The New York Times (Falsely) Informs Its 7 Million Readers Net Neutrality Is 'Pointless'

Let's be clear about something: the net neutrality fight has always really been about monopolization and a lack of broadband competition. Net neutrality violations, whether it's wireless carriers blocking competing mobile payment services or an ISP blocking competing voice services, are just symptoms of a lack of competition. If we had meaningful competition in broadband, we wouldn't need net neutrality rules because consumers would vote with their wallets and leave an ISP that behaved like an asshole.

But American broadband is dominated by just a handful of very politically powerful telecom giants fused to our national security infrastructure. Because of this, lawmakers and regulators routinely don't try very hard to fix the problem lest they upset a trusted partner of the FBI/NSA/CIA, or lose out on campaign contributions. As a result, US broadband is heavily monopolized, and in turn, mediocre in nearly every major metric that matters. US ISPs routinely, repeatedly engage in dodgy behavior that sees zero real penalty from our utterly captured regulators.

The net neutrality fight has always really been a proxy fight about whether we want functional government oversight of these monopolies. The monopolies, it should be said, would prefer it if there were absolutely none. It's why for the last 20 years or so they've been on a relentless tear to strip away all state and federal regulatory oversight of their broken business sector, culminating in 2018's repeal of net neutrality -- which not only (and this part is important) killed net neutrality rules, but gutted the FCC's consumer protection authority (right before a pandemic, as it turned out). The repeal even attempted to ban states from being able to protect consumers from things like billing fraud, an effort the courts haven't looked kindly upon so far.

So with that as background, imagine my surprise when New York Times columnist Shira Ovide, whose tech coverage is usually quite insightful, informed the paper's 7.5 million subscribers that this entire several decade quest to thwart corruption and monopolization is "pointless":

"People may scream at me for saying this, but net neutrality is one of America’s longest and now most pointless fights over technology."

Yeah I'm not going to scream (too worn out), but I will politely note that the paper of record has absolutely no idea what it's talking about.

Again, the net neutrality repeal didn't just kill net neutrality! It effectively gutted the FCC's consumer protection authority, shoveling any remaining authority to an FTC the broadband industry knew lacked the resources, authority, or staff to do a good job. That was the entire point. The repeal also tried to ban states from being able to stand up to companies like AT&T and Comcast. The goal: little to no real oversight of one of the more broken, monopolized markets in America. During a pandemic in which broadband is being showcased as essential to survival, healthcare, education, and employment. Anybody calling a fight on this subject "pointless" hasn't taken the time to understand what's actually at stake.

The whole story paints the effort to have some modest oversight of telecom monopolies as droll and pointless. At one point, the story (which is really just the New York Times interviewing itself) even oddly implies the debate over what to do about "big telecom" is irrelevant and that "big tech" is all we really need to worry about:

"However, the debate feels much less urgent now that we’re talking about threats of online disinformation about vaccine deployment and elections. The net neutrality debate focused on internet service providers as powerful gatekeepers of internet information. That term now seems better applied to Facebook, Google and Amazon."

This idea that "big tech" is the root of all of our problems, and that "big telecom" is not worth worrying about is a message AT&T and Comcast have been sending out for the better part of the last several years. Given how often I see this concept par