The Only Republican in San Francisco

AT&T's net neutrality concession

Interesting bit that AT&T has offered a net neutrality concession in its bid to merge with SBC. It’s causing equal parts triumph and consternation among neutrality advocates. I think the consternation part is most accurate, since AT&T seems to have gained its merger without giving up much of anything.

Susan Crawford has what I found to be the most insightful analysis on this, for a number of reasons. She parses the language to point out a couple of important things. The first is that the neutrality provisions do not apply to AT&T’s new offerings, only to their existing DSL offering:

"Wireline broadband Internet access service" means traditional copper-wire digital subscriber line access provided by phone companies like AT&T.  It's not very fast, but it's much faster than dial-up, and AT&T and Verizon sell it to a lot of people.

Importantly, neutrality does not apply to their new “U-verse” service, which offers Internet-based television to compete with cable. So in that regard, I am OK with it, since most of my concern about neutrality legislation is that it would put a straightjacket around new services.

And the “neutrality” is limited to the pipe from the consumer’s house to the first router that it hits at AT&T. So follow the wire from your home to where it first joins the network. That part is neutral. It’s also the least interesting part of the network, and not the place to put intelligence, in any case.

For these reasons the neutrality provisions are, to my mind, toothless. And in that regard I agree with neutrality advocates, though for me it’s a positive and for them it's a negative.

Susan also points out something I have been saying all along:

This means that naked, neutral, non-prioritized internet access (for AT&T customers, anyway) stays at 2001 speeds.  AT&T has no incentive to upgrade its existing DSL facilities -- it wants to move everyone to this new U-verse.

Exactly right. AT&T (and any other network provider) has very little incentive to invest in a regulated, neutral network. By adding a neutrality promise to their existing DSL, they have removed any reason to build out that network further.

(Our copper phone infrastructure has remained in stasis for 100 years for this reason.)

So imagine if neutrality proponents get their way and enforce network neutrality via a governmental diktat. This disincentive would then apply to our entire network infrastructure. I am glad that Susan has pointed this out, though I suspect this isn’t the argument she wished to make.

Overall, AT&T made a concession out of political expedience, and I think it won’t mean much. The neutrality provisions are sunsetted after two years, and they don’t apply to the interesting parts of the network. I think AT&T won this round.

And, to be clear, I don’t much care if AT&T or any of the other players lives or dies. I am not rooting for anyone except the consumer, who is best served by an unregulated market.

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Richard Bennett has more.

Conservatives and charity

Meant to write about this earlier, filed under "please lose your stereotypes". In this time of giving, I thought I would point out a recent set of studies that found conservatives are considerably more charitable than liberals. From Scientific American:

Syracuse University professor Arthur C. Brooks argues in Who Really Cares (Basic Books, 2006) that when it comes to charitable giving and volunteering, numerous quantitative measures debunk the myth of "bleeding heart liberals" and "heartless conservatives." Conservatives donate 30 percent more money than liberals (even when controlled for income), give more blood and log more volunteer hours. In general, religious people are more than three times more generous than secularists to all charities, 14 percent more munificent to nonreligious charities and 57 percent more likely than a secularist to help a homeless person. In terms of societal health, charitable givers are 43 percent more likely to say they are "very happy" than nongivers and 25 percent more likely than nongivers to say their health is excellent or very good.

More money, more volunteering, and even more blood. Not only is the above true about conservatives, but you will note that it is even more pronounced among religious people.

Which is why, even though I am not religious, I have an admiration for people of faith. Mostly because I find them to be more honest and less narcissistic when it comes to personal morals. They are more likely to understand what faith is and isn't. And, broadly speaking, religious ideals point toward things which are good for communities and individuals.

Predictably, many will point to religious zealots and ask, "how can you say this?" Well, all I can say is that if you seek stereotypes, you will always find them. And if one believes that that the extremes of a particular group represent the rest of the group, that's simple bigotry. In making such an argument, one might look inside and ask how skilled in tolerance one really is.

Mainstream religious folks -- my Mom comes to mind -- like their beliefs, like their morals and, perhaps most importantly, value community. They have very little interest in thumping any sort of book. But they walk the talk when it comes to generosity and tolerance.

Faith, ultimately, is about optimism. Perhaps this is why I think it's worth defending.

Merry Christmas.

Provo learns a lesson

Municipal broadband is fast becoming the electronic equivalent of government cheese

Reason magazine has a report on the absurdity of a municipal broadband project in Provo, Utah. An excerpt:

"Provo entered a fast-moving broadband market that it, like most local governments, is ill-equipped to compete in," said Steven Titch, the study's author and a policy analyst at Reason Foundation. "At this point, taxpayers can only hope to limit their losses."

iProvo lost $1.36 million in fiscal 2003, $1.42 million in 2004, and $1.67 million in 2005.

It seems to me that these are the obvious outcomes when a government attempts to build what should be a commercial offering. Government has very little expertise in consumer services, and more importantly, its standards are much lower than a for-profit company.

Government is not subject to the disciplines of the market. Project is losing money? No real demand? Government will continue to pour money into it, while a for-profit company would direct resources to where they are actually demanded. The incentives are exactly opposite: one rewards success, while the other rewards failure.

I think that is the heart of the problem with municipal broadband: it is being built without verifiable customer demand, but with public money. It’s the electronic equivalent of government cheese.

Let’s imagine it another way. Should your city be in the supermarket business? And if not, why not? The obvious answer is that your current food choices are vast, you can spend a lot or a little, you can go veggie or meatie, you can buy everything from doughnuts to edamame, you can prepare it yourself or pay someone to do it for you.

Nobody thinks it’s in the public interest to have government selling food. And yet we imagine that it can handle something as dynamic as broadband?

