Net neutrality showdown in Washington; Obama threatens to veto Senate resolution

The internet is working just fine, thank you. But the federal goverment wants to regulate with something called net-neutrality.

When the feds get involved with private business, things get worse.

Writing for Fox News, Phil Kerpen has more:

On December 21, 2010, President Obama's Federal Communications Commission (FCC) fittingly chose the darkest day of the year to ignore Congress, the courts, the American people, and common sense. They voted to unravel a decade of remarkably successful hands-off Internet policy and impose potentially devastating regulations on the previously free market internet.

Network neutrality sounds nice. Originally it was the idea that all of the traffic – the zeroes and ones – that travel over the networks that comprise the Internet should be treated exactly the same way. But engineers cried foul, because the routers that make the Internet work are highly sophisticated, with millions of lines of code that necessarily prioritize different types of traffic. Streaming video can't tolerate the delays of a few seconds that, say, and e-mail would not be affected by at all.

So network neutrality morphed into something even more dangerous – empowering FCC bureaucrats to play traffic cops, micro-managing networks and deciding which traffic can or can't be prioritized. The result would be a precipitous decline in private investment, because the companies that spend billions of dollars building networks could no longer be certain how the FCC bureaucrats would allow those networks to be used.

Internet service providers, while claiming "neutrality," claim that all they want to do is provide lanes of traffic, like highways.

But expressways become jammed with traffic every weekday. And for the ISPs, that will be fine.

President Obama, who has never met an industry he didn't want to regulate ruin. He is threatening to veto the resolution.

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