Everyone please welcome Insula Qui, our first additional writer at Zeroth Position. Last week, many libertarians came out in support of a major government program. This would seem odd to many onlookers, as libertarians are supposed to believe in free markets and their efficient allocation of resources, but this issue has divided libertarians like few others. This program is net neutrality, and even anarcho-capitalists have managed to justify supporting it on some occasions, although that is much rarer. To explain the problems within the concept of and support of net neutrality, a working definition is required. In essence, the point of the regulation that assures the net will stay neutral is to ensure an egalitarian allocation of bandwidth among people and websites. This means that no Internet service provider (ISP) should be able to charge extra for access to certain websites or discriminate when it comes to the Internet in any other way. This seems good and necessary at first glance, but even a cursory examination defeats this. Net neutrality was adopted in 2015, which means that for most of the existence of the Internet, there was no need for any legislation. Yet this legislation was created, not because any ISPs were being unfair, and not because ISPs were considering being unfair. The only reason why net neutrality was created and subsequently passed was to ensure that the Internet would stay the same as it always had been. It turns out that we apparently require massive legislative efforts to ensure that absolutely nothing would change. The Past Is Prologue To understand why this debacle started, we must examine the origin of the troubles. The legal procedures were initiated by the situation that was going on between Netflix and different ISPs. The entire spectacle may be summarized as follows: Netflix was using so much data that it was getting slower. That was the entire problem that Netflix had with the ISPs, and that was the start of the entire legislative progress to instate net neutrality. (What was going on was slightly more complicated, but that was the gist of their complaint.) Various streaming services were growing larger on the Internet, so the ISPs were faced with a lot of bandwidth consumption on a continuous basis. With streaming, it is impossible to load the entirety of the data quickly because there is so much of it, meaning that the bandwidth is constantly and intensely used. Since streaming was so popular, there was bandwidth constantly in use and since bandwidth is a limited resource, the streaming sites were getting slower, which was reflected in their bottom line. Because the streaming sites were getting so popular and using gigantic amounts of data and bandwidth, they could not expand more without getting slower and thus expanding less. Read the entire article at ZerothPosition.com
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Source: Reece Liberty.Me – The Curious Case of Net Neutrality