The Seattle times, in a recent editorial, titled “FCC warns Comcast: Keep the Internet open“, supported the FCC action against Comcast for blocking a certain file-sharing program. The Times goes even further in supporting passage of so-called “net-neutrality” laws that would supposedly prohibit large internet service providers like Comcast from discriminating in the type and quantity of content it provides to its users.
The idea behind net-neutrality is that people have a right to the same information on the internet, and consequently, internet providers, specifically the companies that move data around the internet, have a responsibility to provide it equally to all.
People have no more right to internet content then they have a right to food, not if that right forces other men to provide it for them. The internet is not a natural resource, it is a creation of certain men, and those men have the right and the responsibility to dictate its use. Those men are not asking their users for a guarantee to always buy their products.
Some men do not have a right to the product of other men’s efforts, only the right to create those products themselves or obtain them through free exchange. This idea is the ethical cornerstone of our Republic, immortalized in the words of Thomas Jefferson: all men have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The principle specifically says “pursuit”, not “guarantee”. The freedom to pursue one’s own happiness is precisely what our political system of individual rights is supposed to protect, what a free market facilitates and what a country chained by bureaucratic regulation will wreck
The Times argues for introducing the heavy hand of government into a creative and dynamic environment without bothering to take into account the possible negative consequences, moral and practical, of that.
Would the Seattle Times acquiesce to a “printing press-neutrality” law that dictated how it should run its presses?
