A commenter on the article from the previous post about NetNeutrailty squads gives me another example of the rush to "Trust the market" kind of thinking. When we fail to recognize what this commenter refers to as the "occasional" failures (these types of defenses of "free market" already reveal their tendency to rush to the defense of "hands off" at the very moments when the indications are that overstepping by telecommunications companies is already happening . That seems to be the case here. The commenter:
Vint Cerf and Peter Neumann are serious people who have made serious contributions to computer science and engineering, but they’re wrong here. The best role for government in any free market is to keep an eye open for abuses. It should not step in unless absolutely necessary.
Why? In our economic system, vigorous and open competition has produced great prosperity and extraordinary technological advances, not to mention strong motivation for numerous academic disciplines. That same competition works to correct missteps and abuses in productive ways, even though it fails occasionally and government action is needed. Overzealous guidance by slow-moving, consensus-seeking, politically cowering, and, at the lower levels, effectively tenured government bureaucrats, on the other hand, always leads to mediocrity for reasons that are obvious to the observant.
Computer Scientists Form ‘Network Neutrality Squad’ – Chronicle.com
It is the existence of such "free market" defenses that should alert us to the forces of monopoly and abuse that these kinds of companies unleash. It is the tendency to rely on this argument to its logical limits and beyond. I know people in the IT-related circles who see this abuse when it comes to Net Neutrality (because these abuses hit them "where they live", but then refuse to recognize this when corporations in other arenas do exactly the same thing, but they do not perceive themselves to be affected by those abuses, nor do they see or even care if they saw, the effects of such abuses on the more economically vulnerable in our society). An example of such happened when the Net Neutrality debates were happening in the US government a couple of years ago, and most Republicans were backing the arguments of the Telecommunications companies. A former co-worker who was (and still is, to my knowledge) a rabid Bush-backer, made the comment: "It’s enough to make me want to be a Democrat". This was my immediate thought "You see that now because this particular issue hits you where you live". This particular example should be a revelation of sorts. There are lots of other "abuses" that affect those on the lower economic rungs much more so than it does us (and there are long-term "trickle UP" effects coming, and obvious economic effects already happening, as well as the environmental)
