The Labour Party: Patronising working people since 1900

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Chuka Umunna, a Labour Party frontbencher is continuing the champagne socialist tradition of patronising ordinary people. In this case ordinary people who (wrongly in my view - they should vote Conservative) chose to vote for UKIP:

UKIP voters are disconnected because many cannot send and receive emails, use search engines or browse the Internet, Labour’s shadow business secretary has suggested.

Chuka Umunna said that ‘a lot’ of people who voted for the party in its European elections victory were not computer literate and did not have basic online skills.

He promised that a Labour government would be ‘absolutely focused’ on connecting people who have been alienated from the wider economy.

Judging by my blog comments, email in-box and Twitter feed, UKIP folk seem only too well acquainted with the joys of the online world!

Essentially Chuka, in his £1000 suit, is telling the proles that they're too thick to understand. But then his party has been doing this for 114 years so far.

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...and these people might be in government?

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Save us.

Helen Goodman, Labour's shadow minister for media reform, reached further back into history to illustrate her point, comparing the internet to a lawless 13th Century forest.

"It would be quite wrong if we were to preserve a special place within the law, where the net could be outside the law. The net today should not be like the forest in the 13th Century.

"Robin Hood and the outlaws - they were called that because they were outside the law - that was not a sustainable position in the 13th Century and it's not a sustainable position now."

Leave aside the ignorant definition of "outlaw", where exactly is the "net" outside the law? Nowhere - all the laws on libel, hate speech and so forth apply.

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On that clever online booze advertising...

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It seems that the evil drinks industry isn't very good at the online stuff:

"The research found that some of the big alcohol brands - and subsectors - are vastly under performing in social video.

"For wine and spirit brands, the opportunity to increase brand awareness and sales conversion rates through social video is huge, as there has been very little mass movement from these brands in creating shareable video content.

"Additionally, leading brands like Diageo and SAB Miller that have very strong market share are lagging behind competitors when it comes to social video share of voice."

Hey ho.

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The Internet is corrupting our youth!

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Or so says celebrity brain expert, Baroness Greenfield. After all it has been a few weeks since her last national news headline! Children are being damaged by Twitter she says:

Baroness Greenfield, professor of pharmacology at Oxford University, said a decline in physical human contact meant children struggled to formulate basic social skills and emotional reactions.

She criticised the “unhealthy” addiction to Twitter among some users who resort to increasingly nasty outbursts under the “sanitised and often anonymous guise of the web”. 

Did someone have a go at the Baroness on Twitter? Or is she merely surfing on the Twitter brand - after all, her main beef is about the social development of children. And Twitter is full of children!

Baroness Greenfield quoted figures showing that more than half of 13- to 17-year-olds now spend more than 30 hours a week using video games, computers, e-readers, mobile phones and other screen-based technology. 

Apparently all this stuff is making children less well-behaved, is turning them into a bunch of narcissists and creating a generation of cyber-bullies. Doubtless something must be done!
 

“To have this ultimate beauty contest showing how much better you are than everyone else can only lead to sadness because there will always be someone who scores higher than you," she said. "It means you are constantly lacking in self-esteem, over narcissistic and, at the same time, in constant anxiety.”

Baroness Greenfield also warned that social networking websites were fuelling bullying, adding: “The anonymity of the web can make it easier to do and also removes the constraints that would normally apply for what one might regard as human nature.” 

The good Baroness presents no evidence at all to support her contentions - not a single study, nothing that has been through that pesky peer review process. This is just comment made in an interview ahead of Baroness Greenfield presenting her "findings" (also known as her "opinion"). The only piece of "evidence" is a report of an opinion survey of English teachers who think kids have shorter attention spans. Now I love opinion polls but this isn't evidence of anything other than the informed prejudice of one set of teachers.

What seems to be bothering the Baroness is that children are less likely to sit like supine sheep awaiting the latest dollop of whatever their elders and betters believe they should be fed. The choice and liberty that "screen-based technology" provides makes it harder to socialise young people into a particular set of behaviours. It seems to me that young people can (and do) pay attention but that having alternatives to hand means that they are less tolerant of boring lectures.

