Anyone who still thinks “net neutrality” has anything to do with neutrality – or is in any way going to be good for the Internet, for America, or for the world economy – should check out the piece by L. Gordon Crovitz in Monday’s (9/14/14) Wall Street Journal, entitled “John Oliver Makes People Dumb:”
http://online.wsj.com/articles/l-gordon-crovitz-john-oliver-makes-people-dumb-1410728274
Crovitz, who took over the reins on IT matters for the Journal after the Murdoch takeover, is one of the few business writers for major business publications who have been willing to dig into the net-neut movement and to point out that the whole thing is a scam that has been promoted and advanced through a textbook deployment of Orwellian Newspeak – “speech or writing that uses words in a way that changes their meaning especially to persuade people to think a certain way . . . propagandistic language marked by euphemism, circumlocution, and the inversion of customary meanings . . . ” (Merriam Webster online dictionary).
Net-neut is nothing but a blueprint for the imposition of central-planning – i.e., the leftist ideal of governmental micromanagement of the economy – upon the Internet in America. It goes hand-in-hand with its evil sibling, the impending relinquishment of American control over ICANN (the non-profit organization that controls and maintains Internet-address registrations) to international interests, under the Obama White House’s master plan for the future of information-technology. Stripped of the do-gooder hype, the whole point of Net-neut is to impose price controls over every aspect of the pricing of usage of the Internet – with the nominal objective of preventing “price gouging” by providers who might have had the temerity to upset the balance of crony capitalism in the IT/telecom world by charging more to customers who make greater usage of the Internet. The net-neut folks are re-distributionists who simply do not buy the notion of pricing based upon the old-fashioned concepts of supply and demand. (Supposedly the ‘net’ is kept ‘neutral’ when it locks in the present situation in which certain customers get a bargain by paying no more for high volumes of usage than other customers pay for low volumes.) When challenged on this argument, the lefties predictably respond by refusing to get out of the way and let the market do its job via efficient pricing of the different levels of service, and by instead proposing still more regulation and picking of winners (and losers) – e.g., by mandating certain levels of price discrimination while banning other levels, regardless of the extent to which this would eventually have the effect of raising the cost of all things in the IT/telecom world and of retarding the growth and development of the Internet – and of the U.S. economy in general.
If you want a great example of how the left has attempted to obscure the issue by the propagandist “inversion of customary meanings,” just check out the ever-reliable Wikopedia, which defines net neutrality in ways that effectively ignore the free-market objections to the left’s net-neut agenda while pretending to summarize them. These guys never learn, and they never give up. They are like badgers.