Reprinted from The Guardian
Do you want to live in a country where Internet Service Providers can slow down and censor your internet traffic at will, where the NSA has vastly more power than it does today and where end-to-end encryption may be illegal? Then Jeb Bush is the Republican presidential contender for you: he has positioned himself as the anti-internet candidate in an election where internet rights have never mattered more.
A lot of the White House candidates have made worrying comments about the future of surveillance and the internet -- from Chris Christie's bizarre vow to track 10 million people like FedEx packages, to Hillary Clinton's waffling on encryption backdoors -- but Jeb Bush's deliberate campaign to roll back internet rights is the perfect storm of awful.
Bush proudly stated on his campaign website this week that he would axe the FCC's important net neutrality rules, a hard-fought, grassroots victory from earlier this year by internet rights activists almost a decade in the making. As the New York Times described it at the time, the net neutrality rules "are intended to ensure that no content is blocked and that the internet is not divided into pay-to-play fast lanes for internet and media companies that can afford it and slow lanes for everyone else."
The idea that ISPs shouldn't be able to censor internet or slow down traffic at the behest of paying corporations seems like something everyone can agree on, right?
As Gizmodo's Kate Knibbs put it, however, "Instead of viewing the FCC's net neutrality rule as a safeguard for consumers, Bush is framing it a way to sandbag ISPs out of their rightful profit margins, with no upside for people using their services." Jeb Bush is apparently happy to side with Comcast and Time Warner, two of the most hated conglomerates in America, rather than the tens of millions of people who just want to watch Netflix every night without their internet slowing down or having to pay more.
