“Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver used 13 minutes of his program this weekend to try putting the issue of “net neutrality” in a more understandable context, in the process ripping the Obama administration’s friendliness with the cable industry.
“I could show you the troublingly cozy relationship between cable companies and Washington in any number of ways. I could show you the president golfing with the CEO of Comcast or saying at a fundraiser at a cable executive’s house that he’d been there so many times, ‘The only thing I haven’t done in this house is have seder dinner,” Oliver said.
But he had an even more “succinct” way of putting it, showing a clip of President Obama appointing Tom Wheeler, one of the cable and wireless industry’s most prominent lobbyists, to head the Federal Communications Commission.
“Yes, the guy who used to run the cable industry’s lobbying arm is now running the agency tasked with regulating it. That is the equivalent of needing a babysitter, and hiring a dingo,” Oliver joked.
He also called upon the grassroots of cyberspace, Internet trolls, to take their grammatically and morally repugnant rage to the FCC’s comments page to lambaste the agency’s net neutrality proposal. There are two public comment periods that run into September.
Censored — but still somewhat vulgar, be warned — video of Oliver’s segment below.
