Snippet: The Danger of Bad Analogies ☇

Alexandra Petri for The Washington Post:

“Net neutrality is Obamacare for the Internet,” he [Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz] tweeted Monday, after President Obama came out in favor of forceful net neutrality measures, urging the FCC to treat Internet service providers as common carriers. “The Internet should not operate at the speed of government.” […]

I am a big fan of net neutrality, as an outcome. We should want an agency that can actually enforce net neutrality if companies fall short. Anything short of that seems unlikely to hold up in court. But the actual underlying problem is encouraging investment in Internet infrastructure and innovation so that we get quick, non-discriminatory access to the whole Internet. We should not have the ninth-fastest Internet in the world, nor should it be so wildly overpriced. We are America, dang it! (Perhaps net neutrality is like Obamacare, in the sense that it is something we are undertaking it just now in America while in other countries they seem to have things in hand much better, but then again those countries are also smaller.)

Petri offers a fairly light take on the stupidity and scary implications of Ted Cruz’s tweet. If you aren’t familiar with the idea of net neutrality, educate yourself (pipe analogy aside).