One of my latest interviews with the one and only Jeffrey Tucker, now up on DTube!
See the original article below:
Josh Sigurdson talks with libertarian superstar Jeffrey A. Tucker of Liberty.me and The Foundation For Economic Education to talk about his recent article 'Goodbye Net Neutrality; Hello Competition' which anyone in the political sphere would have a hard time avoiding.
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has announced that he wishes to do away with net neutrality and open up the market to competition. For years under Obama, the internet was kind of a socialist monopoly by the state via net neutrality where government regulated prices and monopolized major corporations. After Netflix recently decided to look towards private competition for better quality, this whole domino effect took the United States by storm.
As Jeffrey Tucker goes into, when you open up the market to competition, we see true innovation and eventually prices come down.
Interestingly many are terrified that this could lead to censorship and give too much power to major corporations. Well first off, if anyone's going to censor the internet, it's the government which via the hand of Google they already are with content from RT. If corporations censored content which they are likely to do all the same, in a free market, competitors step in with a censorship free platform and people move to that provider. You don't insult your customers on the free market.
Secondly, the notion that this gives a bunch of power to major corporations is simply not the case. The government has been giving corporations a major handout by monopolizing them under net neutrality rules for years and all the while, these corporations that people are concerned about are actually in support of net neutrality. Isn't that interesting?
The point is that when you want MORE you pay MORE in every industry except the internet for some reason. Well the internet is supposed to be the greatest example we currently have of freedom and we need to ensure we preserve that for future generations without state control and for that reason we must support the free market. With the free market comes competition, innovation, lower prices and far greater quality.
Jeffrey Tucker also dug into the recent Bitcoin rally as it nears $10,000 USD.
We appreciate Jeffrey's time! Stay tuned for more from WAM!
▶️ DTube
▶️ IPFS
Don't the major internet providers already own most of the infrastructure? How can new competition spring up if the barriers to entry are already so high? Am I missing something here?
That's part of the issue. As I said in the video, it's only the beginning because of course there are still government monopolies everywhere thanks to the regulatory and tax burden the government puts on any competition. Big government is a friend to big corporations. But we cannot change this by growing the government further while all of these major corporations cheer on government regulation of the internet, like net neutrality.
So actually it's pretty easy to set up a network... One major pro-NN argument is that there's a lot of places that only have one ISP to choose from and therefore they're at their mercy... when that's kinda a ridiculous notion, actually. If we remove as many artificial barriers for entry into this industry as we can, you may see a lot of grassroots competition springing up. Ajit Pai actually does talk about this topic at length, specifically regarding his Broadband Development initiatives.
Thanks a lot for sharing these news with us all, it is so important!
I have been a strong advocate of Net Neutrality for years already and the latest movement to try to split the internet in two different speeds is still an important fight we need to keep a sharp eye on.
Thanks a lot!!! Namaste :)
As soon as I read the buzzword "socialist," I knew that the article wasn't going to be an objective look at the issue but rather a sort of political "tribe" warfare.
Without net neutrality our internet service provider would essentially act as a gateway to our internet experience. As an internet user, we would only get access to the websites that pay the highest prices to the provider and who do not disrupt their established system. So not only would we not have access to small company websites or people who want to share their ideas, but we also wouldn't have access to services like streaming sites. Internet providers who offer cable TV services, aren't going to allow free TV on the internet. Search engines already act as a major filter to the internet and I'm noticing more and more that the sites that pop up when I type in a search, are paid advertisements. This would just get worse without net neutrality.
The internet would essentially be filtered through a corporate lens. Why would we want to put all of the power of the internet into the hands of a select few corporations?
