Kaveh Waddell, a typical Washington D.C. wannabe insider type at the National Journal sniffs at the above video, which envisions what the internet could become in 70 years. "Doomsday rhetoric," he says, and then proceeds to punch a hippie or two (like Sen. Al Franken) who deigns to care about our democracy and how the internet is helping to preserve it.
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler would have rules enforced on a "case-by-case basis" rather than creating a rigid structure that could stifle the Internet's natural evolution and growth. […]
Besides, the Internet is hardly a level playing field today. Although the FCC's proposed "fast lanes"—which would allow Internet service providers to slow traffic to websites that don't pay for special service—don't yet exist, many barriers already stand in the way of startups' entry into the high-bandwidth online world. Large content providers like Google and Facebook pay for content-delivery networks that ease the burden caused by high traffic. This allows them to host more photos and videos, and deliver them more quickly to large numbers of users.
Although an FCC decision that strikes down net neutrality could exacerbate this inequality, it is unlikely to plunge the Internet into the corporate-owned abyss. Even 70 years from now.
It's an interesting argument, particularly since having had a more rigid structure of net neutrality in place before now might have actually given us the level playing field he says we don't have now, and then dismisses as basically unimportant. He refutes himself there a bit. But he's refuted more effectively by those large content providers themselves, like
Google, who want neutrality.
He's also arguing against all of the giants of the internet as well as venture capitalists when he argues that net neutrality would actually "stifle the internet's natural evolution and growth." All of the people who have succeeded in innovating and growing and creating the internet revolution seem to think that having net neutrality is a pretty key part of that all continuing.
On the whole, I think it's probably safer to trust the opinions of the people who made the internet what it is today on this one, instead of some guy who thinks net neutrality advocates are just too shrill.
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