An obscure American bureaucrat will retire and that’s a bummer for popular British comedian John Oliver. Anchor of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” the funnyman created a repeating schtick around the net neutrality issue. Now it could all be for nothing.
Federal Communications Chairman Tom Wheeler announced he’s stepping down in 2017, leaving Republican commissioners in control of the agency. And even before the Senate confirms Wheeler’s replacement, they can hamstring the cheeky English comedian’s favorite regulation.
When he was still new at HBO in 2014, Oliver’s rant about Comcast catapulted his show and net neutrality into prominence. Comparing Internet companies like Comcast to drug cartels, he got an army of Internet trolls to care about the policy and then to lobby the FCC. The subsequent and overwhelming number of comments ended up crashing the FCC website and getting the federal government to take notice.
How’d Oliver summon a flash mob of Internet outrage? He took aim at Wheeler. “The guy who used to run the cable industry’s lobbying arm is now running the agency tasked with regulating it,” the comedian ranted. “That is the equivalent of needing a babysitter, and hiring a dingo.”
Compelled to respond, the bureaucrat famously dissociated himself with the packs of wild dogs roaming the Australian bush, telling US World News and Report, “I am not a dingo.” More significantly, it pushed Wheeler to aggressively enforce the regulation. Since June of 2015, net neutrality has been the law of the Internet.
But after President-elect Trump’s victory, Oliver’s canis lupus dingus is headed into the wilderness and net neutrality’s days are numbered. With two remaining commissioners to the Democrats’ one, the GOP runs the board at the FCC. They won’t need to wait on the Senate to confirm a new chairman to kill the regulation. The commissioners can simply refuse to enforce the directive, the Washington Post reports, allowing net neutrality and a myriad of regulation to crash in on itself. Should that happen, Oliver’s rant would be reduced to a funny footnote of the Obama years and little else.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
