“Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes,” Chico Marx once asked.
We already know that Google perfected the Washington Two-Step: It signs a sweetheart access deal with Sony Ericcson to corner the market on searches in the quickly growing cell phone market, while pushing the Feds to prohibit similar deals in the wired world.
Wonder why? Well, here’s a possible response, courtesy of Stanford’s Larry Lessig from this month’s Gilder-Forbes Telecosm Summit:
“There’s of course an advantage that eBay and Google have because they have very fast caching servers located all over the world. So their ability to serve content is better than their competitors.”
As Orwell might have put it, neutrality regulation would make everyone equal – though eBay and Google would just be more equal than everyone else. To Lessig’s credit, he added that this was “exactly the kind of preference we ought to be encouraging in a competitive market.”
But unfortunately that distinction seems lost on the rest of the pro-regulation crowd. Congress’ neutrality proposals go in precisely the opposite direction, extending rules designed for the simple copper wire onto the fiber optic network. As George Gilder observed in the same debate, such regs support competition “so long as nobody wins or makes any money.”
Indeed, as Gilder later noted, there’s a larger ironic twist. The FCC’s proposed four basic freedoms of the Internet “depend on building out the broadband network. Those freedoms will be denied if the network is not built-out. So the question is, how do you create incentives for building out these vastly expensive fiber and wireless networks all across the country?”
The answer’s clear: The Internet has become a data-rich entertainment medium where freedoms can only be maintained through exponentially growing bandwidth, not regulatory and judicial fiat.
