Hello. The longer the Democrats are in Washington, the more the mask slips with respect to their true beliefs regarding freedom online. They claim they don’t want a government takeover, they claim they don’t want to regulate content, they claim they don’t want a kill switch, they claim they want to respect privacy, but time and again all of these issues just keep coming up.
Witness the new disaster coming out of the White House which would force private firms like Facebook, Skype, and RIM to assist the government with spying on you. They are to cripple, deliberately, any safeguards they have on your privacy to make it easier for government snoops.
Remember: already nothing prevents them from listening in on the Internet. What they are demanding now is a huge expansion of power to require encryption in America to be crippled for the benefit of domestic Internet spies. Or at least, that’s the phrasing the left used throughout the Bush administration, so I’m going to throw it back in their disingenuous faces every single chance I get.
Remember when fining Janet Jackson’s breast was the worst thing going on in Washington with respect to this stuff, and how horrible that was? As the sign goes, “Miss me yet?”
Of course we’re not licked yet with respect to any of this stuff, which is why Seton Motley wrote an open letter to the FCC laying out to the commissioners just how radical and unpopular the Free Press Net Neutrality agenda really is, and how they need to give themselves an out from this stuff instead of marching off the Cliffs of McChesney.
It seems like many on the right have realized just how terrible Free Press really is, so we have more and more people writing about that neo-Marxist organization. Mike Wendy asks if they’ve lost their minds but as he points out, when their co-founder Robert McChesney called America “the leading terrorist institution in the world today,” the time to ask that may have been long, long ago.
Again, Free Press and its pet commissioners on the FCC don’t have legislative support for what they’re doing, which is why they’re so hot for the “third way” of deem and pass Title II Reclassification, ignoring the courts and the Telecommunications Act to do whatever they want. More proof of their lack of Congressional support comes from reports of Henry Waxman (D-CA) and his new Net Neutrality bill. But much as with the Google-Verizon proposal, this bill will give Free Press and other Communists serious heartburn. It (quite sensibly) treats (typcially franchise monopoly or duopoly) wired ISPs differently from (highly competitive) wireless ISPs. It also discriminates on content, only requiring neutrality to apply to lawful traffic, which again would allow ISPs to kill switch a great deal of BitTorrented traffic in this country, a dagger to the heart the “I want stuff for free online” crowd. It also has mild transparency requirements.
All in all, my reading of the Waxman proposal (which is very short by the way, just three pages) makes it come off as even less intrusive than the Google-Verizon plan as it only discusses Internet access, and not any private managed network access which an ISP might still provide. Those would seem to remain relatively unregulated.
So yes, if we keep up the pressure, the education, and the noise, we just might beat the Communists on this one.