Earlier this afternoon Reps Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and Henry Waxman (D-CA) sent a note to Republicans on the Energy and Commerce Committee requesting yet another hearing on net neutrality before the committee votes on rules to repeal the dangerous policy. The Hill’s Sarah Jerome reports:Waxman and Eshoo suggested the effort distracts from the committee’s jobs agenda.“Our top priority in Congress should be creating jobs and rebuilding our economy. You apparently believe that disapproving the FCC regulation will promote economic growth. There are, however, many fast-growing companies that take a different position and believe approval of the disapproval resolution would be a serious threat to our economy,” they said.“U.S. companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and eBay lead the world in innovation. They all urged the FCC to act to protect an open Internet
Waxman and Eshoo fail to understand 2 major things:
First: Conflict of Interest
There is a giant conflict of interest that exists for companies like Google. These companies, along with others like Netflix and Hulu, are among the greatest bandwidth hogs that exist on the net today. It stands to reason that any company that uses a lot of bandwidth would support a policy (net neutrality) that makes it illegal for internet service providers (ISPs) to charge content providers for bandwidth use. I certainly overuse analogies, but the net neutrality analogy dujour is this:
Imagine a policy that would make it illegal for FedEx to charge companies to ship their goods. In fact, FedEx couldn’t charge differing prices for different goods ever. So companies that ship boats have the same burden as those that ship socks. Asking Google for their opinion on the matter is like asking the boat manufacturer how they’d feel about flat rate shipping.
Second: Net Diversity Creates Jobs
The problem is, though, that all these boat shipping (content delivery) costs are deflected to the consumer. Because consumers can’t always afford to pay the bill for major content providers, ISPs have less revenue to invest in infrastructure. Because ISPs can’t throttle up needed services like telemedicine, innovation gets stiffled. As The American Consumer Institute suggests:
The large-scale economic impacts of regulation would affect one of the only prosperous sectors of our economy. Indeed, one study from NYU concluded that net neutrality would cost Americans 500,000 jobs and $62 billion over the next five years. Sound like a lot to pay for a policy whose advocates have yet to demonstrate any significant harm in the status quo? It is.
Hopefully Waxman and Eshoo can get straight on tech issues at least enough to understand how ironic it is to write a letter that says: Please stop saving all these jobs, we need to focus on creating jobs.
