Network Neutrality is disastrous Internet policy, cooked up in the fevered swamps of university faculty lounges and Media Marxist grievance group offices. Every encounter with Reality has been for Net Neutrality and its proponents an abysmal failure.
Net Neutrality is Socialism for the Internet – it guarantees everyone equal amounts of nothing.
It requires all content on the Internet be treated equally. Meaning the hospital downloading a dying patient’s MRI gets no more broadband speed than the guy next door downloading the panda sneezes video on YouTube. Meaning your work files get the exact same network treatment as a SPAM-riddled email invading your Inbox.
Thus does Net Neutrality fail the Reality test.
It is still as illegal as ever. Before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) can do anything, Congress must first write a law that says “Yo, FCC, do this.” Congress has never done this for Net Neutrality. So the FCC’s second attempt to impose it will most likely face the same ignoble, unanimous, crushing courtroom defeat as the first.
Not surprisingly given all this, Net Neutrality is woefully unpopular.
The rapid unraveling of the pro-Net Neutrality movement began almost immediately after the movement itself did.
…(T)he original 2006 coalition It’s Our Net…boasted 148 partners. Just one year later, they’d “reconstituted in a different form” with a broader focus and were rechristened the Open Internet Coalition (OIC). But that entity had just 74 members – a huge loss of support in but one year. This despite the broader focus – which you would think would lead to more participants, not less….
302 members of Congress said No (to the FCC’s Net Neutrality) – a large bipartisan majority. So did more than 150 organizations, state legislators and bloggers, seventeen minority groups (that are almost always in Democrat lockstep) and many additional normally Democrat paragons including several large unions…, several racial grievance groups…and an anti-free market environmentalist group….
(I)n Election 2010…95 Democrats publicly asserted their pro-Net Neutrality stance, and ALL 95 LOST. Meanwhile, 24 Republicans who voiced their opposition to Net Neutrality won.
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Nothing’s changed. Net Neutrality is once again being put to the popularity and Reality tests – and it is again coming up miserably short.
In yet another end run around proper channels, President Barack Obama’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is forcing three wireless phone companies – AT&T, Verizon and Sprint – to hold shareholder votes on implementing Net Neutrality.
How’s it going? Not well.
AT&T shareholders last week overwhelmingly voted against the proposal, with only 5.9 percent of the votes in favor of it, according to the company’s preliminary results.
But this pathetic tally was enough to make Net Neutrality proponents positively giddy.
AT&T Shareholder Vote on Network Neutrality Surpasses Critical Threshold
If less than 6% is the threshold, how “critical” could it actually be?
Q: How’d it go with Verizon? This would be the same Verizon that is (one of several) suing to undo the Obama FCC’s illegal Net Neutrality imposition. A: It didn’t. From the Verizon Board’s statement:
The proponents (of Net Neutrality) appear to have no concept of the negative technical and operational ramifications of requiring purely “neutral” routing of Internet traffic.
There’s that pesky Reality again.
This proposal would substantially interfere with the technical operation of Verizon’s wireless broadband network and have a wide-ranging and significant impact on Verizon’s business and operations.
What does that have to do with anything? The Left is trying to change the world here.
Up next: Sprint. Wonder how that’ll go?
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This all-encompassing Obama Administration Net Neutrality push is the perfect avatar for much of the Administration itself:
Terrible, illegal and unpopular.
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