As President Obama has pointed out, this one is entirely on your shoulders, FCC. We don’t want another set of half-assed rules that can just get struck down in court. We want you to go back to the plan that would actually work to keep the Internet free and open, and that plan is reclassifying Internet service as a utility.
Really, as big a deal as the Internet has been making about railing against the FCC’s proposed net neutrality rules, those rules are largely meaningless. After all, they already had rules in place, but those rules were struck down in court in January because they basically included provisions to treat Internet service like it had been classified a utility without actually doing it.
If they try to exert authority over it again with another set of rules—this one not even being helpful in the first place—they’ll likely just lose again. What they need to do is go back to square one and reclassify Internet service as a utility, which they abandoned in the first place way back in 2010 due to political pressure, well, like this:
“Net Neutrality” is Obamacare for the Internet; the Internet should not operate at the speed of government.
— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) November 10, 2014
I’m often guilty of talking about “the Internet” as an entity, but at least I have the good sense to do it as a joke. Regulating what Internet service providers are allowed to do and making them not screw everyone over is very different from regulating “the Internet,” and conflating the two is an obvious ploy at best.
Reclassifying Internet service as a utility is the way to go, FCC. Get on it. Only one question remains, and that is which of the White House’s 20-year-old social media interns came up with the next-level buffering gag at the beginning of the video?
(via The Verge)
- Net neutrality protests continue
- The “buffering” gag has been done before on a grander scale
- The FCC requested the help of none other than the Internet to parse neutrality comments
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