As the consequences of the FCC vote to classify the Internet as a Title II service start to sink in, here are a couple of good commentaries you may not have seen. Jeffrey Tucker’s political economy analysis of the Title II vote as a power grab is one of the best overall analyses of the situation that I’ve seen.
The incumbent rulers of the world’s most exciting technology have decided to lock down the prevailing market conditions to protect themselves against rising upstarts in a fast-changing market. To impose a new rule against throttling content or using the market price system to allocate bandwidth resources protects against innovations that would disrupt the status quo.
What’s being sold as economic fairness and a wonderful favor to consumers is actually a sop to industrial giants who are seeking untrammeled access to your wallet and an end to competitive threats to market power.
What’s being sold as keeping the Internet neutral for innovation at the edge of the network is substantively doing so by encasing the existing Internet structure and institutions in amber, which yields rents for its large incumbents. Some of those incumbents, like Comcast and Time-Warner, have achieved their current (and often resented by customers) market power not through rivalrous market competition, but through receiving municipal monopoly cable franchises. Yes, these restrictions raise their costs too, but as large incumbents they are better positioned to absorb those costs than smaller ISPs or other entrants would be. It’s naive to believe that regulations of this form will do much other than softening rivalry in the Internet itself.
But is there really that much scope for innovation and dynamism within the Internet? Yes. Not only with technologies, but also with institutions, such as interconnection agreements and peering agreements, which can affect packet delivery speeds. And, as Julian Sanchez noted, the Title II designation takes these kinds of innovations off the table.
But there’s another kind of permissionless innovation that the FCC’s decision is designed to preclude: innovation in business models and routing policies. As Neutralites love to point out, the neutral or “end-to-end” model has served the Internet pretty well over the past two decades. But is the model that worked for moving static, text-heavy webpages over phone lines also the optimal model for streaming video wirelessly to mobile devices? Are we sure it’s the best possible model, not just now but for all time? Are there different ways of routing traffic, or of dividing up the cost of moving packets from content providers, that might lower costs or improve quality of service? Again, I’m not certain—but I am certain we’re unlikely to find out if providers don’t get to run the experiment.
“Yes, these restrictions raise their costs too, but as large incumbents they are better positioned to absorb those costs than smaller ISPs or other entrants would be.”
Perhaps more accurately, they are better positioned to pass these increased costs through to their customers.
The only people who will do well on this idea are lawyers, consultants, and K Street bandits. The who thing has had such a tortured history that it will be tied up in litigation long enough to result in its death on 1-21-17.
“But there’s another kind of permissionless innovation that the FCC’s decision is designed to preclude: innovation in business models and routing policies.”
Kind of like regulating Uber and Lyft out of a market because the regulated taxicab model works so well.