This program is made possible by people just like you and we need your support right now.

Please visit the fundraiser page at bestofalf.com for details.

Now welcome to the award winning Best of the Left podcast with Cups Today from the Tom Hartman program on the media at the Young Turks List Show,

the David Pakman Show last week tonight with John Oliver and Moyers & Company.

And here is a sentence that has never been uttered in the history of everything prepared to be inspired about net neutrality.

I promised you I would tell you about Chatnougatennicy.

Here in Washington DC, on a good day, I can get a downline and I've got, you know, the top of the line consumer internet service, which is supposedly,

I think 50 megabytes download, maybe the advertise it is 20, maybe the advertise it is 100, I'm not sure whatever it is, but I can, you know, I can get a measured, you know, when you do those little test things, I get 27 down, five up megabytes.

And for that, I'm paying whatever I'm paying. I think it's like something like 50 bucks a month. And, you know, here in the studio, we have the commercial stuff.

And I'm pretty sure we're at 100 down. No, what are we?

It's even slower than that. Yeah. Okay. And we're paying a fortune for this. We've got, we've got several of these lines because we've got all these streams going out.

We've got three of these. And I thought we were pulling them off the cable.

Yeah. And so in any case, it's just, you know, so just think about that. I mean, you know, high speed in the United States means 20 megabytes per second means you can watch Netflix sort of.

If you want to download a two hour movie, it can take a half hour. I remember many times Louise loves to watch movies on her iPad on airplanes.

And so, and we travel a fair amount. And so if we're going to travel someplace, she will try to download a couple of movies to her iPad. You know, she'll go to, you know, one of the site Amazon or whatever where they sell movies and she'll just buy a couple of movies and download them and put them on her iPad.

And she has to sit there and wait for hours. I remember one time we were at the airport. And it was only half downloaded. And she was like, oh my God, you know, she was frantic about it because the, you know, the download speed at the airports, even even in the red carpet club or whatever it's called the, you know, the airline club was still just painfully slow.

And hooking it up to her phone and using the AT&T service with a hot spot. It's still brutally, you know, it's like five megs if you're lucky.

So, Chatton, New, Gatana, C said screw this. The internet is not that different from television, from an electric utility or from water. Right? It's an, it's becoming a natural monopoly. You don't, you can't really choose among a large multitude of providers.

You got one pipe coming into your house and it's part of the commons. It's like the old, you know, Ben Franklin with the libraries back in Philadelphia, you know, it's like they should be available to everybody. Let's make this a public utility because it's part of having an informed and educated electorate.

I mean, even if people do want to watch Netflix or watch porn or something still, there's the news there. There's, you know, you can communicate with people. You can talk to grandma. You can, you know, it's all right there.

People increasingly are living their lives on the web and we can debate, you know, the relative merits or health of that, which is a whole different discussion.

But the fact of the matter is that increasingly you've got to have good, reliable high-speed internet access. So, keep in mind, I'm talking, you know, 10, 20, 50, 100 megabyte download speeds are considered blazing fast in the United States.

...