What Is Net Neutrality?

[Chris]

Here's the latest from PragerU, this one on New Neutrality getting you past the liberal hype.



Here's a more humorous look at net neutrality. As the video points out, Zucherberg, and he even says it, is rent seeking blocking out smaller competitors who would not be able to afford to met Net Neutrality regulations. It hearkens back to the Progressive Era when the robber barrens did the same.

[Hoosier8]

Yep, you couldn't get past the hysteria. I watched people saying the rollback was already affecting their network before it was even implemented.

[Chris]

AMERICA IS MOVING TOWARD AN OLIGARCHICAL SOCIALISM

...Historically, liberals advocated helping the middle class achieve greater independence, notably by owning houses and starting companies. But the tech oligarchy — the people who run the five most capitalized firms on Wall Street — have a far less egalitarian vision. Greg Fehrenstein, who interviewed 147 digital company founders, says most believe that “an increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people. Everyone else will increasingly subsist on some combination of part-time entrepreneurial ’gig work‘ and government aid.”

Numerous oligarchs — Mark Zuckerberg, Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, founder of the Y Combinator — have embraced this vision including a “guaranteed wage,” usually $500 or a $1,000 monthly. Our new economic overlords are not typical anti-tax billionaires in the traditional mode; they see government spending as a means of keeping the populist pitchforks away. This may be the only politically sustainable way to expand “the gig economy,” which grew to 7 million workers this year, 26 percent above the year before.

Handouts, including housing subsidies, could guarantee for the next generation a future not of owned houses, but rented small, modest apartments. Unable to grow into property-owning adults, they will subsist while playing with their phones, video games and virtual reality in what Google calls “immersive computing.”

...Theoretically, the Democrats moving to the left should terrify the oligarchs. Yet increased income guarantees, nationalized health care, housing subsidies, rent control and free education could also help firms maintain a gig-oriented economy since these employers do not provide the basic benefits often offered by more traditional “evil” corporations in energy, manufacturing and basic business services.

...The losers here will be our once-protean middle class....