Bye, Bye, “Net Neutrality”…

The twittersphere has been on fire. In the face of losing future government micro-management over the Internet, activists are spinning their wheels right off their ankles.

One Twitterer, @JohnnyOxyde (but his friends call him “Lil Man”), has a clever plan to save the Internet if TS does indeed HTF.

Bold move.

Mr. Ogden concurs. And, upon discovery, three people were right there with him.

And another…

The resistance, ladies and gentlemen.

Another popular hashtag, spread eagling incredible levels of cognitive dissonance, is #StoptheFCC.

(Stop them from stopping themselves, apparently.)

And here’s the thing.

The Truth About Net Neutrality

The endgame of Net Neutrality is not what most people think — and it’s the complete opposite of “neutral.”

The “Open Internet Order” (OIO), passed by the FCC in 2015, is incredibly explicit about nationalizing the Internet and placing it completely under government control.

“In the text of the OIO,” Drew Armstrong pointed out in FEE, “the George Soros-funded net neutrality group Free Press was mentioned 46 times – it’s almost as if Free Press had written the regulations for the FCC. The OIO sees the Internet as something that should be nationalized by the government to be run like a public utility.”

One of the founders of the Free Press, Robert McChesney, said: “What we want to have in the US and in every society is an Internet that is not private property, but a public utility. We want an Internet where you don’t have to have a password and that you don’t pay a penny to use. It is your right to use the Internet.”

The long-term goal, then, is clear: To have the government, not neutral service providers, in control of your data usage. (For free!)

McChesney stated further,

“At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies. We are not at that point yet. But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.”

Net Neutrality, Like Freedom, Isn’t Granted By Government

Here’s the dig…

The real fight is on the local level, where local governments stifle competition in exchange for free service and kickbacks. This was well documented by Wired magazine back in 2013.

And that’s the point:

The government can’t possibly give the Net Neutrality activists what they want. Even if they succeed for a moment, the potential for abuse, corruption and weaponization is always there.

Only creating a web with neutrality baked into the cake can create true neutrality.

Thus, our only true hope for true net neutrality is innovation… in creating a new web to make the old one obsolete.

And, it’s coming. Several projects we’ve mentioned in these virtual pages, and several more we’ve yet to, are on the case.

Innovation will eventually mark this whole “neutrality” debate irrelevant. We will see that Net Neutrality cannot possibly be granted by government — or promised by corporate entities.

It can only be truly achieved by creating an Internet that doesn’t depend on powerful intermediaries to remain honest and fair.

Only by endowing the backbone of the Internet with properties of open source, distributed technologies — censorship-resistant, permissionless and private — can the Internet truly be and remain neutral.

Only by locking the web open is neutrality guaranteed.

Until then, we’ll keep missing the mark in the fight for “Net Neutrality.”

And we’ll all be worse off for it.

Until tomorrow,

Chris Campbell
Managing editor, Laissez Faire Today

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