Originally posted at The New Media Militia.com
The FCC just tossed Obama’s attempt to regulate the Internet. When my daughter asked my opinion I told her, “remember back in antiquity (circa 2015) before New Neutrality? When the internet was a thriving, growing, thing looking for every way possible to get as many eyeballs on its corner of the world wide web?
“It’ll be just like that, and it will keep getting better.”
I reminded her that the Internet boom has been advancing on its own, without any help from ruling class busy-bodies in the nation’s capital for the entire century. And that whenever the biggest players in any endeavor get together with ruling class busy-bodies and try to tell you that they’re going to impose some rules, and they will be good for “everyone” get cynical real fast and prepare to fight them tooth and nail.
One recent example of this is Health Care reform.
ObamaCare’s only goal was to up-end the institutions of health care on the way to a system run entirely by the government. They said and did everything to pretend it would make things better. In the end, it accomplished none of the promised goals but did manage all the real ones.
We still have just as many uninsured. Costs didn’t go down, they went up. Premiums didn’t go down, the went up. Access didn’t stay the same, it declined. People lost their plans their doctors, competition vanished, but the government grew as did the spending to sustain that.
As costs and rates skyrocketed and competition dwindled, more and more people were crowded into existing state-backed coverage. More and more people became reliant on the state, the regulators, and their decisions about what would be covered and how much that should cost, driving providers out and quality down.
No one promoting the reforms promised any of that, while naysayers were pilloried but still right in the end.
If ObamaCare isn’t repealed, it will metastasize and consume the entire market, giving the government and its regulators complete control of your health-care, and by extension you.
That was always the plan.
ObamaCare was sold as a solution, but it was designed to make things worse and government bigger. To give the state more control.
Net Neutrality is no different. Like ObamaCare, it was never meant to improve costs or increase access. It was always about control. But unlike ObamaCare it was never forced through Congress on a partisan party-line vote, it was imposed by bureaucratic sleight of hand.
Just think about this for a moment. President Obama took the internet, which blossomed between 2000 and 2015, creating an environment where people could do almost anything online and do it with super fast speeds at relatively low prices. Along comes the government savior, telling us the best thing for consumers is to subject the internet to rules under a law from 1934, created at a time when people couldn’t make a phone call without the use of two hands.
How many times have you heard the progressives complain about ancient laws that failed to take into consideration advances in technology? More than you can count? Well, not when it comes to the internet. They reached back 70 years for a morsel of ancient regulatory “might” to start the process of Federal control of the internet.
Regulatory control, and with any luck, more revenue to feed the Federal beast.
Oh, and it’s also polluted with first amendment exercises that place a burden on the state’s ability to go about the business of consuming every aspect of our lives. It represents the most significant single threat to authoritarian rule. Unregulated expression.
The government hates unregulated anything.
But left to its own devices content providers will continue to look for faster, cheaper, efficient and easier ways to get the content to consumers of it. A battle that forces existing players to compete with agile new innovators.
Governments have no competition which is why big established players like regulations that protect their market-share.
So what will happen if Net Neutrality goes away? Nothing, because,
The rules were put in place to solve a problem that didn’t exist.
That is the bottom line. People cannot tell you why the rules were necessary. They can only offer hypotheticals as to why the rules are necessary. But that’s like a cop pulling over a person with a new sports car and writing them a ticket because they might drive 125 mph in a 70 mph zone two weeks from that moment.
The internet didn’t require the nanny state before 2015. The system thrived in a competitive environment. People have so many choices in determining what content they want to watch and how they want it delivered. Everybody benefits. Everybody will continue to benefit once the rules get lifted.
If the ISP’s do what the fearmongers claim, then the government can deal with it if necessary. Until then, sit back, relax and enjoy.
You heard the man.
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