Obama shows the way on Net neutrality
If you’ve been reading these parts for even a little while, you’re sure to have come across one of my many Net neutrality discussions. As tiresome as it has been to pound on the same podium over and over, it has been necessary — and President Obama’s very public statement asking that Internet service providers be classified under Title II is a major step in the fight for an open Internet.
Of course, no reasonable person would think this fight should have to be fought. Common sense dictates that ISPs are telecom providers and should be held to the same open standards as electricity, phone, and other regulated utilities. The ISPs managed to get the FCC to classify them as "information services" instead of telecom utilities because they offered tokens such as email addresses to their customers alongside their data services, and that has allowed us to get to this point. It's a farce.
The Internet is as much of a utility as any other these days, and we cannot play fast and loose with those rules. Otherwise, we risk everything.
Of course, that didn’t stop Sen. Ted Cruz from coming out with a pants-on-head stupid comment about Net neutrality being "Obamacare for the Internet." Making a statement that amazingly dumb in public would probably have found him signed up for forced sterilization in the 1950s. It’s this kind of blatant, arrogant, willful ignorance that undermines our democracy. But enough about the dim, let’s look at the future.
With Obama very openly supporting Title II classification for carriers, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has a very difficult choice ahead. He must jettison either the hordes of ISP lobbying money thrown all around him or the president who appointed him and who has very clearly stated his wishes. It’s not a comfortable spot, but Wheeler arrived here on his own, buoyed by months of equivocation, refusal to participate in public hearings, and horrible “compromises” that weren’t compromises at all. Wheeler's actions will ultimately have a massive impact on the Internet and the United States for decades to come.
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http://www.infoworld.com/article/2845944/net-neutrality/potus-on-net-neutrality.html