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"Fierce advocate" claims to the contrary, no truly sentient being would ever mistake President Obama for a staunch defender of gay rights. Not after he campaigned with notorious homophobe Donnie McClurkin in South Carolina. What made DADT repeal possible was two things: (1) Gay advocates realized they were being strung along, and decided to do something potentially embarrasing about it. (2) There was no discernible corporate opposition.
Neither of these held with net neutrality, despite Obama's proud claim that "I will take a back seat to no one in my commitment to Net Neutrality".
And so we get missives such as this, from Credo:
Today President Obama's Federal Communications Commission betrayed the fundamental principle of net neutrality and sold us out to AT&T;, Verizon and Comcast.
This is the culmination of a long struggle, and it's important we discuss frankly what led to this point. So this will be a longer e-mail than we traditionally send, with some recommended action items at the end.
Despite what you may have read in the headlines, the rules passed by the FCC today amount to nothing more than a cynical ploy by Democrats to claim a victory on net neutrality while actually caving on real protections for consumers.
Make no mistake, AT&T; lobbyists pre-approved this proposal, which means consumers lost and Big Telecom won.
Net neutrality is a principle that says that Internet users, not Internet service providers (ISPs), should be in control. It ensures that Internet service providers can't speed up, slow down, or block Web content based on its source, ownership, or destination.
Yet today the FCC, let by Obama-appointee Julius Genachowski and cheered on by the White House, voted to adopt rules that will enshrine in federal regulations for the first time the ability of AT&T;, Comcast, Verizon and other ISPs to discriminate between sources and types of content. And despite the fact that there is only one Internet, the rules also largely exempt cell phones and wireless devices from what meager protections the rules afford.
It's no exaggeration to say that this decision marks the beginning of the end for the Internet as we know it.
Senator Al Franken laid out what's at stake with this ruling, saying: "The FCC's action today is simply inadequate to protect consumers or preserve the free and open Internet. I am particularly disappointed to learn that the order will not specifically ban paid prioritization, allowing big companies to pay for a fast lane on the Internet and abandoning the foundation of net neutrality. The rule also contains almost no protections for mobile broadband service, remaining silent on the blocking of content, applications, and devices. Wireless technology is the future of the Internet, and for many rural Minnesotans, it's often the only choice for broadband." ....
Now, I must say that it's not Net Netrality activists fault that haven't threatened Obama with course-altering embarrassment, the way that gay activists such as Lt. Dan Choi did. The potential for doing so was just not there in the same way it was for gay activists. So I'm not blaming anyone here. I'm just trying to point out how clearly these two outcomes define the limits of the possible and the impossible with Obama playing the role of political leader.
It should also be noted, of course, that for all of Obama's claims to be thinking in the long term, this habit of always caving on the economic front is virtually guaranteed to destroy the long-term prospective democraphic edge that's been talked about since The Emerging Democratic Majority in 2002. The trends foreseen in that book are not carved in stone, and the more the Dems cave on economic issues, the more social issues are likely to be vulnerable to culture war attacks. And you think the GOP is going to be shy about that?
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