Look, if there is a demand for city-wide broadband, it will be built by those who can make money from it. And if money cannot be made from it, we might take it as a sign that it is not a good use of resources. Provo is learning this the hard way.

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Here’s what I’ve said previously about Manhattan’s attempt at muni wi-fi:

If the argument is that the city needs to serve the needs of its poorest citizens, then let’s address it as such. In that case, consider having the libraries and parks offer WiFi. Put it in their budgets. Make it municipal in the sense of true public spaces. I’m not sure that Citigroup, Time Warner or Trump need any charity bandwidth.

Pardon the self-quoting.

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Update 15 Dec: Tom Lenard over at the PFF further fleshes out the reality that gov’t is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist:

The result is some combination of higher taxes and higher electricity rates (iProvo is being cross-subsidized by the municipal utility), for no real benefit. The Reason study indicates that most of iProvo's 5,000 customers had broadband before and that the rates being charged are not substantially lower than those being offered by the incumbent cable and telephone companies.

The Scarlet R

Dr. Helen has a fun post about whether one should call themselves a Republican, or care how people respond to the term. When I started this blog, I though about it some, but mostly knew that a) it was catchy and b) it would drive people around here crazy.

In some ways I underestimated how people would react when presented with the R word. I was back east for a high school reunion (won't tell you which year) and an old, dear friend of mine, upon learning that I have a blog that is in some way "Republican", immediately said, "What's it called, 'I Am An Asshole'"?

(She's a college professor, too, btw.)

I've learned that, at heart, people do not like differences, or often even the appearance of differences. While many folks I talk to have a sincere interest in issues, a similar number have a Tourettic reaction that assumes I carry certain beliefs, even if we've never discussed a particular topic. Or, more likely, they ask me to defend this or that person who calls themselves a Republican.

And this is from "progressives", mind you. If one were to meet a black guy and immediately assume he likes rap, or a Jewish dude and ask him about money, what sort of person would that make you?

I understand that it is natural to think of people in groups. We all do it, it is a very human instinct. But what separates a person in my mind is one who can actually imagine a world of consenting individuals, with all it entails. That's progressive.

It's also really hard. Most people won't do it, and that's perfectly human. But to imagine that one is somehow more progressive or tolerant, while displaying no such characteristics, well, that's why I started this blog.

Anyway, back to Helen's topic. Sometimes I feel the need to explain to people that "Well, I am a free-market libertarian" when they respond badly to the R word. I considered not using it for a while.

But a good friend demonstrated something to me a few years ago, without his knowing. He is a lifelong Catholic, if not an especially pious one. When a wave of priest-molestation scandals came up, he continued to tell folks he is a Catholic. He caught shit from group-thinkers and headline-repeaters, but had the courage to know what he stands for and what he doesn't. He assumed a base amount of intelligence in the person he was talking to.

More recently, a new friend of mine -- who claims to have had a framed photo of Russell Kirk growing up, and whose dad read the WSJ editorial page at the dinner table (!) -- said, why wouldn't you call yourself a Republican, if you know what you believe?

She's right. There is little value in playing semantics. Yeah, I am Republican. I am also a libertarian, and perhaps I am a conservative, not sure. At the end of the day, if more folks will embrace the ideas that I think are important, I will be thrilled. No matter what they call themselves.

The Myth of the Southern Strategy

Here is an interesting tidbit in today’s NYT Magazine about the myth of the so-called Republican “Southern Strategy”:

In their book “The End of Southern Exceptionalism,” Richard Johnston of the University of Pennsylvania and Byron Shafer of the University of Wisconsin argue that the shift in the South from Democratic to Republican was overwhelmingly a question not of race but of economic growth. In the postwar era, they note, the South transformed itself from a backward region to an engine of the national economy, giving rise to a sizable new wealthy suburban class. This class, not surprisingly, began to vote for the party that best represented its economic interests: the G.O.P. Working-class whites, however — and here’s the surprise — even those in areas with large black populations, stayed loyal to the Democrats. [emphasis mine, link added]

In short, the cliché that Republicans over the last several decades have catered to some canonical Southern racist is bunk. I’ve long wondered where these claims came from — there is very little evidence of racism in the rhetoric that I have seen coming from Republicans, certainly no more or less than comes from Democrats or the society at large. And yet, Dems and liberals work hard to tar the Republicans with this perception.

Here is the important difference: racists in the Republican party are quickly marginalized, certainly for as long as I have been an observer of politics.

In the meantime, identity politics has become the Democratic mainstream. The idea is that people must be identified into groups — by race, class, gender — and from that identification, policy is built. Without this premise, it is my belief that there simply can be no progressive agenda. It is entirely predicated on the group.

This is a natural outgrowth of the collectivist idea, so we should not be surprised. If one’s political instinct is that we must do things as a community, where individual freedoms are subservient to the “greater good”, then of course the group becomes fundamental.

In a libertarian ideology, there is little room for racism. Or, more accurately, you can judge a person by whatever criteria you like, but by choosing something as superficial as race you will do yourself a great disservice.

Self-interest has a way of transcending such social pathologies, more than any government has ever done. It sounds like voters in the South embrace this, perhaps unconsciously:

To be sure, Shafer says, many whites in the South aggressively opposed liberal Democrats on race issues. “But when folks went to the polling booths,” he says, “they didn’t shoot off their own toes. They voted by their economic preferences, not racial preferences.”

So what we have seen over the last 40 years is an expression of the power of self-interest over personal shortcomings.

One of the authors of the study does hold out hope that, even if his findings are a repudiation of a stereotype, it can still work to the Democrats’ advantage:

Shafer says these results should give liberals hope. “If Southern politics is about class and not race,” he says, “then they can get it back.”

Sadly, he seems to be hoping to replace one species of identity politics with another.

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Charles Hope offers a good companion piece.