FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler might not go alongwith President Obama's push for net neutrality, but the American people are speaking loudly on the issue: They don't want "fast-lanes." They want net neutrality.
In a new survey, the University of Delaware's Center for Political Communication found that support for neutrality is strong and widespread -- regardless of gender, age, race and level of education. About 81 percent of Americans oppose allowing Internet providers like Comcast and Verizon to charge Web sites and services more if they want to reach customers more quickly, that is, allowing what are often called "Internet fast lanes."
Most surprising of all, given comments by Republican lawmakers over the past couple of days, is that support for net neutrality is bipartisan. Indeed, Republicans were slightly more likely to support net neutrality than Democrats. Eighty-one percent of Democrats and 85 percent of Republicans in the survey said they opposed fast lanes. The poll's margin of error was 3.2 percentage points.
Maybe Republican lawmakers hope to sway their constituents, but as Joe DiStefano writes, this poll indicates that people will only become more likely to support net neutrality as they learn more about it. Among those who said they'd "heard a lot" about the issue (only about one in ten of those surveyed), 56 percent strongly opposed fast lanes. The corresponding figure was 44 percent among those who said they'd "heard nothing."
All the same, these findings raise the question of why Republicans in Congress have been so quick and so forceful in their responses to President Obama's call for strict net neutrality rules. There is a convincing conservative case for net neutrality regulations. While that might be an attractive position for the GOP, some suggest that Republicans are just dependent on campaign donations from the cable industry.
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