Regulations Affect Consumer Prices? shows Poorer Households Spend More on More Heavily Regulated Goods and government regulation drives prices up. Check their methodology before you try and disagree.
More… link below.