One of the more positive consequences of the whole Sydnor/Lessig debate is that it’s enticed the always-interesting David Friedman to weigh in on tech policy issues, giving me the opportunity to quote him in his entirety:
I’ve been trying for years to persuade Larry to admit to libertarian leanings. I’m not sure from comments here whether he actually did it while I wasn’t looking or is merely being accused of it. My interpretation of his attitude, long ago, was libertarian instincts hindered by a leftist self-image.
Consider his basic argument, a book or two back, for treating the net as a commons–by which he actually meant a commodity, since he wasn’t proposing zero cost access. It was that if the people in the middle, the ones transmitting the bits, got a veto over what sorts of bits they transmitted, that would make innovation very hard, since there would be too many people whose agreement you needed before doing anything.
I think he acknowledged–certainly he knew–that the counter argument was that what was being transmitted varied in ways that were relevant to the cost of transmitting it–burst vs steady stream, material where very low lag was important (real time games, distance surgery) vs material where it wasn’t (downloading), etc. So requiring the same cost for everything, or even specifying the cost structure, meant that some people were free to impose external costs on others without their consent. His conclusion depended on the judgment that the inefficiencies due to permitting that were less important than the inefficiencies due to the high transaction costs of innovation with the alternative system.
What didn’t seem to occur to him was that he had just sketched the argument against zoning. There too, the individual’s decisions–what sort of house to build, whether to use his land for residence or commerce, and the like–can impose external costs on others. There too, requiring the permission of those others, whether directly or via variances in zoning, makes innovation hard. The same argument Larry was making for the net as a commodity, applied to land use, is an argument for strong individual property rights and against land use control. Once you take seriously the point that forcing people to take account of all effects of their acts on others means nobody ever gets to do anything, you undercut a lot of the arguments for a wide variety of government interventions.
Quite so. I’ve said before that network neutrality (the technical principle, not the proposed legal regime) is the division of labor. The end-to-end principle allows decentralized decision-making on the Internet in precisely the same way that the price mechanism allows decentralized decision-making in the broader economy: by giving people a simple, predictable interface to the rest of the world that isn’t dependent on the whim of any central decision-maker.
ISPs that try to implement discriminatory network policies create the same kinds of problems as government officials that enact regulations: they often cause unintended consequences (like blocking Lotus Notes) and they cause people to waste resources evading the restrictions (as with BitTorrent header encryption).
Now, I should hasten to add that as I’ve written before, the fact that neutral networks have good properties doesn’t mean that mandating them is good public policy. Because of course a network neutrality rule would itself have unintended consequences and lead people (in this case ISPs) to waste resources trying to evade the rules. But if we’re talking about network design, rather than government regulation, it seems to me that libertarians ought to look favorably on decentralized networks mediated by the end-to-end principle for all the same reasons we look favorably on decentralized economies mediated by the price mechanism.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.