Gibbs ponders the nature of those opposing network neutrality and whether we, those who understand the issues, are sinners.
There are two ways that you can commit a sin. The first is a sin of commission.
For example, according to a report on Boston’s most excellent Universal Hub (disclosure: UH is run by a good friend of mine), a genius by the name of Brian Hopkins got snockered while barhopping one night in 2006 and, for reasons that aren’t clear, decided, when he got to Boston’s South Station, that he needed to climb on top of an Acela high-speed train.
Now, the Acela trains are electrically powered so when Mr. Einstein reached up he was “promptly zapped with 27,000 or so volts, leading to serious burns and injuries, including the loss of his left arm.”
I’m sure Hopkins will be a candidate for the next Darwin Awards, but what matters here is that what Hopkins did was a sin of commission, a willful act that had grave consequences.
The other way you can commit a sin is by omission, by not doing something. What brought all this type of sinning to mind was an e-mail I received a few hours ago from the Institute for Liberty (IFL) which argued that “the FCC should acknowledge that network neutrality regulations are a solution in search of a problem.”
The message continued: “The American people are awakening to the fact that these so-called ‘network neutrality’ regulations are part of the radical leftist agenda of organizations such as Free Press, and the more the American people learn about such vast expansions of Federal power, the greater their opposition.”
The IFL is described by SourceWatch as “a Washington D.C. think tank that opposes health care reform and promotes keeping a free-market approach to maintaining the health care system in the U.S.”
But wait! That’s not all (as they say on the Shopping Channel). According to a fine post on the magnificently named Majikthise blog, “the conservative Institute for Liberty has truly, if inexplicably, blossomed in the last year”.
I’ll say. The group that had a budget of $25,000 in 2008 to fight healthcare reform, now has a budget of more than $1,000,000 to battle healthcare reform and net neutrality. The curious thing is that the organization refuses to disclose the sources of its funding.
What’s really impressive is the outfit claims 10,000 IFL supporters have filed comments with FCC, which makes it sound like some kind of major grassroots organization despite most of its details being secret.
Then there’s the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) which, as I wrote in a column on ‘Net neutrality last year, “describes itself as ‘a nonprofit, nonpartisan public interest organization’ but is actually a well-funded conservative think tank that promotes a lot of bizarre positions on many issues.”
The CEI followed the IFL into my in-box with an e-mail that contended that “America’s challenge is not for [the] FCC to ‘do something’ in the communications and Internet realm, but rather to dismantle and move beyond earlier regulatory impediments that have limited our creative freedoms in expanding infrastructure and content access.”
What’s interesting about the IFL and the CEI is they stand for the idea that doing nothing is better than doing something. This is a hard argument to deal with unless we really, really, really care because doing nothing is by far the easiest thing to vote for if you are like most politicians, which is to say sublimely naïve when it comes to technology and its impact on our culture.
But what of those of us who “get it”? We understand that network neutrality isn’t some kind of innovation straightjacket that will preclude the United States from competing in some theoretical world of tomorrow by stifling the life breath of the free market.
Oh no, we understand that network neutrality is the thing that will ensure that innovation thrives unfettered as a living thing, not as a prisoner in some kind of corporate walled garden where the public interest is held hostage by large, greedy organizations with little or no concern for social values.
Make no mistake, if we aren’t engaged and fighting for network neutrality then, like Hopkins, we could find ourselves wondering where on earth our left arm went. Unlike Hopkins, we’ll be committing a sin of omission rather than commission and we’ll have no one to sue.
Gibbs networks neutrally in Ventura, Calif. Send your packets to backspin@gibbs.com.
