New York Times op ed on net neutrality uses the wrong analogies

Successful Internet musician, Damian Kulash wrote for the New York Times, the standard pro-net neutrality op ed -- Beware the New Thing.

• It looks like its was ghost-drafted by the FreePress/Moveon.org media machine, because it lip-synched SaveTheInternet's standard chorus -- that because the monopoly phone system was regulated as a common carrier... all internet service providers should be regulated like common carriers!

There are two big flaws in that logic.

• First, the Internet service of cable, the leading consumer provider of consumer broadband, and wireless, the fastest growing form of broadband, have never been common carriers.
  • This standard SaveTheInternet line employs falacious logic -- its like saying that just because men used to be drafted for military service in the past, all men, women and children should be drafted for military service now.
• Second, the appropriate analogy here is not the phone system, which is a dedicated circuit network, but private and unregulated package delivery companies, because the Internet is a private and unregulated packet delivery network. 
  • It makes no more sense for a broadband provider to censor or block the digital packets traversing the Internet than it would for Fedex, UPS, DHL, or Airborne to censor or block the physical packages traversing their delivery networks!
  • No broadband company in their right mind would want to become known as the packet delivery company that doesn't deliver its packets, just like no package delivery company would want to become known as the company that does not deliver its packages.
  • This line of argument from SaveTheInternet is contrived, bogus, and deliberately misleading -- and they know it. 

The real agenda behind net neutrality is not instituting "common" carriage regulations, but getting the government to effectively socialize the Internet as an information "commons."

• See the New America Foundation's manifesto on "Saving the Information Commons" to grasp the enormity of their plans for socializing the Internet. 
• The real radical agenda behind net neutrality, wireless open access, and white spaces is that all Internet infrastructure and digital content should be "commons," or communally-owned property, not private property.
  • That would be the "tragedy of the commons" to those who know economics.