It’s Been Fun
DECEMBER 14, 2017 – 1:55 PM
Well, the Apocalypse is upon us: the FCC has voted to repeal the Obama-era “Net Neutrality” regulations. This means that the Internet we’ve all come to know and love is finished, over, kaput.
The services you love — Google, for example, or perhaps some crotchety old geezer’s curiously named and depressing blog — will henceforward only be available to corporate bigwigs, Russian oligarchs, trust-fund playboys, corrupt politicians, cisgendered white males, and other oppressors of the downtrodden. While they’re all chilling with Netflix and checking streaming updates of their stock portfolios, we’ll be scrounging old magazines from the trash and reading the backs of cereal boxes. While the fat-cats are flying down the fast lane, the “rest of us” will be inching along, bumper-to-bumper. Women will no longer have any way of getting the abortions that are a defining condition of modern femininity.
Get ready, folks. If you want to get online, it’s going to cost you big. And if you have something to say, well, chances are you aren’t going to be allowed to say it. Freedom? Equality? The American Dream? Happiness? Fair play? Truth? Justice? Hope itself? Kiss ’em all goodbye, amigos. The Internet is going to be wide-open to the free market.
Imagine this, if you can: The government will not be in control.
Very grim times are ahead. Those of you who are old enough to remember the horrors of an unregulated Internet — it was two years ago, too far back for most Americans to have any recollection — will know what I mean.
As for this blog: I will soldier on until darkness falls. I may be able to keep things going for days, or even weeks — who can say?
Well, the Apocalypse is upon us: the FCC has voted to repeal the Obama-era “Net Neutrality” regulations. This means that the Internet we’ve all come to know and love is finished, over, kaput.
The services you love — Google, for example, or perhaps some crotchety old geezer’s curiously named and depressing blog — will henceforward only be available to corporate bigwigs, Russian oligarchs, trust-fund playboys, corrupt politicians, cisgendered white males, and other oppressors of the downtrodden. While they’re all chilling with Netflix and checking streaming updates of their stock portfolios, we’ll be scrounging old magazines from the trash and reading the backs of cereal boxes. While the fat-cats are flying down the fast lane, the “rest of us” will be inching along, bumper-to-bumper. Women will no longer have any way of getting the abortions that are a defining condition of modern femininity.
Get ready, folks. If you want to get online, it’s going to cost you big. And if you have something to say, well, chances are you aren’t going to be allowed to say it. Freedom? Equality? The American Dream? Happiness? Fair play? Truth? Justice? Hope itself? Kiss ’em all goodbye, amigos. The Internet is going to be wide-open to the free market.
Imagine this, if you can: The government will not be in control.
Very grim times are ahead. Those of you who are old enough to remember the horrors of an unregulated Internet — it was two years ago, too far back for most Americans to have any recollection — will know what I mean.
As for this blog: I will soldier on until darkness falls. I may be able to keep things going for days, or even weeks — who can say?
Did the moron who wrote that think people forgot what the Net was like BZ?
ReplyDelete(Before Zippy)
BTW Notice how the Lefties can't argue issues? It's always fear and hate.
You folks may be being a bit short-sighted. Some rules are put into place to prevent things from going south. The internet is much larger today than it was 2 years ago and that growth is not going to slow down anytime soon. The bigger it gets, the more competition there will be for its resources. Unless there are preventive measures to keep the playing field level, then what's to stop the wealthy and powerful from taking the lion's share of the available resources? Do you care about local businesses? They could be choked out by large corporations demanding speed and large chunks of bandwidth. Argument from a "leftie."
ReplyDeleteAnonymous,
DeleteIt's called the "free market system". These horrible things you speak of won't happen if there's not "market" for them to happen. In the history of this country, there's not a damn thing the government has taken over that it hasn't fucked up royally. I remember an old joke that suggested something like if the government took over a whore house it would find a way to screw it up. The things you are worried about, not only won't happen, it's almost physically impossible for it to happen unless some nefarious entity deems it so. And I consider our government a nefarious entity of it's own. And I AM a local business. I worry about this about as much as I worry about globull warming and other liberal scare tactics. Meaning not at all.
The internet isn't just a few dozen wires with limited throughput. The more demand, the more systems are enlarged, and the more fiber optic cables installed to handle the demand.
DeleteThe only real change with no net neutrality is those willing to invest in the infrastructure will have a bigger opportunity for increasing their revenue. Those that were riding due to regulations will have to pay for what they once used for free, due to government meddling. Otherwise, money grubbing politicians, and unscrupulous bureaucrats, will not be in control of private enterprise.
Rayvet beat me to it, but W(ho)TF thinks government being in control is an improvement on (or for) anything? This person is obviously a brain-dead liberal. Government can - and has many, many times, FU'd a wet dream.
ReplyDeleteThis was probably written by MZ (aka MotherZucker) while he was sitting in Merkel's lap getting short-stroked. (Pardon all of my crudity.)