F2C: Don’t kill the Net to save it
The inimitable Susan Crawford warns us against Net regulation tunnel vision. Overreaction to perceived problems can open the door to harms worse than the original problems — the “solutions” can bite back. If, for example, we want to regulate Internet providers to stop them from blocking Voice-Over-IP, does that mean we have also acknowledged the power to regulate them for other ends, such as to demand that they enable wiretapping? How rapidly does anti-spyware legislation become full-blown software regulation? Instead of asking government to step in with small-fix regulations, we should take a bigger-picture view, looking for how we can re-open the network to resist these threats on our own.
One limited place we might ask for government help is antitrust — breaking up monopoly control of connectivity resources lets us solve many problems by our own choices by helping ensure the market provides those choices. I’m not sure I share Susan’s optimism — bad regulation comes at us from too many sources and could stop many of our “route-around” opportunities — but I do think that if we disregard her advice, the situation looks even worse.
In Canada it’s a live issue as well. With broadband becoming increasingly important in our lives, and at most 2 providers in any market (cable and DSL), Houston, we have a problem. Given the capital cost of the network and the social utility of connectivity, connectivity is becoming a public utility, and how it is protected ought to be vigorously debated.
Comment by Rob Hyndman — March 30, 2005 @ 1:09 pm
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Comment by Dorothy — June 28, 2005 @ 4:11 pm