14 DAY TRIAL // A couple of weeks ago, John Oliver did a segment on net neutrality, in which he said that appointing Tom Wheeler, a former lobbyist for the cable industry, as the leader of the FCC was akin hiring a dingo as a babysitter.
Last week, Wheeler responded to the video which went viral, saying that he wasn’t a dingo and that he even had to google it to know what the animal was, although he should have at least heard of the baby-eating dingo from the `80s or the movie that resulted from the case.
Either way, in the most recent “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver responded to the challenge asking Wheeler to “prove it!”
Oliver had a little fun on his account, saying that he never actually said Tom Wheeler “was” a dingo, but rather that he was “like a dingo.”
“But now that you are denying it so strenuously, I am honestly trying to wonder whether you really are a dingo after all,” Oliver joked. “Unless you can produce an official document, verified by a licensed zoologist certifying that you are not an 100% talking dingo, I don’t think you can complain if Americans refuse to leave you alone in rooms with their babies.”
John Oliver`s statement a few weeks back came as he discussed the concept of net neutrality and how the FCC’s idea on the topic had nothing in common with the principle.
As it is well known by now, net neutrality means that all Internet traffic must be treated the same by the service providers, whether it comes from the smallest of sites or from a behemoth like Netflix of Google. That means that all content gets to reach the consumer in appropriate quality, as they have certainly paid more than enough for an Internet connection and oftentimes for the content as well.
What the FCC’s Tom Wheeler proposed, however, would allow the ISPs to create a so-called fast lane, which translates into higher speeds for the companies that agree to pay for it, putting smaller companies at a blatant disadvantage. Furthermore, since the ISPs complain they can’t provide higher speeds due to the current infrastructure, the fast lane is actually inexistent, and this becomes more of an issue of slowing down the rest of the content rather than speeding it up for the ones who choose to pay.
In short, the FCC’s proposal would kill net neutrality while Tom Wheeler denies, with a smile on his face, that things are so and claims that everyone else has got it wrong.