Even us old clunkers deserve to drive on the Information Superhighway
by digby
Many of you have undoubtedly already heard about the impending big el foldo on Net Neutrality. For those who don't follow these issues, suffice to say that most people were hoping the administration would fight to uphold the notion that the "Information Superhighway" wouldn't be allowed to change its basic structure to allow big money players to have an advantage over little nobodies like me. Oh well:
How did Obama go from championing an open web to potentially presiding over the very dismantling of its openness? It's likely that his idealism eroded, the same way most starry-eyed candidates' idealism does; worn to a nub by a relentless tide of industry lobbying and influence peddling...
So how corrupted is the office charged to protect consumers from telecom monopolists and traffic profiteers? How bad is it, really? According to the watchdog group LittleSis.org, which maintains a "free database of who-knows-who at the heights of business and government," it's about as bad as it gets. Kevin Connor, the org's co-founder, used LittleSis's new mapping tool, which is currently in beta, to whip up a chart of the interconnected FCC-telecom lovefest transpiring in just Wheeler's office alone for Motherboard:
"The FCC might as well be a subsidiary of Comcast, once you map out the org chart," Connor told me. "The regulators used to work for the industry, they will in the future, and they think they do right now. So they make the policy work for the industry, and that's how you get proposals like this one."
This is just a microcosm of the way our government works in general.
I don't honestly know if the president has been corrupted by this process. But being as generous as I can be, I'm going to guess that there are a number of factors involved, not the least of which is a desire to keep the cable companies happy so they don't decide to become aggressively adversarial on the spying stuff. They have a big card to play, even beyond money. And there is clearly a partisan race to see who can best kowtow to Silicon Valley money, which is obviously an enormous cache of cash. Since most of those players are libertarianish by orientation, I'd expect to see more of this sort of thing.
And finally, there's always the Occam's razor explanation which is that the president never cared about Net Neutrality and the Democratic strategists see this a gimme to one of the big players in a way that will only upset some dirty bloggers and a few liberal malcontents who think the internet is a vitally important modern institution which belongs to everyone and should be kept as open as possible. And who really cares about them anyway?
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