Finally, Baroness greenfield seems to think that children are spending the sixty-odd hours of the week when they aren't looking at a screen or sleeping doing absolutely nothing. Perhaps gazing blankly into space or wandering zombie-like round the house. Funnily enough those children are spending that time in a social environment surrounded by and interacting with their peers, their parents and their teachers.

The Internet  - whether its Twitter, Facebook or something with penguins - isn't corrupting our youth. In fact it might just be liberating them!

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Advice to the Internet from an old mail order guru

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I was reading an incredibly complacent interview with Alan Rushbridger, the Guardians editor. There was a hint - indeed the very faintest of hints - that the newspaper's on-line business model might not be a sturdy cash generator:

I think you’re putting the cart before the horse. I think it’s better if you embed yourself in this new world of information and work out what it is what we can do that they can’t do and vice versa. If at some point in the future it looks as though some form of payment is going to work, we’re not going to set ourselves against it

And here lies the rub, not just for the Guardian but for much of the 'world wide web' - Rushbridger touched on it by saying:

There would have been no point in 1997 or 2000 saying that we don’t like the idea of this all being free...

At which point I recalled some sage words from a real life mail order guru - my former colleague John Hinchcliffe. We were discussing the strategy (or rather John was discussing and I was doing what might be called 'intelligent listening') options faced by the Freeman's brand following its acquisition by (I think) Littlewoods. Now Freeman's were the only big book mail order company that didn't give new agents a (significant) free gift with their first order and John was considering whether to bring the brand in line with the main Littlewoods brand. This brought the observation:

Once you start giving away free gifts you can't stop

The Internet wasn't listening to John (perhaps it should have been) but this is precisely the problem that we face - not just news providers but social media platforms, music sellers, book retailers and any number of folk supplying software stuff. We gave stuff away for free. As Rushbridger argues (somehow I suspect this is more post hoc rationalisation than the honest truth) this was about embedding yourself in the wonders of the on-line world.

However, it was still giving stuff away for free. And we now have a generation of web wanderers who assume that it's all free and that this is the right way for it to be. Weaning them off that free stuff (especially when so many bely their degree level qualifications and actually believe it is free) is a massive challenge.

John was right. Giving away free stuff was always risky and the Internet is about to discover this truth!

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I'm not sure social media do 'nuance'...

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How on earth can we include uncertainty, conditionality and nuance in an instant gratification medium built around popping 140 characters into a box on the Internet? Twitter isn’t an equivocal medium, it is a place for the definite, the certain.

Even those who have managed to order the system so as to create doubt and an open-ness to other positions cannot buck the medium. The reader – or most of the readers – arrive perceiving twitter as a place of absolute certainty: “god is dead”, “abortion is wrong”, “Tories are scum”, “Arsenal are shit”. A veritable cacophony of conviction, a place where “I’m not so sure about that can you explain” doesn’t really have a place.

This soup of competing but equally unconditional truths worried some folk. Here’s Peter Beaumont writing in The Guardian:

Because of the measures of success in the new online world, including how many comments are attracted and the number of page views, it has been inevitable, some argue, that the loudest and most partisan voices seem attractive. Which leaves a burning question unanswered. How to quantify what all this means for those engaging in public debate, including bloggers, writers, journalists and commenters.

Part of Patrick Ness's argument was that the often brutal nature of the online world has started to impose a culture of self-censorship as some have sought to avoid inevitable flame wars. Other writers have remarked the opposite to me, describing how, in reviewing his writing, he had gradually used fewer qualification in his arguments.

We see here two competing responses: “I don’t like the game in that sandpit, so I’m not going to play there any more” and “I don’t like the game in that sandpit but everyone I want to play with is there so here goes”. Both are correct but define the person – there is no requirement to ping out tweets all the live long day, to record every last second of your life on Facebook or to scribe angry little pieces on a blog read by seventy people (on a good day). Yet in the discourse about the Internet – or more specifically the social aspect of the Internet – no-one states the obvious: you don’t have to be there.

