The Gateway Pundit recently took part in a phone conference where Congresswoman Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA), U.S. Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) and former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler attempted to sway reporters on their anti-American and anti-innovation “Net Neutrality” policies. Releasing a public statement before the call, the Washington shills attempted to claim that Chairman Ajit Pai, the first ever Indian American to hold his position, plans to “gut” the “protections” that have allowed for innovation and “free and open internet as we know it.”
Somewhat ironically, the regulations that they are proposing will do just that; they will take the ability to innovate and the power away from the engineers and innovators behind ISPs and place it squarely into the hands of career politicians in Washington.
Gateway Pundit: Regarding Pai’s statement, that this essentially taking power away from innovators and entrepreneurs and engineers and placing it in the hands of governments, which would lead to less innovation overall and rather than these websites, the Googles and the Netflixes of the world, having to pay these costs, putting it back in the hands of consumers, do you have an argument against that, how this will still foster innovation?
Response: This is Tom. Since the open Internet order, there’s been expansion of venture capital going into Internet-based companies, there has been an expansion in the market valuation of those companies, and oh yeah, by the way, there’s also been an expansion in the possibility and the stock prices of the companies that say they’ve been damaged by it. So what we see here is a whole series of unsupportable allegations and red herrings to chase off in another direction. The question here is, do monopoly providers get to make the rules, or do the people’s representatives acting through their representative government say, ‘We’re gonna have some oversight.’
Gateway Pundit: To quickly push back on that, by your logic, isn’t the real problem the monopolies which are only in place because they’re functioning off of the old regulations in the first place rather than how they regulate traffic?
[The response was muddled and unclear, they refuted w/o giving evidence.]
Info Wars: Two questions, one is, I’m unaware of any established legal precedent that says the Internet has to be regulated under . . . I don’t know if that question was litigated or was just resolved in the 2015 order and secondly, if, in fact, you are after competitiveness here for equal access to the Internet, the argument that I chairman Pai is making is that the censorship that’s gone on with Twitter and the others have really been the more anti-competitive function under Net Neutrality rules.
Response: Nothing in the 2015 order gives the FCC the ability to regulate the Internet. What it does give the FCC the authority to regulate are telecommunications carriers and what the 2015 orders finds . . . is that broadband providers are acting as telecommunications providers, not because they are the Internet but because they are the mechanism, the network by which people get to the Internet. That’s the scope of the act as it was put into law in 1996.
Additional reading on these disastrous (ironically named) “Net Neutrality” policies:
Breitbart: Here’s What ‘Net Neutrality’ is… And What To Think About It
Daily Wire: 7 Reasons Net Neutrality Is Idiotic
