With the revival in process counterplans over the last few years the concept of an “internal” net benefit is something students have had a lot of questions about. When asked “what is an internal net benefit” the answers range from “its read on the same page as the counterplan” to ” its not a disad to the plan, its a net benefit to doing the CP alone”, with many odd ones in between.

While “read on the same page” has a pretty clear brightline, “doesn’t link to the plan” is a bit iffier. Let’s start with the Lopez counterplan. Lopez was a supreme court case dealing with competing state and federal jurisdiction that somehow turned into a CP where the negative would “devolve” parts of the USFG to the states. So say the affirmative dealt with the military, usually the states CP would be a no go because the military is an area of exclusive federal control. The “Lopez” counterplan would have the USFG give control of the military to the states so that they had the necessary jurisdiction to then do the plan.

The net benefit to Lopez is federalism… which doesn’t make a lot of sense so bear with me. Usually the federalism disad says something like “the affirmative encroaches on state power, that hurts federalism”. As previously mentioned, if you are reading Lopez its because the regular states CP can’t solve the case because the states have no jurisdiction. If they lack jurisdiction there isn’t really a link to the federalism disad- the USFG can’t encroach on state’s power if they don’t have any. So what the Lopez CP cliamed was that the CP reinvigorated or saved federalism from collapsing in the status quo, the dramatic act of devolving new power would stop federalism from being destroyed. This is just basically a “uniqueness” counterplan, the reason it becomes an internal net benefit is because the CP is (at least superficially) mutually exclusive because it “bans” the plan from happening. Once the SCOTUS has devolved power over the military to the states, congress can no longer do the plan. This means that you can’t permute the uniqueness counterplan to solve the net benefit- the (fake) mutual exclusivity stops the perm, which means the uniqueness CP reviving federalism is a benefit only the CP alone can resolve which makes it offense.

So in the Lopez instance the “internal net benefit” is basically the neg ability to fiat in both uniqueness and link to the federalism disad via the counterplan. This means the affirmative cannot link turn and the only way they can generate offense vs the internal net benefit is to impact turn. This is what makes process CP’s with internal net benefits so ridiculous/susceptible to theory like pics bad- they steal the whole 1AC and leave the aff only able to generate offense via impact turning a net benefit they don’t usually prepare for because its a bad disad but that the negative knew about in advance. There isn’t really a lot of good neg offensive theory arguments to justify that.

Example 2- consult Japan. Consultation counterplans compete via a similar “ban the plan” mechanic, so a 1NC internal net benefit for consult Japan could look like

-The US-Japan alliance will collapse now

-Consultation revives the alliance

-Alliance solves war

If so the arguments would be exactly like Lopez. Consult, however, does not have to fit this mold as the 1NC could also look like

-The alliance is strong now

-Failure to consult over important security issues weakens the alliance

-Alliance solves war

In this example the net benefit works as a disad (as in there is a link to the plan rather than just the CP does a good thing), does that make it “external”? What if the negative reads both the link argument and the CP solves argument? This is what I mean by no brightline, with a few tweaks here and there the internal/external division can break down quickly.

Given that the team running consult Japan could read it as a disad why would they chose to read it as an “internal” net benefit instead? You would think the shoddier nature of that argument/the way people react to them would make it less strategic. There are basically two reasons

1. Permutations- most people believe perms are the most important argument for beating a process CP like consult. If the link is “lack of consultation kills alliance” it makes for an easy “perm solves the net benefit” explanation. (Note, it SHOULDN’T do that/that doesn’t really make any sense, but for some reason the argument that “SQ is ingenuine consultation, only the CP being radically different can revive the alliance” makes the CP sound more competitive)
2. Strategy- vs the “disad” the affirmative has more ways to win, specifically they can no challenge uniqueness and link because the neg isn’t making the “we fiat them in ” kind of explanation

This kind of strategy argument is very useful when going for theory against a CP that people consider “process”. Don’t just talk about that round/what this specific CP did, talk about the “model of debate” that CP produces. What kind of research practices does it incentivize? In the instance of internal net benefits the combination of plan inclusive + offense/defense means that you want the NB to be as obscure as possible so the aff can’t generate any offense against it. If your super sick process CP just ends in something like heg or growth thats bad because the affirmative could imapct turn those and then we’d have to have a debate- the horror! If instead the impact is something ridiculous and hyper specific than its unlikely the other team will have impact defense and you can no link any turns. This is why so many process strategies lately impact in “unregulated emerging tech causes extinction but nuke war doesn’t”. Pretty hard to turn – what is emerging and why would the unregulated version of it be better?- and has a built in magnitude filter. Ditto the inane “X is a conflict filter” or “Y caps impacts”. These arguments wouldn’t hold up to scrutiny if the neg had to defend the SQ (and the aff read a decent adv) but when combined with a pic they are deadly.

When debating these strategies it’s important to know what are the ways you can win

-theory- can be a win

-offense vs net benefit- can be a win

-perm – can be a win

-impact defense- cannot be a win

-uniquness/link presses- cannot be a win

-solvency deficits -cannot be a win

If you understand why the first group of arguments CAN win, and the second group CAN NOT win, then you understand what an internal net benefit is.