Sunday, July 22, 2018

If Tax Cuts Haven't Killed You Yet, Surely the End of Net Neutrality Will


It’s been a little over a month since “net neutrality” regulations officially ended, reverting civilization back into those internet dark ages of 2015 we all remember. In the final days of the Obama administration's federal expansion and power grab, faceless government bureaucrats were handed the sweeping power of regulation, framed with a misleading name of neutrality, and classified the internet as a common utility under the Federal Communications Act. It gave them power to regulate Internet providers as if three dozen or so ISPs in the United States constituted some kind of nefarious monopoly.

In December of last year, FCC chairman Ajit Pai announced the repeal of heavy handed Obama era regulations. With all manner of usual leftist hysteria, Hollywood celebrities jumped to the valiant defense of their countrymen not already dead from tax cuts by voicing protest of the coming repeal, while declared the Internet over. Some frantically insisted the rule change would lead Twitter to charge users per tweet. The ACLU warned the repeal could lead to “erosion of the biggest free speech platform the world has ever known.” In typical grandstanding fashion, on July 19, Democrat politicians across the country made one final push to stop the “net neutrality” repeal before it was too late. Unfortunately for the hapless digital doomsday prophets, the new policy had already gone into effect more than a month earlier on June 11.

The skies did not darken, the earth did not quake. The repeal date came and went with little fanfare. The Internet survived. Twitter didn’t start charging per tweet. The World Wide Web persists un-eroded. Cher continues to tweet incoherent nonsense. 

The Democrats’ “net neutrality” narrative never made any sense anyway. The regulations made the Internet less free. The Internet as we know it expanded and developed unencumbered on it's own. So of course, someone sees a problem. If Democrats wanted to keep the Internet the way it had always been, they would have campaigned to repeal the regulations. But the hysteria over “net neutrality” was never about preserving the Internet we all knew, it was just another power grab. Catastrophe is always imminent according to the Left. It's their favorite tool. They warn of disaster but promise to save us if we’ll only give them more power and more money  The Democrat Party will continue to peddle their same old urine Kool-Aid through the midterm elections and beyond. Their political Armageddons will come and go, the cultists will remain.

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