CUT THE CRAP! Your Month in Review from the most "progressive" administration ever.

[Armstead]

302. Those are the basic two choices

I won't disagree that there are many possible variations and trade-offs involved, and legal and technical complexities and possible models.

But all of that flows from that basic binary choice. As with so many other industries, we can choose to keep the horse in the barn (make the bottom line the Internet as a public resource that is equally accessible and affordable to everyone) or we can let that critter get outside and eventually run away (start to give access providers the ability to discriminate, make their own rules and allow monopolies to form).

What too often happens is that a few little exceptions are made to the idea of regulation, and the floodgates open up and pretty soon the horse is miles away, and we're stuck with unregulated monopolies with a stranglehold on basic services.

That's what happened with Broadcast and cable deregulation, and the Financial System, and that's gonna happen to the Internet, unless the line is firmly drawn now about maintaining public control over access and the infrastructure.

If we ensure the public-interest standards now, service providers can still make money. Public and/or private investments can be made to improve service. But they won't be able to gouge us, force rotten conditions on use of the Internet and separate us into information haves and have-nots just so they can make obscene profits with no requirements to operate according to the public interest.