[wpietri]

I'm always disappointed when deregulation advocates don't seem to understand how markets work.

Free markets are great when you have a large number of relatively equal agents interacting freely. E.g., the classic farmer's market, or the stock trading pits of old. But the more you drift from those conditions, the less effective they are.

Here, with large, rich players paying for access to poor, mostly-uneducated individuals, it's a situation ripe for abuse. Especially because those individuals won't have access to the regular Internet to help them sort through what they're seeing.

I expect a lot of what they get will be from the sort of people who exploit the poor, the online equivalent of payday lenders and debt relief scam artists.

[bko]

I don't think having a large number of relatively equal agents interacting freely is ever realistic. There will always be those at an advantage and they should choose what he pursue based on their abilities. Kind of like very tall people with an athletic disposition should consider playing basketball. On the surface it is unfair to those under 6 feet tall but the NBA, being a market, is most concerned with attracting the talent that should be playing basketball rather than providing a level playing field to those who aspire to play.

In that sense, the market isn't about providing fairness to all players but for allocating talent and abilities.

In regards to exploiting the poor, I think that sort of mind-set often results in a dangerous kind paternalism. Protecting the poor is an excuse used for all sort of policies that often keep the poor down (cigarette taxes, drug policy, etc).

[wpietri]

> I don't think having a large number of relatively equal agents interacting freely is ever realistic.

By which logic, free-market approaches are also never realistic.

> On the surface it is unfair to those under 6 feet tall but the NBA, being a market [...]

Your example doesn't make much sense to me. The actual market involved is the labor market, which does indeed have a large number of relatively equal agents interacting freely. Known labor market failures occur when that's not the case. (E.g., company towns, employer collusion.) But when it does work well, it both provides a kind of fairness and also acts as a reasonably good way to allocate talents and abilities.

[lake99]

Not only that, it takes away an avenue for companies with large coffers from doing charity. For example, Google might want to make all of Khan Academy available via 'zero bandwidth' to Indian customers, by footing the bills themselves. Forcing customers to pay for the bandwidth (when someone else is willing to pay) goes against free-market principles.

[wpietri]

Free-market principles aren't a religious goal. They're tools we use to design markets. And we do that to achieve some real-world end, like better resource allocation, more stable social structures, or smarter, healthier citizens.

In this case, if we're writing net neutrality rule, it's easy enough to exempt charity cases like you describe.