CSotD: Net Loss
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Mike Thompson on the FCC's announced intention of giving Comcast and its brethren the right to accept bribes to stifle any competition to Netflix, Amazon Premium, Skype and other large, well-established streamers.
For those who have not heard, or whose eyes roll up when the geeks start talking about "net neutrality," the basic story is in two parts and, yes, you can understand it. But first, here's another take:
I like Toles' take because, while Thompson's is more direct in describing the impact on consumers, Toles better outlines the cause, which is a combination of bland indifference to monopolistic practices, and ignorance in high places.
I feel less threatened by that bland indifference, because we could, if we had the will, recapture our nation from the plutocrats and oligarchs and it wouldn't take armed insurrection.
All it would take would be for us to somehow have a momentary, miraculous reversal of public apathy and indolence, a brief flash in which we would neither fear to bell the cat nor decline to sow the wheat, harvest the wheat, grind the wheat and mix the cake batter.
Which is to say, it's not going to happen but at least it could.
It's nice to think that we could recreate the reform mood that followed Watergate, but you have to remember that, while liberals cheered all the way, the head of the spear in that movement was a combination of pragmatic, patriotic conservatives in Congress and the never-to-be-repeated happenstance of those White House tapes, as noted in "The Ford Presidency: A History," by Andrew Downer Craig.
Until then, the conservatives were attempting to rally the few votes they thought they still had, but the June 23rd "smoking gun" tape ended any attempt at damage control.
The Goldwaters and Doles and Towers were a different breed than McConnell and Boenher and Ryan. But even they would have held out, were it not for those tapes, and you cannot expect to be saved by tapes. It was miracle enough then, and, you'll note, the reforms have since, for the most part, been rolled back to a level that well predates Richard Nixon.
And this reminder once again: Theodore Roosevelt, who created many of the reforms that protected people from corporate greed, was only president by virtue of assassination and had been hidden away in the Vice-Presidency precisely in order to remove him from the more powerful governorship of New York where he had been protecting people from corporate greed.
It is as if Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren were to be made VP, except that they don't have the power of the governor of the Empire State and are only "threats" if you consider Facebook shares and Daily Show sound-bites a real threat to the power of the Koch Brothers.
And TR had a Congress that was more responsive to reform, even if it wasn't inclined to initiate it.
If you are hoping President Sanders or President Warren will fix things, you'd better start working now, because you need to give them not only the residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue but a Congress that won't block every proposal that comes from the executive branch.
All of which will happen right after the cat has been belled and the wheat has been sown.
As for ignorance in high places, there's no shortage, and likely no solution, not because stupid people are more likely to reach prominence — that's just a Will Rogers gag line — but because tech is evolving faster than people can keep up unless they're paying plenty of attention, and you can't follow the tech curve while putting in the level of concentration and effort needed to get to, say, the Supreme Court.
Which is why ABC vs Aereo is being decided by people who have no freaking idea what it's about.
At least, back in 1972, the Supreme Court knew how tape recorders worked.
And it's not confined to SCOTUS. A large part of why the discussion over net neutrality is even taking place is because the Grand Wazoo of the FCC has never quite figured out how the Internet works either.
So in 2002, the FCC decided that high-speed Internet access is not like telephone access. End of story, end of net neutrality. Here is four-minutes-and-forty-seven-seconds (plus the transcript if you prefer to read the bad news) that will break your heart.
The Internet is broken in the United States and nobody who can fix it wants it fixed. That story talks about access in Great Britain, but I've had friends travel to places like Uganda and Nigeria and they report that the Internet isn't broken there, either.
Yes, the Internet works better in the middle of an African-freaking-jungle than it does in Boston or Chicago or Los Angeles.
Scroll down to Matt Wuerker's cartoon from the other day about American Exceptionalism. We're willing to be 100th-and-whatever in Internet access because, hey, we're the best and everyone is happy and everything here works perfectly and all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
Truthiness rules.
It just takes a little longer to load.
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