The Wall Street Lesson For Network Neutrality

[Commentary] As the institutions of Wall Street continue to crumble one after another, there's a lesson to be learned for those of us who want to make sure the Internet remains as free and open in the future as it has been in the past. The underpinning the whole mess is a philosophy about business and government. That way of thinking posits that deregulation is the best path for the economy, and that government is best when it's out of the way to let the private sector do what it wants. Into the midst of this debacle, the fact that there is even a debate over Net Neutrality seems foolish, and the fact that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is being criticized for taking a stand against Comcast's throttling of BitTorrent traffic (and lying about it) seems oblivious at best. The laws regulating the telecommunications world and those regulating the financial world have a joint history. The Communications Act of 1934 wasn't passed in a vacuum. It was part of a new generation of laws that passed after the Depression, including the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. A law was passed in 1935 giving the Federal government the power to regulate interstate electricity, which updated a 1920 law governing water power much as the Communications Act updated the Federal Radio Act of 1927. The Communications Act, as with the laws of the same era, was passed with the intent of protecting the public from the abuses of private industry. The basic tenets of non-discrimination were written into that law. If regulators do their jobs, everyone wins - the industry makes money and provides services, and consumers aren't harmed. If regulators don't do their jobs, and/or if a compliant Congress passes laws allowing for an industry to run wild by taking away federal regulation, then it's a different story. That's what happened in financial services and in telecommunications the last few years, and now we're suffering the results.