A Commons, Not a Mall by Kevin

Atrios finds it hard to understand why the Telco’s don’t understand why net neutrality keeps them in business. I think there are tow things going on here: the slave-driver that is the quarterly statement and a fundamental misunderstanding of why people use the internet.

First, there is no doubt that in the short term, extorting money from websites in exchange for access by the telco customers is a money winner. Amazon, Dell, Google, etc. cannot survive without those eyeballs, so I suspect they will come to some sort of agreement. And those agreements will raise profits and rive up stock prices, allowing telco execs to keep their jobs and eventually cash out their stock options at a nice premium.

Second, I think the telcos don’t understand why people use the net. They see the money that places like Dell, Amazon and Google make and think “commerce”. They assume – not without reason — that people will congregate to the familiar and established brands. Must people shop at just a handful of online resources now, so, as far as commerce is concerned, most users probably won’t see a large difference. But commerce is a small part of the reason for going online, at that is where the telcos are being short-sighted.

The internet is the greatest common square in the history of the world. You can go online and find almost any piece of information, but you can also find weird and entertaining videos by artists you’ve never heard of, pictures of cats that want to kill you, science fiction stories you cannot get in the bookstore, music tailored to your tastes, political essays by people who live outside the bounds of beltway consensus, discussion boards about your love of television or cross-stitching or Japanese cuisine or conversations you overhear in New York City. You can learn to write or build a bookshelf or raise dogs or fold a shirt. The Internet is a source of entertainment and education, and most of that fun and knowledge comes from individuals or collections of ordinary people sharing their particular passions on a small corner of cyberspace.

Those little corners are why people go onto the internet in the first place, and why they continue to log on, and why they stay. No one pays broadband prices to buy books or computers or dog food faster. No one goes on the internet just to shop. They shop online because they are already online, doing other things. But if the telcos kill those other things — and that will be the effect of losing net neutrality, as only those with money and/or the right opinions will have traffic allowed to them – then people will be less and less willing to pay to go online, online businesses will suffer and be less able to afford the fees the telcos want to extort, and, eventually, the whole mess will collapse around them.