It’s my own personal conspiracy theory but if you stop and think about it for just a few minutes it will begin to make sense.
Internet access in the United States is near ubiquitous. Almost everyone has access or can get access if they want. Investment and innovation has not slowed since the last round of Net Neutrality regulations were proposed and stopped. No one’s content is throttled in any meaningful way because it doesn’t pay for an ISP to slow down access. So why this repeated push from the FCC for regulation?
The big threat the government says is ISPs can enter into agreements to favor certain content providers over others. So, they need to implement regulations that will keep the “Internet open and free” from selective throttling. The Internet is a computer network. Throttling, as it is commonly known, is nothing more than network management. Content gets routed all over the net and ISPs and content providers want to figure out the most efficient way to deliver that content. Text and pictures are far less bandwidth intensive as audio or video and as such should not move across the Internet in the same manner because their bandwidth requirements are different. The government tells the public they will ensure they’re not paying more to stream one provider’s content over another or that one provider’s content will stream or download slower than another. It’s a red herring. They don’t really care about how fast you get to download a movie or if you can stream in 4K. What they want is to control and license content publishing.
Why would the government want to control content? Just look to broadcast TV and radio. Look at what broadcast television and radio have become. It’s a cesspool of nonsense and government whitewashed information.
Okay, how will they do that if the proposed regulations have nothing to do with content publishing and is only concerned with ISP traffic? Reclassifying ISPs as common carriers is the magic sauce. It’s the wedge they will use to open the door to licensing and content regulation. Here’s how I see this coming about.
- Reclassify ISPs as common carriers
- Declare Internet traffic as public bandwidth
- Require ISPs to grant some basic level of access… for free
- Public bandwidth content must be regulated to conform to “community standards”
- Any person or company wishing to publish must have a license in order to protect children
- Children’s content to be heavily regulated
The government, through the FCC, used the wedge of regulating frequency interference to regulate content. They didn’t stick to their original mandate. They used the concept of “limited frequencies” to get into content regulation. They took something that was seemingly benign and expanded their power to eventually castrate and homogenize broadcasting.
This is coming. The government doesn’t want you saying what you want to as many people as will listen. The Internet is a threat to their control and they’re coming for it.