All posts by Thomas L. Knapp

Op-Eds

No, The End of “Net Neutrality” is Not The End of the World (Wide Web)

Leave a comment

RGBStock.com WWW

I get lots of email, including email from political advocacy groups trumpeting the Impending Doom of the Month. This month, that doom is the coming end of “Net Neutrality” at the hands of the Federal Communications Commission.

“Donald Trump and his corporate cronies are about to destroy the Internet,” writes Eden James of Democracy for America.

“[FCC chairman Ajit] Pai is paving the way for monopolistic ISPs to block and censor what we see online, and push anyone who can’t pay extra fees into ‘internet slow lanes,'” warns Carli Stevenson of Demand Progress.

Kurt Walters of Fight For The Future says that the impending end of the FCC’s “Net Neutrality” rules is a “plan to end the Internet as we know it …”

For some reason, those alarmist emails leave out the fact that “the Internet as we know it” — the World Wide Web — survived and thrived for nearly a quarter of a century without “Net Neutrality,” which was only imposed by a previous FCC a little more than two years ago.

But now the alarmists insist that axing the two-year-old rule will suddenly, for unspecified reasons, cause Internet Service Providers to divide the Internet into “fast” and “slow” lanes at the expense of their own customers and of small web site owners. Why ISPs would cut off their noses to spite their own faces in this way isn’t explained, probably because the prediction makes no sense at all and simply isn’t based in reality.

The fight over “Net Neutrality” is best understood as a duel between corporate interests — Big Telecom on one hand, Big Data on the other, with Big Data doing a better job of fooling activists into making a moral crusade out of the matter.

Big Data — specifically companies that deliver high-bandwidth services like streaming video (Netflix, Google’s YouTube service, et al.), or that consume lots of bandwidth simply by virtue of being very popular (Facebook and so forth) need ever larger pipes to shove that data at you. They want ISPs to shoulder the costs of building and fattening those pipes.

Big Telecom — the ISPs — want to charge the bandwidth hogs extra for getting such large amounts of data to your screen in a timely manner, so that Big Data bears the costs of building those pipes and keeping them uncongested.

If Big Data wins (“Net Neutrality”), ISP customers will end up paying more for Internet access. Everyone’s Internet access fees will go up (or at least remain higher than they otherwise would) and broadband Internet’s expansion into rural areas will slow down.

If Big Telecom wins, different customers (streaming video subscribers, web hosting users) will see our fees rise.

There’s no such thing as a free Internet. Someone’s going to pay to make it keep working. The only question is who. I’d rather pay an extra $5 a month for my web hosting and Netflix binges than shift that cost to my neighbor next door who checks her email once a day. Good riddance to “Net Neutrality.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

Things I’ve Found to be Thankful for in 2017

2 Comments
A Puritan Thanksgiving
A Puritan Thanksgiving (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s that time of year, and like most of you I’m planning on a big meal and a lazy afternoon as America celebrates yet another Thanksgiving. Naturally, I’m also thinking back over the previous year and looking for things to be thankful for. I’ve found some. Here are a few that aren’t about family, spiral cut ham and so forth:

I’m not thankful that Donald Trump is president of the United States, but I am thankful that he hasn’t blown up the world or any of the other bad things that some were predicting this time last year.

He’s even done some good things, like firing US Attorney Preet Bharara (and all the other US Attorneys), appointing a so far not too terribly shabby Supreme Court Justice (Neil Gorsuch), and throttling back a little on some aspects of the executive branch’s regulatory urges.

He’s also failed to deliver on some of the worst things he promised.

His protectionist disposition on trade hasn’t cratered the American economy — at least not yet.

There’s no wall on the border with Mexico — at least not yet.

He hasn’t pulled the plug on the Iran nuclear deal — at least not yet.

The courts continue to frustrate his attempts to cow sanctuary cities and ban Muslims from visiting and moving to the United States.

While he’s escalated US military adventurism in Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere, he’s so far held off on all-out war with North Korea. Let’s keep our fingers crossed on that, just in case.

For all these things I am thankful.

While I never supported Trump, I was thankful when Hillary Clinton didn’t win last year’s presidential election. A year later, I am thankful that she’s not president. If anything, she’s spent the last year demonstrating her own complete unfitness for the office to anyone who doubted it before. It’s not so much that I think she’d have been worse than Trump. It’s that for all practical purposes she IS Trump, minus the entertainment value.

I’m thankful for Congress, too. Not for anything they’ve done, but for the fact that they’ve been able to do so little. Gridlock is good and we’re long overdue for some. Here’s hoping for three more years of it. Laws are like speech: If you can’t pass anything nice, better to pass nothing at all.

Most of all, I’m thankful for all of you: The editors who choose to publish my columns and the readers who hopefully enjoy — and sometimes respond to — those columns. The Garrison Center’s mission (and mine) is to bring libertarian viewpoints to mainstream newspapers and non-libertarian political publications. That happened nearly 1,000 times in 2016 and I expect it to happen more than 1,000 times in 2017.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

How to Stop a Rogue President from Ordering a Nuclear First Strike

14 Comments

The “Baker” explosion, part of Operation Crossroads, a nuclear weapon test by the United States military at Bikini Atoll, Micronesia, on 25 July 1946. [Source: Wikipedia]
On November 15, US Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) and US Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) introduced  one of the shortest bills in the histories of their two parliamentary bodies. Shorn of the obligatory “be it enacted, blah, blah, blah” boilerplate, the bill’s content comes to 14 words: “It is the policy of the United States to not use nuclear weapons first.”

It’s a short bill and it’s a good bill, but it could be made both shorter and better by eliminating the word “first.”

What America needs is a “no use of nukes, period” policy, followed quickly by an “elimination of the nuclear arsenal” policy.

In July, 122 United Nations member countries endorsed a treaty  banning nuclear weapons altogether and providing for their elimination. The US abstained from the vote and won’t be signing the treaty. I’m not sure why, since the treaty wouldn’t really impose any new obligations and since unstated US doctrine is that only other countries, like Iran, should be expected to live up to their treaty obligations. The US is already formally committed to nuclear disarmament by virtue of its participation in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It’s just never taken that obligation seriously.

Congress recently took up the question of whether or not President Donald Trump can be trusted with the authority to order a nuclear strike. His personal temperament alarms them. That temperament may or may not truly be more prickly than that of past presidents, but in the age of Twitter it’s more openly alarming.

Unfortunately, Congress has ceded so much of its authority over foreign and military policy to the presidency since the end of World War Two — the last time the US entered a war by congressional declaration, as required by its Constitution — that trying to claw back just this one little bit of that authority is theater without substance.

Possession of the “nuclear football” is nine tenths of the law. To keep Donald Trump, or any other president, from using nuclear weapons wickedly (as if there were some other way to use them), Congress needs to get rid of the  nukes, not just tinker with the legal authority to use them.

Nuclear weapons have no legitimate military use. They are weapons of terror, not of war. It’s time that the first and only government to ever use them become the second (after South Africa) to voluntarily give them up, for its own sake and the world’s.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY