Next Week

From Wikipedia: Net neutrality (also network neutrality or Internet neutrality) is the principle that Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or mode of communication.   (Read the full Wikipedia article here)

Those who favor net neutrality argue that it’s in the public’s interest to require equal treatment of internet data. Those who oppose it argue that it’s in the public interest to let the companies that deliver Internet data to decide how best to deliver it. It’s a coincidence that the corporations that favor net neutrality would economically benefit from net neutrality and the corporations that are  against net neutrality would benefit from not having net neutrality.

Really. It’s just a coincidence. Their arguments are really about the public interest.  Honest.

And it’s not surprising that usual conservative suspects are opposed to net neutrality and the usual liberal suspects are for it and for the usual reasons. Conservatives argue that net neutrality requires governmental regulation that will disrupt market mechanisms that tend toward optimality; and liberals argue that without net neutrality large corporations that have gained dominant, market-distorting positions will exploit those advantages and further distort the market.

Against neutrality

Those who oppose net neutrality argue that mandating equal treatment of internet data will poorer service or higher prices. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Comcast have invested billions of dollars in the infrastructure that brings the Internet to the public. At any moment, the bandwidth that is available is limited. ISPs are economically motivated to optimize network bandwidth so that they can deliver as much data to as many users as possible with the bandwidth they have. They can do that best by setting rates so that price signals will tell them how to allocate bandwidth optimally and tell them where and how to invest to provide the best  service.

Greedy companies like Netflix, Facebook, and Google make huge profits by delivering their content over networks that they did not pay a penny to build.  In most markets Netflix and YouTube (part of Google) use half of the available bandwidth and pay not one extra penny for it. They are not motivated to use bandwidth move efficiently. Even if ISPS like Comcast really were greedy, the invisible hand of an unregulated market will ensure maximal public good.

For neutrality

Those who favor net neutrality argue that no customer wants to pay an ISP  a single penny to get data. They pay to get content: movies from Netflix, search results from Google, information from Wikipedia, video from YouTube.  Content providers invest billions of dollars to create the content that users want and more billions to build the infrastructure needed to create and deliver their content, in the form of data, to ISPS so that they can deliver data to their customers. Without that content, for which ISPs pay not one penny, the ISPs, most of whom are extremely profitable,  would not make a single cent.

Even if you assume that the content companies that support net neutrality are greedy (with they say they are not) letting ISPs charge them extra money to get their content delivered means that content providers will have less money to spend creating the content that customers want and less money to build the infrastructure they need to deliver that content to the ISPs.

Some Resources

Here are some places to get more information:

Wikipedia Article “Net Neutrality Law in the United States”

National Cable Telecommunications Industry web site.

Forbes article “Am I the only techie against net neutrality?”

Mashable “Arguments against net neutrality.”

Quora “What are some of the strongest reasons against net neutrality?”

Quora “What are some of the strongest articles for net neutrality?”

Google’s pro net neutrality web site, here.

Wikimedia (includes Wikipedia) position on net neutrality.

 Analysis

I think this is an interesting issue to analyze and one on which I have a strong position. I’ll post my thoughts on the subject later.

Never mind the other guys (whatever “the other guys” might mean to you on any particular topic) are we (meaning me, you, and the people you find yourself agreeing with on that topic) being rational?

This is a big subject, and the more I think about and research it, the bigger it gets. So here are some subtopics/questions for discussion.

1. What does it mean to be a rational person?
2. What does it mean to be a rational citizen/voter?
3. Is it even a good idea to try to be a one?
4. Do you think that you vote in a rational way all the time? Most of the time? If so, what definition of rationality are you using?
5. Are you (and the people you agree with on a particular topic) rational citizens?
6. Do you think that the people who disagree with you are rational citizens?
7. Is there something that you do to help you improve your level of rational discourse?
8. Is there something that you know that you are not doing, but which you could do?

Here’s some food for thought on the topic by a blogger whose nom de blogger is “Scott Alexander.”  His real name (or at least the name he uses elsewhere) is Scott Siskind. Either way, he seems to be call himself Scott, which prejudices me (and perhaps at least one other of us) in his favor.

Scott writes long, long , very well thought out and very well documented posts. If you’re new to his writing,  you probably won’t be able to wade through his build-up to the main argument in the first post. So let me give you a teaser from the post and suggest that if you find it interesting that you start reading around Section VI or VII and go back, bit by bit, if you like it.

To understand the teaser you’ve got to know about the Implicit Association Test. This is a well-studied, time-tested, cleverly-constructed psychological test, which tries to measure association between associations between examples from one concept area, for example:

and from the domain being tested, for example pictures of black people and of white people.

If  you have an easier time associating “good” things with pictures of white people than associating those same “good” things with black people, and you have an easier time associating “bad” things with black people than you do associating “bad” things with white people, the test concludes that have a  measurable prejudice in favor of white people and against black people.

If you believe that you hold no prejudice and your responses show this effect nonetheless, then the theory holds that you are still prejudiced, but unconscious of the prejudice.   (Wikipedia article)

You can try it yourself here. You can do the test as a guest or login or register.

Here’s the promised teaser Scott’s article:

Anyway, three months ago, someone finally had the bright idea of doing an Implicit Association Test with political parties, and they found that people’s unconscious partisan biases were half again as strong as their unconscious racial biases (h/t Bloomberg. For example, if you are a white Democrat, your unconscious bias against blacks (as measured by something called a d-score) is 0.16, but your unconscious bias against Republicans will be 0.23. The Cohen’s d for racial bias was 0.61, by the book a “moderate” effect size; for party it was 0.95, a “large” effect size.

Read the whole thing here: “I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup”

The other post (also long) is called “Five Case Studies in Politicization” and applies some of the theory from the first article to real situations. Scott provides  links to news stories illustrating his points, just in case you don’t believe that an article like “Fat Lesbians Got All The Ebola Dollars, But Blame The GOP” could possibly exist. Apparently does. Or did when I clicked on it. This post is easier to get into, but like many of his posts long. And thought provoking.