I’ve written before about the GOP’s peculiarly uncompromising stance on net neutrality. At its core, net neutrality has always been a battle between two huge industry groups and therefore never really presented an obvious reason for Republicans to feel strongly about one side or the other. But they’ve taken sides anyway, energetically supporting the anti-neutrality broadband 
industry against the pro-neutrality tech industry. Today an LA Times article dives more deeply into the problems this is causing:
As tech firms and cable companies prepare for a fight that each says will shape the future of the Internet, Silicon Valley executives and activists are growing increasingly irritated by the feeling that the GOP is not on their side. Republican leaders have struggled to explain to their nascent allies in the Bay Area why they are working so hard to undermine a plan endorsed by the Obama administration to keep a level playing field in Internet innovation.
….The fight comes at a time when Republicans had been making gains in Silicon Valley, a constituency of well-heeled donors and coveted millennial-generation voters who have generally been loyal to Democrats….Republicans have hoped to seize on recent Democratic policy moves that riled tech companies, including a push for strict anti-piracy rules and the Obama administration’s continued backing of National Security Agency surveillance of Internet users.
But the hot issue in Silicon Valley now is net neutrality. And on that issue, the GOP and the tech industry are mostly out of step….“It is close to a litmus test,” said Paul Sieminski, a Republican who is the general counsel to Automattic, the company that operates Web-making tool WordPress.com. “It’s such a fundamental issue for the Internet,” said Sieminski, who has been active in fighting for net neutrality. “I guess it is a proxy on where a candidate may stand on a lot of issues related to the Internet.”
The obvious and cynical explanation for the Republican view is that President Obama is for net neutrality, so they’re against it. The more principled view is that they hate regulation so much that they don’t care what it costs them to oppose net neutrality. It’s regulation, so they’re against it.
Neither one truly makes sense to me, and I suppose their real motivation is a combination of both. Most Republicans probably started out moderately skeptical of net neutrality because it represented a new layer of regulation, and then gradually adopted an ever more inflexible opposition as it became clear that Obama and the Democratic Party were staking out the pro-neutrality space. Eventually it became a hot button issue, and now the die is cast.
But it’s sure hard to see what it buys them. It’s already eroding any chance they had of appealing to the growing tech industry, which is going to be even more firmly in the Democratic camp after this. And while the support of the broadband industry is nice, it’s not big enough to tip the fundraising scales more than a few milligrams in either direction.
All in all, it’s an odd fight. It remains unclear to me why Republicans have chosen this particular hill to die on.
