Dems are failing Millennials on net neutrality

This blown opportunity to craft meaningful legislation will lead to bigger problems later

In one of the latest displays of dysfunction, the mosh-pit charged with doing the peoples’ business — otherwise known as the U.S. Congress — has once again failed to protect the internet — and what’s so galling is that progressive leaders apparently wanted this effort to fail for political reasons.

Senate leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and others sought to use a procedure known as the Congressional Review Act as a kind of legislative “time-machine” to purportedly reach back and reinstate the net neutrality rules adopted in the Obama administration. But everyone knew that neither the House nor the president would agree to it and the maneuver was a political one designed to anger millennials, like me, so we would vote for Democrats in the fall.

I like net neutrality and a healthy internet. But what I — and other millennials — don’t like is being patronized and manipulated like political props for politicians more interested in headlines than doing something to improve our lives.

There were more promising, but perhaps less media-grabbing, avenues to save net neutrality; our leaders didn’t take them. Good, old-fashioned legislation, for example, would have avoided many of the pitfalls of the CRA maneuver and removed the issue from politicized agency rulemaking.

Some Democrats argued that a more traditional legislative approach might require a compromise on substance, but with over 70 percent of the public backing net neutrality, Republicans were not about to play the loophole game. Many Republicans even sent up siren calls favorable to legislation.

By not taking this important opportunity, progressive leaders in the Senate forsook the opportunity to protect net neutrality, but also other, arguably more important opportunities. These antics did nothing about Russian election interference, online bigotry and harassment, housing and other new strains of digital discrimination. It implicitly blessed the regular invasions of privacy that, as AP reported recently, have created a secret modern surveillance state where Google and other Big Tech monopolies track our every move.

These concerns are not the musings of hipster Millennials on laptops at the coffee shop. They are real problems that affect our lives — poisoning our politics, reintroducing segregation, and often powerfully but secretly shaping our online behavior and culture.

The 2016 elections and Cambridge Analytica woke us up to the dangers of the internet — but it’s not still clear whether real, corrective action will occur. Polls show 70 percent of millennials expect more breaches of their privacy, and 55 percent of all Americans believe government won’t do enough to rein in the abuses of Big Tech.

But as I cheer truth seekers of the Russia probe — those like Special Counsel Robert Mueller — Congressional leaders who have the power to hold Facebook, Google and the other enablers accountable turn a blind eye.

For many months now, the public has wanted Congress to restore net neutrality protections and stop enabling parasites often incubated on Big Tech social media platforms. The real big thinkers have seen the light for over a year. “Rather than jousting over a resolution of disapproval, Congress needs to put this issue to bed once and for all by crafting a bipartisan deal,” thundered the LA Times. New York Times tech reporter Farhood Manjoo urged the same last summer.

It’s time leaders on both sides end the charade. We need real net neutrality in legislation that is permanent and without loopholes. And we need leaders who will stand up to big tech, its monopoly power and enablement of abuse.

The current crop of congressional leaders seems to have missed the boat on all of this. Maybe it’s time for a changing of the guard.