What Ajit Pai Should Have Said About Killing Net Neutrality... And Why It Still Would Have Been Wrong

What Ajit Pai Should Have Said About Killing Net Neutrality... And Why It Still Would Have Been Wrong

6 years ago
Anonymous $roN-uuAfLt

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180611/01111640009/what-ajit-pai-should-have-said-about-killing-net-neutrality-why-it-still-would-have-been-wrong.shtml

As you've probably heard, today's the day that the fairly straightforward and non-onerous net neutrality rules put in place in place by Tom Wheeler back in 2015 are officially taken off the books. We've posted a ton about net neutrality and will post a lot more, but I've been thinking about a few things related to how all of this went down that seem worth discussing. As background reading, it might help to first read why I changed my mind about net neutrality -- from originally being against the FCC setting any rules to eventually being for a fairly limited set of rules. However, what really inspired this post was the podcast conversation I had with Barry Eisler back in December about the lost art of productive debate. One of the points that Barry made was that it's especially easy in these crazy social media-driven times to argue against someone by taking the absolute worst or most extreme version of their argument and then destroying that. As he notes, as a former practicing lawyer, it's the kind of thing he was trained to do. However, he suggested that the more intellectually honest way of holding a debate is to actually reframe the argument and present back to the person what their best argument appears to be, and then debate that.

That can be difficult to do -- but let's take a shot. Because the arguments that Pai and his supporters have given so far for wiping net neutrality off the books really don't make any sense.

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