One of the few good things that have happened in the last little while has been the decision by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last week to make the internet a neutral place (relatively speaking). It was a great achievement in that it prohibits service providers from prioritizing the delivery of online content to household customers. It creates a kind of equality that won’t choke out smaller services, or places that you want to go on the internet.

The battle over net neutrality has been a battle of competing capitalist interests. One section of the capitalist class would like a dominating power within the cyber world so that they may wield control over what content may be accessible and what is not. Another section of the capitalist class doesn’t want to get choked out completely killing their profitability. The debate has been so fierce here because two sets of ruling class interests have been at war. One side is struggling for dominating power to obtain greater profits, while the other side is struggling to hold on to what profits they have.

Already the Republican Party is gathering their forces to try and have this momentous ruling overturned. An effort lead by Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) seeks to pass a bill (HR-1212) that would overturn this ruling and prevent the FCC from making such rulings in the future. Her claim is essentially that regulating the internet is an Obama conspiratorial move to have the government control the internet.

Blackburn said:

“Once the federal government establishes a foothold into managing how Internet service providers run their networks they will essentially be deciding which content goes first, second, third or not at all. My legislation will put the brakes on this FCC overreach and protect our innovators from these job-killing regulation.”

Blackburn has dubbed her bill, HR 1212, the “Internet Freedom Act,” and it has attracted 31 cosponsors thus far. So once again we see the Republican Party is the most open and transparent tools of the most fascist elements of the capitalist class. The scaremongering of an evil totalitarian control is frankly laughable when we consider that the National Security Agency (NSA) already holds such overreaching power. All this ruling does is keep a certain section of the capitalist class from controlling public access to particular information via the internet. The capitalist class’ overall interests are already protected by the NSA.

Blackburn said:

Blackburn’s efforts once again expose the bald face of the Republican Party and its disdain for the free choice of access to information. This ruling once overturned would essentially allow Verizon and a few others to dominate the bandwidth in America. The entertainment industry would essentially choke out legitimate information exchange, and most importantly anything that might challenge their rule. This also shows once again that the market prioritizes mindless Hollywood drivel over true intellectual discussion and access to information.

In this clash of interests among the capitalist class the neutrality of the internet serves the interests of the people as it keeps out a total dominating particular capitalist control over the ability to control what gets preferential access. While the capitalist class still controls the internet in general and the access to it, this ruling keeps it relatively neutral giving us (the people) more freedom to choose what we want to access.

We must understand that neither the Republican, nor the Democrat Party are warriors for the people, they do not represent us. We can however determine what is in our interests and what is not. Freedom to chose information is certainly in our interests.

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Source:

Republicans aim to reverse landmark net neutrality ruling, RT
http://rt.com/usa/238521-blackburn-gop-fcc-neutrality/