At the same time, we should be able to distinguish between styles of communication and how places (if we can truly call Twitter and so forth: ‘places’) change the nature of our speech. The way I talk to a bunch of mates down the pub will be very different from the manner in which we talk at work. How often have friends and family rung you at work and been surprised by your ‘posh work voice’? And have you ever been shocked at bad language from someone (like a teacher or local councillor) you’ve only ever heard in a formal context?

Places like twitter are growing up as the users get to understand them. The etiquette, the behaviours and the language evolve. Not from some heavy-handed set of rules but from the manner in which that community polices its own behaviour and defines its own boundaries. Indeed, when heavy-handed rules crash into social media we get the nonsense of the ‘twitter joke trial’ or the lunacy of arresting some kid because he offended a celebrity.

The other part of Peter Beaumont’s worry is equally confused – sectarianism. By this he means, I guess, the tendency of humans to cluster into idea-reinforcing and like-minded groups rather than Orange Order marches or Glaswegian football violence. Beaumont suggests – in referring to the work of US academic, Cass Sunstein:

...while the internet was efficient in bringing together virtual communities of interest, it also encouraged participants "to isolate themselves from competing views... [creating a] breeding ground for polarisation, potentially dangerous for both democracy and social peace".

In other words, virtual communities, unlike physical communities that are under constant pressure to compromise, are at risk of a tendency to organise around confirmatory bias.

It seems to me that this is perfectly normal human behaviour. For sure, the Internet provides more opportunities for that ‘confirmatory bias’ but we have always sought out places and things that confirm our position, that affirm our world view. Perhaps the liberation lies in the fact that a young conservative in Grimethorpe (there may be one) or the budding Marxist in Steppingley can engage with respectively other young Tories and emerging Marxists. The assumption that on-line engagement means a new universalist idea evolving from some primeval internet soup may indeed appeal but surely it is nonsense?

Finally – and this really is important – there are more people on-line who prefer chatting about the X-Factor, football or the simple minutiae of an ordinary life. Perhaps Beaumont’s assumption that on-line activity is all about politics and media is simply his own form of confirmation bias?  While there was plenty of robust debate around Julian Assange on assorted social media channels, I’m prepared to bet that there were more pictures of cute puppies and kittens posted on various social media sites than coruscatingly insightful remarks about wikileaks. And this is how the world should be.

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The Peterborough Pravda. Is this what Louise Mensch wants from local media?

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Yesterday, Louise Mensch – the MP for Corby – argued that local newspapers are an essential cog in our democracy:

She called on the government to conduct a review into "local democracy and the local press" to see if there might be some sort of direct or indirect subsidy that could support the sector.

She attacked plans for local TV stations, which will compete against newspapers, because the proposed funding plans include using part of the licence fee as well as BBC content.

Now there are a few obvious things that might be said about Mrs Mensch’s suggestions not least that Tory MPs calling for business subsidies is a wholly new experience for this very long-standing Tory member.

However, at the heart of this isn’t the question of whether we have a local press – in my view we have as vibrant a local debate as we’ve had in a very long while. But here in Bradford very little of that debate is down to the local evening paper.

Local papers have declined, many have merged, closed or become mere shadows – more advertising sheets that newspapers. And that decline continues – think for a second or two where you go to look for a job, a car, a house or the cinema listings? In times past you bought the local rag on the appropriate day and looked in the class ads. Now you use your lap top or your iPhone – tomorrow you’ll be using the telly in your living room.

Local newspapers have become ever more reliant on the money that local councils spend – the statutory notices, job ads and theatre listings. Without this cash, many more local papers would go to the wall. Maybe this would be a loss but it is the market that is killing these papers not the choices or decisions of local councils. People no longer buy the evening paper – 30 years ago the penetration of the York Evening Press was up at around 80%. Hardly a house in the City didn’t receive the paper. Today that paper sells around 25,000 copies each day (as it happens about the same as Bradford’s Telegraph & Argus). The Doncaster Star sells fewer than 3,000 copies.

