The Right's War On Net Neutrality

jamie writes "To understand the debate being waged in the United States over Net Neutrality, it's important to understand just how drastically one side has been misled. The leaders of the American Right are spreading the lie that Net Neutrality is a government takeover of the internet, with the intention of silencing conservative voices. (Limbaugh: "All you really have to know about Net Neutrality is that its biggest promoters are George Soros and Google.") This may be hard to believe to those of us who actually know what it's about — reinstating pre-2005 law that ensured internet providers could discriminate on the basis of volume but not content. Since the opposing side is so badly misinformed, those of us who want the internet to remain open to innovation and freedom of expression have to help educate them before the debate can really be held."

Comments

I have to deal with this all the time....

[gandhi_2]

I'm pretty right-wing... but I have some awesome arguments about this with other right-wingers.

Some of them can't seem to evaluate the situation for themselves so they just go with whatever their media talking head tells them.

None of them can explain how the Internet is supposed to work, nor how companies are screwing it up, nor what net neutrality means.... but they are pretty sure that gay socialists are going to take over the internet.

I usually paint it like this:
What if ISPs and common carriers started deciding to block FoxNews.com because they didn't like the message? That seems to get thru to some of them.

The right-wingers have one point though:
Liberals usually work incrementally. It starts with simple net neutrality rules. Then later on, they add some more rules. And more. And more. A Killswitch and some hate-crimes legislation later and before you know the government is all up in your intarwebs.

Now before you liberals get all self-congratulatory on your enlightened position.... none of my liberal friends can think for themselves on several liberal bandwaggon issues either.

Re:I have to deal with this all the time....

[dkleinsc]

Liberals usually work incrementally.

As a liberal, I can play this argument too: It starts with short-term tax cuts to stimulate spending after a recession. Then later on the short-term has become a decade and then permanent. And the cuts go deeper, and deeper. Then comes a deficit commission and Social Security and unemployment insurance is gone and you have a significant population of desperate unemployed people starving to death on the streets.

The trouble with the "work incrementally" line of reasoning is that it can be used to shut down any real evaluation of perfectly reasonable proposals solely because they come from the 'other' side. Once that short-circuiting is completed, you're halfway from turning somebody from a reasoning adult to a partisan moron. (The other half is convincing the potential partisan that they should support anything their leaders propose because it's necessary to achieve ultimate victory for their side where all their dreams can be realized.)

The one simple fact the right is missing.

[pcx]

There is one, simple, crucial fact that the right is missing in these debates. There is no free market in broadband access. If you are extremely lucky you can pick between your telephone company and your cable company and they tend to not compete on either price or service and quickly move to adopt the same draconian policies introduced by their "competitors" -- and again, this is if you're lucky, most people are stuck with their cable company. Not even the right will argue against regulating monopolies, we all realize that in the absence of competition monopolies will provide poor service for rates that border on extortion.

If you want to win the net neutrality debate with the right then offer a simple concession: IPSs which open up their network to third party providers can operate without regulation. Those providers that have no competition or only one competitor must put up with regulation.

You can also remind everyone that the government invented the internet (arpnet was a darpa project) so the Internet was never created to be run by businesses anymore than the national interstate system was, but that doesn't resonate nearly as well as shifting this back to a monopoly vs. consumer debate.