Network Neutrality (NN) is now decidedly, demonstrably unpopular – and unnecessary.
If this were high school (and politics really sort of is), Net Neutrality would be sitting alone at lunch – shunned even by the members of the marching band and the audio-visual club. Having had its lunch money taken, it would have only enough for milk (and would sadly be unable to open the container). It would be planning to take its aunt to prom.
But it’s Mom – Free Press and the rest of the Media Marxists – is always there, telling NN how handsome it really is. And that the other kids just don’t understand it.
In short, almost NO ONE likes Net Neutrality. Let us look at the debilitating, devastating facts.
The rapid unraveling of the pro-NN 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.
The already-diminishing pro-NN push began – rightly – in the House, Congress being the only proper venue for this sort of thing. But it repeatedly went NOWHERE.
So in 2007 the pro-NN gaggle bailed on Congress – despite the new Democrat majorities – and instead went for a totalitarian Federal Communications Commission (FCC) implementation.
Where they only had to get three votes from unelected bureaucrats – rather than 218 from the People’s representatives.
But the FCC doesn’t have any authority over anything unless and until Congress writes law giving it to them. And Congress has not yet written said law.
Nevertheless, the pro-NN gaggle spent two years quietly building the fraudulent case for unilateral FCC NN regulatory fiat – when what they thought was their Nirvana arrived. Barack Obama- an on-the-record pro-NN Democrat – was elected President in 2008. And with him came a 3-2 Democrat FCC majority.
The Media Marxists were salivating. Sensing it was their moment, they attempted to seize it. But a problem arose. Their greater, more public push for FCC unilateral NN enactment raised the little-known issue’s profile – and nearly every new person who learned about NN loathed it.
And in April, the D.C. Circuit Court further demonstrated the fallacy of their efforts, unanimously ruling the obvious – that the Commission does not have the authority to do anything to the Internet.
Even FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski knows this, as he acknowledged in the Washington Post:
“(W)e have a Communications Act that wasn’t written for broadband.”
Undaunted, Chairman Genachowski in June called for and got a 3-2 Party-line vote to begin the process of reclassifying the Internet – to (over)regulate the Web the way they (over)regulate land line telephones – and thereby illegally grab the power necessary to enact NN.
This led to even more opposition. A LOT more.
302 members of Congress said No – a large bipartisan majority. So did more than 150 organizations, state legislators and bloggers , seventeen minority groups (that are usually almost always in Democrat lockstep) and many additional normally Democrat paragons including several large unions: AFL-CIO, Communications Workers of America (CWA),International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW); several racial grievance groups: League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), Minority Media and Telecom Council (MMTC), National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Urban League; and an anti-free market environmentalist group: the Sierra Club.
And Americans certainly love their Internet the way it is – and see ZERO need for huge, dramatic new regulations. As demonstrated in Election 2010 – when 95 Democrats publicly asserted their pro-NN stance, and ALL 95 LOST. Meanwhile, 24 Republicans who voiced their opposition to NN won.
There simply is very little support for NN – ANYWHERE, from ANYONE.
From their outset, the pro-NN gaggle stridently asserted that if NN was not IMMEDIATELY implemented, the dynamic open Internet we have been overwhelmingly enjoying – WITHOUT NN IN PLACE – would cease to be.
For four plus years they have incessantly repeated this mantra – all the while, our access to the Web has become far greater, meteorically faster and cheaper – and the Internet has become a far greater free market, free speech Xanadu than anyone in 2006 could have envisioned.
Isn’t it finally time to stop listening to the unpopular kid ranting and raving from his solo lunch table, complaining that Internet life – which everyone else is relishing – isn’t “fair?”
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