It seems to me that, for all her good intentions, Mrs Mensch is railing against the wind – for sure, stopping councils from producing their own free newspapers and not using the license fee to support local TV might slow the decline a little. But the decline will continue for the simple reason that people no longer buy the local paper and local businesses no longer advertise in the local paper. And while this is happening local papers reduce their editorial staff – I fear that many will simply be desk-bound churners of press releases (which isn’t why anyone went to journalism school) – to the point where they simply don’t have the resource to cover stories.

However, public subsidy – using taxpayers’ money to stop local papers closing – seems like a recipe for a supine, state-directed newspaper. Something of a Pravda of Peterborough or Isvestia of Ipswich – regurgitating the tractor stats produced by the local authorities and printing without question or challenge the words of the local MP. A ghastly shade of the challenging, offending and investigating local paper of legend.

Maybe that’s what Mrs Mensch wants but for me, I’ll take my changes with bloggers, Facebook and citizen journalism. That might just be the better future don’t you think?

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Lord, save us from "researchers"!

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We will all be addidcted - to the demon interwebs with their social networks!

Resisting the urge to check social networking sites for updates is more difficult than turning down a drink, according to a study of people's everyday desires.

Something must be done before the economy grinds to a complete halt while everyone alive checks their tweets and amends their status!

This is the sort of research that, you know, gives research a bad name. And the main finding about daytime desires:

The survey of 250 people found that sleep and sex were the two things people most longed for during the day...

So we're all regular and normal after all!

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The Web is Addictive! Something must be done...

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The web is corrupting people's minds - and some are addicted to the Internet:

Web addicts have brain changes similar to those hooked on drugs or alcohol, preliminary research suggests.

We need the following clearly*:

• Guidelines for recommended maximum exposure to the Internet
• An age restriction preventing harm to children
• Taxes on Internet access to begin the process of denormalisation
• Public health campaigns highlighting the risk of Internet use
• Work towards a minimum price for Internet access

We must act now to save lives!

*I take this from the public health response to tsimilar problems with alcohol, tobacco and other things that affect people's brains. Something must be done!

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Is this how Councils should encourage members to make use of social media?

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From Bradford Council's Standards Committee:

Resolved –

(1) That the Monitoring Officer be requested to consult with the officers responsible for provision of IT equipment to Members to draw up a protocol advising on appropriate usage for issue when the equipment is first provided.

(2) That the Monitoring officer be requested to draft a brief guidance note for Members in respect of the potential pitfalls of all forms of communication, including electronic, and that this be presented to a future meeting of the Committee for comment.

They didn't think to ask us about how we might want to make use of technology merely to control and manage the manner in which we do so. Ridiculous.

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Why Labour is wrong (apart from on VAT) about 'saving the high street'

The Labour Party is setting out to “Save our High Street”. And it has a four-point plan to do so. Now one of the points – cutting VAT would make a difference (nothing like a price cut to stimulate spending). The rest are eyewash, anti-competitive or downright stupid.

Introduce a retail diversity planning clause, putting communities in charge of the future of their local high streets. Local people and local retailers would have a say on any retail plans for their area, giving them the power to put the heart back into the high street.

This is about stopping the further development of those dreadful supermarkets (although Labour should bear in mind that, for most supermarket developments, public opinion is pretty evenly split). However, it also hands to businesses the opportunity to prevent competition. This rather reminds me of the retired shopkeeper who once told me that “they shouldn’t allow” two shops selling a similar range in a high street. And it certainly reminds me of the way in which the National Market Traders Federation has browbeaten markets operators to do just that.

Create a ‘competition test’ in the planning system, leading to greater choice and lower prices for shoppers. The test would ensure a level playing field between small and large shops.

No I haven’t any idea what this means – except that it doesn’t seem to mean more competition or for competition to be effective. Translated it appears to mean – again – saying no to supermarkets. Now this might be a good thing – I have some sympathy with those who dislike supermarkets – but it will not lead to “greater choice and lower prices for shoppers”.

