Whom do you trust with the Internet? | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Perhaps you have been listening to the yays and nays concerning the net neutrality decision of the FCC, which also gave the City of Wilson permission to expand their Greenlight Internet service. Where you stand on them basically comes down to whom you trust: big business or big government? For many of us the answer is neither.

    For most of my professional life owning and operating small businesses I recognized a responsibility to four groups of stakeholders: the owners, the employees of the business, its customers and the community in which we operated. I was taught that the enterprises that did the right thing by most of those stakeholders were most successful and always felt most other businesses believed the same.

    Not so today. The more companies expand the further they remove themselves from those who work for them, buy from them and live where they operate. Two things consume big publicly traded corporations: profits and stock prices. They pay obeisance almost exclusively to shareholders (mostly large institutional investors) and their top executives. Witness the financial sector's greedy crash, automakers who put profits above safe airbags or ignition switches and industrial pollution and coal ash spills as but a few of many examples that prove the point.

    We've watched megopolies like Time Warner-Comcast, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple make George Orwell's 1984 predictions of Big Brother look infantile. These companies know more about you than you can imagine, including your relative age and sex; what you watch, when and for how long; who you are likely to vote for; where you live; and what you likely earn, purchase and do for recreation. Don't believe it? Search for any product, then watch how fast it pops up as an ad on Internet pages you view.

    Many businesses have grown so large as to be labeled "too big to fail," increasing both their size and influence over us every day. The Federal Trade Commission, formed 100 years ago this month, was supposed to protect consumers and promote competition but has become a toothless tiger, as has the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulators.

    I don't trust big government either. Most of us can tell tales of bureaucrats and onerous regulations that cost us money, complicate our lives and delay our actions. Just like big business, the larger and more powerful government becomes the less it is in touch with and concerned about you and me.

    We need checks and balances on both. As an individual I have little influence on corporate America and while I don't have much control over government I feel some influence by voting for those who do.

    Supposedly nobody owns but everybody owns the Internet. The Federal Communications Commission, charged with regulating public airways, is tasked with purview. Only time will tell what impact net neutrality will have, but someone needs to make sure you and I won't be forced into an ever-constricting communications pipeline while the big players gobble up all the bandwidth and pay substantially lower rates for so doing.

    In the end I don't trust either big business or big government but I sleep better at night believing somebody is providing some checks and balances to keep the playing field at least a little more level. Right now I like net neutrality.

    Publisher's note: Tom Campbell is former assistant North Carolina State Treasurer and is creator/host of NC SPIN, a weekly statewide television discussion of NC issues airing Sundays at 11:00 am on WITN-TV. Contact Tom at NC Spin.