The crazy part of this is that BOTH the leftists AND those of us on the right want the same result. We want a free and open market as it pertains to the internet as a whole. We don’t want one company or agency or cartel being able to dictate who gets to say what, what speeds certain companies serve certain types of data at, how many options for service everyone gets, etc... Pretty much everyone wants it to be open, free-wheeling and lucrative like in the wild west days of the 90’s.
The question is: Do either of the proposals on the table get us from here to there? Does government oversight and regulation get us there? Does ceding control to the telecoms get us there?
Something tells me that whoever “wins” this battle will be sorely disappointed.
Answer me this...Name one federal agency that is not staffed, controlled and funded by the very same industries that it regulates. Sure, stricter government regulation of the telecoms will initially be painful for them but make no mistake, the long term downside of this for them is that they will have to increase their bribery fund to continue getting what they want.
“We don’t want one company or agency or cartel being able to dictate... how many options for service everyone gets”
But we can’t have that, because of the way the modern internet scales. Free market forces have consolidated the internet into one giant company. (I’m talking about the Comcast/Time Warner merger.)
Ceding control of a public asset worth billions to a private company cannot be the answer. Since it is a public asset, the public must exercise regulation. In its absence, you get the kind of shenanigans Comcast has been pulling with impunity regarding throttling.
And to answer your question, the FCC has done a decent job regulating the broadcast networks. (We the people own the band the networks sit on.) Except for eff bombs and nudity, the government does not have a track record of trying to regulate network free speech. And the FCC continues to enforce the rule that over-the-air broadcast must remain free to anyone with an antenna, though the networks would love to get rid of that rule.