President Obama issues a strong request for the FCC to implement net neutrality rules, so of course Republicans and conservatives began their usual freak out.
See that photo up top, taken this summer? The one with a sign calling for “Net Neutrality” in front of the Gadsden flag, which has been co-opted by the Tea Party?
Yes, that’s right.
If there had been one thing liberals and conservatives, for the most part, could agree on, it was net neutrality.
What is net neutrality?
In short, it’s what we’ve had since the World Wide Web began: every site on the Internet is treated equally, no fast or slow lanes based on who you are or where your content is coming from.Â
Watch this video from HBO’s John Oliver, explaining it, that went viral and crashed the FCC’s website after he urged commenters to speak out.
Today, in a strongly-worded statement, President Barack Obama kept a campaign promise and called on the FCC to treat the Internet as a public utility – something Internet freedom activists have been urging for years.
An excerpt:
We cannot allow Internet service providers (ISPs) to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas. That is why today, I am asking the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to answer the call of almost 4 million public comments, and implement the strongest possible rules to protect net neutrality.
I believe the FCC should create a new set of rules protecting net neutrality and ensuring that neither the cable company nor the phone company will be able to act as a gatekeeper, restricting what you can do or see online. The rules I am asking for are simple, common-sense steps that reflect the Internet you and I use every day, and that some ISPs already observe.
So, of course, the radical right has attacked.
Ted Cruz fired the embarrassing shot that the Tea Party – remember, those folks who just a few months ago were standing up for net neutrality – has now embraced.
One this the Texas Tea Party Republican Senator failed to mention in his tweet.
Sen. Cruz has “accepted campaign funds from Comcast,” even though (or because) he sits “on the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, which handles internet governance and FCC oversight,” as Gizmodo reports.
Calling Cruz’s tweet “half-buzzword, half-slur, and 100% cynical,” Gizmodo notes “Cruz’s communications director got in on the action, too”:
And they call Carpenter’s tweet “nothing more than” a “disingenuous, chickenshit political maneuver,” adding,
Government will not rate regulate and saying so is lying (or maybe they didn’t actually read the statement?)
But once Cruz unleashed his attack, the radical right, Tea Party trolls, and conservative creeps were well under way.
Little Green Footballs found many tweets building on Cruz’s bunk. So did we:
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Image via Flickr
Jon Oliver hat tip: Media Matters