MattMaroon.com

TechCrunch today touched on the real reason I’m personally endorsing Obama for president. It isn’t mainly his inspirational ability, though I think that’s an underrated quality in a leader, especially in tough times, which these certainly are. It’s his stance on technology issues, and specifically net neutrality.

Net neutrality is the most underrepresented issue right now, and certainly one of the most important. Sadly, I’m not sure any of the other candidates truly understand what it means. Even the Senators who are essentially in charge of regulating the Internet say things like:

Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got… an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.

This is who is controlling the flow of information in our country. People who don’t even know the difference between an email and the Internet, let alone understand how either of them work, are in charge of the most important force in the history of humanity. That’s not only unacceptable, it’s incredibly dangerous.

The Internet is so massively integrated into our lives now that it’s hard for many of us to remember life before it, and most people first experienced it less than a decade ago. It’s influencing more and more of our everyday lives each year. It’s aiding in globalization, and might is beginning to chip away at oppressive regimes in countries like China. It’s probably the most significant invention since the printing press.

Because the Internet is, and for the foreseeable future will be, delivered by wires, telcos and cable operators have monopolies or duopolies in most of our country. Wireless that truly competes with today’s broadband won’t be here for a while. And in the mean time, allowing a couple corporations in each market to have that much control would be a disaster.

Government has long regulated natural monopolies, and the Internet certainly is one. Maybe in some deregulated future multiple ISPs will share the same cable and phone lines, as power companies often do, and the free market will ensure a neutral Internet, but we’re nowhere near that now, and it’s just too much to risk.

Net neutrality is one of the reasons I never could get behind Ron Paul. I’m pretty libertarian, but I still believe the government has to do some things, and regulating natural monopolies is one of them. And the Internet is so massively important to our economy and the future of our democracy that it needs all the protection it can get.

This entry was posted on January 30, 2008 at 1:29 am and is filed under Opinions You Would Agree With If You Weren\'t An Idiot . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.