Sometimes a politician’s talking point perfectly capture the underlying intent to deceive. Actually, that happens a lot. A bit more rarely, such a talking point also captures an interesting point about civics and popular perceptions. It happened yesterday, when Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison said that the FCC’s net neutrality rules are “a stunning reversal from a hands-off approach to the Internet that federal policymakers have taken for more than a decade.”
(1) In a nutshell, the net neutrality rules forbid internet providers from favoring some content providers over others. So, for instance, Verizon can’t take a bunch of money from Disney and send along blazing fast ABC programming to your monitor while non-Verizon-paying video producers get throttled. Rather, internet providers must blindly provide equal access to the highway without special lanes for the paying preferred.
(2) It’s been widely discussed lately that resistance to “control” is at the heart of both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements, the former concerned with government control and the latter concerned with corporate control.
(3) Hutchison asserts that prohibiting companies from making deals with each other (resulting in faster or slower websites for those of us downstream from the deal-making) is harmful government control. It is doubtlessly correct that the FCC is exercising some control. But her comment is in a contextually, and horribly incorrect tunnel of vision looking only at the sphere of companies making deals.
(4) The rules, pretty clearly, do much more to keep control from happening than to allow control. Net neutrality is basically a mandatory Autobahn.
(5) Thus, Hutchison very ably demonstrated the problem of rhetoric in the dearth of context. In this case, not many folks were fooled.
