Over at the Lounge, Julian takes issue with a pro-net neutrality metaphor from Craig Newmark, of Craigslist fame. Newmark compares the possible consequences of bandwidth discrimination to a situation wherein "you call Joe's Pizza and the first thing you hear is a message saying you'll be connected in a minute or two, but if you want, you can be connected to Pizza Hut right away." This, Newmark suggests, is a Bad Thing. Julian, smartly, snarks, "what a topsy-turvy, dystopian sci-fi world this is, where large companies pay for what we might call "additional phone lines" while customers of a small business might attempt to call in, only to encounter some kind of "busy signal." Clearly an existential threat to democracy."
Well, democracy will probably survive. But Julian's acceptance of this situation is...odd. What market interest is being served by the increased accessibility of Pizza Hut? After all, we want our pizza places competing on a variety of metrics, from deliciousness to delivery speed to courtesy. How much bandwidth they can purchase, however, is not one of them. Indeed, a preventable situation in which subpar pies are propagating because Luigi is purchasing more tube space than Mario is...a bad situation.
Now, maybe it's a less bad situation than the one that would result were you to impose net neutrality, or phone line equality, or whatever. But then that's the argument that should be made. Otherwise, it's perfectly possible that government should step in and create the conditions for more beneficial competition. In other areas of commerce, we've already made that judgment, and thus most roads are built by the government, and you don't have to decide which pizza place to go to based on how much money they mustered for pavement. That, most of us agree, is a good thing. As Brad DeLong says in his fascinating essay on Milton Friedman, "Sometimes government failures are greater than the market failures for which they purport to compensate. Sometimes they are not." The question is whether bandwidth should be treated similarly, and a sort of equality imposed to force competition onto more relevant grounds.
