Neutral Observer

Earlier this year, a U.S. court struck down laws defending net neutrality. If you're not familiar with it, net neutrality is the concept that all the information growing around should be treated equally. Nothing should be given preferential treatment and allowed to go faster.

The nightmare scenario of an Internet without net neutrality is one in which owners of Internet infrastructure (mainly the big telecommunications companies) close their networks to any businesses who don't pay big bucks. Big companies can do business over the internet, but anyone else is out of luck.

What I find frustrating about the net neutrality issue is how it exposes the weakness in your average geek's political philosophy. As I touched on when discussing Bill Gates, many techies are politically naive and thus fall prey to simplistic view points. And the most likely is extreme libertarianism or objectivism.

Because of that, your typical geek's answer to pretty much any problem is, “less rules.” Of course, there's plenty to be said for small government and less regulation, but any reasonable person recognizes that government and legislation occasionally has its place. And if net neutrality is important to you, that's going to have to be one of those places.

But the tech world has been slow to admit this. You still find geeks who are very passionate about the need for net neutrality, but then advocate against laws backing up the principles. So - much as I’m worried for the end of net neutrality - I do feel a bit of schadenfreude when I watch uncompromising libertarian geeks forced to lie in the bed they’ve made.

Increasingly, we're seeing the internet and the tech world pitted against politicians. So far, politics has been kicking technology's ass. Beloved tech principles that the Internet is a world-wide, uncensored, private medium are falling, and technology proponents seem powerless to stop it. I wish I could go back in time to the mid-nineties and rub this in the face of geeks in Wired bragging about how the Internet was making government irrelevant. They should have learned to play the political game then; they're going to have to take a crash course now.