According to the most popular British talk show host on American premium cable, net neutrality is one of the most important regulations for the future of telecommunications (and, by extension, all of humanity under the age of 50). Net neutrality is about making sure your ISP can't control what you view on the Internet and how fast you view it -- or, as the aforementioned talk show host put it, "Preventing Cable Company Fuckery." How could anyone possibly be against something as basic as that? The answer, as the following reactions to net neutrality prove, is "by being hilariously stupid."
#6. An Anti-Net-Neutrality Group Made A Pseudo-Porn Parody
Protect Internet Freedom
Protect Internet Freedom is a group of concerned folks, not cable company lobbyists / possible reptilians, trying to raise awareness of the evils of net neutrality. How? For starters, by making an anti-net-neutrality porn parody ... parody. For real:
The video (which is safe for work, unless your workplace bans cringing) starts with a woman going to her door and being greeted by a buff cable guy. Just as the porno grooves indicate that boning is about to commence, the cable stud is brushed aside by a bunch of nerds in suits, representing the government. The "Department of the Internet" officers then go into the young horny lady's home and start rifling through her shit. They inexplicably make her replace her webcam, ask her about listening to music in the shower, and then make her sign a contract which is intended to look unnecessarily confusing, but actually looks pretty similar to what you really sign with an Internet provider.
Protect Internet Freedom
But minus the blowjob, which is bullshit.
The woman begs for the hunky cable guy to stay, but he dejectedly tells her that the government is in charge now. The pesky Department of the Internet returns in another video, in which a woman calls them to complain that her bill has gone up (something that has zero to do with net neutrality) and has to deal with an unhelpful government employee who would rather be throwing darts at the Bill of Rights. Literally.
Protect Internet Freedom
At least he's using patriotic darts.
Once again, the problem here is that no wacky fantasy these people can think up comes even close to the Kafkaesque nightmare of dealing with a cable company in the real world. Nothing in these videos is based on anything resembling a valid concern, but they manage to fail even on a metaphorical level. Is the hunky cable guy supposed to represent Comcast, Verizon, and the like? If so, we really have to wonder how no one involved with producing the video caught the far more literal interpretation of their message: "So if I support net neutrality, the government will stop cable companies from fucking me?"
#5. There Are Already Insane Net Neutrality Conspiracy Theories
Rush Limbaugh
What would any controversial debate be without some tinfoil loonies stopping by to throw their two crazies in? So what will it be this time? Is net neutrality a sordid anti-American censorship plan by Obama? Is it a way to take away your guns? Is ISIS involved, somehow? All of the above, actually.
Rush Limbaugh
We weren't familiar with that laptop brand.
Field Marshall Logic (aka Rush Limbaugh) announced on his radio show a labyrinthine conspiracy that probably took a lot of pushpins, yarn, and lead paint chips to come up with. Exhibit A: On February 25th, three men were arrested in New York City on suspicion of trying to join ISIS. One day later, the FCC announced new rules to try and preserve net neutrality. COINCIDENCE?!? Impossible.
The third triangle in this Triforce of Stupid was an ATF proposal to ban armor-piercing rifle ammunition (which was quickly shot down). So clearly, Obama was using the cover of the ISIS arrest to enact net neutrality laws so that he could ban the sale of one specific type of ammunition. How any of these things are related is only known to the hamster on the wheel in Limbaugh's head.
Rush Limbaugh
We're starting to suspect he makes this stuff up just to Photoshop himself in action poses.
Another conspiracy comes from the fact that the FCC hasn't released the official regulations that are being proposed, and critics were declaring this evidence of a cover-up less than 24 hours after the initial announcement. The turd in this conspiracy's punch bowl is that it's standard procedure for regulations like this to be unavailable to the public until lawmakers have had a chance to read it over and make their objections. The only difference is that, until now, nobody gave a shit about all the other boring-as-hell telecom regulations they couldn't read. But rest easy, gentle reader, for when they are released to the public, you will have several weeks to read and not understand the official regulations before they're added to the Federal Register.
#4. "Net Neutrality Is Totally Communist!"
Pressphotos/Getty Images News/Getty Images
The western world and the US in particular enjoyed a solid half-century of being able to blame everything that was wrong with the world on those dirty communists. Then the Berlin Wall came down and we spent a decade waiting for our new boogeyman to come by, which turned out to be terrorism (the '90s tried blame their ills on El Nino, but it just wasn't the same). Unfortunately, terrorism isn't terribly advanced in terms of economics, so when trying to sway public opinion on matters like, say, regulation of a telecommunications industry, you might find yourself falling back to blaming Stalin's followers.
Or fuck it, just blame Stalin himself.
The People's Cube
"What key do I press to see the little magic horse cartoons?"
Last August, a conservative think tank called American Commitment began bukkaking people across America with anti-net-neutrality emails in an attempt to start a grassroots campaign to stop Obama from "destroy[ing] American capitalism altogether" and allowing the FCC to initiate a "federal Internet takeover." These emails are, of course, totally absurd, and show that American Commitment has forgotten that the administration they believe to be masterminding a takeover of the most powerful communications service in history couldn't even make a functional website on the first try.
American Commitment
Pictured: two dangerous hackers, apparently.
But they're far from the first ones dusting off the old Ruskie standby. In 2011, Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee declared that by implementing net neutrality, the FCC would be drawing an e-Iron Curtain across the Internet -- because there was nothing the USSR loved more than protecting free speech. She was a bit hazy on the details, but remained quite adamant that the FCC was attempting to nationalize the web. At least that was an improvement from her earlier attempts to paint net neutrality advocates as leaping vampires coming for your Wii:
via Ars Technica
The intro for the lamest Tales From The Crypt episode ever.
If there's any more damning single piece of evidence that net neutrality is the work of communist shadow people, just read this op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, which claims that Putin likes net neutrality so much that he wouldn't even have it killed or sent to a gulag. Of course, the communism link breaks down there, since Russia is no longer a communist state (closer now to a fascist khakistocracy), but you make the best of what you're given.
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