Not a surprise that Hari Kondabolu goes there. The problem with making everything about racial dynamics is that more white people in the United States might take a page from that. I don’t wish to encourage that.
Also, believe it or not racializing a topic that the majority probably agrees with you on might make it less popular. But if you now talk to people who just agree with you all the time on these things you might not remember that.
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Razib Khan
Razib Khan is a Bangladeshi-American geneticist and writer. He is co-founder of Brown Pundits and runs Unsupervised Learning, a Substack on population genetics, evolution, history, and politics with more than 55,000 subscribers, alongside the accompanying podcast. He has blogged at Gene Expression since the early 2000s.
His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Review, Slate, India Today, Quillette, and UnHerd. He is Director of Operations at FUTO in Austin, Texas, and co-founder of GenRAIT, a life-sciences platform company. Earlier in his career he developed ancestry algorithms for Gene by Gene, the Genographic Project, and Insitome, and was among the first employees at Embark Veterinary.
Born in Dhaka and raised in upstate New York and eastern Oregon, he holds degrees in biochemistry (2000) and biology (2006) from the University of Oregon, and undertook doctoral work in genomics and genetics at UC Davis. He lives in Austin.
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I am very surprised Hari went the racialization route. What he said about the FCC chairman is completely unacceptable and inappropriate. Hari has strong policy arguments and should focus on them alone.
I see no reason to impugn Ajit Pai’s intentions or to imply that Mr Pai is anything other than sincere and authentic. I think Ajit Pai genuinely believes what he is doing will benefit most people.
To massively oversimplify the discussion in question, net neutrality likely significantly increase broadband costs in return for free flow of information. I think that perhaps America is rich enough and the cost of broadband sufficiently low that it might be worth considering paying up for free information transfer. [President Obama and many others have made several other good arguments in favor of net neutrality.]
A question to all of you. Net neutrality significantly increases the cost of broadband. Net neutrality also increases freedom of information and competition in software as a service applications.
For rich countries it is easier to make the case for net neutrality since broadband is cheap even for structurally poor people. But what about for poor countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Africa? Are they better off ending net neutrality to sharply lower broadband costs and maximize the percentage of the population that accesses broadband at the cost of freedom of information?
Where does everyone come down on this? [I think maybe net neutrality should be suspended for poor countries, but am not completely sure.]