A very poor argument against net neutrality

At first I thought that this New York Times op-ed was written by Tim Berners-Lee, in which case I might have given it more credence, but it's not. It's written by this Tim Lee instead, a Tim Lee who worked for the Cato Institute, which means he's a Libertarian, which means he's an idiot.

I think there are cases to be made for holding off on so-called "net neutrality" legislation, but he doesn't make any of them. Instead he argues a derivative of the basic libertarian credo, which is roughly that, "Because every government official is corrupt, telco lobbyists will write legislation that gives them control of everything in a legally binding way! See? It happened 150 years ago with the railroads! Eh? Eh?" Ignore for a moment that anti-trust legislation was enacted in the 30's partly due to the railroads. And that the internet is vastly more complex than the railroad system. Ignore all that.

Focus instead on the logic, which basically says that because you can end up with the wrong people writing or influencing regulations, you shouldn't try. That's stupid, and I think most sane people recognize that that's stupid. The same line of reasoning would lead you to declare giving up on the criminal justice system entirely because you can never catch all the crooks, and in the meantime figure that the criminals will kill each other off in sufficient numbers that a few of us normal folk will survive the mayhem. Good system, eh?

And as an aside, the comment, "Today, government regulation of cable television is the primary obstacle to competition" is unsubstantiated horse shit (yes, this is my new favorite phrase). The fact that there's only one physical coax cable winding around your sprinkler system and into a hole in your wall is the primary obstacle to competition, and that cable is either connected to something on the other end if you paid your Comcast bill this month, or it's not, you jackass.

(I've decided to cut this rant short and do a separate network neutrality rant)