Sen. Ted Cruz’s comments on the net neutrality debate Monday accomplished two things. One, they successfully mobilized a coalition to oppose the president. Two, they set the internet ablaze. Cruz may have razed the structures on which internet “fast lanes” are built before this matter is even resolved.
In response to President Obama’s call on the Federal Communications Commission to “implement the strongest possible rules to protect net neutrality,” Cruz tweeted the most unflattering comparison involving the buzziest term in telecommunications regulation:
“Net Neutrality” is Obamacare for the Internet; the Internet should not operate at the speed of government.
— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) November 10, 2014
He elaborated on Facebook, writing that the president’s suggested approach of bringing consumer broadband under tighter federal oversight “puts the government in charge of determining Internet pricing, terms of service, and what types of products and services can be delivered, leading to fewer choices, fewer opportunities, and higher prices for consumers.” Without such regulation, proponents of the president’s plan or something like it say, internet service providers are the bogeymen. Were the FCC to permit “fast lanes,” they say ISPs like Comcast would have undue authority to discriminate how quickly they deliver companies’ products by price. For example, if a small company were unable to afford or declined to pay an ISP a fee for faster content delivery, would it sink?
The debate aside for a moment, Cruz completely hacked off the web. Imagine his comments were a book. Here’s how the reviews on the jacket cover would read:
” … a disingenuous, chickenshit political maneuver and nothing more.” — Gizmodo
“… an insanely cynical tactic that should worry all citizens regardless of political stripe …” — The Verge
” … completely nonsensical …” — Salon
“Let this be a reminder about how damn glad we are that Congress is not in charge of this critically important issue.” — Tech Crunch 1
“What the f*ck does that mean, ‘The speed of government?’ ” — Cenk Uygur
“What does that mean, ‘To play us out?’ Otherwise, a thought-provoking read.” — Bill O’Reilly
Continuing the internet dwellers’ tradition of ‘splaining things to people they see as dumb — what a self-esteem booster and adrenaline rush it must be! — The Oatmeal came up with a cute cartoon that “destroyed” or “dismantled” Cruz’s argument, or “disemboweled it in totality, leaving its entrails strewn across your bandwidth and accessible free of charge (take that, Verizon!)” if we’re really getting colorful.
The cartoon called the internet “that throbbing, fractious hydra of whirring, blinking hard drives,” which is fittingly pornographic, if not terribly helpful. If the internet were truly a hydra, wouldn’t the hard drives have shorted in the water? Or at least shrunk. Whatever.
And whatever the merits of Cruz’s overtly political description and the offended and hyperbolic responses to it, the whole party is perhaps guilty of this foul: “The net neutrality debate has got many facets to it, and most of the points of the debate are artificial, distracting, and based on an incorrect mental model on how the internet works,” Dave Taht, an open-source networking software developer, told WIRED. (For more information about that model, read the WIRED piece, as well as this paper from Reason.)
The internet evolves with great speed, and to believe that it is “neutral” by default is unrealistic and erroneous. From congressional testimony from tech expert and researcher Craig Labovitz this year:
“Whereas Internet traffic was once broadly distributed across thousands of companies, we found that by 2009 half of all Internet traffic originated in less than 150 large content and content distribution companies. By May of 2014, this number had dropped by a factor of five. Today, just 30 companies, including Netflix and Google, contribute on average more than one half of all Internet traffic in the United States during prime time hours.”
“Because these companies are moving so much traffic on their own,” WIRED notes, “they’ve been forced to make special arrangements with the country’s internet service providers that can facilitate the delivery of their sites and applications.”
What much of the net neutrality debate misses — and would surely reassure supporters of more regulation if the following were to come to fruition — is the development of more competition among ISPs. Only one-quarter of Americans can choose among two or more ISPs for a 25 Mbps connection, which the FCC views as the emerging staple consumer speed.
Some municipalities are trying to build their own broadband networks, but face legal pushback from ISPs. As Ars Technica notes, it’s difficult as all heck for a private entity to enter the game, largely because of cost. In any case, there’s room for that hackneyed word, “innovation.”
“Bandwidth is like putty in the hands of entrepreneurs — new regulations are cement,” a piece from Andy Kessler in The Weekly Standard observed eight years ago. “Net neutrality is already the boring old status quo. But don’t give in to the cable/(telecom) status quo either. Far better to have competition, as long as it’s real, than let Congress shape the coming communications chaos and creativity.” (The net neutrality issue was previously a hot legislative item in Congress.)
The bottom line is that there is no easily understood, crafted and implemented policy or rule to address what has the pro-regulation folks worried: the “unequal” treatment of data. What is certain is that reclassifying broadband as essentially a public utility under 80-year-old law so it can be tightly regulated by the government — as the president called for Monday — could be an unreasonably forceful and misguided attempt to resolve a concern that can be addressed better through other means.
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1 The URL to this is just too much: http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/10/hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaah-ted-cruz-you-silly-senator/.
