Imagine they take the interstate highway system and sell it off to private corporations because “it will bring the efficiencies of the free market system” to keep them repaired and functioning. All such roads would become toll roads and the corporations would not only maximize the revenues extracted but might eventually control what kind of vehicles would be allowed to traverse them. Not only that, they could restrict, say, truck traffic to their own fleets and start to control commerce. Sounds like crazy talk, but that’s what “privatizing” the Internet is all about and that is the threat to our open and free democracy. Today these corporations have their hooks in the “people’s representatives” through their massive political contributions and for the last 40 years or so we’ve seen the erosion of oversight and passage of “reform” legislation that does the opposite and benefits, not the American people, but the private interests of their political donors.
If the media corporations shut down an open internet they will want to control what your can say and will start to exclude people who are a political liability to them. Historically, the people who own the printing presses got to control the content printed from them. The Internet needs to be free and open so our “printing press”, that of a free people is filtered by no one. An open Internet allows free expression, association and commerce. When it becomes the domain of private interests you can be assured that all that will disappear.
The problem is not that spending on consumer goods is in itself destructive but that unrestrained consumption that puts people into a position of a excessive debt without an adequate income that is to us as individuals and as a democratic society. “Spend, spend, spend” has replaced “Jobs, jobs, jobs” in the political construction and the corollary to the “Go out and buy” side is “Debt, debt, debt”. A good job provides a positive income and stability. Putting people into excessive debt does the opposite. Of course, the corporations who make vast amounts of money from Borrow Money and Consume don’t want to change this. They don’t want checks and balances on their ability to operate freely, and they have used their wealth to protect the system even while in the long term it will fail and wreck the economy, the society and the people therein.