The Fight for Free Speech: Will We Be the Greatest Generation?
I feel caught in the middle on this issue.
First, I don’t agree with Steve that the private sector has no incentive to mess with speech. They have incentive to make profitable speech/viewing easy and unprofitable speech/viewing not easy, because that transmission of information costs money. How would that look if they acted on that incentive? We’ve seen the pre-cursors of what could be examples with Comcast and whatnot, but nothing really extreme has come to light yet. That doesn’t mean I don’t think they have motive to do it though.
Second, while I like the freedom of expression concerns of the net neutrality movement, I don’t want to stifle the market’s creativity for potentially better technologies either. Much like requiring catalytic converters for cars instead of setting standards that any technology should’ve met, there could be unintended negative externalities of freezing the technological model at its present state (through the lack of competing innovations). While I don’t have an answer to the problem, I do think it should give us caution in thinking about how to ensure our free expression.
