‘Last Week Tonight with Jon Oliver’ tackles tricky subject of net neutrality

We have to give Jon Oliver quite a bit of credit these days, with one of the major reasons being that he continues to be unafraid to tackle some tricky subjects … regardless of whether or not they are controversial.

The issue of net neutrality has been a hot-button one globally for some time, mostly because you are dealing with everyone from corporations to small businesses and even consumers. Also, at the center of it is still something that is fundamentally new to most people. We’ve had pretty close to a century at this point for average consumers to figure out the card, and only a fraction of that time the internet. The former was also much easier to define, since it was a gigantic piece of metal you purchased to drive around. Trying to value and figure out who should be accountable for what on an information superhighway is a complex task.

Yet, Oliver tries his best on “Last Week Tonight” Sunday to condense it almost as much as the argument can be. He’s basically the Pied Piper of fake newsmen, to throw an analogy to another HBO show in “Silicon Valley.”

First of all, we applaud Oliver in the first place for taking on a subject that frankly, many people out there are still somewhat afraid of because they have no real clue just how to understand it. this is something that he has done since this show’s inception; it may be too similar to “The Daily Show,” but he has never limited the scope of his series to what you would expect. (The Nintendo bit from a couple of weeks ago is still hysterical to us.)

If you haven’t caught the series yet, you can find it on HBO every Sunday at 11:00 p.m. Eastern. Also, the network has been kind to put up a variety of clips from the show every week.

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Photo: HBO