I know, it’s terrible, but after missing Friday due to the RedState upgrade, I feel behind tonight and so am just going to have to speed through some of this tonight.
Ah, the ARRA, aka the Porkulus. Picking Internet winners and losers in Colorado, and probably nationwide in many “little” stories the national media chooses not to pick up.
That, combined with the final, eventual word that the FCC is looking at a national Internet tax, is why we must all be aware, and make the country aware, that a vote for Barack Obama, and only a vote for the President, is a vote for greater government and less liberty online.
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Another quick one tonight. Ah, the joys of there being no Internet crushing legislation or regulation under consideration right now.
Cue the dramatic music: While it’s true that both Oracle and Google were paying people online to write for their side (not that I was even offered a penny; I’m thinking it’s more because I’m unimportant than that I have some reputation of some sort), Google made the mistake of not complying with a judge’s order to reveal who. Uh oh.
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Time to defend Google: It’s unfair to attack them for excluding Youtube from its “anti-piracy” penalties, when they’re also excluding every other popular site driven by user-generated content. Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Youtube are four sites that, whether Google-owned or not, need to be indexed and valued to a degree. The point of the penalty is to punish illegitimate sites, not legitimate sites with some illegitimate users. So, yeah, lay off this time.
However I see I’m not the only one who thought Google got off easy over the Safari privacy hack perpetrated at Google, that led to the paltry $22 million fine of Google by the FTC. I still wonder if somebody should have gone to jail over it. Who was responsible? Where was the oversight that leads up to Larry Page and Eric Schmidt? Google should have named names.
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So the FTC is on a tear. Google is officially smacked for $22.5 million for hacking though Safari’s privacy protections to sell Safari users’ information to advertisers. Then Facebook got whacked for lying about what privacy protections it was giving users. Some are saying this is bad, as it’s expanding FTC power, but this is really a bad time to make that point. Google brought this on us. I’m not up on the Facebook issue, but the Google/Safari thing was a huge breach.
Had someone gone to jail, I would not have thought it wrong. If an ordinary citizen hacked through that many users’ privacy protections, we might have, you know.
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With the Cybersecurity Act on hold for now, it seems like a slow news week, so a quick one tonight.
We’re in a spectrum crunch, and as long as the Obama administration is restricting spectrum allocation, including the critical secondary spectrum market that firms like Verizon and AT&T are trying to operate in, it’s not going to get better. The Obama FCC claims to get it, but it’s not there yet.
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We had no Tech at Night on Friday becuase I was at the Gathering in Jacksonville. Hope those who went enjoyed it, and that those who weren’t able to attend can make it next year!
So, Harry Reid offered to let Republicans fix Lieberman-Collins. Republicans took him up on that, and he was unhappy. So he tried to ram it through after all. Republicans objected, and the cloture vote failed. I’d say my support for this tactic by Republicans has been vindicated.
Harry Reid, the embattled Senate majority leader under a cloud of serious allegations about his behavior lately, has continued to try to politicize the Cybersecurity Act. Republicans tried to be good legislators. That was embarrassing to Reid, so he had to cut it off.
Proof Democrats have been bargaining in bad faith the whole time comes from Barack Obama’s consideration of rule by decree on this. This of course is a bad idea.
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Lieberman-Collins is in trouble! There is apparently some misinformation going around. I’ve seen people claiming that gun control is in the bill, when it’s just an amendment possibly to be added, along with an anti-Obamacare amendment going around. Further, The Hill posted and pulled a story saying Harry Reid postponed the Cybersecurity Act.
But it looks like I was right to respect Republican attempts to modify the bill, because it’s going as it should, according to reports.
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Senate Republicans have decided to take Harry Reid at his word that Republicans will have the opportunity to amend the Lieberman-Collins cybersecurity bill. So, many Republicans voted for advancing the bill, which passed 84-11.
And oh boy it needs amending. Who are you going to believe? For it is Barack Obama. Against have been Kay Bailey Hutchison, John McCain, Marco Rubio, Ron Johnson, Heritage, and IBM.
Privacy is a red herring. The problems are in the mandates and power grabs. So if this bill isn’t effectively amended into SECURE IT, they must vote no on passage.
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Right now the top issues are both getting lots of attention in the Senate. One is the cybersecurity bill. It’s been difficult for me to find out much about what’s going on with it, and it turns out there’s a reason. Sources familiar with the situation indicate to me that Harry Reid has been negotiating with Republicans in bad faith. Even Republicans who love to negotiate with Democrats, and are well known for producing major pieces of legislation with Democrats, are being stonewalled.
Lieberman-Collins is even worse than I thought, too.
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It’s easy to see why there’s sudden, strong opposition to the Marketplace Fairness Act, as yet another Republican governor, Terry Branstad, backs the bill.
I again state my opposition to the lousy language backing the bill, including “fairness” and “loophole”. Yes, that language is being driven by marketplace losers, but both sides of this debate are ponying up cash.
I favor the bill on its merits, not because of who’s spending. I’m not even used to seeing Republicans equating business backing of a bill with the bill’s wrongness. Democrats? Yes, but not Republicans. I don’t think it should be a factor at all. I want to save the sales tax from becoming obsolete, and from having to be replaced by “progressive” taxation, as it probably will, since as people shift from local to national and global, firms not called Amazon still aren’t going to have distribution in every state.
Limited government does not mean no government, particularly at the state level. The money’s got to come from somewhere. Either we shore up the sales tax or we raise other taxes, all else being equal.
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