The following is loosely transcribed from a speech I gave at George Mason University

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Soviet Union was in trouble. It had been on a protracted economic slide for many years, and showed no sign of lifting. Mikhael Gorbachev, leader at the time, fancied himself a reformer, and went on a spree of deregulation and privatization. But coming from such a regulated environment, the sweeps of deregulation were not – and could not be – total. People were free to do things they were not before, but the perverse incentives still existed. The house of regulatory cards collapsed: capital fled the country in a firesale, and with it went all potential for the future of the Soviet Union.

Now we’ll come back to that story later, and talk about Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality is an unpopular issue among Libertarians, most of whom are against all regulation at all times. Though it would indeed be ideal to have a completely deregulated market, this is not what we have, and we must be careful how we get there.

Let me start off with a brief explanation of what net neutrality is. It is in no respects a price cap. It is what we have now and have always had, though it has yet to be codified into law. Imagine, if you will, a line with you on one end, and Google searches, Youtube videos, and Rush Limbaugh podcasts on the other. Between us on my end is my service provider AT&T, and on their end, their respective servers, each of whom we pay respectively for access to each other. The key stipulation of net neutrality is that AT&T must treat all traffic I want the same. Whether I want to listen to Rush Limbaugh podcasts or send my friends Rick Astley videos, AT&T may not filter or give preferential treatment to data coming from one server over another.

Without net neutrality however, AT&T suddenly gets the right to charge me for access and to charge Google for getting their data to me. Content providers and websites get double charged. What this means is the death of free on the internet. Those increased charges aren’t going to be absorbed by Google; they’re going to be passed to the consumer. No more free Gmail, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook; and what of small blogs like this one? The single most important reason the internet has taken off so quickly as a tool of commerce and communication has been the low barriers to entry. If we take that away, we essentially kill the internet. Without the ability to pay double, we’ll be relegated to the lowest tier of access. People will get slow, if any, access to the material of all but the well-endowed, and that’s a best-case scenario. Countries like Iran and China use a nonneutral internet to outright filter political speech.

Now that Net Neutrality has been established as an unequivocally good thing from a consequentialist standpoint I ask further, what right does a service provider have to decide what constitutes a good or bad use of the bandwidth I’m paying for? I believe in consumer sovereignty in the marketplace. Consumer sovereignty is exercised through market competition as consumers flock to those who best meet their demands. Unfortunately the government has given regional monopolies to telecoms all over the United States – Verizon in the Northeast, AT&T and the former Baby Bells in a lot of other places, for example – stifling the potential exercise of consumer sovereignty.

This is where we get back to the Soviet Union. Total deregulation would be a good thing, but fiddling around at the margins is not necessarily so: it can even be disastrous. Am I saying that net neutrality legislation is ideal, or even good? Not in the least. What I am saying is that it is ultimately harmful to our infrastructure and to consumers if we allow a nonneutral internet before intra-regional competition can be firmly established nationwide. Deregulation is good, but in states of transition, we must take care to deconstruct our house of cards in such a manner that it does not first collapse upon us.