The Vast Majority of Americans Like the Internet Just the Way It Is

Even Obama voters think Net Neutrality is a solution looking for a problem

Free Press, Public Knowledge and the rest of the ever-dwindling Media Marxist “Save the Internet” contingent incessantly assert that they are pushing their government regulatory Web agenda in the “public interest” – to protect consumers from the Big, Bad Telecom companies.

Well it turns out – yet again – that the public isn’t interested in what Free Press & Co. are offering – perhaps because they rightly realize that the “reformers” are looking to burn down the Internet in order to “save” it.

There is a new poll out that shows an overwhelming majority of the consumers Free Press and Co. are claiming to be helping – don’t want their help. 75% of Americans like the Internet just the way it is – no “saving” necessary. And 57% think the federal government should not regulate the Internet at all.

And of the 31% who think the government should regulate the Internet, more than two-thirds of them said that the regulation should be focused on privacy, online safety and protecting.

Doing the math, that means less than 10% of Americans think the government should be regulating the Internet to the tune of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reclassification and Network Neutrality.

Full disclosure: the poll was conducted by Broadband for America, a coalition of more than 200 free market-favoring companies and public interest groups. Some of these members are the Big, Bad Telecoms from whom Free Press & Co. are allegedly trying to protect us. So the Media Marxists will soon be denouncing the results (if they have the guts to respond at all) as mere propaganda from the “Media Capitalists.”

Let us again remind everyone what Robert McChesney – the co-founder of Free Press and the Godfather of the media “reform” movement – has to say about what they want to use Net Neutrality to do to those dreaded “Media Capitalists”:

“At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies. We are not at that point yet. But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.”

Media Capitalism, the State and 21st Century Media Democracy Struggles: An Interview with Robert McChesney – The Bullet Socialist Project

August 9, 2009

That’s certainly a bit drastic, is it not? I’m fairly sure most of even the pro-Net Neutrality less-than-10% did not have this particular outcome in mind.

So the Big, Bad Telecoms and their many, many fellow free marketeers can be forgiven for checking in with the American people to see if they like what they as Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are providing.

Given that Free Press & Co. are working to “get rid of” them and “divest them from control” of the Internet structural framework that they’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars building and maintaining – and that the American people love using.

And here’s the really amusing part – the part that makes it inordinately difficult to dismiss out of hand the poll and its results given the pollsters.

Of those polled, only 36% said they voted for Republican Presidential nominee John McCain in the 2008 presidential election, versus 44% who voted for then Democrat nominee and now President Barack Obama.

Meaning those polled here had a wider pro-Obama margin than did the nation in 2008 (53%-46%). So this was not the partisan hack-poll as which they will try to dismiss it.

So here you have less than 10% of an Obama-majority polling sample supporting the Media Marxist agenda of Free Press & Co.

Which begs a few questions. Why on Earth are we still talking about Net Neutrality and Internet reclassification? Why hasn’t this ridiculous concept yet been summarily dismissed?

And why do Free Press, Public Knowledge and what remains of the Save the Internet gaggle – now clearly defined as the quintessential extremist fringe group – still hold any sway at the FCC?