Recently, The Nation ran an article,
The End of the
Internet, that viewed with alarm some efforts
by telephone companies to hack their governing regulations so they can
price-discriminate. Their plans include tiered pricing so a consumer’s
monthly rate could be tied to the amount of bandwidth actually used. They
also want to be able to offer preferred fast access to on-line services
that pay for the privilege — and the flip side of that could
be shutting down services like peer-to-peer networking that big media
companies dislike.
One of my regular visitors. David McCabe, asked me what a libertarian
would do about this. A fair question, representative of a large class
of problems about what you do to constrain monopolies already in place
without resorting to more regulation.
Here’s the answer I gave him:
Deregulate and let the telcos have their tiered pricing — as long as
we also deregulate enough radio spectrum that the telcos
(evil monopolist scum that they are) will promptly be hammered flat by
wireless mesh networks.
David replied “Beautiful. Blog it.” Hence this screed…
The fundamental problem with the telecoms regime we have is that
the Baby Bells inherited from Mama Bell a monopoly lock on the last
mile (the cables running to end-users’ homes and businesses). More
backbone capacity would be easy and is in no way a natural monopoly,
especially given the huge overbuild of optical-fiber trunk lines
during the Internet boom of the 1990s. But the ‘last mile’, as long
as it’s wire lines, truly is a natural monopoly or oligopoly —
nobody wants more than one set of telephone poles per street, and
their capacity to carry wires is limited. That system doesn’t scale
up.
To a left-wing rag like The Nation, the answer is to
huff and puff about more regulation. But more regulation would do
nothing to attack the telcos’ real power position, which is the
physical constraints on the last mile. The truly pro-freedom anwer is
to enable the free market to take that power position away from
them.
Wireless mesh networking — flocks of cheap WiFi nodes that
automatically discover neighboring nodes and act as routers — is
the technology that can do that. With the right software, networks of
these can be self-configuring and self-repairing. It’s pure
libertarianism cast in silicon, a perfectly decentralist bottom-up
solution that could replace wirelines and the politico-economic
choke-point they imply.
The main thing holding wireless mesh networking back is the small
size of the bandwidth now allotted to it for spread-spectrum frequency
hopping. With enough volume, competition would drive the price of
these creatures to $20 or less per unit — low enough for
individuals and community organizations to spot them everywhere
there’s an electrical grid. Increments of capacity would be cheap,
too; with the right software, your WiFi card could aggregate the
bandwidth for as many nodes as there happen to be in radio range.
(And that software? Open source, of course. Mesh networking relies
on open source and open standards. Some of the node designs out there
are open hardware, too. The mesh network would be transparent, top
to bottom.)
Today, many people already leave their WiFi access points open for
their neighbors to use, even though DSL or cable costs real money,
because the incremental cost of being nice is negligible. At the
equilibrium price level of mesh networking, wireless free Internet
access would be ubiquitous everywhere except deep wilderness areas.
But the wireline backbone wouldn’t vanish, because mesh networking solves
the bandwidth problem at the expense of piling on latency (cumulative
routing and retransmission delays). Large communications users
would still find it useful to be hooked up to long-haul fiber networks
in order to hold down the amount of latency added by multiple hops over the
mesh. The whole system would self-equilibrate, seeking the most
efficient mix of free and pay networking.
As usual, the best solution to the problems of regulation and
imperfect markets is not more politics and regulation, but less of it
— letting the free market work. Not that I expect The
Nation to figure this out soon, or ever; like all leftists,
they will almost certainly remain useful idiots for anyone, tyrant or
telco monopolist, who knows that political ‘solutions’ to market
problems always favor the powerful and politically connected over the
little people they are ostensibly designed to help.