Yes, I’m sorry. When I found out yesterday morning that it was Labor Day, I did shift gears and relax a bit. By the evening I was treating it like a weekend and forgot all about Monday’s Tech at Night. So we’re making it a Tuesday morning Tech in the Morning instead.
Let’s get started with what happens when you let government regulate: they begin to ban things over their content. Yes, The DSCC is sending lawyers after the book Young Guns. Or at least, the Democrats are trying to ban the promotion of the book, which effectively amounts to banning any mass-produced book of this nature, because you can’t afford to publish a book without making sure it sells.
Just imagine what they’d do online once we gave them regulatory power there.
Speaking of Net Neutrality, James DeLong at Digital Society found a great gotcha as in 1875, AP paid for its own prioritized use of a telegraph line under the Atlantic instead of having its telegraph traffic have to wait in line with everybody else’s. They’re lucky Free Press and the FCC weren’t around then, or as DeLong said, “AP would probably be in its 50th round of hearings as to whether this proposal was in the public interest.”
Note that the Google-Verizon Net Neutrality proposal specifically allows this kind of private network arrangement, and the radical left hates that. So it’s interesting to see that even the AP back in the day saw this as a reasonable, common-sense approach to getting things done, one that clearly didn’t hurt anyone.
Last point this morning: Something to watch for is the use of federal subsidies to promote radical Net Neutrality proposals. Take as an example WAMU, an NPR affiliate in DC: Their formerly Google-subsidized morning show has frequently had guests from organizations like Free Press. These true radicals of course have as a greater agenda the total government subsidization and control over the mass media… which means they want to put more money into NPR, CPB, and similar efforts. NPR affiliates take your subsidized programming to keep themselves in operation, then turn around and use their subsidized existence to promote getting themselves more money.
That is corrupt and should not stand.