There’s an article in Monday’s Wall Street Journal by Andy Kessler, who is a former hedge fund manager and writes books. And it’s a good example of how not to argue against net neutrality.

It’s such a muddled argument that it seems for at least half the time as if he’s arguing for the other side. He gets his facts wrong (suggesting Comcast blocks P2P downloads rather than uploads), makes invidious comparisons (because Comcast’s packet reset technique is the same as used by China to censor content the two are apparently in the same boat) and generally seems to be uninformed about the debate or the current state of the market. He mentions AT&T as a competitor to cable, but only as a provider of DSL services (he either doesn’t know about or conveniently forgets to mention its fibre rollout, which is delivering substantially faster speeds), and he doesn’t seem to know about Verizon, which is rolling out fibre too.

His solution is to drive more competition, which would apparently stimulate a rollout of fibre (ahem - see previous paragraph). Qwest is also rolling out fibre to the node in 23 of the markets it serves in 2008. He does seem to acknlowedge this fact later on but only in the context of this paragraph:

Municipal or privately run wireless data services using Wi-Fi or WiMax should be sprouting like weeds. But they aren’t being built because of lack of access to street lights, of all things, to set up access points. Verizon is busy rolling out a fiber optic service, FIOS, that will provide much higher speeds and real competition to Comcast. But it is slow going, as state by state video franchise rules still favor cable over any newcomers.

He seems to be unaware that several attempts have been made to run municipal WiFi and on the whole they’ve been flops, not because of access to street lights (which, in municipal deployments, aren’t a problem) but because the technology and business model are lousy. WiMAX is being deployed by Towerstream and Clearwire among others, with Sprint set to follow, but it too is unproven as a technology which would compete effectively with fibre rollout. And his details on FiOS are also a little out of date - it’s been some time since Verizon complained about franchising, since it’s actually making very good progress on that front with help from national and state-wide efforts to ease franchising processes.

My favourite line, though, has to be this one:

We have faux competition, cable monopolies versus phone monopolies

Does anyone want to volunteer to help Mr Kessler with a definition of the word monopoly?

Another great set of paragraphs:

A stroke of a pen can cure these ills, incumbents be damned. They will adjust. I personally would climb telephone poles on my street to run fiber if I could get 100 megabit Internet service. Any takers? Talk about an economic stimulus; this is the type of infrastructure we need. The stock market will fund it all as well as resolve overbuild problems.

Don’t think of Internet access as a static business — someone put in phone lines 50 years ago or cable lines 20 years ago, and we are stuck with their limitations. Technology changes the game every few years. Even fiber lines put in today will be obsolete within 10 years and need upgrading. Same for wireless systems.

The trick to an open and innovative Internet is not sneaky technical fixes nor more rules and regulations and bureaucracies to enforce them. The Internet will only expand based on competitive principles, not socialist diktat. The more we can do to clear a path, the greater our national wealth will be. Comcast did us a favor by bringing this net neutrality debate out in the open. I hope the FCC doesn’t fall for this lousy idea.

I love the way that he’s proposing massive new regulations on incumbents in the form of rights of way and pole access, but also decries “socialist diktat”. What’s the difference, Mr Kessler? If the government should be getting out of the way, then let them get out of the way. Don’t go backwards to where we were two to 12 years ago, when the kind of access he’s proposing was part of the failing regulatory regime. Competition is thriving. Yes, in most areas it’s currently a duopoly between cable and telco, but wide area wireless broadband through the cellphone companies and WiMAX-based providers are potential competitors too, and all because government finally got out of the way and stopped trying to create competition through regulation, allowing the market to work.