Mark Cuban on net neutrality: Fear the FCC, not Comcast

Mark Cuban doubled down on a recent Twitter rant in which he likened the Federal Communication Commission’s proposed broadband regulation to some sort of socialist dystopia.

“We’re seeing competition, but everyone is like ‘the big ISPs are going to f--- everyone,'” said Cuban, who argued that the public is better off waiting for competition between broadband providers than running the risks of regulation. He pointed to the FCC’s reaction to the Janet Jackson nipple-slip incident to argue the agency is inherently political, and will ultimately screw up forbearance or whatever pro-consumer mandate it tries to impose. In Cuban’s view, the widespread fears that ISPs like Comcast will squeeze small websites are illusory, while the outlook for fast Internet is better than we think. Cuban assured his audience that, years from now, we’ll all be awash in 8-gigabit Internet and so we can rest easy. Advocates for Internet competition can only hope that Cuban will follow his Dallas Mavericks basketball team on the road to cities like Brooklyn, where there’s precisely one broadband provider -- and consumers have no hope of switching, no matter how bad the service gets.