I think it's time to mention again why net neutrality should be repealed, and for that matter, the FCC should be put out of business. Both are violations of the First Amendment and its proscriptions on government regulation of media ("Congress shall make no law").
I've been making this point for a few years, already, but it never has had more relevance than in this day and age, with someone in the White House who would love carte blanche control over all media.
How much more evidence of the danger of government controlled media do we need? Trump almost daily rants about how real media such as CNN are purveyors of "fake news," which, in Trump-speak, amounts to anything he finds unwelcome. He just this week moved to prevent the merger of Time Warner and AT&T, unless Time Warner divested itself of CNN, which could well put the pioneering all-news cable network out of business, or at least hinder its operation.
The notion that if net neutrality is abolished, all of us will be prevented from reading and writing and watching what we want online is not true, anyway. Everyone was doing just fine before net neutrality was adopted by the FCC just a few years ago, under Barack Obama's urging. That was in June 2015. Were any of deleterious consequences of no net neutrality - individuals or small companies being locked out of the Internet, or crippled by glacially slow service - in effect then? They weren't, and that's because the anti-trust laws - collusion of huge corporations to the detriment of individuals - were in full effect, then, administered by the FTC (Federal Trade Commission, not unconstitutional like the FCC), and the FTC will continue to do that job if net neutrality is eliminated.
But even if net neutrality were desirable, the price we would pay by weakening the First Amendment would be far too high. Our freedom of expression, and thereby our freedom, has never been under greater attack. Now is the time to get keep governmental regulation as far away as possible from our essential media lifelines. We shouldn't let the fact that Trump wants to do away with net neutrality blind us to the fact that such an action would be a good way of limiting his attempts to punish media not to his liking.
I've been making this point for a few years, already, but it never has had more relevance than in this day and age, with someone in the White House who would love carte blanche control over all media.
How much more evidence of the danger of government controlled media do we need? Trump almost daily rants about how real media such as CNN are purveyors of "fake news," which, in Trump-speak, amounts to anything he finds unwelcome. He just this week moved to prevent the merger of Time Warner and AT&T, unless Time Warner divested itself of CNN, which could well put the pioneering all-news cable network out of business, or at least hinder its operation.
The notion that if net neutrality is abolished, all of us will be prevented from reading and writing and watching what we want online is not true, anyway. Everyone was doing just fine before net neutrality was adopted by the FCC just a few years ago, under Barack Obama's urging. That was in June 2015. Were any of deleterious consequences of no net neutrality - individuals or small companies being locked out of the Internet, or crippled by glacially slow service - in effect then? They weren't, and that's because the anti-trust laws - collusion of huge corporations to the detriment of individuals - were in full effect, then, administered by the FTC (Federal Trade Commission, not unconstitutional like the FCC), and the FTC will continue to do that job if net neutrality is eliminated.
But even if net neutrality were desirable, the price we would pay by weakening the First Amendment would be far too high. Our freedom of expression, and thereby our freedom, has never been under greater attack. Now is the time to get keep governmental regulation as far away as possible from our essential media lifelines. We shouldn't let the fact that Trump wants to do away with net neutrality blind us to the fact that such an action would be a good way of limiting his attempts to punish media not to his liking.
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