There’s a great conversation going on over at Marginal Revolution about net neutrality. As a card carrying free-marketeer I feel I’m expected to support Verizon, AT&T and the rest when they demand payment for use of their pipes. But I haven’t made up my mind yet. While net neutrality looks like forced access redux, I think it’s actually a much more complicated issue.
I am skeptical of regulation or legislation to enforce neutrality; preemptive regulation hardly ever works out they way it is intended. However, as Tyler Cowen points out, tiering the internet would change the nature of online content:
The beauty of the status quo is that web sites compete on the basis of consumer surplus alone. The bandwidth costs end up as a fixed charge on net access as a whole; I suspect this hits many inelastic demanders, a’la the Ramsey rules for optimal taxation. Admittedly it may be a bad deal for the poor who cannot afford to connect, but the overall arrangement enhances the long-run “competition of ideas” feature of the net.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
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