The University Channel

The University Channel, a "A collection of public affairs lectures, panels and events from academic institutions all over the world for you to view, listen to, stream or download", is quickly becoming of my favorite resources on the Internet. I started subscribing to their podcast feed and I can't recommend it enough. The quality of the lectures is incredible and the selection and breadth grow almost daily. Most of the recordings range from 60 to 90 minutes in length and usually include a lecture followed by a question and answer session.

I've listened to about ten of them now and while they've all been very interesting, the one I absolutely implore you to check out is American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation, by Jon Meacham. He discusses his book about the relationship between our nation's formative years and religion. He's an interesting character – a devout Episcopalian with a keen sense of humor and eminent respect for both sides of the fight over separation of church and state, in which he rests solidly in the center. I can't wait to read the book.

(Thanks to Thomas for showing me The University Channel)

More on network neutrality

I know I haven't been posting lately, and I apologize. I've been extremely busy and sort of out of the loop on current events. Hence I've deemed it better to keep my mouth shut than to talk about issues that I haven't been following. However, this week I have discovered the magic of using the copius amounts of time that I spend sitting in my cubicle at my new job to listen to all sorts of lengthy podcasts. More on my job in a future post, but the idea is that if I can make it look like I'm doing work and simply listening to music, I can really do hardly anything and concentrate on learning great things from recordings of NPR programs or lectures from esteemed university professors, all without having to compromise myself by running up suspicious network logs.

One of the issues that's really captured my interest over the last few months has been network neutrality. It's obvious to anyone who actually uses the internet that network neutrality is absolutely essential to the character of our cherished internet. You probably wouldn't be reading this blog if there was no such things as network neutrality (although in reality, "you" probably aren't reading this blog, because nobody really does read this blog, as indicated by my traffic). There's been lots of ridiculous rhetoric from  right-wingers who are predictably walking the party line of being "pro-business", which in this case means the telecom companies. Now, I'll be damned if there exists a collection of companies on the planet that are more anti-competitive, corrupt, and deeply evil than the Baby Bells (what, all two or so that are left now?). The keyword is anti-competitive. There is nothing "free-market" about the telecom industry. To eliminate network neutrality is to stymie small business and innovation.

And while an appeal to entrepreneurialship alone makes the answer clear, we can go further and ask ourselves if that's even the whole story. All of this treats the internet solely as a gigantic, expanding marketplace. Yeah, it is, and that's great. However, the internet is first and foremost about information. Not a market for information, but the Information Superhighway. The telecoms want to play god and load up certain lanes with extra 18-wheelers as they see fit, and you can guarantee that Wikipedia isn't going to be able to pony up the dough for the fast lane. The efficacy with which the internet distributes vast amount of information to anyone with the curiosity to look has redefined our lives. And getting back to the business argument, it's completely obliterated information asymmetry in more markets than we could even begin to count.
Network neutrality completely turns the conventional wisdom about what constitutes "regulation" on its head. Yes, technically the government requiring that network operators must treat all network traffic equally is a regulation, but what does it actually mean in terms of beauracracy and oversight? Not much. The internet has grown exponentially and ingeniously so far, and this so-called regulation has been in place every step of the way. The federal government has done very little in the way of governing or controlling the internet. This regulation has been the key to the internet being the ultimate free-market, democratic establishment of the planet. "Hands Off" the internet could just as easily apply to Verizon and AT&T.

At the recent WWW2006 conference, Tim Berners-Lee made the excellent point that our economy can only function because of the "regulation" that we can't, for example, print our own money. It sounds pedagogical, but that's just because conservatives have been so successful at demonizing the word "regulation" like only they can do.

If that's the kind of regulation that self-proclaimed "free-market conservatives" are moaning about, then I think it's a clear indication that these people are either completely misinformed or extremely disingenuous as to exactly whose interests they are trying to protect. As with most issues, the average voter falls under the former category and the average Republican lawmaker/power broker falls under the latter – yet another example of the ingenious scam that is the continuing Republican stranglehold on our governement.

The internet is a bargain

Brad DeLong links to this recent paper from Stanford and University of Chicago economists that attempts to determine the price elasticity of internet access by valuing the time people spend using it versus their wages, reasoning that the time spent internet constitutes an opportunity cost for high-wage earners. Here is the abstract:

For some goods, the main cost of buying the product is not the price but rather the time it takes to use them. Only about 0.2% of consumer spending in the U.S., for example, went for Internet access in 2004 yet time use data indicates that people spend around 10% of their entire leisure time going online. For such goods, estimating price elasticities with expenditure data can be difficult, and, therefore, estimated welfare gains highly uncertain. We show that for time-intensive goods like the Internet, a simple model in which both expenditure and time contribute to consumption can be used to estimate the consumer gains from a good using just the data on time use and the opportunity cost of people's time (i.e., the wage). The theory predicts that higher wage internet subscribers should spend less time online (for non-work reasons) and the degree to which that is true identifies the elasticity of demand. Based on expenditure and time use data and our elasticity estimate, we calculate that consumer surplus from the Internet may be around 2% of full-income, or several thousand dollars per user. This is an order of magnitude larger than what one obtains from a back-ofthe-envelope calculation using data from expenditures.

You can download the PDF of the whole report here.

The details are probably a little over my head, but without reading the paper yet, the bit about the eye-popping consumer surplus basically confirms what I've been thinking all along. I've been fortunate enough to have my parents pay for my internet access for my whole life, whether through the cable bill at home or footing the bill for my dorm room, but if they didn't, I'd be willing to shell out on the order of a few hundred bucks a month, if that's what it would take.