(I am not endorsing this opinion, merely putting it out there for discussion-O)

IMAGINE A WORLD where Comcast slows video streaming from Fox News’s website to a pixelated crawl while boosting Rachel Maddow—who happens to star on Comcast-owned MSNBC. What if Verizon, which owns the liberal Huffington Post, charged you more to visit right-wing Breitbart. Or maybe Google Fiber bans access to the alt-right social network Gab.

Today, it’s illegal to impose tiered pricing on any internet content, thanks to the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules. But if Republicans have their way, those rules will soon disappear, leaving companies like Comcast and Verizon free to block, throttle, or charge a toll to access your favorite websites and apps.

The principle of net neutrality asserts that internet service providers should treat all internet traffic the same way, regardless of a site’s content or owner—or its politics. Under the FCC’s net neutrality rules, your cell phone carrier can’t stop you from using Skype on your data plan. Your home broadband provider can’t slow Netflix to a crawl. And neither can stop you from visiting all the conservative websites you want.



Broadband providers probably wouldn’t openly discriminate against content on a purely political basis. After all, that wouldn’t be politic. But most of them already favor their own content in one way or another, thanks to loopholes in the existing rules. And that should worry the very conservatives actively seeking to dismantle net neutrality now that a Democratic president no longer stands in their way.

To appreciate just how partisan net neutrality has become, look no farther than Ted Cruz. This past week, he once again called the FCC’s rules “Obamacare for the Internet.”

President Trump, whose rise to power the internet largely facilitated, takes his own issue with net neutrality, sticking to a now-popular conservative talking point against the principle. “Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine,” Donald Trump tweeted in 2014. “Will target conservative media.”

But equating the two gets both wrong. The FCC adopted the Fairness Doctrine in 1949 to require that broadcasters present both sides of news stories. The end of that rule in 1987 enabled the rise of right-wing talk radio shows such as the The Rush Limbaugh Show. But unlike the Fairness Doctrine, the FCC’s net neutrality rules don’t dictate what content websites or apps can or can’t publish. Quite the opposite: Instead of insisting that carriers include specific points of view, it bans them from excluding any legal content subscribers may wish to access. Net neutrality and the Fairness Doctrine are comparable only because of their FCC origins. But the “neutrality” of “net neutrality” hardly requires a politically neutral point of view.

continued..https://www.wired.com/2017/03/trump-...et-neutrality/