Taking sides on net-neutrality impact.

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How would you feel if the telephone company wouldn’t let you call your mom? Not your mother-in-law; your mom. Or if the phone company made you pay extra to call your mom. Or told you that you couldn’t call your mom unless she became a customer. Or said that if you called your mom, you’d have to call Aunt Millie, too. Or made the line buzz every time you called her.

That may be what it’s going to be like on the internet, with net neutrality repealed.

The reason why phone companies can’t do any of the things above is that they are “common carriers,” and common carriers are not allowed to discriminate among callers (or “callees”). You can call anyone you want, and anyone can call you, period, as long as the caller pays for the call. That’s the law.

“Net neutrality” applied the same rule to the internet. When net neutrality was in effect, you could browse any website, anywhere in the world, on the same terms. That was the law.

In 2014, the Obama administration’s Federal Communications Commission instituted net neutrality. (In 2010, I said that I favored a statute, or even a constitutional amendment, to protect net neutrality.)

Under net neutrality, your internet service providers — ISP is the acronym — could charge you for delivering the internet to you, but it could not charge extra for Facebook or YouTube or any other content provider. Nor could it charge that content provider, nor could it block or slow any content provider.

The Trump administration’s FCC repealed net neutrality last week. This will allow ISPs to discriminate among websites, by preventing you from accessing websites, or charging you (or the website) extra for whatever sites it wants, or slowing down your connection to certain sites. Think of it this way: Internet indoctrination Digital deceit Cyber-subterfuge The World-Wide-Whitewash The Information Highway Giveaway Well, you’re thinking, “If my ISP does that, I’ll just choose a different ISP.” But you can’t. The cable TV companies have a chokehold on “fast internet” service (faster than 25 Mbps downloads) in the U.S. Satellite and phone internet, their competitors, are nowhere near as fast. And virtually all of us have only one cable TV provider. It’s a legal monopoly.

To make matters worse, just two companies, Comcast and Charter, own around 70 percent of those cable TV lines. Even if that weren’t true, though, only one of them would have your house wired, and that’s what matters to you.

Google made $79 billion in advertising revenue last year. Comcast has 23 million internet subscribers. With net neutrality dead, then it would be child’s play for Comcast to block Google, substitute its own Google-like service (called “Coogle”?), and steal all the advertising revenue. Same thing for Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Reddit, Amazon, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Netflix, eBay and the Huffington Post.

And once people “cut the cord,” giving up cable or satellite TV in favor of the internet, then without net neutrality to protect you, your ISP will be able to determine what news you hear. Fox News could pay Comcast to be the only source of news on the internet for 23 million families. The new Fox News motto could be this: “Fox News: If you don’t like us, then turn off the internet.” Or MSNBC. You get the idea. Think it couldn’t happen? Well, last year, Comcast didn’t like the deal it had to transmit New York Yankees games on its cable system, so it just took the Yankees off the air in New York and New Jersey. For a year.

In fact, net neutrality was instituted because a phone company tried to block an internet company from transmitting phone calls. So, of course they will try to do it again.

Now that the Trump administration has had its way, internet R.I.P. COMMENTARY |

The hypocrisy of the left never ceases to amaze. Liberals shout about the inherent evil of monopolies, unless it’s the government monopoly. Whether it’s health care, education or any other area of our economy, the left preaches one thing and governs the exact opposite. Consider the following easy examples — liberals and their counterparts claim to want to improve access to health care and then promote a government-run monopoly on health care that will destroy it (single payer). They claim to care about students and then fight school-choice initiatives that are saving hundreds of thousands of poor children trapped in failure factories of government-monopolized public education. And now they have shifted their duplicity into the battle over the future of the internet and their desire to control how you access and pay for technology services.

A bit of perspective is in order: Over the course of the entire history of the internet, we have survived just fine, free from the heavy hand of government intrusion. Technology innovated from the days of AOL disks that would arrive via snail mail and dial-up (remember that sound?), to the advent of DSL, to iPhones and 5G fiber-optic lines. We now possess more power in our handheld smartphones than was used to land a man on the moon.

And then in 2015, like a Ronald Reagan analogy come to life, we witnessed the arrival of “the federal government, here to help.” Enter “net neutrality.” First off, it’s necessary to dispel with the notion that there was anything neutral in the scheme of net neutrality. A truly neutral market would not look like the FCC regulating the internet like a utility. Think about it — if we left control of the internet to a government bureaucracy, would we be at all surprised when regulators, lobbyists and special interests established dictates to protect entrenched players at the expense of innovation and new competition?

A graphic shared by California Congressman Ro Khanna in the debate over net neutrality illustrated the sheer lunacy of letting federal bureaucrats control the internet. Ironically, Khanna was using his graphic to argue in favor of continuing net neutrality. In tweeting this piece showing the differing views, one of California’s finest actually made the case for getting rid of this onerous policy.

According to the left, government should be able to dictate that companies can’t innovate and unbundle services to offer consumers what they need. Bureaucrats would rather have government set the “essential tech benefits” in the same way they set essential health benefits for Obamacare. The consequences of that decision — health premiums out of control and spiraling costs — are still being felt by working families all across the U.S. Now, like Einstein once relayed in defining insanity, they’re simply repeating the same mistake and hoping for a different result.

From its inception in the late 1970s-early 1980s until 2015, the internet went from a little-known resource for sharing military data to the single biggest technological innovation in human history. Its expansion fueled human connection and spawned more wealth and growth than anything we have ever seen. Consider how this history would have been different had the heavy hand of government been controlling the levers from the get-go.

A recent analysis conducted by the American Enterprise Institute should put this issue to bed once and for all. Examining the price trends of a basket of selected consumer goods and services from 1996-2016 using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the prices of cell service, software and televisions (subject to very little government regulation of pricing) all saw downward trends in the double digits. Contrast this to college tuition and health care, which have all seen triple-digit price inflation over the same period as government expanded its control over prices.

We all want a free and neutral playing field for internet services. By going back to the ancient history of 2015, the FCC has made the case we know to be true — that free markets are far better equipped to ensure greater access, promote new innovation and keep up with the speed of change in technology. Internet freedom has worked for the past 20 years; we should breathe a sigh of relief that D.C.’s hands are out of it for the next 20 years. There’s nothing neutral about net neutrality.