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AT&T's Net Neutrality Doublethink
GMGruman writes "George Orwell would be proud of AT&T, as Bill Snyder explains in this blog post, for its new ads saying it supports Net neutrality when in fact it is working actively to scuttle proposed FCC rules that would clearly ban discriminatory practices against different types of data, such as video streaming or VoIP. It's also trying to get government subsidies to build a substandard broadband network for the under-served areas of the US. If it and its carrier partners win, 'Internet freedom' will mean freedom for carriers to be the 21st century's robber barons."
Congratulations. You learned EXACTLY the wrong lesson from the mortgage melt-down.
For the past ten or so years, idiots like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd have been imposing laws on banks forcing them to make loans to "under served" minorities. The unintended consequences of this actions were that a lot of people who shouldn't have have been able to qualify for an auto loan were given a mortgage--because the banks were in mortal fear of being called out as discriminatory, fined, shamed, or put out of business. When it turned out that a lot of these "sub-prime" borrowers (Frank and Dodd were shocked! Shocked! to find bad loans being made) couldn't make their payments, the whole regulation-created house of cards collapsed. When the credit default swaps went south, and no one could be certain how much exposure they had, the system (and lending) ground to a halt.
Laws (let's just drop the "government regulation" euphemism and call a spade a spade) aren't NECESSARILY bad. In a lot of cases it's needed to protect citizens from each other and from corporations. But you've apparently fallen into one of the classic blunders. The most famous of which is "never get involved in a land war in Asia" but only slightly less well-know is "never accept at face-value the explanation of the very people who caused the problem"