Martin Geddes on net neutrality, federalism, and U.S. vs. EU

Martin Geddes has written a very interesting post at his Telepocalypse blog titled "You won't like this, not one bit," but I do like it, very much. He links to his past statements on network neutrality, and then asserts that "over time, the architecture of the telecom system will resemble the political system around it." He compares the U.S. government to the EU, and the irony that the planned federalism of the U.S. (where the states would run things their own way, competing with each other and evolving better rules in the process) has been supplanted by much stronger federal government setting most of the rules at a national level, while the EU, composed of nations of a much more collectivist/statist variety, has evolved into a collection of "competing regulatory regimes and voluntary cross-border cooperation compared to the centrally planned US communications economy."

For good measure, he throws in a comparison to networks: "That means the EU constitution is “edge-based”, and the US one doesn’t scale. Oops. Hey, just skip a generation and move straight to anarchism: peer-to-peer contracts, and a state whose only function is to enforce them."