These three FCC Commissioners are clearly rabble, too.
There's a "think tank" called the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). They recently had an event in D.C. to denigrate what they're calling "tech populism." They mean us by that, all the millions of users of the internet who had the temerity to contact the FCC and tell them what we thought about net neutrality. They say that we're grubby populists in contrast to what they represent, "tech progressivism." By that they mean being a think tank funded in part by the telecom industry who should be deciding for us on issues as critical as net neutrality. Free Press's Tim Karr
has the details.
Tech populism threatens innovation and the economy, argued ITIF President Robert Atkinson in his opening comments. Its practitioners, Atkinson said, are "emotional" and "self-interested." Reason and the "benefits of progress," on the other hand, motivate tech progressivism—which is really just another name for the cozy alliance between the corporations and government that had written tech policy for decades. […]
According to Atkinson and his colleagues, the public should trust that this insular process will lead to policies that serve all of our interests. Rather than engaging, people should just sit back and wait for the corporate-government pact to bestow its benevolent dictates upon us.
In this backwards equation, Atkinson casts newly engaged Internet users as straw men. We tech populists rely on mob rule and a distrust of authority, he claims. It's the enlightened few, tech progressives like Atkinson and his corporate cronies, who must intervene in tech policy before we do any more damage.
The
net neutrality victory we had with the Federal Communications Commission this winter has these folks alarmed, particularly as it follows a second, massive victory by the people who use the internet—when we killed
SOPA/PIPA, the online piracy bills that would have shut down enormous amounts of content on the internet.
You see, for these "tech progressives," democracy in tech policy is a bad thing. We shouldn't have so much influence with our elected representatives or with the agencies regulating things like the internet and which ask for public opinion when they devise those regulations. In fact, Atkinson says, our desire to have a say in how our government regulates the industry that we pay money to every month so we can use the internet is "extremely toxic to practical policy debates."
We're rabble, in other words. Toxic rabble. We should be grateful to our technology lords for providing us the crumbs of broadband speeds slower than in Latvia or Romania and eleven other countries. Because our ingratitude in asking for an open internet is stifling innovation. Clearly. Look out how much innovation we got before the FCC ruled on net neutrality. Fourteenth place in the world in broadband performance.
But what do we mere internet denizens know about important stuff like keeping the internet open and operating. We're just rabble.
Keep up the rabble rousing. You won net neutrality. Now, are you ready to defend it? Call the congressional committees working to defeat us.