As somebody who uses words everyday I understand that they can be difficult. Sometimes you think of the perfect word to make your smartass zinger shine but are uncertain if you’d be using it in the correct context. For those situations there are these things called dictionaries. In fact if you go to Google and type “define:word” you will be greeted with the definition of “word”. Because this wonderful technology known as a dictionary exists I’m not terribly forgiving when people totally fuck up their word usage in a professional piece of writing. So when I saw this petition claiming to oppose a federal takeover of the Internet I realized that the author doesn’t know how some very basic works work:
Dear Mr. Wheeler,
Americans have been getting faster and faster Internet speeds because of competition in the free economy, not because of anything the government has done.
To which I ask, what competition? What free economy? This is one of the biggest problems with the net neutrality debate. One side wants to use the state to mandate net neutrality and the other side has no fucking clue how Internet provision works in this country. There is very little competition in the Internet provision market specifically due to government regulations. In the current environment a handful of companies such as Comcast, Century Link, AT&T, and Verizon have near monopolies, if not outright monopolies, in many areas. People who are really lucky may have two Internet Service Providers (ISP) to choose from but that’s not always the case. Thanks to lobbying efforts by large ISPs the option for communities to build their own ISP isn’t even legal in many areas.
If you think the net neutrality debate is currently between a government regulated market or a free market then you have no clue what’s going on. The debate is between a government regulated market or a government regulated market with the only question being what set of regulations should be used to fuck the American people. Don’t fall for ploys like this petition that claim to support a free market in Internet provision. A free market isn’t even an option on the table at this point and the only people who claim it is are shills for large cable providers that are trying to sucker free market advocates into supporting their own subjugation.