FCC Can't Wait To Do For Internet What Trumpcare Will Do For Healthcare

But if one is a Trumper, fucking things up is what one does

The great thing about Net Neutrality, if you're a rightwing politician, is that it's so damned easy to lie about. Remember how Ted Cruz insisted treating the internet as a public utility would be just like "Obamacare for the Internet," because he had no idea what words mean? (We are kidding of course -- he knew exactly what Net Neutrality is, and was lying about it). Despite all the rightwing pissing and moaning about how regulations designed to keep the internet operating the way it always had would somehow be tyranny, the FCC in 2015adopted Barack Obama's sinister plan for Net Neutrality, and the Internet continued to work. But lots of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) hate Net Neutrality, because if they had their druthers, they would like to provide the fastest data transmission speeds to companies willing to pay extra for it, and slow down internet traffic for everyone who doesn't pay the premium. Since Rs are already committed to the idea that all regulation is evil, then obviously, FCC regulations requiring all internet traffic be transmitted at the same speed is easy to portray as tyrannical government interference, and maybe a threat to free speech, too -- as tech expert Donald Trump insisted in 2014:  

So now Donald Trump is president, and to fix what was never broken on the Internet, FCC chair Ajit Pai has released a plan to get rid of Net Neutrality so everyone on the Internet will be free of burdensome government regulation, and subject to the whims of ISPs as the Founders intended. It's yet another of those terrific moves to free us from stuff we have and like already, just like Trump has already freed us from a big chunk of online privacy. But internet service providers will make a bundle, so it's all good!

In yet another entry for some future compendium of Trumpian Newspeak, Pai accused the Obama administration's internet policy as "all about politics," and insisted that freeing ISPs to sell the speediest transfer speeds to the highest bidders while throttling internet traffic for everyone else was all about making the internet tubes bigger:

“Two years ago, I warned that we were making a serious mistake,” Pai said. “It’s basic economics: The more heavily you regulate something, the less of it you’re likely to get.”

You might remember how two years ago, Net Neutrality slowed down your internet all the time. We sure don't, but you might.

The new proposal will have to go through the usual votes on the FCC and then comments from the public that are part of federal rule-making, so it's possible that overwhelming public preference for a free and open internet will keep the idiotic new rules from going through. The geeks and the content providers who would rather not have to pay through the nose to have their bits and bytes delivered are a considerable force, and if it's anything like the public comment process in 2015, it's quite likely the geekatariat will break the FCC's servers again with calls to keep the internet free and open.

Not that the FCC is necessarily all that interested in what most Americans think, of course. Gizmodo reporter Amir Nasr details the FCC's position on public comments -- so tailor yours accordingly, kids:

Nasr's colleague Libby Watson sums it up pretty well:

We'll spare you the messy regulatory details about how the 2015 FCC regulation classified ISPs as "common carriers," like phone companies, and why that's a good thing to continue; lord knows if you already know it we'll oversimplify it and bore you, and if you aren't into the minutiae of regulation, we'll bore you to death . The best quick visualization we've seen is this fine, much-reproduced cartoon by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune's Steve Sack:  

If Trump's FCC gets its way, we'll all pretty much be in the right lanes. You don't want to be in those lanes. That's pretty much it. Also, watch this John Oliver video, which is every bit as accurate today as it was two years ago:

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[ WaPo / The Verge ]