Most ominously, the new policy gets the camel’s nose, head, neck, and a hump under the tent of Internet content regulation. If the FCC’s common carrier rules creates artificial scarcity of broadband (the odds-on-favorite bet), then how long will it be before some president, senator, representative, bureaucrat, MSM personage, or academic proposes a “public interest” test for Internet sites? Sound like the Fairness Doctrine? If the market and economics are not allowed to determine who gets Internet service and on what terms, we know what will: politics. Bye bye all those pesky, inconvenient, politically incorrect blogs and sites. Tellingly, the FCC has embargoed the new 332-page administrative policy from public distribution, but according to Ajit Pai, one of two Republican commissioners on the FCC, it involves proposed new taxes and content fairness.

Net neutrality has been sold as a way to protect the little guy from giant ISPs. As a certified “little guy” with a pesky, inconvenient, politically incorrect blog and site, aspiring to a readership large enough to make the government want to stamp it out, Straight Line Logic says: take your protection and regulation and shove it! SLL and the rest of the non-mainstream Internet are better off with the status quo, taking our chances with the ISPs, who, large and powerful though they may be, are much smaller and less powerful than the federal government and its minions with whom they’ll be forced to bed down.