What’s your opinion on net neutrality?

Anonymous

I’m against it. I just think it’s hypocritical to say we should live in a world
where corporations are free to shape laws and pay no tax but not screw the internet.
That seems unfair to me.

Don’t get me wrong: You definitely want to keep ISPs’ hands off the net as much
as you can. ISPs are like water utilities that realized they should come right into
your home and decide what kind of showers you can have, since it’s their water.
You don’t want a bunch of water engineers trying to sell you eight-minute shower
bundles. No-one wants that.

But I’m not comfortable with the portrayal of Net Neutrality as a fight between
good companies and bad companies. That dynamic always gives me the heebie-jeebies.
There’s just something about people praising the kindness and decency of an
amoral profit-making machine that doesn’t sit well with me. I mean,
I’m glad some companies are better than others. I appreciate that
they’re not all dumping oil in the oceans and poisoning children and telling employees
they’re family right before they fire them. It’s definitely a good thing that
companies who get financially punished if they have a bad public image are
compelled to act nicer than ones who don’t.

I just don’t like pretending they’re champions of freedom. Last
time I checked, Apple and Google and Facebook and Netflix and all the rest
were super-interested in sealing everybody into their own sections of the internet
for money. Well, not so much Google. Google is still pretty great. But as a rule,
they are big fans of the principle of removing user choice in exchange for cash.
In this particular case, abolishing Net Neutrality means they might have to pay
cash to ISPs, so they’re against that. But they’re all still busy working on their own
forms of user lock-in.

The other thing is that this keeps happening. How many times has the battle for Net
Neutrality been won? Four times? And each time the ISPs go away and sulk
with their paid-for politicians and wait for everyone to stop cheering about
how they saved the internet, and then they return with a new version that tries
to do the same thing. So I would like to dispel the illusion that
we’re actually accomplishing anything substantial here, and instead take a look
at the system that allows a thousand things like this to pass a year, only more
quietly because they’re not opposed by major corporations, steadily entrenching
inequality, selling out the future for the short-term gain of a powerful few.

But since we’re not doing that, Net Neutrality is okay, I guess.