To solve many serious Net problems, we need more thoughtfulness, not more speed. Maybe a little sand in the wheels is a good thing. The last myth is that market competition is good for everybody. This approach makes cheery assumptions about the world that experience does not bear out. The Administration wants the market to take the lead in developing standards for protecting consumer privacy.
Consumer choice ends where corporate needs begin.
In a terrific article in Newsweek last year, Marc Levinson showed that in the the financial world, banks don't want to compete for most of us. That means that if there's more competition, the banks will compete to attract the 20 percent who generate profits and they will compete to dump the 60 percent who don't. As Nathan demonstrated in his last two E-Node columns, we see similar economics in electrical and telephone services. If the same holds true for Internet commerce in general, then far from leading to high-quality universal access, more competition could leave a lot of us worse off. The final example of the disconnect between who markets are supposed to help and who they really do help is the tricky issue of taxes.