The problem with these proposals is that they are – as is too often the case – intended more to get the right headline than to look at what might be done to “save” the high street. There is no analysis, no appraisal of the retail markets just banal (and dangerous – putting retailers ‘in charge’ of retail planning, that’s a great idea) comments.

The problem with ‘our’ high streets is that:

1. People like to take their car to go shopping – it’s convenient with those heavy bags – and town centres have hard to access parking that costs too much.  Out-of-town retailing has ample, surface car parking that’s usually free. Unless Labour are planning to ban cars (or maybe just car parking) this will not change – people will continue to prefer out-of-town to the high street
2. Even lazier folk have discovered the Internet and on-line shopping! Without leaving the cosy comfort of my house I can purchase – and have delivered to my door – all the good things I want.  Good things that, in times past, I had to go to the high street to buy. Whatever you do with the planning system – short of banning home delivery or shutting of the Internet – the growth in on-line retail isn’t going to stop

 It really is as simple as this – yet Councils and their planners continue to make it ever harder for people to get their cars into town centres. And this means those people choose differently – they don’t do what the planners want and hop on the bus, they take the car to Bluewater, Lakeside, Trafford Park or Meadowhall.

If you want to ‘save the high street’, you have to start with what it’s for – is it the place we go for everyday shopping or is it a destination for leisure and pleasure? It seems to me that the days of the high street as a place for convenience shopping were numbers when, in 1968, planners in Sussex allowed Tesco to build their first out-of-town supermarket in Crawley. And once the principle was established in one place, for one set of goods the genie was out and away – out-of-town shopping had won. We should accept this reality.

But surely town centres will be kept going by all those workers who trail in and out of town every day? Partly, yes but only partly - next time you’re on the edge of town look at the tenants moving onto business parks. Where once there were just low added value operations – call centres, back office paperwork farms and warehousing – now we see front of house functions, lawyers, accountants and others who once dominated the commercial sector in town. The convenience of free parking combined with lower rents (and other benefits such as staff safety) sees business moving out from town centres into these out-of-town locations.

So what to do with the town centre? The answer lies with leisure – with the fact that we need a location to play out our celebrations, that we like to wander and admire nice buildings, that we enjoy culture – theatre, galleries, museums, and that we enjoy down time in a pleasant place. When Will Alsop published his Bradford masterplan with its park, with a lake and with an anti-development theme, people scoffed, called it madness. And tried then to turn it into a traditional, development-led masterplan founded on property values.

Looking back, I have come to the view that Alsop was right – Bradford needed less development to make it succeed not more development. We did need to clear out the horrible 1960s buildings that stood in homage to the failures of the City’s past dreams. We did need a park – including, if you will, a great lake. What we didn’t need was a soul-less commercial approach to the problem. We needed to make Bradford a destination.

And that is what we should be doing with town centres – giving people a good reason to go there rather than trying to stop us having the convenience of shopping out-of-town. The Labour proposals are pretty thin – rather than creating places people want to visit, they want to prevent development, stifle change and reduce competition. All for the sake of a cheap and easy headline.

Our high streets deserve better than this, they deserve some real thought based on a fuller understand of the social changes that drive the decline of in-town retailing rather than the sad, sourness of “we hate supermarkets”.

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Seems Robert Halfon wants the government to regulate the Internet (but only for businesses). And he's a Tory?

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Now before I go any further let’s be clear that I know little of the technical whizz-bangery that underlies on-line advertising and marketing. Indeed, it is possible – just as was the case with a previous generation of targeted marketing – that the technical possibilities get in the way of sense and good tactical thinking.

The objective of targeted market hasn’t changed – the aim is to reduce cost-per-order. That is it. There is no other justification for targeting customer and prospects. The only point is to raise the productivity of marketing activity and to improve the return on marketing investment.

Now we know how targeted advertising and marketing raises privacy concerns – indeed MPs are very keen to apply standards of data protection, data gathering and data use to private business that are ignored in the operation of public activities (and especially security and law enforcement).

