Goodbye, Net Neutrality. Hello, Liberty.

Gary North - November 30, 2017

The New York Times has published a screed with this title: The Internet Is Dying. Repealing Net Neutrality Hastens That Death.Let me remind you of the basic rule of titling breathless articles: begin with the phrase "the death of" or "the end of." When you read such a phrase, you can be sure that whatever it is, it is not dying. Whatever it has been in the past, it is likely to be in the future. It is not facing the end.Here is the logic of the screed.

The internet is dying.Sure, technically, the internet still works. Pull up Facebook on your phone and you will still see your second cousin’s baby pictures. But that isn’t really the internet. It’s not the open, anyone-can-build-it network of the 1990s and early 2000s, the product of technologies created over decades through government funding and academic research, the network that helped undo Microsoft’s stranglehold on the tech business and gave us upstarts like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Netflix.Nope, that freewheeling internet has been dying a slow death — and a vote next month by the Federal Communications Commission to undo net neutrality would be the final pillow in its face.Net neutrality is intended to prevent companies that provide internet service from offering preferential treatment to certain content over their lines. The rules prevent, for instance, AT&T from charging a fee to companies that want to stream high-definition videos to people.

The phrase "preferential treatment" is easy to define: high bid wins. It is the organizational principle of the auction.The mainstream media are Keynesian to the core. The fundamental principle of the free market is this: high monetary bid wins. It is the principle of the auction. Liberals hate most auctions. Yes, they like auctions of incredibly overpriced and incomparably ugly art. They don't get upset when somebody pays $150 million to buy a piece of tripe painted by Picasso. That's their kind of stupidity. They like it. But they don't want the common people to have access to open markets. Open markets are only for the elite, in the view of America's Left............To Read More.....