Free Internet

My mother is an employee of Cisco Systems and thus works (ultimately) for one John Chambers. Apparently, Mr. Chambers has lately been pushing for government-backed free internet for all.

This is an issue that most people I know either support, or don't particularly mind. Even the most avid free marketeers have mostly, in my experience, been OK with the idea of the government providing internet for people.

I am categorically opposed to the idea.

Here is why: because government provided internet means that government bureaucrats also get to decide what is and is not filtered. Taxpayers end up paying more in order to give the government more control over what can be accessed.

There's little reason to be skeptical that this would occur; it has happened already in cities like Boston that have municipal wifi.

Some might argue that having internet that is free, but government controlled, would be at least a good option to have. It's not an unreasonable point of view, but I still disagree. For having that "free" internet would limit our ability event to go to an alternative.

After all, what "free" really means is that the cost is spread out among the taxpayers. The price is still paid, and in the end people are left with less money to spend than they would have been had they gone without said "free" internet. Moreover, with less money in their pockets, the extra cost of going to an actual private internet company over using the public service will increase, distorting the market.

As more people actually make use of the public internet service, it will grow slower and require more expansion. Only now that using funds to invest in improving internet service is a political decision rather than a business decision, it's unlikely that it would do any better for itself than mass transit has. As with public buses or trains, it's one thing to pay the initial costs of production, and quite another to provide good maintenance after the fact. In the market, an increase in demand means that more money will be invested in producing a better, and more affordable product. In government, an increase in demand means long waits and low quality.

So maybe, in the end, people would opt out of the free internet, as it became slow and cumbersome and regulations cut out too much of what people go to the internet for in the first place. But again, unlike the market, that doesn't mean that it would just go away. Just as public services have a lousy track record when it comes to maintenance, so too do they have a tendency to achieve near-immortality.

So even if everyone opted out of the government funded internet, it'd still probably end up as a big money hole that no politician would have the backbone to suggest simply doing away with.

That is pretty much the long and short of why I find myself being one of maybe five guys in the whole damn world who opposes the free internet lobby.