So last week Comcast gave up on a free market deal under extreme government pressure. It’s the ongoing power grab by the Obama administration that Mike Wendy calls the Inter-nyet policy.
Planned economy, one industry at a time.
Continue reading »
Socialists desperate to vilify private business in favor of a totalitarian nanny state are now asking us to get outraged over Comcast’s campaign to fight back.
Tell you what, guys. If ghostwriting is now disallowed, why don’t they go and look up how many industry letters, legislation, and books that Democrats have had ghost written for them? No? Oh, that’s what I thought.
Continue reading »
“Conservatism” as we know it is primarily an Anglo-American tradition. Not all countries have something like it, and Germany definitely does not. Their major ‘right’ coalition (the Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union parties) are Christian centrists. The believe in a powerful state, but one that should show compassion and respect for Christian values. They are most definitely not a small government movement.
So it’s telling that even German Chancellor Angela Merkel has come out against Net Neutrality, and for the right reasons.
Continue reading »
The Onion Router, more commonly known as just Tor, is a cryptographic network of computers that seeks to provide anonymity to its users. Users connect to a Tor “entry node,” and tell it what Internet sites they want to access. That request is then passed through a series of encrypted links, bouncing around unpredictably, until it finds an “exit node,” and then that server (likely nowhere near the user) then makes the request, and the results are sent back through the network.
While Tor users are not as anonymous as they’d like, criminals use it to great effect, and that’s why Comcast would be reasonable to watch Tor use carefully.
Continue reading »
Time and again I’m seeing analyses from the left about broadband competition in America, that show a complete lack of awareness about how wired broadband actually works in America.
Not all markets are created equal, and you have to understand how those markets work if you’re going to try to sound intelligent about the effects of mergers on competition.
Continue reading »
Is he still going on about Net Neutrality? Yup, the Notice of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM) was just the beginning of this dance. They don’t seem to understand that it’s a bad idea that’s run its course. I mean, even the radicals as they stretch to come up with excuses to do it, can’t even get their stories straight. They whine about fast lanes, they whine about Comcast giving “free” bandwidth to Comcast video users, but they also call for Internet to be regulated under Title II of the Communications Act, which would allow the fast lanes they claim to hate.
We need to deregulate, as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Newt Gingrich intended with the Telecommunications Act. Tom Wheeler and the FCC need to be told this, and we ought to pass legislation to enforce it. Every time we pass one new regulation picking a winner and a loser, we create two paid lobbyists in DC: one from the winner to protect what he got, and one from the loser to get something else to make up for it. That’s why Netflix is screaming, because they want to be a winner and that’s also why Marsha Blackburn is calling them free riders. No more winners and losers. Deregulate now.
Continue reading »
In Monday’s Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson really went off in favor of Net Neutrality, the policy that twice has been struck down by the courts as an illegal power grab by the FCC, and is being promoted a third time by the Obama FCC at the behest of the radical socialist wing of his party.
Francis Cianfrocca I thought put in a good effort trying to be even handed about the whole thing, but I wanted to respond to a message like that making it to the front page of RedState. I understand where both of them are coming from, and I think it’s important to explain why Net Neutrality really is a terrible idea.
Continue reading »
While Bitcoin is traceable, that process can be made very difficult by a determined attacker, because of the existence of sophisticated money laundering operations in the Bitcoin community, operations designed specifically to aid criminals. So I think it makes sense for the FEC to place cash-like restrictions on Bitcoin. As long as we’re stuck with these laws, it doesn’t make sense to give Bitcoin a special exception.
The quest to deliver the Internet from American-guaranteed liberty and into Russo-Sino-tyranny is on, down in Brazil. They call it NetMundial, but’s really a one country thing. It’s just an anti-American hate fest.
Continue reading »
As the rest of the world attacks us every day, people just keep looking to demonize NSA. And it’s foreign threats we need to worry about, and that link doesn’t even talk about the state-sponsored threats out there.
Troubling news, as Democrats want to apply speech codes online, using a shooting to push for online censorship. Never let a crisis go to waste, so say the progressives.
Continue reading »
Mike Lee, we’re your friends here at RedState. We backed you in the primary, and we’re sure to back you going forward. But please, lay off on his Comcast/Time Warner deal. The arguments you’re making, at least as portrayed by The Hill, are the same arguments that were used falsely to fool conservatives into backing the Net Neutrality power grab. Now they’re being used to trick us into backing an antitrust power grab.
First off, even if Net Neutrality wasn’t fixing an imaginary threat, the kind of discrimination you’re talking about is already banned by consent decree from the Comcast – NBC Universal deal. So your fears are doubly unfounded. But don’t take my word for it. Let the market work. Markets are how all of us speak, and we know better than government.
Continue reading »