Obama: If you like your internet, you can keep your internet

Despite the shellacking they took in last week's elections, the progressive power-grab continues unabated. Obama's FEC is already debating how to regulate what you say on the internet. Now he's demanding FCC regulation of what you can see on the internet too.

Back in 1934 the internet was merely a gleam in Al Gore's father's eye. But the FCC was doing a bang-up job regulating its phone company predecessor — AT&T. You could have any phone you wanted, so long as it was a black rotary-dial desk phone. You could call anywhere you wanted, at $8 per minute for long distance. You could even get a mobile phone.

Ah, the good old days!

Like the telephone companies of old, broadband providers would be required to file a "tariff" at the commission, meaning they would submit mountains of paperwork and ask the government to approve the prices they intend to charge for services. The bureaucrats would then consider whether the prices are fair. FCC bureaucrats would also hold sway over plans to expand or build digital networks. Under such conditions, who would invest to build the next generation of broadband technologies?

Let's have a show of hands? Who wants to trade their iPhone 6 for a 1946 Western Electric model 41A?

Anyone?

Didn't think so.

It took deregulation of AT&T to give us the phone and internet choices we have today. So why would Obama want to put it all back under the government's bureaucratic thumb?

Control. The progessives want to control what you say, see, and do. The internet is already "neutral," anyone can log in, anyone can create content, and anyone can view anything.

Statists don't like that.

So they create straw men, obviously ridiculous arguments designed to sway an unwary public into accepting their supposedly benevolent hegemony.

Comcast might prevent you from accessing Google!

Time Warner could slow down Netflix!

Trust me, these doomsday scenarios are pure fantasy. Comcast and Time Warner do not want to face the wrath of their subscribers. Just look at the hullabaloo that already occurs when FCC-regulated TV channels demand higher subscription fees from cable operators, and the cable operators turn them off. Consumers complain, because FCC "must carry" regulations interfere with the free market and the end result is higher prices for cable TV.

The internet doesn't need the FCC telling them what to pipe into your home.

You should get to decide that, not lobbyists and bureaucrats.

And if you want to pay Netflix, and if Netflix wants to pay Time Warner to give them a faster path into your home, why is that anybody's business but yours?

The idea that the internet has always treated all content equally is a bald-faced lie. Internet operators discriminate every day. They have to. Some data is more important than others. The concept is known as QoS — Quality of Service. Without it, the internet would be unusable.

Asking Netflix to pay for a connection to the internet is no different from asking you to pay for a connection. But Net Neutrality mavens believe Netflix should get a free ride. Why? I dunno. Maybe Netflix has great lobbyists, or maybe Netflix hires cool kidz and lets them play XBox all day. Whatever the reason, the progressives are insistent that Netflix, and all the other content providers, should get a free path directly into your PC.

I happen to have some experience with running a network and delivering content. Many years ago, before home broadband, there was dialup. And my day job set up a dialup service for insurance agents to access policy and claims information electronically.

It took the agents about 15 minutes to discover they could also use the dialup service to download pornography. Lots and lots and lots of pornography. It got to the point where the pornography ate up all the available bandwidth (download speed) we had. And thus no insurance data was able to get through.

I blocked the pornagraphy sites. Yeah, that's right, I violated Net Neutrality. Because the people paying the bills wanted to get what they were paying for. And, I know you're going to find this hard to believe, the pornography sites weren't willing to pay me.

Now imagine Obama's FCC telling me I couldn't do that. Imagine me being forced to carry all the pornography the insurance agents wanted. Because right there is the essence of Net Neutrality. Everything is "equal." It's also the core maxim of communism by the way, except you quickly learn that under communism some people are more "equal" than others. So it will go with FCC regulation of the internet. The government will pick the winners (and the losers).

Here's a tip, when the government is involved, the winners never include you.

Posted at 11:58 by Chris Wysocki   [/tech]   Comments | Perm Link |
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