As I’ve written before, back in the 1960s I was surrounded by well-meaning people who tried very hard to reform the system and to make life better. And now, the very same problems they were devoted to solving are the problems de jour: war, poverty, welfare, racism, and police brutality – the very same list!

50 years of their efforts were fully wasted. Shall we really continue the waste? At some point, doesn’t patting ourselves on the back for accomplishing nothing become ridiculous?

"You can’t use logic on these people,” Geoff Keith told me over dinner at the Hilton, “or then they think you’re a dick.”

Politics is a game, a joke, a hustle, a con, a distraction, a spectacle, a sport, and for many devout Americans, a religion.

In other words, it’s a sophisticated ruse aimed at keeping us divided and fighting over two parties whose priorities are exactly the same. It’s no secret that both parties support endless war, engage in out-of-control spending, ignore the citizenry’s basic rights, have no respect for the rule of law, are bought and paid for by Big Business, care most about their own power, and have a long record of expanding government and shrinking liberty.

In effect, when solar energy made no economic sense, companies received subsidies, now that solar makes sense, many governments want nothing to do with it.

So it looks like we are going to get net neutrality.

This should be opposed for the same reason all other price controls are, namely because they are not capable of accomplishing their stated objectives (stimulating supply or demand for products of a given quality).

The notion that all packets should not be interfered with by those who own the private property that said packets travel about on is a price control; namely it is a price floor. Not filtering anything (and ergo maximizing the traffic on your infrastructure) implies a higher cost of doing business with said infrastructure than can be achieved with filtering, tiered pricing, etc. This in turn creates a minimum price for all firms on the market, namely how cheaply can I lay cable or make a wireless network.

Guess who has the easiest time doing that? Large firms that get volume discounts, and can cajole local authorities into coercing easements on people’s property, be it through brand clout or straight up bribes. So it’s fundamentally going to do what price floors always do — enlarge monopolies, impede small business and create a shortage of consumers (the people who would have bought the lower priced service which they are now prohibited from doing).

Price floors always create shortages of consumers, while price ceilings create shortages of producers. This is a law of economics that has been known for hundreds of years.

In summary, if you prefer to lock the poor out of a market completely rather than allowing them to get some utility out of an inferior good, impose a price floor. The effects of the minimum wage upon structural unemployment (it increases it) is the classical example of this phenomenon.

If you want a good to never be produced above the quality threshold implied by the price ceiling (and ergo deny those who can afford it a higher standard of living), then impose a price ceiling. In extreme cases, when the ceiling is lower than the cost of the factors of production for even the shoddiest quality of some good, shortages occur and famines result.

All law is fundamentally price controls. Consider that every time you are advocating one policy or another — It is socially desirable to have a shortage of murders, so I advocate making it’s cost prohibitively high (a price floor). This is imposed implicitly by our courts system's overhead and so forth. Similarly, society wants a shortage of hit-men, so a price ceiling of $0 is imposed (outlawed).

Do I want a shortage of internet service providers, or conversely to limit access to the internet for our poor brothers? no. So, I don’t advocate regulation on the internet. Stimulation of supply via force always encourages lower demand, which defeats the purpose of higher output. Stimulation of demand via force always encourages lower supply, which defeats the purpose of higher demand. As such, these controls make sense only in cases where both demanding and supplying a good or service is considered universally undesirable.

That’s the classically liberal perspective — lassiez faire, lassiez passer.

For the moral perspective, it’s a clear violation of “Love thy neighbor as you love thyself”. It is not loving behavior to interfere in the behavior of two individuals/organizations that are interacting at arms-length (a contract), and harming no third party with their actions. Interference is only moral if coercion is involved — one of the parties does not consent to the deal, or a third party is harmed.

Nobody is explicitly harmed by traffic prioritization supposing this is laid out in the contract as the nature of the agreement, which is is in most ISP service contracts. Regrettably, few actually read said contracts, much less anything at all. So they naturally become upset when they realize the marketing material they read that convinced them to purchase was not a full disclosure, like the contract is. While that is indeed a shortcoming of the firm in serving their customers adequately, it is not a legal harm, as the customer had every opportunity to understand the nature of the relationship, had they read the contract.

So these customers get upset and rail against these companies, and advocate government force to change the relationship into what they believe the relationship should be. Basically, shoving guns into business owners' faces to cover for their customers inadequacies (insufficient care/reading comprehension). Much of government action is this at work — violence to cover up more mundane sins. This underlines the old adage that "The government breaks your legs and then hands you crutches".

It is a pity they are not more bold as sinners. Simply mugging people would more quickly remove from society those who wish to maintain or improve their standard of living through violence.

So who's next on the chopping block? My guess is the shared hosting industry. The same logic used to justify "net neutrality" can be used to mandate equal shares of resources on shared hosts, which would annihilate the profit margins of many of our largest customers. Shared hosting relies on under-delivering and over-delivering to customers based on traffic; if a specific amount of traffic is mandated, you may as well head over to any dedicated server firm with your website.

This does result in the occasional case of overloaded servers and site downtimes; but let's face it -- these bargain basement programs offered by various shared hosting firms aren't exactly advertising themselves as top-quality products either.

As a marginal firm, I would prefer to have a low quality vendor that works 80% of the time rather than one I can't afford which results in no online presence whatsoever.

This is why $1/month hosting exists. Cutting corners and making a shoddy product is often the only way to serve marginal consumers. As such, don't advocate for levelling -- pay more for quality products and live in peace with your less fortunate neighbors.

I guess the final injustice coming soon to my professional field is going to be licensure of techs and programmers, as the old guard will quickly be upset by downward wage pressure. This will be due to people flocking to the tech field in droves, as it's one of the few "freedom zones" left in professional America. Maybe the political class will throw in some hyperventilation about cyberattacks too.