Cable Lobby Survey Backfires; Most Americans Support Net Neutrality (consumerist.com)

New submitter Rick Schumann writes from a report via Consumerist: The NCTA hired polling firm Morning Consult to survey people about their attitudes toward net neutrality. In the results and a blog post about the survey, the organization crows that clearly, everyone thinks regulation is bad. Here's the "TL;DR" version: The NCTA claims Americans want "light touch" regulation of the "internet," but did not ask about regulation of internet service providers. The survey claims most voters believe regulation will harm innovation and investment, but their own numbers show that just as many people believe it won't. Most people don't believe the internet should be regulated like a "public utility," which is good because that's not what net neutrality does. When people were asked their feelings about what neutrality actually does, they overwhelmingly support it.

Comments

Re:Misleading summary as usual

[Samantha Wright]

As you may know, net neutrality is a set of rules which say Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, and Verizon, cannot block, throttle or prioritize certain content on the Internet. Knowing this, do you support or oppose net neutrality?

• Strongly support: 24%
• Somewhat support: 37%
• Somewhat oppose: 13%
• Strongly oppose: 5%
• Don't Know / No Opinion: 21%

So that's 61% in favour of net neutrality rather than the abstract jargon-laden questions of 88% of people disagreeing with "the government should have the ability to set the specific prices, terms and conditions for Internet access," the 43% people who believe the internet would "get worse" if "government were to regulate Internet access as a utility" (ignoring the fact that it arguably already does, and things clearly are not getting progressively worse already), and the 51% who said "Internet access should not be considered a public utility regulated by the federal government" when it was compared to everything but telecommunications.

Two points arise from this: the 5% of people who 'strongly oppose' net neutrality may very well believe they're supporting censorship of terrorist propaganda, and if there is a major overlap between the population segment that wants an open internet and the one that wants minimal government interference in ISPs, they're probably free-market idealists who want the ISPs to have the good taste to maintain net neutrality without government oversight, much like the software industry created the ESRB to avoid government regulation of video game ratings.

It is, I think, absurd to conclude that any majority of the population is in favour of Comcast absorbing a bunch of media companies and manipulating rules so it can steal Netflix's income with XFINITY TV—no matter how many layers of bullshit they bury it under.