Here a few updates in the intersection of Internet, the law, and politics:
Free Press is still being hypocritical: They took out a full page ad denouncing (in true Communist style) FCC Chairman Genachowski for having one closed door meeting with the likes of AT&T and Verizon. Free Press has had over 30. By their own standard, the FCC has sold out to the neo-Marxist Free Press itself, not to ISPs.
FCC plans threaten the recovery: The Hill warns that 500,000 good jobs in the industry could be lost if the FCC proceeds as Free Press demands. Net Neutrality and Title 2 “Third Way” Deem and Pass reclassification must be stopped.
No, really, Free Press is two faced about the FCC, and is holding themselves and ISPs to a double standard. Communists get to do what they want, but people who create good jobs in America have to sit in silence as the industry is attacked with crushing regulation, if they get their way.
Remember the Andrew McLaughlin Emails? Timothy Carney points out that they reveal the White House to be violating the pledge to attack special interest lobbying.
Free Press, the Communist organization founded with the goal of “media reform,” which should be read as the nationalization of mass media in America, is still shouting about the great injustice at the FCC. That injustice is, of course, the shocking revelation that the FCC is meeting behind closed doors with industry stakeholders before making any firm decisions about the Internet, and in particular the Title II Deem and Pass reclassification plans to regulate the entire Internet in America.
Free Press wants you to think there’s something corrupt about this, though as Politico points out, Free Press itself is still taking part in the meetings. Some animals are more equal than others, I suppose.
It doesn’t matter that nearly all House Republicans are against it, and a good number of Democrats besides. It doesn’t matter that ATR is against it, CNBC warns it could “kill the Internet,” or that we just don’t need it.
The FCC has gone ahead and put out a Notice of Inquiry to go ahead with Deem and Pass reclassification of ISPs away from being “information services” under the law, which was the plainly obvious intent of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. You see, in Comcast v. FCC, the courts have strictly limited how much regulation the FCC can do of information services. So, the FCC is going to declare that ISPs are now phone companies, and regulate accordingly.
Continue reading »
Via InsideGoogle.com I’ve come across the Andrew McLaughlin emails released via FOIA requests (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3). I’d meant to make a 5 part series of my reading through them for signs that McLaughlin was inappropriately acting as an agent of Google from his job as White House CTO (which is an accusation that Darrell Issa is not letting drop quietly, internal slap on the write to McLaughlin or not, and is in fact expanding beyond McLaughlin). This will be a four part series this week though. We’re starting on Tuesday instead of Monday because life got in the way. Unlike some of my opposition, my advocacy on technical matters is not funded.
Anyway, let’s begin.
Continue reading »
I’ve talked quite a bit how net neutrality is a big scam, and how it’s just a ruse to censor the Internet according to the desires of neo-Marxists like those at Free Press.
But there’s another, more basic reason, to join the majority of the House (including 171 Republicans) in opposing the runaway FCC: People are happy with their ISPs, both landline and wireless. The FCC itself says so:
Fully 91 percent of broadband users say they are “very” or “somewhat” satisfied with the speed they get at home. The comparable number for mobile broadband, which is not yet technologically capable of the same speeds as home broadband, is 71 percent satisfaction. As a point of comparison, 92 percent of cell phone users are very or somewhat satisfied with their cell phone service overall.
We don’t need new regulations, and especially not Net Neutrality regulations, when over 9 out of 10 people are happy with their high speed landline Internet access. Period.
It’s now out in the open: the Internet censors are on the march. The neo-Marxists at Free Press promised us that Net Neutrality had nothing to do with censorship. But as I’ve warned, once the FCC did their Title II Deem and Pass reclassification of ISPs as phone companies, in direct contravention of the Telecommunications Act, censorship was fully within their reach.
Even as Republicans have come out strongly against the FCC’s excesses and opposition is even growing from House Democrats, with total opposition now accounting for a majority of the House, Free Press and their pet commissioner Michael Copps are trying to control the whole Internet in the name of preventing “hate speech.”
Continue reading »
When the FCC announced plans to declare that ISPs are no longer information services, but are instead phone companies, the FCC claimed the authority to regulate content and prices on Internet service nationwide. And no matter how many times the neo-Marxists at Free Press (and their front group Save the Internet) claim that Net Neutrality is all about “preserving an open Internet,” the FCC’s actions are all about command and control.
Even Democrats see the problem, as 72 House members of the Democratic persuasion signed a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski urging him to slow down and let the Congress do its job, instead of taking matters into his own hands and defying the law and the courts to do so.
Update: It’d help if I link the right letter.
Continue reading »
I hear that Free Press employees all have to see the New Orleans Saints’s old team doctor after one month on the job, because they all get turf toe by that point.
But seriously, they really are. National Journal recently wrote them up (subscription only, unfortunately) but here’s what I think the key takeaway is about the neo-Marxist organization dedicated to the nationalization of all mass media in America:
Most of Free Press’s financing is also concealed. In 2008, the group and its lobbying arm, the Free Press Action Fund, raised $5 million, including $270,330 in public contributions and $3 million from 12 major donors. The group’s Form 990 tax filings do not include the names of 11 out of 12 donors, but Internet searches revealed donations of $225,000 from the Park Foundation and $300,000 from the Ford Foundation. In the same year, the action fund spent $332,967 on lobbying and $89,855 on grassroots efforts, according to its Form 990.
What do they have to hide? Why are the supposed proponents of openness themselves so opaque? Just how do we know that George Soros and Google aren’t behind the hidden donations, as the organization acts in the interests of huge, wealthy Internet firms in the course of its net neutrality special interest lobbying?
We don’t, and until they open up, we have every reason to believe they’re a bunch of fakers who throw big, corporate money around to gin up artificial support. I mean heck, they can’t even give consistent numbers on how large they are.