It has become obvious to our overlords in government that us slaves are rather fond of the way the Internet has worked since day one. But its corporate partners have dictated that they desire legal permission to throttle traffic selectively and what the government’s corporate partners want they get. So it’s time to play that wicked game again where the government slips in what it wants to do under the guise of something else. Net neutrality is now being sold as cyber security:
The cybersecurity bill making its way through the Senate right now is so broad that it could allow ISPs to classify Netflix as a “cyber threat,” which would allow them to throttle the streaming service’s delivery to customers.
[…]
The bill, as it’s written, allows companies to employ “countermeasures” against “cybersecurity threats,” but both terms are extremely broadly defined, and video streaming could easily fall within the purview of the latter.
“A ‘threat,’ according to the bill, is anything that makes information unavailable or less available. So, high-bandwidth uses of some types of information make other types of information that go along the same pipe less available,” Greg Nojeim, a lawyer with the Center for Democracy and Technology, told me. “A company could, as a cybersecurity countermeasure, slow down Netflix in order to make other data going across its pipes more available to users.”
You would think with a Senate full of lawyers that net neutrality could be force fed down our throat in a slightly more subtle way. This strategy just reeks of laziness in my opinion. There is only a handful of things I expect the government to do well: killing people, expropriating wealth from the people, pretend that it’s benevolent, and slyly sneak in its corporate partner’s agenda in a way that we don’t readily recognize.
But there you have it, net neutrality is now part of cyber security. And while cyber security hasn’t received much love from the slaves it’s easier to force feed to them because it’s part of OH MY GOD NATIONAL SECURITY!