^{Democracy & Technology Blog} Welcome to the revolution

If you ever wondered how net neutrality could possibly arouse as much passion as it does, The Bullet, a socialist newsletter from Canada, has an illuminating interview with Free Press co-founder Robert W. McChesney in which he discusses the big picture:

… Instead of waiting for the revolution to happen, we learned that unless you make significant changes in the media, it will be vastly more difficult to have a revolution. While the media is not the single most important issue in the world, it is one of the core issues that any successful Left project needs to integrate into its strategic program.

* * * *

The first issue is the Internet. The battle for network neutrality is to prevent the Internet from being privatized by telephone and cable companies. Privatization would give them control over the Internet, would allow these firms to privilege some information flows over others. We want to keep the Internet open. What we want to have in the U.S. and in every society is an Internet that is not private property, but a public utility. We want an Internet where you don’t have to have a password and that you don’t pay a penny to use. It is your right to use the Internet.

Net neutrality for all
McChesney also acknowledges that net neutrality ultimately isn’t just about telephone and cable companies. The Left is using a divide and conquer strategy, in which the telephone and cable companies are merely the initial targets.

[Interviewer]: By making net neutrality the law of the land, is there any risk of lending support to the accumulation interests of digital capitalism’s dominant corporations? Is the network neutrality fight also expressive of a rivalry between old media interests such as the telephone and cable companies and the interests of new media firms such as Google, eBay, Amazon, and Microsoft?
[McChesney]: Absolutely. One of the reasons we’ve been able to win this fight is that most of the new digital capital community is not supportive of the telephone and cable monopolies either. We have been in bed with some media companies that on other issues we are mortal enemies with. For a lot of people on the political Left who practice their politics on a barstool, we’ve committed a high-crime and misdemeanour for building a short-term alliance.
But I’ve learned, by participating in over a decade of specific media struggles, that when you are in the short-term and you are fighting to win, sometimes you make tactical alliances. You don’t sacrifice your principles and embrace someone else’s lame political agenda. If you want to win public credibility and advance a progressive media agenda that actually has a broad impact, this is what you do. That is how politics works. Most progressives understand this.

The ultimate goal, of course, is to completely overthrow capitalism itself.
So now you know why some people consider net neutrality regulation a matter of transcendental importance.