Blowhard Sen. Ted Cruz is getting hit from all sides for his ridiculous net neutrality nonsense. His fellow conservatives, and Facebook followers
blasted him for being an embarrassment to the whole movement for getting this one so wrong. He's also being
schooled on the issue by fellow Sen. Al Franken (D-MN).
"He has it completely wrong and he just doesn't understand what this issue is," Franken said about Cruz on CNN's State of the Union.
"We have had net neutrality the entire history of the Internet. So when he says this is the ObamaCare, ObamaCare was a government program that fixed something, that changed things," Franken explained. "This is about reclassifying something so it stays the same. This would keep things exactly the same that they've been."
Now, Ted Cruz isn't a dumb guy. Chances are pretty good he understands exactly what the issue is, but that
he does pretty well by Big Telecom (particularly that $10,000 from AT&T). And he's thinking about that 2016 presidential run and how well he could do by the industry then. But he might need to rethink that.
Not only is Cruz totally on the wrong side of conservative public opinion (they wholeheartedly support net neutrality), he's on the wrong side of the rest of big business. It turns out that major companies in a variety of industries—Ford Motor, Visa, United Parcel Service, and Bank of America—have been lobbying the Federal Communications Commission for the last several months to protect strong net neutrality rules by reclassifying broadband as an essential service. Why? Here's how they argue it: "Every retailer with an online catalogue, every manufacturer with online product specifications, every insurance company with online claims processing, every bank offering online account management, every company with a website—every business in America interacting with its customers online is dependent upon an open Internet."
It really is Big Telecom—and Ted Cruz—against the entire rest of the world on this one.
Call the FCC. Tell them to pass strong net neutrality rules under Title II, and to do so this year.