Good evening RedStaters. I spent all weekend battling a monster cold, so I’m still a bit thrown off, and so didn’t even try to get tonight’s installment of Tech at Night in before midnight Eastern. In fact it’ll be a reach to get this done before midnight Pacific, but such is life.
RedState diarist ladyimpactohio (follow her on Twitter at @ladyimpactohio) already scored one big win by peeling the Gun Owners of America from the Free Press radical Net Neutrality coalition, but the right is already at work on the next target: the Christian Coalition. Dick Armey and FreedomWorks are leading this fight, and I’m glad of it.
Way back when I started covering this issue, I said there were three names on the Save the Internet (Free Press front group) list that bugged me: Gun Owners of America, Christian Coalition, and Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds. If we can peel off at least two of three, I’ll be happy.
Meanwhile, Verizon is trying to sell the White House on the joint Google-Verizon Net Neutrality proposal, saying that their compromise would fulfill the letter of Obama’s campaign promise. I like that tactic, and it has to make some people tense over at Free Press. The radicals already lost allies in most Democrats in Congress, Google, and Gun owners of America. If they lose the White House, then the pressure on the FCC to back down might be unbearable.
And if we didn’t have enough reason to watch Free Press’s Net Neutrality push closely: ACORN’s relationship with Free Press is now being questioned widely, again thanks in part to RedState community members.
Of course with Google switching sides, we needed a new villain, and it looks like we’ve got one: the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) wants to piggyback on Net Neutrality to get new subsidies. They’re going to shroud themselves in the mantle of property rights and copyright, and paint their opponents as child molesters (literally), but they’re going to ask for government regulations and requirements that benefit them at everyone else’s expense, and that’s just wrong. That’s just socialist central planning of the economy. Let them figure out how to sell more CDs or iTunes tracks on their own dime. Besides, last I checked, they don’t need us to worry for them ’cause they’re all right (yeah, I used one of their own songs against them in open parodic fair use, take that). Go ahead with your own business, RIAA, leave us alone.
And one more point for tonight, that isn’t even Net Neutrality related. Bayshore Networks has an analysis of Intel’s acquisition of McAfee. This is, as Bayshore points out, an odd thing because McAfee is purely a software company, selling end point security, while Intel primarily sells hardware. But it is clearly a “vote of confidence” in the industry as they say, and could lead to more acquisitions. What I think Bayshore is missing though is one big reason to make such acquisitions: this all comes in the context of a drumbeat from the Democrats on the need for new laws to deal with “cybersecurity” nationally. Given the rewards that have fallen on GM and Tesla as members of a favored industry, I think it makes sense to pick up a cybersecurity company in the hopes that massive government subsidies will be pushed out to them before Republicans can clamp down on spending next year.
I’m told many in business prefer to ignore politics, but this is one case where the political environment has to matter, I believe.