“…libertarianism is good because it helps conservatives pass off a patently probusiness political agenda as a noble bid for human freedom. Whatever we may think of libertarianism as a set of ideas, practically speaking, it is a doctrine that owes its visibility to the obvious charms it holds for the wealthy and the powerful. The reason we have so many well-funded libertarians in American these days is not because libertarianism suddenly acquired an enormous grassroots following, but because it appeals to those who are able to fund ideas. Like social Darwinism and Christian Science before it, libertarianism flatters the successful and rationalizes their core beliefs about the world. They warm to the libertarian idea that taxation is theft because they themselves don’t like to pay taxes. They fancy the libertarian notion that regulation is communist because they themselves find regulation intrusive and annoying. Libertarianism is a politics born to be subsidized. In the “free market of ideas,” it is a sure winner.”
— Thomas Frank (The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule)
(Columnist for the WSJ)

Reminds me of a conservative version of the liberal flirtations with Communism back in the old days — great in theory, but in reality essentially intellectual masturbation.

Let’s face it. A lot of companies would like to go back to the walled garden setup. But they’d loose customers fast, and they know it. This attempt, to be able to charge more for certain types of service is no surprise. They want to increase their profits. To bad if it inconveniences their customers. After all customer service isn’t what they are about. It’s profits.

Weren’t AOL and MSN two of those “on-line” services. It probably isn’t really a coincident you are drawing them in the first layer of the illustration.

;-)

Before the web was born “on-line” services existed that did the exact same kind of tying content to communication services. I remember the French Minitel service, introduced in the early 1980’s that – due to state funding – had a huge number of subscribers. But despite 15 years of trial these services never really took off. Too much control, lack of choice, value only for a limited amount of applications, never able to reach a generic mass market and the scale benefits connected to that.
Compare that with the web, with its inherent net-neutrality, which took some two years to conquer the world. So yes, I agree, it is worthwhile to protect net neutrality.

BTW, Cato Institute is a Libertarian organization. There are more opinions in the world than just Left and Right.

Pipe or river? Does a person who buys up land in the middle of a river have the right to withhold water from all people downstream? I truly hope the free flow of the net gets protected otherwise it will simply become another greed strangled media source and that’s all, just like the graphic above illustrates.