Wow! The Koch-founded Tea Party group FreedomWorks must have been working overtime to come up with such a load of semi-plausible sounding (to the ignorant) BS about Net Neutrality.
“Supporters of the plan call it a free and open Internet, but in reality, it is anything but,” FreedomWorks communications coordinator Iris Somberg said in the video.
Somberg explained that Net Neutrality regulations would prohibit Internet providers from blocking or slowing down access to any website or online service.
“The same speed, the same prices, the same access, but all web content isn’t equal. Netflix is not the same as a high school blog, and YouTube certainly isn’t the same as Facebook. They serve very different purposes and they have very different needs.”
“By dictating that all these sites be treated the same, Net Neutrality makes small companies that don’t take up much bandwidth at all pay more so that big companies can pay less,” she said. “That’s not the kind of equality the Internet needs.”
“Net neutrality is not a level playing field. It’s an anti-competitive policy that protects the Internet’s biggest companies at the expense of everyone else.”
Watch, if you have a strong stomach:
All web content isn't equal, so Internet providers should be able to block or slow down access to it? That doesn't even make any sense.
The whole premise of the Internet thus far has been net neutrality, that all content is equal. The regulatory change would be only to preserve that long-term status quo. So their other implication, that this will be something new, imposed from above, also is stupid, ignorant, and deliberately misleading.
But if you'll notice, they are in their dishonest way using a very interesting angle for their pitch. They're using economic populism and income inequality as the reason to end net neutrality.
"We just want to make sure you little guys get a fair shake against those nasty big companies."
It's going to be fascinating for the next two years watching how the right-wing party grabs hold of the broad-based hunger for economic populist policies on issue after issue and twists it to their own duplicitous purposes.
While the Democrats no doubt will bumble about at the behest of their DLC-mentored strategists, forgetting their own populist history of policies like Social Security and Medicare, minimum wage, support for unions, and so on, that lifted up working people into the middle class.
Instead they'll be busy trying to figure out how to appear timidly "centrist" in what they fear is really a right-wing country.