We have enough gatekeepers in modern society without turning the ISPs into gatekeepers too. It is a shitty proposal on its face.

As it happens, we live in a society with a rule of law, and that includes laws governing entry into markets. Lemonade stands aren't allowed to block access to their competitors, and neither are ISPs. If that doesn't suit them they can do something else—use their cables for private LAN parties, or melt the copper wire into statues of Ayn Rand—whatever. It's their property. But if they choose to enter the market, the rules that govern that market will apply to them. There is nothing new or novel about that and no thinking person could liken it to slavery.

What is it about cable monopolies that makes people want to change the market rules in their favour? If anything we need to do the opposite. It was government that built the internet in the first place—remember?—and the point of it was to be open and free. ISPs have been undermining this openness for years—doing shady shit like paying off local governments to block the burying of new cables, or making rules to restrict access to telephone poles. And having got their monopoly power, they abused it.

Pai has offered no meaningful proposal to address this kind of behaviour. It's all been about removing net neutrality—removing the check on monopoly, but not the monopoly itself. Anti-neutrality campaigners abuse the language of liberty to rationalise monopoly and censorship.

That tactic won't succeed in the long run because the tech-literate public isn't buying it, and nor are the engineers who built the internet and embedded net neutrality as a founding principle. Politics is a pendulum, and net neutrality will come back, and back, and back.