> The person I was listening to was not a conservative and pretty much embodied the nightmare a lot of conservatives have about "Net Neutrality".
To be fair, that didn't seem clear, but I might've misread your post! Regardless, I do know of a few conservative hosts who have most claimed net neutrality and the fairness doctrine are analogues. Fairness doctrine has been used as a right-of-center zeitgeist for some time (and rightfully so, IMO), but that the current state of net neutrality is beginning to frighten people who don't identify as conservative is a good thing. The problem I have with it, for instance, is similar to your reasoning: It proposes stricter regulations that might transform government-enforced "neutrality" into something far worse than the present alternative. Of course, I'm supportive of the idea that something needs to be done to prevent anti-competitive practices--I just don't think I agree with the current propositions. (At the very least, the bittorrent fiasco with Comcast is suggestive that highly unpopular actions can be reversed if enough people are willing to push back; it just isn't guaranteed and public complacency/apathy works against those of us who wish to do the right thing... then again, when doesn't it?)
> It grates me as a small government conservative (for some definition of all those words) that I cannot find a simple example legislation dealing with peering and traffic shaping that would keep Comcast / Verizon from using a natural monopoly to change what buying internet bandwidth means.
I definitely agree. I think this is a problem that's endemic to government. There are few good reasons why legislation should be more than a dozen pages--and certainly not multiple thousand pages--and all too often reasonable legislation makes it through almost entirely disassociated from the problem it was originally intended to solve. Simple problems are conflated into things that become unsolvable simply on the merit that everyone wants a proverbial piece of pie. But no one actually wants to prepare it.
To be fair, that didn't seem clear, but I might've misread your post! Regardless, I do know of a few conservative hosts who have most claimed net neutrality and the fairness doctrine are analogues. Fairness doctrine has been used as a right-of-center zeitgeist for some time (and rightfully so, IMO), but that the current state of net neutrality is beginning to frighten people who don't identify as conservative is a good thing. The problem I have with it, for instance, is similar to your reasoning: It proposes stricter regulations that might transform government-enforced "neutrality" into something far worse than the present alternative. Of course, I'm supportive of the idea that something needs to be done to prevent anti-competitive practices--I just don't think I agree with the current propositions. (At the very least, the bittorrent fiasco with Comcast is suggestive that highly unpopular actions can be reversed if enough people are willing to push back; it just isn't guaranteed and public complacency/apathy works against those of us who wish to do the right thing... then again, when doesn't it?)
> It grates me as a small government conservative (for some definition of all those words) that I cannot find a simple example legislation dealing with peering and traffic shaping that would keep Comcast / Verizon from using a natural monopoly to change what buying internet bandwidth means.
I definitely agree. I think this is a problem that's endemic to government. There are few good reasons why legislation should be more than a dozen pages--and certainly not multiple thousand pages--and all too often reasonable legislation makes it through almost entirely disassociated from the problem it was originally intended to solve. Simple problems are conflated into things that become unsolvable simply on the merit that everyone wants a proverbial piece of pie. But no one actually wants to prepare it.