So we have an EDM – a pointless motion to be sure but a statement from some MPs – about “new data protection controls to protect people against the rise in targeted advertising.” Apparently, WPP have “...profiles of up to half a billion internet users, which the motion suggests may include almost all British citizens.”

We’ll return to Big Brother Watch’s scaremongering about WPP in a minute, but first the motion:

That this House is deeply concerned that privacy is gradually being eroded by private companies using the internet to obtain personal data and selling it for commercial gain; notes that the latest problem is with WPP Group plc, the advertising firm, which claims to have built up individual profiles for half a billion internet users across the world, including allegedly almost 100 per cent. of British people; further notes that secret monitoring of internet users is already a huge issue, with data scraping and cookies monitoring people without their consent; believes an internet bill of rights is needed to guard against the growing infringement of civil liberties that are not covered by existing legislation; and further believes that the Information Commissioner lacks the powers necessary to protect personal data and has done precious little to protect our privacy in recent tests such as the Google Street View project.

Note that the MPs aren’t expressing concern about the police collecting and storing personal data, or HMRC, or DWP, of the security services or your local council. These MPs are concerned that private businesses are “secretly monitoring the internet”. This is rubbish. Utter rubbish.

Now I don’t know for sure what it is that WPP have collected but I’m pretty sure that if it does contain data on “almost 100% of British people” that will be information that you or I – or even Robert Halfon, the motion sponsor – would be able to collect without much trouble. You know the stuff – name, address, maybe a phone number, some credit history analysis and, for some, a little purchase history. Understand that this is the collecting of information that people give across freely in order to play in the Internet’s happy world.

And it makes me smile when phrases like “using the Internet to obtain personal data and selling it for commercial gain” – what on earth do these people think businesses do? And the Internet is increasingly the place to do business. So for Mr Halfon – who is a Tory and should know better – let me explain targeting.

There’s a shopkeeper who, when a customer walks into his shop, engages them in conversation. He finds out where they live, what they like to do, how many kids they have, when their birthdays are, what sort of jam they prefer and so forth. That same shopkeeper also notes what the customer buys, how much they spend and even where else they shop. And he keeps a record of this “data”.

The shopkeeper sends the kids a birthday card – perhaps with a discount off some sweets or a toy. And he makes sure he stocks the right jam, tells those who like it when there’s an offer on and introduces new offers, maybe as a result of looking at what other similar customers are buying.

Now I’m pretty sure that Mr Halfon would applaud such enterprise from a shopkeeper in his Harlow constituency. Indeed, as MPs are wont to do, he might pass comment on such initiative in the House while urging some minister to support and encourage such entrepreneurship.

But it seems that when a business does just this – gathering information about people so it might make better offers to them, design the products they need or want and reduce costs through less wasteful advertising – Mr Halfon disapproves and talks darkly of “civil liberties”. Yet there is no real difference – other than efficiency (the shopkeepers records will be far better than WPP’s ‘profiles’) – between the two activities.

There is a problem with targeting – mostly that it doesn’t work nearly as well as those selling the technology claim. And indeed the most precious information – purchase history and responsiveness to offer – isn’t something that businesses are prepared to share with their competitors. Simple address-related data has some use but as a tool for targeting is of limited value – and bluntly this is most of what WPP will have gathered.

And finally let me make an important point. I know exactly and precisely why a business wants to collect, store and use information about me. The business does this in order to improve its chances of selling something to me. I get benefit from this. That is it.

the state collects, stores and makes use of information about me for reasons of control, direction and taxation. I derive no benefit from such activity. Perhaps, rather than getting in such a flap about WPP, Mr Halfon (and the assortment of lefties who have signed his motion) might like to turn their attention to the real problem – abuse of personal data by the state.

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Why you mustn’t let the Government regulate the Internet – some thoughts on net neutrality

I mean, what do I know? Surely Simon you should steer away from those geek subjects like ‘net neutrality’! But it’s important – very important – because…

…the advocates of ‘net neutrality’ are asking for the Internet to be regulated by Government.

