All the big newspapers have an editorial about Net Neutrality today, and the
Surprisingly, Wu's new tack on the bandwidth issue wasn't a call for more regulation, as critics have often assailed, but less. Wu proposes the federal government open up spectrum to create wireless broadband competition. Wu criticizes the government's "Soviet-style rules" that result in a lot of wasted spectrum. Up to 90 percent goes unused at any given moment.
The idea, then, is decidedly anti-regulatory in that it removes tight government controls of spectrum and encourages broadband competition. The current environment favors a few powerful, bandwidth-controlling companies who stand to profit immensely from doling the bandwidth out. Few alternatives aside from wireless ones have presented themselves as a solution.
Detractors predictably seized Wu's analogy from the start, excitedly noting OPEC is a government-run cartel, not a free-market cartel. One could argue the current group of ISPs don't really operate in a free market, especially with the government's own forced scarcity model regarding bandwidth.
Regardless of whether Wu's analogy was apt, and it's likely it's not as apt as it is eye-catching, the
So what he's saying is bandwidth scarcity is a notion invented by internet service providers and wireless providers to jack up prices and provide excuses for interfering with competing services on their networks. Nice. In a weird way, Swanson focuses so hard on disproving Wu's analogy one way, he misses how the analogy is proved in another: a few organizations (government or not) controlling an important resource and forcing artificial scarcity in order to control the market for that resource is called a cartel.
In this case, there is a government cartel and a non-government cartel scratching each other's backs. Don't think so? How does the US rank in broadband access again?
Wu: Watch Out for OPEC 2.0
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