More Net Neutrality Talk (sorta)

I am frequently dismayed by how easily economic conservatives get hoodwinked into adopting the positions of their ideological opposition. Case in point: "Big social media platforms should be public utilities to guarantee access to all".

No. They shouldn't. Why not? Because the answer to a threatened monopoly is not to make it a *guaranteed* monopoly under the partial or full control of the government.

How do we know this? Look at ISPs. The alarmists of yesteryear used the fact that broadband was nascent and far from ubiquitous to suggest that there might be a market failure of ISPs to service under-privileged neighborhoods. Thus, the government erected regional quasi-monopolies, and have since been protecting them from outside competition through licensing and quashing new technology (like Google Fiber).

What was the result? Just about every area in the U.S. has one or ISPs, with regular outages, poor service, and little (if any) choice.

So, now big tech monopolies are using their power to banish people from their platforms, and because these platforms are monopolistic and ubiquitous, we are facing another (somewhat more legitimate) fear of loss of access, and we seem to have a quandary: the libertarian resists government regulation, but the free speech absolutist acknowledges the massive human rights violation that occurs when someone is banished from what is effectively a public forum. So the libertarian in us is meant to swallow sadness and go along with the effective nationalization of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. turning them into a public utility "for the greater good".

Well, again no. My questions would be, "why have Facebook, Google and YouTube attained such dominance in the first place? Why have competing platforms failed so much? This is important, because if there were a plethora of Twitters, Facebooks and YouTubes, then there would be no 1A concerns if you were banned from one platform. You'd simply go to another platform, and the platforms that didn't exercise censorship would become more or less popular based on the tastes of their users. You might recognize this as precisely what the internet was 10-20 years ago, with chatrooms and message boards across all spectrums of use.

So what caused the change? One issue is misuse of patent law (as it always is). Some company comes up with a formula that works well online, catches fire, makes billions of dollars, then they are insulated from competition who want to utilize their invention for so many years that they are able to consolidate an effective monopoly. In short, current patent law is outdated. Twitter gained net dominance within a year. They didn't need years of patent protection to protect them.

Even worse, you have tech giants like Google who go around buying up patents, and turning them into proprietary software that they incorporate into their service so that no other platform can use them. Then, you have Google Maps, Google Docs, Google Drive etc, all making the Google search engine the natural choice, and protecting their market hegemony. In both of the cases, deregulation would help to solve problems.

The final, and in my opinion most easily dealt with, problem was Title II Net Neutrality. Now that the abomination has been mercifully released, hopefully we can see a small chipping away of market dominance, and the flourishing of alternate vendors such as Gab and BitChute.

The problem with Title II was that it guaranteed free and neutral access of broadband to all. This is a nice thought (as virtually are government regulation is) but it came with a host of unintended consequences (as *all* government regulation does).

Imagine the government decided that national freight shipping was necessary and extremely important, to the extent that it had to be protected for everyone. Thus, businesses should be allowed the use of transport for free. No taxes for the roads, not paying for cars, boats, trains or planes. Every business, regardless of scale or location, gets free and neutral access to transportation. Sounds lovely, right?

Now imagine that when this legislation was passed, I owned a business (let's call it Schlamazon) that held a near monopoly on products being shipped around the country. 98.8% of all goods shipped, were shipped by my company. Suddenly, this regulation frees up millions (if not billions) of dollars in my budget, which I can put towards improving services, and R&D. Still sounds kinda nice, except imagine my competitors trying to get started. They have literally no advantage over me for being small. Sure, they get free access to transportation, but so do I. And that access benefits me, the giant, more than them by many orders of magnitude.

Naturally I, the CEO of Schlamazon, would *love* this policy, and the freedom it's given me to crush my competition in other ways. You have just erased the single biggest problem of holding a monopoly (the high cost). So if someone threatens to take it away, I'll fight tooth and nail to keep it. "I don't want to pay the millions for access to transportation," I'll say. "I'll force you to pay."

"Every Schlamazon package you buy," I'll warn, "Will cost you, the customer $75, because that will cover my expenses."

"You, as the customer, will have no choice," I'll lie. "Because I'm currently your only option, and will always be your only option."

In reality, the moment Schlamazon starts charging $75 per package, consumers will go crazy trying to throw their money at my competitors. Since my competitors can stay small, and only use small amounts of local transportation, or build relationships and get special deals, they can deliver packages at a tiny fraction of the cost, or for free, to drum up business. Rapidly, my monopoly with dwindle under the sheer expense of itself, and soon you'll have a free marketplace of shipping, and the threatened monopoly will evaporate.

Obviously, things aren't always quite this simple in practice. However, I think it's important to take a harder look at these issues, and consider the obvious, well-documented and unintended consequences of government action. As Milton Friedman said, "When a market program fails, it is ended; when a government program fails, it is expanded." The answer to failed government regulations that put the internet into today's sorry state, is *not* MORE well-intentioned, nice-sounding regs that just make the problem worse. Maybe instead we should go back, and try to find where the internet first went wrong. And I can tell you, the internet used to be pretty dang great.