Telcos Turn to Stalin for Help Against Net Neutrality
March 4th, 2008 by tkarrIn no uncertain terms, John C. Dvorak takes apart the latest broadside against Net Neutrality by the modern-day red baiters at the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board.
You would think Journal editors know public policy well enough to pull their writers’ frequent rants against it into line with the facts.
 Net Neutrality’s No. 1 Supporter? |
Not so.
“I’m suspicious of op-eds talking up the horrors of Net Neutrality, especially when the facts are never made clear,” Dvorak writes. “Instead, we have an out-and-out attempt to befuddle the public and confuse the reader.”
The piece in question, by Andy Kessler, highlights the shady logic of the anti–Net Neutrality faction.
Kessler writes in the Journal: “With Net Neutrality, there will be no new competition and no incentives for build-outs. Bandwidth speeds will stagnate, and new services will wither from bandwidth starvation.”
Dvorak responds:
This is funny, since until just a while ago, we had been operating under a de facto Net Neutrality.
Using Kessler’s logic, we should still be using 300-baud modems since there’s no incentive to do anything different. How does he — or anyone else, for that matter — explain the progress from 300-baud modems to fiber to the home during this period of genuine net neutrality? It’s only recently that the phone and cable companies have decided to futz with bandwidth, with packet sniffing, bandwidth shaping and ceiling limitations.
… Net Neutrality is nothing new. It’s the way it has always been. How does codifying it into a law change anything, except to foil the scheming of the phone and cable companies that have — during the era of net neutrality and genuine deregulation — competed very well?
It wasn’t until 2005 that Net Neutrality protections were stripped from the law. Our efforts here at SavetheInternet.com and elsewhere are simply to restore them — especially at a time when companies like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon are making moves to block, filter and censor digital communications.
Lacking any real arguments the anti-neutrality folks resort to tired and overly simple scare tactics.
At the Journal, Kessler plays the red card (a tactic familiar to other telco shills) when he writes, “the Internet will only expand based on competitive principles, not socialist diktat.”
Dvorak again responds:
I love the way these guys throw in the ugly term “socialist” when they want to trigger a 1950’s-style knee-jerk reaction from the American public. And in case you didn’t notice, he also throws in a Communist term “diktat” so you dummies will be totally repulsed and imagine Stalin lurking.
…We have no socialist diktat going on, and we are falling behind other countries like crazy in broadband speeds and connectivity. Countries that mandated universal high-speed connectivity (aka socialist diktat) have all zoomed ahead of us.
We are in 16th or 17th place and falling fast. This tells me that we are doing something wrong. We’re kowtowing to the wishes of the big telcos — mega corporations that have no real interest in progress, just profits.
Indeed. But don’t just listen to us. Read Kessler vs. Dvorak and decide for yourself: Support Net Neutrality or follow phone and cable logic?
The choice is clear.
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UPDATE: Please also read John Quarterman’s dis-assembly of Kessler.
March 4th, 2008 at 10:46 pm
[…] an Andy Kessler piece, Save The Internet quotes Kessler who says: “With Net Neutrality, there will be no new competition and no incentives for […]
March 5th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
IS NET NEUTRALITY A FORM OF TERRORISM, FASCISM OR JUST ORDINARY TOTALITARIANISM?
Godwin’s law has prevailed. Recently discovered evidence shows … wait for it … that in addition to the Nazis being vegetarians they also supported net neutrality, only back then it was called analog genocide and it brought the Nazis down in a thundering clash of suffocating regulations.
That’s how Nazis, vegetarians and now, “Net Neuts” came to be lumped together and mocked as brain-dead “Vegetative Vegans” by talk radio and anyone else right of Attila the Hun, except for Jonah Goldberg of course, whose access to this info was blocked by a Liberal Fascist ISP …
The internet would have died forever in Nazi Germany had it not been for the Communist Reds putting Sputnik into orbit in the ’50s which
baitedstartled the innovation-deprived Americans so much that they paid taxes to support the ARPANET which evolved into today’s internet.So clearly, communism was responsible for the internet. It inspired the U.S. Federal Government to create the internet after net neutrality kept it out of the hands of the Nazis due to excessive regulation.
Likewise, Kessler, the self-made economic historian and forecaster, is surely aware that the transistor could never have been invented by the largest regulated company in the world at the time, AT&T.
Instead, this was one of the many myths developed over the years by soft-headed socialists determined to obscure the real origins of the transistor, which was actually developed in hidden underground caves with exclusive vertical property rights to the stars.
Libertarian anarchists were inspired by reading Ayn Rand and worked merrily in the caves, hiding from the book-burning brownshirts above, otherwise known as “three branches of government” in a democracy.
Of course the inventors did come out of hiding long enough to acquire monopoly patents from the communist government for their invention to protect them from evil competition, then scurried back into their caves. They also used public water and electricity but
pretended it came from private vending machines.
Surely Kessler will be publishing new evidence shortly for all that lost economic productivity attributed to the presence of common carriage regulation and its de facto carry-over in the form of net neutrality … talk about stifling competition, well hey, it was like Jesse Owens up against the Nazis in the Olympics … wow, Godwin’s law explains just about anything doesn’t it? …
After all, if net neutrality brought down the Nazis, imagine what it has already done to us, much less what it could do …
Kessler has stumbled onto the holy grail link of dot.com bubbles to housing bubbles to China bubbles of foreign currency all caused by net neutrality and if allowed to continue will destroy Iraq and Afghanistan as well unless we abandon it for at least 100 years.
March 9th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
What I find interesting is the contradiction in their argument concerning the best way for competition to remain healthy on the net. The telco’s are arguing that net neutrality legislation would lead to some kind of socialist concentration of control because it would not allow the free market to “work.” Yet exactly the opposite is true. When there is no government intervention almost every industry gravitates towards oligopolies or monopolies (just look at the history of AT&T). However, in Europe where they have a system more akin to market socialism ISP competition is much healthier and their average bandwidth speed is faster. So how can the telco’s possibly claim that net neutrality would be bad for competition?
March 17th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
What I find interesting (and depressing) is that so many people actually buy into the lies these corporate cronies spew forth. No doubt these same misinformed people rely almost exclusively on the mass media for information. Without the existence of the internet to provide people with access to lots of different sources of information I am certain corporate power and corruption would be even worse then it is now. The importance of this fight to reinstate Net Neutrality can not be over stated. Control over information I am certain is at the very top of the to-do list for the relatively few in positions of power.