The Washington Post Opposes Net Regulation

The Washington Post editorialized yesterday in opposition to regulating the Internet:

The advocates of neutrality suggest, absurdly, that a non-neutral Internet would resemble cable TV: a medium through which only corporate content is delivered. This analogy misses the fact that the market for Internet connections, unlike that for cable television, is competitive: More than 60 percent of Zip codes in the United States are served by four or more broadband providers that compete to give consumers what they want–fast access to the full range of Web sites, including those of their kids’ soccer league, their cousins’ photos, MoveOn.org and the Christian Coalition. If one broadband provider slowed access to fringe bloggers, the blogosphere would rise up in protest–and the provider would lose customers…

The serious argument for net neutrality has nothing to do with the cable TV boogeyman. It’s that a non-neutral net will raise barriers to entry just slightly–but enough to be alarming. To use a far better analogy: Competitive supermarkets aim to please customers by offering all kinds of goods, but the inventor of a new snack has to go through the hassle of negotiating for display space and may wind up on the bottom shelf, which dampens his incentives. Equally, if the owners of Internet pipes delivered the services of cyber-upstarts more slowly than those of cyber-incumbents, the incentive to innovate might suffer. Would instant messaging or Internet telephony have taken off if their inventors had had to plead with broadband firms to carry them?

This concern should not be exaggerated. Cyber-upstarts already face barriers: The incumbents have brand recognition and invest in tricks to make their sites load faster. The extra barrier created by a lack of net neutrality would probably be small because the pipe owners know that consumers want access to innovators.

Mike Masnick correctly notes that the Post exaggerates the competitiveness of the broadband market a bit–60 percent of zip codes may have four broadband service providers, but that doesn’t mean that 60 percent of consumers do–the vast majority have two or fewer. But I think the broader point of that paragraph–that there’s no danger of the Internet turning into a non-competitive service like cable TV–is exactly right. The value of the Internet stems from the availability of hundreds of thousands of small sites. The telcos would be shooting themselves in the foot if they cut off their customers’ access to those sites. And most broadband customers do have at least one option, so their ability to jerk their customers around is limited.

The editorial’s conclusion gets it right:

The weakest aspect of the neutrality case is that the dangers it alleges are speculative. It seems unlikely that broadband providers will degrade Web services that people want and far more likely that they will use non-neutrality to charge for upgrading services that depend on fast and reliable delivery, such as streaming high-definition video or relaying data from heart monitors. If this proves wrong, the government should step in. But it should not burden the Internet with preemptive regulation.

The pro-regulatory side has worked very hard to create a sense of urgency on this issue, but in fact the urgency is in the other direction: if we regulate the Internet, it will be very difficult to un-regulate it. But if we do nothing this term and it leads to problems, Congress can easily come back and pass new regulations next year. If we’re not sure about the best policy, the prudent thing to do is to wait and see how things develop.

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