TO THE EDITOR:
In Tuesday’s edition of The Daily Tar Heel, Zach Rachuba of Young Americans for Liberty wrote that net neutrality does not favor consumers; however, what few facts he presented in his argument were blatantly incorrect. In general, I would find myself agreeing with YAL, but the discussion around this issue has gotten so muddied with disinformation that some otherwise well-intentioned observers have ended up championing the opportunity for a government-installed monopoly to hold consumers’ paid-for internet access for ransom.
I can’t hope to explain the technological issues completely in a few words here, but the important thing to understand is this: Last-mile providers (those who are actually affected by net neutrality rules) only provide internet access to you, the consumer, and they do not normally have anything to do with content providers such as Facebook, Google and Netflix. However, in the past several years, certain last-mile providers have been essentially holding consumers for ransom by demanding that Facebook, Google and Netflix pay them a second time to deliver the internet access that their real customers, U.S. households, are already paying for.
To use the grocery store analogy, it has nothing to do with shelf space (the internet at large), but it has to do with the cashier (the last-mile provider). A proper analogy for the current situation is that when you take, say, your eggs to the cashier and pay for them, the grocery store demands that the farmers pay them a fee or else they will not put the eggs — which you already purchased — into your cart. If that sounds insane, it’s because it is, yet that exact same scenario is playing out in the American last-mile internet provider market.
Zach and the YAL are justifiably suspicious of increasing government regulation, but their concern is misplaced and even dangerous here, because what the government now wants to regulate is not the free and open internet, but rather a part of it, which, for historical reasons, has been granted a de facto government monopoly; that is, the last-mile providers. It is widely acknowledged that government monopolies such as utilities, insofar as we can’t simply eliminate them, must also be regulated. Ideally, the last-mile monopoly would be eliminated and a free market established for consumer internet access, but until that happens, net neutrality regulations may be the only way to protect consumers.
David Adler
Senior
Computer science
