Anti-Net Neutrality

I think this net neutrality debate is really fascinating. At first, I saw the YouTube video praising net neutrality and was very much on board with keeping the Internet as open as possible. Net neutrality seems like a great concept in order to allow everyone to access as much information and knowledge as possible. I was shocked at how quickly I switched sides upon reading more. It seems clear to me that any net neutrality legislation would be absolutely unconstitutional. In Goldstein’s essay, he makes convincing points through the use of newspaper analogies, suggesting that no one would be on board with the government restricting the types of business practices a newspaper could employ. While net neutrality supporters invoke a need to protect the First Amendment, so that all sorts of speech on an open internet can reach a national audience, it is those against net neutrality who have the Constitution on their side. The government cannot tell a private corporation how to run their business because that would be a violation of private speech. For those that invoked the argument about cable television, the comparison seems weak, as most cable providers were in the position of being local monopolies, leaving viewers with no choice—a very different situation than the competitive market that BSPs inhabit.

Furthermore, the entire existence of this unnecessary debate appears to be the result of paranoia. There is very little evidence that any BSPs plan to restrict access to the Internet, and even if they did, in a free market economy where competitors are virtually omnipresent, why would they? Surely, any BSP that enacted such measures to the chagrin of their consumers would experience a mass exodus and loss of revenue.

Some sort of compromise on the issue of net neutrality seems reasonable, as it is certainly in the public interest to retain access to an open Internet, but many issues need to be addressed before any sort of legislation is set forth. These include: Why BSPs are being singled out, and not search engines or browsers (a question that Goldstein put forth)? How do we address the ambiguity of a phrase like “reasonable network management practices”? Why the sudden distrust of BSPs after all the beneficial progress they have provided in delivering more access and information to the public in the past two decades?