Net Neutrality Fight Isn’t About Saving Internet Freedom, It’s About Saving Internet Commerce

By Steven Rosenfeld

July 16, 2014 | Net neutrality, as comedian John Oliver said [3] on his HBO show, may be the worst-named cause ever. Besides being “completely boring,” it refers to “all data being treated equally no matter who creates it and why the Internet is a weirdly level playing field.”

Like many Internet activists, Oliver has been urging all conscientious citizens to tell the Federal Communications Commission to leave the net alone. Go file online comments before Friday's deadline [4], he urges, and don’t allow cable companies to charge content creators different prices for sending data at different speeds, which might disadvantage a NetFlix or Facebook or Google.