The real irony of NN opposition is that the dial-up era, which one would otherwise characterize as exactly the kind of thriving market-based competition that conservatives love, only existed in the first place because the phone lines that these small providers used to operate their businesses were regulated as utilities.
In effect, we had net neutrality in all but name until the Internet started to move to other, more vertically-integrated forms of infrastructure like DSL and cable.
I would really love to see a Ted Cruz or Dan Crenshaw or some other disingenuous right-wing hack try to argue that, had it not already been illegal to do so, AT&T wouldn't have done the exact same things to AOL that Verizon and Comcast have gotten caught doing to Netflix.
(EDIT: At least, it would amuse me in theory. In practice, my blood would probably start boiling about 30 seconds in.)
There's that time he tried making some smug Twitter dunk about how anyone concerned about this is a "snowflake, believing online propaganda"[1], claiming that "the Internet grew up wonderfully free from govt regulation" as if he isn't old enough to have personally seen it grow up on publicly regulated phone lines.
There's also the time he suggested that setting basic standards for ISPs amounted to "Obamacare for the Internet"[2], a patently ridiculous statement clearly designed to pander to a base that thinks any government is too much government. (Crenshaw has made similar comments, claiming that "They want to do it by classifying the Internet under a law from 1934"[3] - referring to the Communications Act, literally the one that established the FCC and gave them the power to regulate the aforementioned phone lines. It was also superseded by the Telecommunications Act, passed in 1996, but who's counting?)
There's also that whole thing where he's spent the last several months pretending that he didn't spread lies about the 2020 election that led directly to a terrorist attack, but now I'm getting off topic.
Except not entirely, because there's also the time three days later that he called Donald Trump's Twitter ban "Big Tech's PURGE, censorship & abuse of power"[4] as if it weren't already well-documented that the only reason it didn't happen sooner - given his numerous violations of their ToS up to and including calls to violence - was his status as a head of state.[5][6] (I would link to examples of some of those violations, but... you know...) Which, specifically, also flies in the face of the same laissez-faire capitalism bit that he would throw around over topics like Net Neutrality - since, if he really believed that, a more logically consistent position would be that Twitter is a private company and is allowed to make its own policies.
In a broader sense, the GOP spent the entire Reagan administration maligning the Office of Technology Assessment, a Congressional office whose literal job was to educate lawmakers so that they have more knowledge about these topics than Ted Cruz displays in public, before eventually defunding it in the mid-90s - an act which directly contributed to a Congress which has issues like this, or like "Senator, we run ads,"[7] or like that time AOC apparently had to explain to colleagues what Twitch even is while they were attempting to legislate about it.[8]
In effect, we had net neutrality in all but name until the Internet started to move to other, more vertically-integrated forms of infrastructure like DSL and cable.
I would really love to see a Ted Cruz or Dan Crenshaw or some other disingenuous right-wing hack try to argue that, had it not already been illegal to do so, AT&T wouldn't have done the exact same things to AOL that Verizon and Comcast have gotten caught doing to Netflix.
(EDIT: At least, it would amuse me in theory. In practice, my blood would probably start boiling about 30 seconds in.)