Why we need a fair, free, and open Internet
(this is a letter I wrote to my congressman concerning the Net Neutrality law currently before the House of Reps in the US. You are free use it if you like)
Take a moment right now and look out your office window. What do you see? Expressways, roads, sidewalks, buildings .. all infrastructure for commerce that has been needed, and much of it still as valuable as ever.
What you do NOT see is the real infrastructure of modern commerce today .. the electronic standard of communication and data transfer, the Internet. Today’s commerce runs on it, not just here in the US but around the entire world. Yet today’s superpower, the United States ranks 28th in network speed. Why is that? You can say that it’s older infrastructure, that as pioneers we do not yet have the latest and greatest because companies cannot invest in the fastest network protocols .. but that would wrong .. very wrong.
A quick look at the chart below shows that in the US we pay more for internet connection than almost every other country. It’s actually even worse than that because this chart shows wired and wireless connections. When it comes to wireless only look at the second chart showing that the US is 28th in the world in wireless speeds.
So why is this, really? Companies in the US have no incentive to innovate their backbones. They have a captive audience already with most suppliers using only 2 backbones. There is no competition to innovate and increase speeds.
So here we are, the largest financial power in the world, having paved the way for the Internet’s creation and we are stifled in comparison to our competitor countries. If we had more competition more innovation would be required.
Sadly today we live in an environment where industry leaders can increase profitability at the expense of the consumer instead of the benefit of the consumer, whether that is a 500 person business, or content streamers, or just mom and pops.
And yet we have those same companies lobbying our own government to increase costs on the backs of the businesses and citizens to fatten their bottom lines. Companies that are already so profitable that they “invest” in stock buybacks and acquisitions to squelch competition and innovation.
And as a representative of the people you take that money and hear their ideas and you spend it to win yet another 2 year seat in the halls of power. All the while the businesses and citizens of this country that you represent see their costs ratchet up thanks to the selling of influence for easy money for your corporate donor.
This bill will increase Internet costs to consumers, be they business or individuals. It will not improve the Internet. It transfers control of the Internet, a public utility, for yet another profit opportunity at the expense of the citizens of this country. This is NOT free enterprise and moves like this are destroying this country.
Do you remember 1998? Why is 1998 significant? Because that’s the last time that household income went up. See the chart on household income below for proof, it’s from the Fed.
Meanwhile our economy has the lowest amount of money velocity in history of the dataset. Again see the chart below, again from the Fed.
This is the real world economy. This is what the citizens of this country are dealing with. The reductions in money velocity are so severe that if we even just had the same money velocity we had back in the days of stagflation of the 70’s our entire economy would be 20–25% larger. Yet here we are with another corporate give away which will increase costs on the businesses and people of this country when the “street economy’ has never been worse.
Yet here we are .. selling off control of a public utility so that Americans can be “mined” for yet more profits.
If there was some kind of substantial benefit to this selling of Internet controls it would LOWER costs, not raise them. It would make us MORE competitive relative to our competitor countries. It would empower the country, not a few corporations with lobbyists.
THIS BILL DOES NONE OF THAT.