Net Neutrality: The proper role of government?

Every once in a while there comes an issue on which I am undecided. Yes, as hard as this may be to believe, even someone as opinionated as me is stumped on occasion. One such occasion occurred today. From the AP:

”A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that the Federal Communications Commission lacks the authority to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all Internet traffic flowing over their networks.

The ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia is a big victory for Comcast Corp., the nation's largest cable company. It had challenged the FCC's authority to impose so-called "net neutrality" obligations on broadband providers.”

Normally I am against government interference in the market by default. To see the words “big victory” attached to an entity whose name ends in “corporation” is usually enough to send tingles of glee down my leg. The roles of government in the market ought to be limited and confined to protecting on person from another. Legitimate examples would include fraud, monopoly, and trafficking.

Unfortunately in this instance my instinct for the Free Market runs headlong into my desire for freedom of information. In case you are unfamiliar with the net neutrality debate, the argument is whether or not companies have the right to regulate what data you can access using the bandwidth that you pay for. In other words, does Comcast have the right to censor your internet usage? Should they be able to stop you from visiting competitors?

The internet is the holy grail of free, somewhat accurate, and usually filthy, information. The arguments to keep it this way are self evident. If you give some CEO the right to say what you can and can’t see on the internet, it would give corporations enormous influence that could very well be used inappropriately.

On the other hand, the corporations contend that not all content is equal. Some sites eat up far more bandwidth than others, and simply allowing anyone to access anything they want whenever they want will cause the bandwidth available to dwindle until everyone is forced to get their daily Cyanide & Happiness comic via dinosaur.

Should companies start charging per MB of data usage, causing the free ride of the internet to turn into a bean counting nightmare? Should the government force the companies to allow anything and everything through their gateways to paying customers, causing the internet to grind to a halt when the bandwidth is eaten away by BitTorrent and Everquest?

What do you think, my loyal readers? Leave your comments here. Of course, if you are among the 99.999% of my readers who access this site via facebook, you’ll probably leave all your comments there so that if anyone else who might stumbles on my blog it’ll look like I’m talking to myself for page after page of content.

But hey, whichever works for you. No pressure. It won’t be the first time I looked like I was talking to myself.