About Scott Cleland
Wireless investment already is "unleashed!"-- FCC net neutrality regs would only leash it
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Fri, 2009-10-30 09:52
The WSJ op-ed, "Net Neutrality: Spur to Entrepreneurship, an open network will unleash investment" is a dystopian and nonsensical assertion that it is Government that "unleashes" investment, when everyone's common sense knows that Government regulation is all about putting leashes on businesses and investment!
Competition and market forces have already unleashed $300 billion in cumulative U.S. wireless investment per CTIA!
- Only net-neutrality-at-all-cost-proponents would argue that a big new government leash and spiked-choke-collar -- of banning wireless business and technical practices that have always been legal and necessary to operate wireless networks efficiently and meet demand -- would somehow "unleash investment!"
- How are new, never-before-imposed FCC "leashes" -- on standard wireless business models/practices, everyday network operations, and network design/engineering -- going to "unleash" investment?
- How would creating new massive uncertainty about how wireless business, operations, and engineering can legally be done -- encourage more wireless investment and not less?
- How would bringing the notorious inefficiency of government red tape and the FCC to wireless, somehow spur more efficiency in the wireless market and accelerate more net investment than the free market does today?
A big takeaway here is that this op-ed is part of a much broader PR and advocacy campaign by the FCC and Google, to justify a new "Open Internet" industrial policy that specifically favors only Silicon Valley California venture capital and company investment over most all other forms and sources of investment around the country.
- This discriminatory and unbalanced investment thesis requires an elephantine-pirouette on the head-of-a-pin to not fall down in embarassment.
- This government-is-the-font-of-all-investment thesis requires selective one-sided analysis where one inflates and glorifies the investment generated by the very narrow Silicon Valley California segment, while also totally ignoring and demonizing those currently investing heavily in wireless.
- A big part of the FCC's justification of net neutrality and a bigger government role in broadband overall is making the case that the private sector and private investment has failed the Nation and consumers and that Government intervention is needed in order to make it all right.
Finally, it is interesting to note that in advocating for an FCC proceeding which seeks to advance more transparency, the authors of the WSJ op-ed today were not transparent in disclosing their extremely close financial ties to Google, the company that would be the single biggest beneficiary of the FCC's proposed open Internet regs.
- Many may not know that the IRS has been investigating the tax exempt status of Mozilla, to determine whether the Mozilla Foundation behind the popular Firefox browser, can legitimately claim tax exempt status when 88% of the Foundation's revenues come from Google in payments for being the default search engine for Firefox downloads.
- These Mozilla "entrepreneurs" were not very "open" about Mozilla effectively being on the Google dole...
Net Neutrality favors small start ups, not google.
With Google pulling in 6% of all web traffic, it doesn't need net neutrality rules to protect it. In fact, they are acting against their own interests because they believe that only through fair marketplaces can innovation continue to occur. Small businesses need net neutrality so that they can publish music for instance at a fair rate. Small bands that I know will sell me music for a dime to a quarter a song and they make almost all of that as profit. If they were to sell on itunes for a dollar a song, they'd sell fewer songs and make less per song. But if net neutrality was put in place, all the traffic could be forced to go to Amazon instead of this small band's website.
And I don't know what you mean about Mozilla not being very open about how they make money with firefox. It's definitely in the top 10 results of google searches. Perhaps the fact that the news article you linked to is from November of 2008 confused you.
The reality is that our current infrastructure is growing at a rate that is slower than the rest of the world. Competition should have spurred on investment in this area, but that hasn't happened. When companies start trenching and defending their profits at the cost of the consumer and the loss of innovation, government steps in and makes them knock it off. That's because Americans like a fair fight.