The Seattle times, in a recent editorial, titled "FCC
warns Comcast: Keep the Internet open", supported the FCC action
against Comcast for blocking a certain file-sharing program. The
Times goes even further in supporting passage of so-called net-neutrality" laws
that would supposedly prohibit large internet service providers like
Comcast from discriminating in the type and quantity of content it
provides to its users.
The idea behind net-neutrality is that people
have a right to the same information on the
internet, and consequently, internet providers, specifically the
companies that move data around the internet, have a
responsibility to provide it equally to all.
People have no more right to internet content
then they have a right to food, not if that right forces other men to
provide it for them. The internet is not a natural resource, it is
a creation of certain men, and those men have the right and the
responsibility to dictate its use. Those men are not asking their
users for a guarantee to always buy their products.
Some men do not have a right to the product of
other men's efforts, only the right to create those products themselves or
obtain them through free exchange.
This idea is the ethical cornerstone of our Republic,
immortalized in the words of Thomas Jefferson:
all men have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness. The principle
specifically says “pursuit”, not “guarantee”.
The freedom to pursue one’s own happiness is precisely what our
political system of individual rights is supposed to protect, what a
free market facilitates and what a country chained by bureaucratic
regulation will wreck
The Times argues for introducing the heavy hand of
government into a creative and dynamic environment without bothering to
take into account the possible negative consequences, moral and
practical, of that.
Would the Seattle Times acquiesce to a “printing
press-neutrality” law that dictated how it should run its presses?
