Saturday, May 20, 2017

Why the Crazy ‘Net Neutrality’ Demands From the Left

FCC chairman  Ajit Pai's FCC voted 2-1 to begin the process to scrap the Obama administration’s net-neutrality regulations.

The left harrases him endlessly.

The Wall Street Journal at the start of an interview with Pai reports:
Protesters from the far-left group Popular Resistance have swarmed the Arlington, Va., street where Ajit Pai lives, placing pamphlets with his face on his neighbors’ front doors. “Have you seen this man?” the flyers ask, stating that Mr. Pai—“Age 44 / Height 6'1" / Weight 200”—is “trying to destroy net neutrality.” Mr. Pai is chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and the activists, not without perverse humor, describe their picketing of his home as “Ajit-ation.”

“They were there yesterday,” Mr. Pai tells me Monday in his office at the FCC, in uncool Southwest Washington. “I understand they’ll be there today. They’ll be there tomorrow and the day after. It’s a hassle, especially for my wife and my two young children.” The activists, he adds, “come up to our front windows and take photographs of the inside of the house. My kids are 5 and 3. It’s not pleasant.”

During the interview, Pai beautifully explains the situation:

I ask Mr. Pai whether it would make sense for those who oppose net neutrality to choose different language and push back against the phrase. He chuckles and says, “I haven’t tended to use it much.” In an April speech at the Newseum laying out his plans, Mr. Pai did not utter the term even once. “It’s certainly one of the more seductive marketing slogans that’s ever been attached to a public policy issue,” he says. “There’s no question that seeming to be against ‘neutrality’ is a very difficult default position.”

So how would he explain the idea? “A more accurate way to call it, I think, is ‘internet regulation,’ ” he replies, “because the essential question is whether we want it to be governed by technologists and engineers and businesspeople, as it was under the light-touch approach during the Clinton administration, or by government lawyers and bureaucrats here in Washington.” In Mr. Pai’s view, the choice is “a free and open internet versus Title II.”...
One of the “fundamental misunderstandings” of applying Title II regulation to the internet, he says, “is the belief that there’s a dichotomy between the market and the consumer. To me, at least, markets and market-oriented policies have delivered far more value to the consumer than pre-emptive regulation ever has. There’s a reason why we had an internet economy that was the envy of the world for the better part of 20 years.”
Bottom line: Like almost everything else with the Left, net neutrality demands are about gaining power and central control. They are essentially power freaks. They ignore logic, facts, and analysis. They are anything but neutral. They are Alinsky hardwired to always seek power over freedom.

-RW 

For more on net neutrality, see here.

11 comments:

  1. They are essentially power freaks.

    Why mince words? They are the Khmer Rouge.

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  2. Pro-statists ascribe to individual liberty a host of non-existent problems, then, when the Pro-Statists gain power, they proceed to create the previously non-existent problems.

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  3. Centralized power increases by removing net neutrality while retaining everything else because net neutrality is a patch such that the controlled competition allowed by the state doesn't break functionality.

    Without net neutrality the companies with government permission to have the physical and wireless infrastructure can start blocking/slowing sites like EPJ. The government could even apply pressure or incentives for them to do so. On the local level companies have franchises granted by local governments. With all the layered government permission required new competition won't arise unless it goes along with what has been established. Without free competition and without the net neutrality patch, various sites packets could simply not be served or dropped way down the priority list.

    That wouldn't happen in a free market because competition and the threat of new competition wouldn't allow for it, but in today's market where your choice is of two maybe three providers at the ISP level it's easy if they agree to block/slow a list of sites for the children or whathaveyou. It could even be done a layer up from them outside the big cities where maybe there is only one trunk line carrier for internet data regardless of ISP.

    net neutrality isn't free market but it balances the other side of government interventions.

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  4. MSNBC are doing a piece on that intimidation tonight! Right after monkeys fly out of my ass!!

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  5. as if any of you could understand it. It would be like a fundamentalist Christian understanding evolution

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    Replies
    1. "Understanding" and "accepting" are not the same thing.

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    2. RW, why do you approve comments by this dumbass? Anyone stupid enough to name themselves after Peak Oil is obviously too stupid to post anything relevant here.

      Ban it.

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    3. @Mrs K

      I actually kind of like the fact that someone is so obviously furious over libertarianism. Shows that we're hitting close to the mark.

      Delete
  6. Was there ever anything so woefully misnamed as "Net Neutrality"?

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  7. hmmm every couple i day i see a post from Comcast on my twitter feed saying how committed they are to net neutrality. wonder why.

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  8. Well, net neutrality has become a need of time, because it helps protecting our children to watch out obsolete content through the internet. I am a strong supporter of net neutrality charter. What about you?

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