A Right-Wing Perspective on Saving the Internet as We Know It

I just finished listening in to a national conference call put on by the SaveTheInternet campaign. The call was advertised to reporters as a meeting of “strange bedfellows,” because in addition to usual suspects from Public Knowledge and Consumer Federation of America there was the inclusion of Craig Fields from Gun Owner’s of America. Fields explained his participcation simply: “Whenever you see people on the far left and the far right gettting together, you know what Congress is getting ready to do is un-American.”

I appreciated hearing Fields’ perspective, because he made it clear that internet freedom is an issue of importance to smaller voices, regardless of ideology. In his opening remarks Field said that the telephone companies’ approach to the internet, “turns the free market on top of its head.” With these companies, “even if you leave political bias out of it, simple greed takes over.”

Fields concluded that a free internet with a “free marketplace of ideas” is a sufficient cause to require “government intervention.”

I’ll add that there is no free market in telecommunications and internet to begin with, so the big telcos’ argument against network neutrality using those principles is paradoxical nonsense, whether you accept the ideology of the free market or not.