Oh, FCC, you’re such a lovely beast!

I don’t think that most people would call me a friendly proponent of government control over our choices. At times my opinions are extreme, such as being perfectly fine with the legalization of illegal drugs. My morals are bound more by personal choice and the responsibility of accepting the consequences than by what could happen. This usually makes me a very unpopular person with both liberals and conservatives. Believe it or not, both desperately want to control you and your choices.

Personally, I don’t care what you do with your life. If you want to smoke crack in your hoopty with your ho, then go right ahead. And when you drive off and shoot your car into a family driving to church I want your head on a damn platter. Some might point to the fact that if the drugs were illegalized and if there were more stringent regulations and laws, that family might not have been hit by the hoopty driving crackhead. It is the exact same argument behind gun control. The idea is that if you limit what a person can buy, in regards to firearms, you lower the chance of innocent people being murdered by that person. To which I am forced to ask the obvious:

If they’re willing to murder somebody, are they then not willing to steal the gun?

Why would anybody who is planning to commit a crime use a gun that they bought? Instead, they would steal one from an innocent person, since they obviously don’t have the morals to compel them not to. In the age where science is an art and ballistics are a lawyers best friend, why take that chance?

Now, with all of that said and plenty of my friends from San Francisco angry with me (yet again), I think it is appropriate that I take a stance on Net Neutrality. I cannot name all of the people who, in the last week alone, have talked my ear off about how dumb Glenn Beck is and how the conservatives hate Net Neutrality because they’re evil and hate poor people or various sorts of minorities.  Yet, they are missing the obvious point to all of this: the conservatives, who are slowly becoming more libertarian (but not really), are some of the strongest proponents of the FCC.

The conservatives seems to go insane with joy whenever they get a chance to tell somebody that they can’t or shouldn’t do something. Bill O’Reilly has recently spoken out against the courts siding with the Westboro Bapist Church because they are saying hateful things. While I disagree intently with Fred Phelps (for obvious reasons) and everything he has ever said, I will be the first one to admit that he and his lunatic cultists have every right to say whatever it is that they want. Nevertheless, the conservatives want to control his ability to speak, just like the liberals want to control the conservatives right to speak. In the end, both sides are nothing more than mirrors reflecting each other, but placed on different sides of the aisle.

Net Neutrality, from what I understand, would essentially mean that the government, or rather the FCC, would have regulation control over the internet. Essentially, they would control it. With Obama in office this might sound like a good idea to liberals, and certainly the President supports the idea. Unfortunately, what we as a whole, no matter our political opinions, often forget is that we are not always in power. While Obama and the liberals are in control right now, it does not mean they will be in three years. Certainly Democrats should be able to recognize a growing number of conservatives in America, even if it pains them to do that.

So, do you want a conservative FCC (think back to Bush) controlling your internet? The obvious retort, of course, is that right now the corporations are in control of our internet. Instead of having a logical argument, whenever you bring up the big corporations you invite emotions to the dialogue. The ridiculous idea behind the spite towards big business is that they take advantage of people. That argument, however, is flawed when you consider that most of us have options when it comes to our internet providers. Hell, I’ve been having trouble with Comcast lately.  There are a lot of people who would have you believe that I am stuck because Comcast is the great octopus swallowing the fleet of innocent folk. So what am I going to do? I’m switching to SureWest on the twentieth. That is how the Free Market works. Sadly, there are a lot of people who don’t want to believe that the Free Market works at all.

Instead, I simply want you to ask yourself if you want the government, whose control is fluid and never given to one group permanently, to regulate your internet? If you do then certainly we are forced to agree to disagree. The FCC already controls what we can view on TV and what we can listen to on the radio, with exception to satellite radio, why are we so quick to give them control over what we can see, read, watch, and listen to on the internet?

Do you really want Sarah Palin to control your internet?

-Irish

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