We may be coming to a point when Internet may be considered a “public good” and a “natural monopoly” for government to regulate and administer. This comes from what appears to be a long established mentality which already treats certain goods and services as things that can only be provided and cared for by a government (public roads, provision of law, courts and defense etc.).

We therefore have the privilege of witnessing just how does a particular good or service undergo this amazing transformation from something that previously operated in a decentralized manner by countless of individual actors pursuing their own interests to something that is considered impossible to manage without a centralized governing body.

I say this because the tune sang by net-neutrality advocates makes me think of what could be 10 or 20 years from now, when people might start forgetting the fact that Internet once actually functioned largely unregulated (to a point of having some people call the way Internet is ordered as “functional anarchy”, and meant this as a compliment).

Indeed, and if it wasn’t obvious by now, I do not want to see that day come. That said, net-neutrality advocates may have a point in so far as they target corporate entrenchment of certain Internet service providers and the feared inability of market action to provide sufficient recourse should these ISP’s misalign their offerings to market demand. Truth be told, it doesn’t take much to convince me that big corporations such as Comcast aren’t necessarily our friends.

Unfortunately, that’s where our agreement ends. The reason why I think they aren’t so friendly is quite different from the reason they would put forth. I don’t believe it is so much because these ISPs want to throttle or prioritize traffic. In fact I think that is entirely besides the point. The reason is that these corporations are willing and able to use the government to make competing with them difficult or next to impossible.

If it was easy to establish a competing Internet service provider then that alone would put a pressure on an existing ISP not to make their customers unhappy and if they did so the best and most obvious solution to the problem would be to “route around them” by establishing a competing ISP.

Some might argue, then, that if this is not the case and the establishment of competition is so difficult due to corporate entanglement with government power it is only fair for us to also use the government to essentially “shoot back” and limit these ISPs from doing what we don’t want them to do.

That however makes a rather bold assumption that the government itself can be trusted any more than a big corporation, which is rather intriguing considering that it is the government itself which gave the big corporations the anti-competitive powers they enjoy to begin with. Using the government in this case is basically trying to have it undo only one part of the damage it itself created with its previous actions.

Net-neutrality legislation wouldn’t create a more competitive environment in the market of Internet access provision. In a contrary it would actually make it even more difficult as it would put an additional regulatory burden on potential new competitors. In other words, it actually helps preserve the entrenchment of current big corporations even if it limits the ways they can operate.

This puts us in a rather interesting situation. Next time these entrenched ISPs try something the public doesn’t like we would need to go through this all over again, more campaigning and lobbying just to change or expand the law to include banning of these additional “bad” activities, making competition even more expensive.

It shouldn’t be too hard to see that this is a slippery slope and an extremely inefficient way of solving the problem. But unfortunately this only scratches the surface.

There are “other” big corporations, the big content providers. Net-neutrality legislation essentially gives them a foot in the door towards further regulating the actual content on the Internet in the name of fighting copyright infringement. Besides, they are already making similar inroads in other countries, gaining the power to order ISPs to filter unauthorized content due to claimed “copyright infringement” and even turn off access to “repeat offenders” (three-strikes).

Recent FCC proposal makes this threat quite solid as it leaves a loophole which would allow ISPs to act as “copyright cops” for the entertainment industry. EFF in response already launched a REAL Net Neutrality campaign calling for the removal of the copyright enforcement loophole. Even if they succeed, however, that doesn’t guarantee that a similar loophole or worse wont be added later on when scrutiny withers away or a new “cause” is manufactured to support it.

Then there is the government itself. Every new legislation over something that previously wasn’t regulated essentially expands the power and responsibilities of government and therefore increases the risks of its abuse. This shouldn’t be very reassuring in a country which is engaged in multiple wars and in which such things as citizen wiretapping, detaining of innocent travelers and even torture are known to happen. If it ever was a beacon of freedom, that beacon sure doesn’t look very bright these days. Why should anyone for a moment trust that this government wont eventually abuse a power given to it?

Finally there is a very real possibility that the legislation would make activities which are actually very beneficial and desirable illegal such as packet filtering for the purpose of fighting spam, preventing spread of viruses, optimizing access to the content generally more valuable (such as web page loads over FTP transfers) and so on. Various new technologies and methods which may improve the service without the negative effects that net-neutrality advocates are concerned of may end up being blocked. The result may be Internet access quality that is even worse than it already is or at least worse than it could have been in the future if it weren’t for the legislation.

Increased costs of compliance also affect company’s ability to provide a quality service. Given that legislation wont help the competition nothing will change as far as their entrenchment is concerned, only this time innovating and improvements would be even costlier. What reason does Comcast or any other big ISP have then to provide their users with a cheaper and better service, especially if their own customers were the ones in favor of laws which made their work more difficult?

All this considered I think pushing for a net-neutrality legislation is simply a very bad move no matter how you slice it. At best it will provide net-neutrality advocates with a merely temporary solution to the problem of big ISPs throttling and prioritizing traffic, provided that they even intend to do as much as they are accused of. But this will almost assuredly come at a great cost as illustrated above. They would’ve given more power to the big content providers in their copyright crusades, made competition in the Internet access market even harder (essentially entrenching the very corporations they’re fighting), made technological improvements in quality and price of service harder and risked further government abuses of this new power.

Yet all of this could’ve been avoided. As I noted in the beginning the most obvious solution to the problem of an ISP providing a non-neutral service of online content is by creating or propping up competition. If existing regulations make this more difficult and help entrench the existing ISPs than a far better thing to do instead of advocating net-neutrality legislation would be to campaign the government to deregulate the ISP market in order to make competition easier.

The real problem is not having the power to do something on your own or in collaboration with others because of powers that the entrenched corporations bought themselves from the government. There can be no other solution than to withdraw those extra powers from them and leave the market, that is the individuals like you and me, with the power to respond to value propositions freely and without costly interruption.

In essence, instead of using the government to force ISPs to not make preferential treatment of bits they deliver ask the government to stop the preferential treatment of businesses. That’s what every regulation essentially is. It inevitably provides advantages to one industry or business at the expense of another depending on who is better adapted to environment that said legislation establishes.

Otherwise we may indeed end up in a world which is quite the opposite of what net-neutrality advocates probably imagined and nothing like the “free and open” Internet we’re used to.