I like a good fight, no matter who’s fighting. Matt Stoller, the MyDD blogger who’s wasted so many electrons on the dubious cause of net neutrality, wrote a post immediately after the recent election in which he declared that the “netroots” legislative agenda begins and ends with his pet cause. A somewhat more serious thinker, Bob Fertik, quickly listed 140 agenda items and asked his readers to vote on them; his list includes things like raising the minimum wage, signing Kyoto, restoring habeas corpus, and all that sort of trivia. Net neutrality came in at number 14. Here’s the explanation:
Bloggers who work mainly with text and photos (and that’s most political blogs) could blog without net neutrality; it would mainly affect video bloggers since they consume far more bandwidth, and that’s what the monopoly gatekeepers want to tax.
But Bloggers couldn’t do what we do without the First Amendment…
Now that seems awfully sensible, especially for somebody who drinks the Kool-Aid. Why is it that Stoller has such a hard time keeping things in perspective?
It is also possible that some video bloggers might see the value of QoS.
Live video needs it, for sure.
14th? That high?
Then again, Kyoto was far ahead of it. Which suggests both immense ignorance about what Kyoto would actually do, and either immense ignorance about the political possibility of passing the treaty, its popularity, or an immensely quixotic view of their own powers.
The whole top of that list is boggling. Good thing the Netroots aren’t powerful – and never will be with policy priorities and policies like that.