The End of Net Neutrality Could Mean the End of Wall Street
The Federal Communications Commission’s repeal of net neutrality has gone into effect, and the consequences may extend beyond increased prices, slow service, and corporate driven access. The move to repeal net neutrality may represent Trump’s greatest attack on Wall Street and the global economy yet.
According to Verge reporter Makena Kelly:
“At its core, net neutrality means that all online traffic is treated equally. The rules put in place by Wheeler’s 2015 Open Internet Order prevented internet providers from throttling or blocking traffic or offering paid fast lanes…. As long as Wheeler’s classification was in place, it provided a strong legal backing for treating the internet as a public utility, along the lines of telephone service, electricity, and running water.
The Pai order rescinds this classification in an attempt to return to what he often refers to as a “successful, light-touch regulatory framework.” … That means regulators have no legal basis to block paid prioritization, throttling, or other violations of net neutrality. In essence, carriers are free to do what they want, and any problems are left to the market to sort out.”
The dominant narrative surrounding Net Neutrality has largely focused on how it’s repeal will affect individuals and various market entities. As CNN Reports, “The concern among net neutrality advocates is that the repeal could give internet providers too much control over how online content is delivered. It may also make it harder for the next generation of online services to compete if they have to pay up to be placed in a so-called internet fast lane.”
There is no doubt that Net Neutrality has the potential to completely devastate how individuals and organizations interact, participate in national dialogues, and contribute to the economy. The nation should absolutely be concerned about the effects the repeal of Net Neutrality will have on the landscape of the internet itself.
There is another danger, though, that is hiding behind this set of offensives that could serve to bring the nation and our global allies to it’s knees.
In 2014, a man by the name of Michael Lewis published a Book entitled Flash Boys. In this book he describes how stock market trading can, and is, rigged in such a way that traders can exploit the market by using something called High Frequency Trading.
As NPR reports, “High-frequency trading, in which the fastest computers with the highest connection speeds get the information first, and make the trade before anyone else can. A millisecond — even a nanosecond — can make all the difference between how much money is made or lost on any transaction.”
At the time the book was written, a handful of traders were hoarding these milliseconds. Lewis explains:
“What turns out is happening is he’s sitting physically in lower Manhattan when he makes his trades. When he pushes the “buy” button, the signal from his computer travels up the fiber optics along the west-side highway of Manhattan and through the Lincoln Tunnel. On the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel is one of the 13 stock exchanges, called the BATS Exchange founded by high-frequency traders.
They’re sitting there, and they get the signal that he wants to buy first. … They can see what he wants to do.”
Speed became such an important issue, it even factored into the adoption of a new operating system on Wall Street called Linux.
Just as Linux was taking over Wall Street, PCWorld reported:
“As late as 2007, Wall Street exchanges were still largely run on Unix, such as Hewlett-Packard’s HP-UX, IBM’s AIX, and Sun Microsystems’ Solaris. Over the past few years however, Linux crept into this market, showing up first in ancillary systems and then running a few core exchanges…
The largest exchange, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) Euronext, is run on a Linux system that can generate 1,500,000 quotes and process 250,000 orders every second, offering acknowledgments of each transaction within two milliseconds.
Financial exchanges need their servers to execute trades as quickly as possible. Even an edge of a few milliseconds could, over the course of trading billions of dollars a day, provide a competitive edge.”
And that competitive edge can become a complete takeover now that certain corporate, political, and corporate entities are able to control at what speed individuals, organizations, and even Wall Street itself are able to buy, sell, trade, and discuss. The repeal of net neutrality puts the control of the national market and the global market in grave danger — especially in the current political environment.
As of now, no solutions have been presented that address these dangers.
To learn more about Dr. GS Potter and the Strategic Institute for Intersectional Policy (SIIP), visit: http://strategycampsite.org/v2/
