Ron Paul @Google Video Most Viewed Ever

This points to a core problem with our situation today.

While it's true that government has helped create monopolistic structures, it's also true that a monopolist (or oligopolist) can easily implement unfair trade practices, acting alone or in collusion. This is one of the problems that Net Neutrality advocates are legitimately addressing.

There are two solutions to this. The first is regulation and the second is competition. We probably all understand that competition is preferable to regulation. The question is, what can be done to address the lack of competition? For technical reasons, a phone and DSL network has aspects of infrastructure, which leads to monopolies for cost reasons.

So, remembering the infrastructure aspects of communications networks, what public policies - if any - address the problem without creating more harms than the problem itself? Market-based reform at the last mile would look at removing barriers to competition; one example might be freeing up channels for microwave internet providers, which have much lower infrastructure costs.

We are seeing very disturbing trends in corporatist and government control over internet content. Spreading the idea of Net Neutrality and privacy and advocating it is very, very important, so that consumers and voters demand it. We should always look first to ways to open-up service markets to competition, rather than regulation as a means to prevent monopolist abuse, but if deregulation does not create a free market - for e.g. if structural exigencies prevent it - then the public has a legitimate *public interest* in that monopolist service is provided.

In that case-of-last-resort, it is the States which have juristiction over the 'last mile' of internet, and the Federal Government which has jurisdiction over the interstate commerce aspect of internet backbones.

By analogy, Congress would have (under the ICC) the legitimate authority to prevent a private owner of interstate highways from levying a higher toll rate (or mandating a lower speed limit) on trucks carrying goods for competitor businesses than for affiliated or neutral businesses.

An appropriate bill might read something like "No interstate communications services may discriminate data transfer based on owner, origin or destination or proprietary data format. This restriction does not apply to differentiation of Quality of Service between classes of data defined by open formats."