When the net-neutrality debate hit its peak in the fall of 2014, Ted Cruz wrote a bad tweet:"Net Neutrality" is Obamacare for the Internet; the Internet should not operate at the speed of government.' Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) November 10, 2014The Republican senator was torched for this, for many justified reasons. The net-neutrality laws that would be passed in 2015 ' which prevent ISPs from blocking, throttling, or prioritizing certain traffic for financial gain ' have not let the Fed determine how much you pay for internet service, and banning internet providers like Comcast and Verizon from slowing down websites for profit has never been the same as mandating citizens to buy private health insurance. Cruz's rationale was wrong.But with the GOP in control of Washington, and with current Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Ajit Pai intent on erasing those net-neutrality laws from the books, Cruz hasn't softened his stance whatsoever. In a FCC oversight hearing last month, he used the phrase yet again as part of a wider call to repeal the net-neutrality laws.And you know what' The notion of the net-neutrality laws being like Obamacare isn't that crazy. It wasn't crazy the first time, either. But Cruz won't agree with the reason why.SEE ALSO:Trump's new FCC boss could have a lasting effect on the internet ' here's what to watch out forIt is very easy to agree with net-neutrality advocates. Conceptually, saying you support net neutrality is like saying you support not murdering people. A Comcast or Verizon squeezing a YouTubeor, more significantly, the next YouTubefor cash, or giving certain traffic preferential treatment, is a potentially disastrous consolidation of power.This is why, when you pitch net neutrality purely as a concept, both liberals and conservatives tend to say they support it.The dangers advocates warn of aren't totally hypothetical: Comcast did try to slow down Netflix, and AT&T does use its status as an ISP to give it services an advantage. Its important to prevent the current powers from abusing their positions, just as it is in any industry. The big questions we need to look at, however, are why ISPs are so eager to do that (beyond saying theyre bad lol), and how we get to a point where we arent having a political war over this issue every four years.Pai says he objects to the current net-neutrality laws because they classify ISPs as Title II public utilities. The major ISPs have persistently said the enhanced oversight that comes with that will slow their incentive to invest in upgrading their networks. We took our own look at if thats been true thus far, though, and couldnt find a definite trend.Regardless, the larger point is that ISPs need to be incentivized to expand and improve their networks in the first place, because we are only going to increase our dependence on, and usage of, the internet as time goes on.The current net-neutrality laws dance around that. That they prevent ISPs from discriminating against certain traffic is great, but they effectively accept that the current ISPs are pseudo-monopolies, then ask them to not to make things any worse. They ensure competition on the internet, but they merely hope to expand more diverse access to the internet itself.See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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