Oh, and please don't use the term "scholar" and "Discovery Institute" in the same sentence. It physically pains me.
It shouldn't surprise me that the conclusion of Captain ID is that, "...and therefore net neutrality is bad." Incidentally, let me point out before moving on the following passage in the Ars Technica article:
"The first two [of Captain ID's] examples have nothing to do with any sort of commonly-understood concept of 'Net neutrality (neither Google, MySpace, nor Dell are network operators), but one sees what Swanson means."How typical of Discovery Institute publications: "Well, it's kind of incoherent nonsense, but we can sorta kinda see the point the guy was ineptly trying to make."
First, let's point out that this is just the classic last-mile problem being rehashed. This has nothing to do with the capacity of the Internet itself. It's an economic rather than a technical problem.
Further, it's alarmist horse shit. They make it sound like we will continually need to upgrade wires into everybody's homes. We don't. Install fiber once, and the problem is basically solved, at least for the next few decades. The problem just becomes who is going to pay for the wire. And hey, psst, you know what? If private enterprise is balking at paying for it, we could...*gulp*...get government to do it. It's common infrastructure. That's supposed to be part of what government does. We did it with roads, we did it with electrical wires, and we did it with telephone wires. Why is fiber so different? Government builds the wires and then leases them to ISPs. You get the side benefit of inducing competition in the ISP market. Come on people, it's just not that hard!
If a bunch of schmucks from Utah can do it, I think we can handle the problem, don't you?
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