Heh, Heh, Heh… The Internet is Ours… All Ours… Heh, Heh, Heh!!!

The notion that government regulation is either “creeping socialism” or a “job destroyer” is well-funded but inordinately inaccurate corporate BS. I’ll give you an example. If dumping toxic effluents into our rivers and streams is standard practice among chemical plants and paper mills, and if adding scrubbers and pollution controls would add 15% to the cost of otherwise fungible products, then any company that would adopt such environmentally beneficial systems would no longer be competitive. Its more expensive products would be drowned out by those companies not paying for those pollution controls, selling those same level products at vastly lower prices. So what if the water pollution in the areas around those industrial plants made aquifers, rivers and streams fetid and poisonous?! Without government pollution regulations to level the playing field, any company that would adopt environmentally-sound practices would go bankrupt.

The same holds true for having a consumer-friendly financial regulatory agency protecting just plain folks from unfair practices born of corporate greed. Without a governmental regulatory agency, it would be too expensive for the average “duped” consumer to take legal action. The offending companies could simply rub their money-laden hands in delight. Oh, you may have noted that, in a world where the worldwide web is now our principal connective tissue, where content, communications, retail and financial transactions are completely dependent, is getting pricier by the day, controlled by fewer and fewer corporate suppliers and often deaf to consumer complaints. Why is that?

One of the core tenets of the Republican Party is that government regulation is bad, that government agencies, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, need to be disbanded as part of an intrusive and expensive federal regulatory schema that wastes taxpayer money and prevents business from growing and creating jobs. Climate change and local inconvenience, they argue, are not significant enough to justify clean air, clean water and controls on greenhouse gas emissions. People with brown sludge running from their faucets or being devastated by increasingly intense and more frequent wildfires and hurricanes should know better. Many cling to the false marginalization or flat-out denial from their pledge-breaking MAGA leadership. Trump’s brief presidency disbanded or defunded dozens of federal regulatory agencies designed to protect most of us. Rich companies do not, of course, want to be regulated… or even pay taxes for that matter.

There are the most obvious examples, noted above, and the more subtle examples where we pay more, have less choice but might not know why. And as you might surmise from today’s blog title, the Internet is one of those recently Trump-era deregulated arenas. The issue is called “net neutrality,” a notion that those providing consumers with Internet access could not discriminate against consumers by throttling their online speed or access and could not favor their own captive content providers, or those that paid the for better positioning, over other providers. But as Los Angeles Times OpEd columnist, Michael Hiltzik points out in his October 15th editorial, Donald Trump’s appointed regulators made short shrift of net neutrality:

“If you’re unhappy with the high cost and low quality of your internet service — and who isn’t? — the reason is easy to pinpoint… It can be found in an ill-considered, cynical and overtly pro-business decision in 2018 by the President Trump-controlled Federal Communications Commission to abdicate its authority over broadband internet service and repeal rules guaranteeing network neutrality, a core principle of the open internet.

“As I wrote when the change was first proposed by the FCC’s Republican chair, the former telecommunications company lawyer Ajit Pai, consumers would inevitably feel the pain… Internet service would become more expensive, and users would have less choice. Internet service would be dominated by a few big content providers, with smaller and potentially more innovative providers shouldered out of the way… Every one of those predictions came true, I’m sorry to say…

“[Biden appointed FCC Chair, Jessica] Rosenworcel laid out her proposal in a Sept. 26 speech in Washington. Her starting point was the observation that broadband connectivity is no longer a luxury in the modern world… ‘It is a necessity,’ she said. ‘It is essential infrastructure for modern life. No one without it has a fair shot at 21st century success.’

“Yet the 2018 repeal left the U.S. without any regulatory supervision of this crucial industry. Left to their own devices, broadband companies spent the intervening years continuing a preexisting trend away from competition and toward consolidation through mergers… ‘That is why almost half of us lack high-speed service with 100-megabit-per-second download speeds or can only get it from a single provider,’ Rosenworcel said. ‘In fact, only one-fifth of the country has more than two choices at this speed.’

“As a result, she pointed out, ‘if your broadband provider mucks up your traffic, messing around with your ability to go where you want and do what you want online, you can’t just pick up and choose another provider .... You need a referee on the field looking out for the public interest — and ensuring your access is fast, open and fair.’…There’s nothing particularly new about Rosenworcel’s proposal — she’s merely aiming to restore the level playing field in broadband services established as long ago as 2004, during the [Republican] George W. Bush administration.”

As the FCC revisits resumption of its regulatory control of the Internet, in an era where a rightwing Supreme Court is decimating federal regulatory powers even under the FDA, you can expect the ISPs (Internet Service Providers) to scream like stuck pigs, funding a massive campaign of disinformation, to convince consumers that continuing to throttle “net neutrality” is in their best interest. It absolutely is not!!!

I’m Peter Dekom, and it is amazing how many Americans are easily misled by false corporate messaging and associated conspiracy theories, often by simply mislabeling a clear value to most Americans as “woke,” “anti-job creation,” “radical leftwing,” or “creeping socialism.”