I am a long time Republican and conservative but I cannot understand the great hatred of net neutrality shared by my fellow conservatives. Do you really want to see an internet that allows preferences of packet transmissions? Do most of you really even understand what that means?
I’m not about wanting to see my ISP be able to charge me an extra $XXX dollars a month just so I can pull up google.com in under 3 minutes over someone who pays an $XXX extra a month so their Skype packets get priority over mine. That would be at best. At worse (and more likely to occur) would be ISP’s creating packages of sites that you can access for extra fees over not even being able to get them at all. Want to be able to pull up google/FR/foxnews, etc? Great! Just pay an extra $50 a month and you’ll have access to them. Don’t pay and they don’t come up.
Or am I just not understanding the whole ‘net neutrality’ thing??
The whole goal is CENSORSHIP.
“I am a long time Republican and conservative but I cannot understand the great hatred of net neutrality shared by my fellow conservatives. Do you really want to see an internet that allows preferences of packet transmissions? Do most of you really even understand what that means?
I’m not about wanting to see my ISP be able to charge me an extra $XXX dollars a month just so I can pull up google.com in under 3 minutes over someone who pays an $XXX extra a month so their Skype packets get priority over mine. That would be at best. At worse (and more likely to occur) would be ISP’s creating packages of sites that you can access for extra fees over not even being able to get them at all. Want to be able to pull up google/FR/foxnews, etc? Great! Just pay an extra $50 a month and you’ll have access to them. Don’t pay and they don’t come up.
Or am I just not understanding the whole ‘net neutrality’ thing??”
I don’t claim to know all the ins and outs of ‘net neutrality’, but I vehemently oppose it for the following reasons:
1. It is a solution looking for a problem-the above scenario you describe is NOT happening and is not likely to happen if the govn’t gets out of the way and lets the free market take care of itself.
2. Liberals lie! Whenever a liberal/socialist administration proposes doing something under the guise of ‘fairness’ or ‘neutrality’, you can pretty well bet-as was the case with the Fairness Doctrine years ago, that their regulations will have the opposite effect. Bottom line-I don’t trust anything this administration does, cause I fear the underlying motivation is more control over our lives.
3. The courts have stated clearly that the FCC has no authority whatsoever to impose this, and yet they don’t appeal to a higher court, they just completely ignore the court ruling and move forward to impose the regs anyway. Based on this fact alone, EVERY person who calls themselves a “lifelong” Republican or conservative should be 100% opposed to this.
If there’s really a problem that needs addressing, let the administration take it before Congress and ask them to write a new law to fix it. That’s the way our Republic works-at least it was until this regime took over.
Has your ISP ever stated they are planning on doing this? Or any other ISP, for that matter? This is a solution in search of a problem. And let's not kid ourselves, when the Left is so strongly behind an initiative with seemingly good intentions, it is time to watch the other hand. That is ALWAYS how the Left pushes the ball down the field. Their real goal is to control the message again, as they have lost it due in large part to the existence of the Internet. They controlled the flow of information for a long time, which allowed them to shape the debate in this country for several decades. But they've lost that control and they want it back. Frankly, I think the court that told the FCC that they have no jurisdiction here should slap them with a contempt of court order.
It's a quis custodiet problem, neo-Stalinists vs. Ordoliberals (the good guys) vs. the economic royalists (Adam Smith's back-room market-fixers).
People like me who want the Net to continue to function as it did in 1997 are up against the fact that some economic entities now have got control of big enough chunks of the backbone and infrastructural ISP's that they can now start to change the rules and erect turnstiles all over the place. They're robber-barons, basically. They talk a lot of marketarian language and laissez-faire capitalism, but they're nothing of the sort. They're rent-seekers.
And so now the Stalinists in the White House see their chance to overreach everybody and impose an East German-style iron state control, like China's Golden Shield system.
Comments, people? That about sum it up?
I have had similar questions. However, I have come down on the no regulation side. The most damaging thing about it is that it gives politicians an infrastructure to start rewarding friends and punishing enemies who provide information over the web. Like the income tax and regulations, it will be badly abused. It will be abused to control content and eventually, the regulatory scheme will be extended to censor speech. It’s best to cut it off at the very start.