And, you are quite right dear reader; this is not a good thing at all.

But first the argument. Here’s Ed Vaizey upsetting the net neutrality wonks by saying no:

Internet service providers such as BT should be allowed to abandon net neutrality and prioritise users' access to certain content providers, the communications minister Ed Vaizey said in a speech today.

The move away from net neutrality in the UK will prove controversial as it opens the door for ISPs to favour some websites in terms of the volume and speed of the delivery of their content to users, while others given lower priority could see their internet traffic suffer.

This is a bad thing say those wonks (and some vested interests like the search engine providers and the BBC):

In this case the baby they'll eat is the open internet. If ISPs can say to firms, "nice data you've got here. It'd be a shame if anything happened to it" they can ensure that the next YouTube, the next iPlayer never takes off.

Bear in mind that many ISPs aren't just carriers: they're also in the media business, so for example ISPs such as BT, Sky and Virgin have services that could be seen as competitors to, er, YouTube and iPlayer. That should be reason enough to worry about net neutrality.

The problem is that the solution offered by the supporters of ‘net neutrality’ is more Government. Because we think that corporations eat babies, we hand control over to the biggest baby eater of them all – our Government? Now that seems a really good idea! What do you think that Government will do with its regulatory powers? Allow us really free access to the Internet? Any Internet? Who are you trying to kid!

Of course statist apologists like to play games with words – here’s the estimable Left Foot Forward demonstrating how he doesn’t understand what makes a free market:

What does net neutrality actually mean? Net neutrality can be hard to define because of technical issues involved. But according to one of the world’s experts on it, Professor Tim Wu of Columbia Law School in New York, it is a principle that advocates no restrictions by internet service providers, infrastructure providers or the government on content, sites or different ways of using the ’net. It is an online ‘free market’ in its purest sense.

Not really since net neutrality requires enforcement, regulation and controls that are designed externally to the market. But that’s not the big deal here. The big problem is that there are no constitutional protections in the UK – government, that rapacious, lying hobgoblin, can do as it pleases. And it will – even the waving of a tiny stick by Ed Vaizey shows a willingness to order and direct the operation of the market.

In a more considered and less frothing piece on Wired three concerns are raised about ‘net neutrality’ arguments:

First is that bandwidth is not, in fact, unlimited, especially in the wireless world. One reason ISPs are averse to neutrality regulation, they say, is that they need the flexibility to ban or mitigate high-bandwidth uses of their network, like BitTorrent and Hulu.com, which would otherwise run amok. Take away their ability to prioritize traffic, the ISPs say, and overall service will suffer.

Second, enforcement of neutrality regulations is going to be difficult. Comcast may not be able to block Skype traffic altogether, but what’s to prevent the company from slowing it down relative to other traffic it carries? Such preferential “packet shaping” is easy to turn off and on, as network demands ebb and flow. By contrast, proving such infractions of neutrality will be complex, slow and difficult.

Third, the new regulations create an additional layer of government bureaucracy where the free market has already proven its effectiveness. The reason you’re not using AOL to read this right now isn’t because the government mandated AOL’s closed network out of existence: It’s because free and open networks triumphed, and that’s because they were good business.

Now the FCC is proposing taking a free market that works, and adding another layer of innovation-stifling regulations on top of that? This may please the net neutrality advocates…but it doesn’t add up.

I’m somewhat equivocal about this but my instinct is that we should be more concerned with core market constraints - access, oligopolistic power, cartelization – than with introducing new regulations. Especially when Government has already taken to itself the power to act on such anti-competitive actions.


Finally I do not really subscribe to the ‘corporations eat babies’ principle that drives much of the ‘net neutrality’ support. In the main corporations operating in a free market have cause to provide for their customers what those customers want – and not just fifty percent plus one as is the case with government. Government’s duty is not to punish Virgin and News Corp for being successful businesses with strong brands but to ensure that those businesses do not prevent market entry or stifle competition. And we need no new laws to do that.

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