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Internet neutrality 2.0

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Current debates about twitter, Alex Jones, etc. help put in perspective a quite recent debate over "net neutrality." We are now facing "net neutrality 2.0" and we can achieve some clarity over what it does and what it doesn't mean. 

 Last year the Federal Communications Commission, at the insistence of the man that President Trump has made its chair, Ajit Pai, repeals an Obama-era rule that prohibited Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from charging websites or apps for the ability to load ahead of potential competitors.

 Advocates of the rule said that it wasn't an Obama invention, but simply the codification of an older tradition and understanding, and that Pai -- and the huge  ISPs including AT&T and Verizon, were breaking not only with the one but with the other, to the detriment of the public interest. 

 Pai, on the other hand, portrayed the rule itself as fixing something that wasn't broken, and said the ISPs should be allowed to innovate in ways the rule would constrain -- that their room for innovation IS in the public interest. 

 Now we face another, apparently unrelated, argument about social networks -- Facebook, twitter, Instagram, etc. Conservatives say that these networks have become dangerous (left leaning) censors, as illustrated for example by twitter's recent action against conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.  The government has to step in to stop them. Of course the conservatives aren't proposing that the government step in to enforce conservatism. But they do seem to be proposing that government enforce some notion of fair play, or neutrality. 

 So what we are hearing is a demand for Net Neutrality 2.0.  The battle has nothing really to do with the public interest. It is part of a fight between two contending sets of government cronies, two media giants, the maintainers of the pipes on the one hand and the Kings of Content (K of C) on the other. The corporations involved on both sides are huuuge. 

 The Trump administration is simply all in for the guys who own the pipes, and intent on weakening the K of C precisely because it offers countervailing power to the ISPs. 

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