Ted Cruz Says Net Neutrality Is 'Obamacare For The Internet'

Sen. Ted Cruz came out swinging after President Barack Obama wholeheartedly endorsed new internet regulations Monday morning.

Cruz, who is mulling a run for president in 2016, compared the entire concept of "net neutrality" — which posits internet companies should not be allowed to speed or slow down their services for certain users — to Obama's much-maligned healthcare reform.

'"Net Neutrality' is Obamacare for the Internet; the Internet should not operate at the speed of government," Cruz wrote on Twitter.

Cruz's spokeswoman, Amanda Carpenter, added that net neutrality would place the government "in charge of determining pricing, terms of service, and what products can be delivered. Sound like Obamacare much?"

The reason something like net neutrality might make sense is because it's not really a situation of the market "working things out".

The reason this is true is because of the effective monopoly which is granted to broadband providers like Comcast/Xfinity, Brighthouse, etc.

You can't have a situation where an entity which has been granted a monopoly can then turn around and use that monopoly power to discriminate and crush potential competitors.

Netflix is a good example. If Xfinity wants to compete with Netflix for providing streaming service to broadband internet consumers, it wouldn't be fair for them to simply degrade Netflix's bandwidth in order to make the service worthless when compared to Xfinity.

I'm against Net Neutrality in any kind of free-market environment, but it's a fact that we're not functioning in anything even close to that with respect to Comcast and their ilk.

If I want bidirectional broadband internet service, I have one choice in my city, or two, at most, if I count AT&T's lower-speed garbage. The same is true for most of us, regardless of which city we live in.

The current environment is heavily monopolistic, and it's the furthest thing from a free market system, and therefore dogmatically dismissing Net Neutrality as some kind of anti-free market Tyranny is rather naive, IMHO.

If I'm a customer of NetFlix, and I've paid Comcast for a certain amount of monthly service, then it's not really Comcast's business what services I'm doing on the internet, as long as it's legal and it doesn't exceed my contracted bandwidth usage.

Under such conditions, I certainly shouldn't be forced to ultimately purchase Xfinity's streaming service due to the fact that Comcast unfairly degrades Netflix's service using their monopoly power.

I must reiterate that the reason this issue arises at all is because of the effective monopolies which are in place.

I'm happy to be persuaded otherwise on this issue, but I must insist that there is nothing remotely resembling a free market in this situation. Therefore, free market logic does not apply without a significantly higher amount of justification and explanation.

I honestly don't know what the best solution is here. But I do know that there's a huge difference between a free market and granting de facto monopolies to huge corporations, and then allowing them to use their monopoly power to crush direct competition.

“There is a lot of misinformation about ‘net neutrality’ because too many people do not really understand how the internet works.”

Yea, some of the responses I got are simply appalling with disinformation and willful misunderstanding.

Net Neutrality concept has been around for at least 2 decades. It’s not about government micromanaging the internet. It’s a doctrine that all the carriers and providers route traffic without bias and without surcharges.

Carrier — Like AT&T, Verizon et al.
Provider — innova.net .. leased DSL line to my house, (only the line is really owned by the carrier who wholesales it).
Content provider — Netflix — provides content that crosses various networks to get to your home.

BTW: Netflix uses distributed media servers hooked up downstream either co-hosted or leased space/bandwith from a carrier physically administered by the carrier, remotely controlled by Netflix. So see, they already pay. I think that’s how they settled things with verizon.

But, it puts the government in charge instead of a corporation. Why do you trust government NOT to do exactly the same thing with THEIR companies of choice....Solyndra, GM, Hollywood, etc. depending on the party in power?

And the corporations, depending on which ones, are government cronies, so in a fascist system, if you get the government you get the corporation, and if you get the corporation, then you get the government.

We’re screwed.

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