Net Neutrality Explained

RUSH: I got another note also from somebody who said, “You know, you’ve explained net neutrality a couple, three times, but I think you better do it again because now they’re protesting at Ajit Pai’s house.” He’s the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. And they’re protesting at his house.

And of course all of the Millennials and all the tech bloggers are all caught up in this believing that net neutrality is equality and fairness and sameness and does not allow the evil cable companies and the evil internet service providers to gouge you and to overcharge you. And nothing could be further from the truth.

had a great interview with Professor Thomas Hazlett, my friend from the old Sacramento days who has written a book. I would really recommend, and I’ve recommended it two or three times, his book, The Political Spectrum, Thomas W. Hazlett. In fact, it’s written for laymen in its verbiage, thereby easy to understand, and it’s a history of the regulation of the telecommunications industry.

And what it demonstrates — and he was great in the interview in The Limbaugh Letter and I’m gonna excerpt some of it during the program today. He’s just excellent in pointing out the history of regulation of the entire spectrum, wireless, FM, AM, television, police band, air traffic control, you name it. The regulation retarded — do you realize that we could have had cellular communications in the fifties? FM radio was delayed 20 years because of the power of AM broadcasters to shelve it, influencing regulators. The history of the telecommunications industry is the history of regulating it and impeding it. And net neutrality is an often-used misnamed term that is designed to make everybody think that no one user, no one provider, no one company will have any more access to the internet than any other.

One of the best analogies I could give you on this — … The pro-net neutrality people have come up to analogies to try to help people understand what they think they’re trying to propose. And they use Federal Express and Amazon as their illustration. And they say FedEx delivers Amazon’s packages, and they’re all treated the same. No package gets any preferential treatment. FedEx gets the packages, they deliver them.

Nothing could be further from the truth! Whether you’re talking about Amazon or Shmazon, you can choose your delivery speed, you can choose how many days, weeks, you can choose the kind of delivery you want, do you want ground, do you care if it doesn’t take a month, do you want it tomorrow, do you want it in two days. All of that depends on how much you are willing to pay.

There’s all kinds of flexibility and it’s based on what people are willing to pay. All packages are not treated the same.

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