They do. Oh boy do they ever want to censor the Internet. Why else would the FCC take the radical step of deem-and-pass Title II reclassification of ISPs to regulate them like phone companies? It’s because the endgame of Net Neutrality is total control.
Today I came across two slipups that give up the game, despite the FCC’s promises of “forbearance” and the greater left’s assurances that the War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength, and Regulation is Liberty.
Cass Sunstein, legal professor and currently the head of Obama’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, said this as far back as 2001, per Althouse:
Sites of one point of view agree to provide links to other sites, so that if you’re reading a conservative magazine, they would provide a link to a liberal site and vice versa, just to make it easy for people to get access to competing views. Or maybe a pop-up on your screen that would show an advertisement or maybe even a quick argument for a competing view. [break] The best would be for this to be done voluntarily, but the word “voluntary” is a little complicated, and sometimes people don’t do what’s best for our society unless Congress holds hearings or unless the public demands it. And the idea would be to have a legal mandate as the last resort, and to make sure it’s as neutral as possible if we have to get there, but to have that as, you know, an ultimate weapon designed to encourage people to do better.
Yeah, a member of the White House in charge of regulation thinks that a government mandate to control political content is something that could be done in a “neutral” way. And the FCC, a regulatory body, just claimed the ability to regulate content from Internet Service Providers in the name of Net Neutrality. File under “Things that make you go Hmm.”
I was all ready to post on just that tonight when I ran into something even more blatant. Don’t take it from me that the FCC has all this in mind. Take it from Jennifer Schneider via Reason. She is after all the legal adviser to FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, and she says that “Commissioner Copps would love to have jurisdiction over everything.”
Hmm. Yeah, some “jokes” are just too revealing, much like when Dick Armey made his little joke on Barney Frank’s name. Armey clearly had no love for Frank, and the Copps office has plenty of love for total Internet regulation.
We’ve got to get a Congress that will stop this runaway FCC.