Questing for Atlantis

Crunchgear’s Nicholas Deleon seems to have his panties in a bunch over the country’s biggest ISPs refusing to take stimulus dollars for broadband development.

I’m not going to get into his two theories for why they are choosing to act the way they are (although I think they made the right choice). What I am going to take issue with is nonsense like the following:

That’s the crux of net neutrality, ISPs want to cut deals with their preferred partners at the expense of everyone else.

This sort of sentiment reeks of an unjustified sense of entitlement. It’s also just plain wrong in economic terms.

To address the first point, the implicit element of Deleon’s gripe here is that he and everyone else have a right to equal internet access, without discrimination based off of website viewing or bandwidth usage. This is lunacy. The internet is not a right. It isn’t even a common good. There’s no logical reason to get all huffy about actions changing the access dynamic when it’s a service that no one is obliged to provide.

This is also why it makes no economic sense. The market is rarely a zero-sum game. Providers don’t gain at the customer’s expense, at least not so long as they don’t have a monopoly. Not to say it doesn’t happen but there isn’t one currently. Hell, there isn’t grounds to claim a cartel in the provision of internet service. Although I’d wager if net neutrality happens the big companies will eventually end up as government protected monopolies much like utilities are.

Back to the zero-sum point though. No matter how obnoxiously and inefficiently the major ISPs make their services, it’s not at the customer’s expense. The reason is simple. The internet doesn’t have to exist, and so long as it does exist everyone is the richer for it. The providers because they gain revenue from it. The consumers from the numerous opportunities it provides them, both economically and socially/personally. And that’s ignoring the spillover effects from the jobs the ISPs provide, the tax revenue their businesses (and all the businesses made possible by their businesses), etc.

And finally, I just want to throw up an excerpt from one of the comments on this post, because it makes several a cogent point I haven’t addressed as of yet:

3) If there is such a BIG opportunity to take government money and create a business to serve consumers, why don’t you, Nicholas, go create this business?

This definitely needed to be said. If this really is such a gross offense then plenty of people would be eager to jump to the service that offered interference free internet. Hell, they might even be willing to pay a premium for it. If you believe you’re own ideas, then man up and put your money where your mouth is, a la Julian Simon.