Agreed, I live in a large suburb of one of the largest cities in the USA. Essentially, I have two choices for decent internet. That's ATT and Comcast. Lots of people I am connected with have one choice.
that is literally everything that an ISP does. With or without net neutrality, that's the ISP's job. The ISPs you deal with, anyway... And you deal with the ISPs that you deal with because they promise and deliver the best internet available to you. I would suggest that the provider who censors content is a provider you should no longer deal with. There are no monopolies for ISPs. There's areas, cities and municipalities that enter into exclusivity contracts with ISPs. That's government creating a monopoly in areas. Yes, absolutely, ISPs have dirty hands when dealing with these local governments, they're able to buy these exclusivity rights far too often, and are also able to lobby to get stricter regulations to choke out smaller competition.
You know about Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, et al... But do you know about Cogent, Akamai, Level3, Centurylink, NTT, Softbank?
Content providers deal with these ISPs... They pay a rate to deliver content out of the datacenters and into the tier 2 networks and then into the tier 3 networks, that you buy your internet from.
Content providers actually created InternetAssociation.org, back in the Netflix vs Comcast days, to support Net Neutrality movements.
The Net Neutrality regulations, as they stand (stood) gave the Internet Association, some would say, an unfair advantage in pricing negotiations between ISPs and these content providers.
We love our content providers, we sure do. But when Netflix eats up 37% and can spend $6 billion on making movies and shows that mostly flop, they can afford to pay the ISPs! Netflix passing additional ISP costs onto their customers is BULLSHIT! How about they abstain from hiring Adam Sandler for the next few years instead?
This is a tribal warfare thing... It's also a marketing thing. Look at the InternetAssociation membership and then tell me that they don't have an obscene amount of control over the content you're able to access. There might be a reason there's such a high availability of pro-nn arguments and an awkward squelching and promoted ridicule of pro-repeal arguments...
With Net Neutrality (NN), ISP's have to treat all content the same and not block, or slow down any website on the internet. Without NN the ISP could slow down any average websites and essentially make it non-functional. At the same time it could give priority (increased speed) to sites that are sponsored.
Remember when it comes to government it's always the opposite of the what the title says.
Example:
The affordable care act - Insurance premiums double or tripled for many Americans since 2016. Last year my insurance went up about 60%. So ya, not so affordable after all and this Net Neutrality law seems like favoritism to mega corporations like google and facebook.
As a community we need to start looking into ways of decentralizing the internet.
We are already starting to do that. Steem is the first in a series of steps to do that.
Yeah but we also need decentralized hardware, so net neutrality will not be an issue. It is going to take some sort of wireless solution.
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Great at least we can get all the latest information. Thanks keep doing your thing.
thnx a lot @joshigurdson for share this news .this news really very important all steemit member or user.
DTube is the best news in recent time
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Follow me @tjunaidi vote please.
very very important news ..
This Really clears up the whole controversy over Net Neutrality. If it's going for pro-freedom of speech, censorship free platforms, then I'm going with that.
Yeah, it removes the stigma that is associated with the removal of Net Neutrality and changes my perspective a bit, makes me a bit less apprehensive. My husband also says that if we use a VPN, we won't encounter some of the "problems" that we might otherwise face. He's not worried, which reassures me, because he understands and knows a lot more regarding alternate media and such than I do, so I will trust his judgement.
Free competition is always the development of democracy.
Competition breeds technological advances and contributes to the development of countries and improve the lives of ordinary citizens.
We welcome the development of democracy in the Internet space.
Now that's the Smack which was needed to get over Net neutrality..
I have had it enough ..that we are going to lose the fight ...
Now show us the victory
I agree that these changes will increase competition, innovation, ect. But for the best outcome, a large number of small ISPs, or Co-ops, would really hep break things up. I used to be able to purchace service from a number of mom and pop ISPs. I had the highest speed and most stable connection of anyone I knew. It was awesome! If these changes bring back situations like that Sweet
Net Neutrality is bull. Nothing ever happened. It's just more legislation which they can use to screw us over. The Free Market is not regulated. Right now, ISPs compete wildly for our business. The less legislation the better.
And from the horse's mouth:
Wouldn't a lack of net neutrality mean big companies could bid high enough to slow DTube down?