The Motives Behind The FCC's "Net Neutrality" Rule

from The American Thinker:

December 22, 2010


The motives behind the FCC's 'net neutrality' rule

Norah Petersen

Regulating the internet may seem as backwards as the book burnings of past centuries, yet the motives behind such attempts to control the flow of ideas and information - as the FCC showed yesterday with the passage of a "net neutrality" rule - are essentially the same. Thomas Sowell has written:

"Intellectuals and their followers have often been overly impressed by the fact that intellectuals tend, on average, to have more knowledge than other individuals in their society. What they have overlooked is that intellectuals have far less knowledge than the total knowledge possessed by the millions of other people whom they disdain and whose decisions they seek to override."



"Intellectuals" feel threatened by the internet because it has become the tool by which the "total knowledge possessed by the millions" and is able to be shared on an international scale. People at an internet café in Macedonia can read your grandmother's cinnamon bread recipe and the whole world can watch as Iranians post YouTube videos of the violence that racked their country following the 2009 elections.



The World Wide Web is truly an unprecedented phenomena in history- perhaps even more monumental than the invention of the printing press. Books can be burned, but ideas posted on the internet can remain there indefinitely.



The internet gives a power to the masses which they have never before possessed and, as such, it is an influence that inevitably serves to decentralize the grasp of the intelligentsia worldwide.





Posted at 08:59 AM