February 2016

[Commentary] Whoever becomes our next president will want to notice that network neutrality activists and the Obama administration have locked the nation into a stance badly at odds with how the Internet actually wants to evolve.

For starters, notice all the developments in the marketplace that neut activists feel obliged to be outraged about, which they imagined the government could stop. We come to the most bizarre case of net neuties making lemons out of lemonade. A Pew survey finds a small but absolute drop in the number of American households subscribing to fixed broadband. Now, no WSJ reader would be so incautious as to conclude the value of the Internet must therefore be falling for many Americans—it costs too much, who needs it! Yet this is exactly the interpretation the neut brigade are peddling, even while Pew quietly acknowledges the truth: Fixed broadband subscriptions slipped slightly because fast wireless is increasingly seen by many customers as an adequate substitute. Especially paying note should be those frantic about a digital divide. Millions of Americans who are still offline never bought a PC in the first place, and then weren’t going to get caught up when the Internet arrived. Now these people are getting a second chance thanks to smartphones and tablets tied to speedy wireless networks. This is bad?

Bernie Sanders’s critique of the news media, as in nearly everything else, has remained constant as he has risen over the last 40 years from radical protester and protest candidate to mayor, congressman, senator and now a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president.

Despite the advent of the Internet, the diminishing of traditional news media companies and the emergence of new media Goliaths like Facebook that have helped fuel his rise, Sen Sanders (I-VT) remains orthodox in his mass media doctrine. Antagonism toward the news media is, of course, the standard posture for politicians, especially insurgent candidates. Republicans frequently try to prove their conservative bona fides by bashing the “liberal media,” and Barack Obama tried to circumvent the press filter with his own website. But Sanders’s dim view of the “corporate media,” as he refers to it, is much more than a campaign tactic; it is a pillar of his anti-establishment, socialist worldview.