A Silent Victory for Liberals
As the country has silently moved on from the decision to repeal an Obama era FCC regulation that imposed restrictions on bandwidth throttling by the large ISP’s that control internet access, the big question now is, why would the conservative party do this to themselves.
Much has been said of the recent repeal, which has taken an obscure topic on content influence to the forefront. From the standpoint of influence though, it seems that the repeal wouldn’t benefit the smaller news sources that conservative leaning patrons seem to congregate around, such as Breitbart.com, or American Renaissance. ISP’s such as Comcast, which owns the broadband provider XFINITY (my personal residential ISP), controls vast amounts of the content flowing to the public in the United States. It would seem that such a large business would benefit immensely from the repeal of the Obama Era legislation. News outlets owned by Comcast, including NBC, CNBC, and MSNBC tend to lean left if asked by an average conservative, and Comcast has been known to violate Net Neutrality laws in the past. Why would conservatives want a media behemoth like this to have more control over which content gets streamed into their households?
In fact, if one were to turn on Rush Limbaugh and listen to the more conservative leaning ideals for repealing, one would get a sense that the repeal would somehow be a net positive for conservatives. While I would suggest repealing net neutrality benefits no one, Rush seems to pursuade his listeners that business wins, at the expense of Government, which he seems to think is a good thing. His argument is a common theme among conservatives alike. The only problem with it, is that it doesn’t benefit conservatives at all. Repealing net neutrality, unfortunately, benefits no one.
Any astute observer of the debate can foresee a time with no net neutrality when large oligarchs control most if not all of the content on the internet. With the repeal of Net Neutrality, that time now is only a question of when, not how. Internet content throttling after all will be paid for by the likes of large corporations like Netflix, Google, CNBC, and other internet content providers that gross north of several billion dollars of revenue a year. Any corporation with the available funds capable of paying ISP’s for the advantage of clearer signals into the population’s living rooms and bedrooms will be able to influence ones opinion, over time, by the repeal of Net Neutrality.
If it is corporations that conservatives would like to benefit for the repeal of this legislation, then they(conservatives) must come to terms with one unfortunate conclusion: they are not the beneficiaries of it, at all. It seems to me that for now, only liberals will benefit.
