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.
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Welcome to the fourth and final part of the series (See I, II, and III to get up to speed with what’s going on here).
Brief summary: Andrew McLaughlin is Deputy White House CTO, and has been reprimanded by the White House for inappropriate relations with his former employer, Google. Due to a Google Buzz security hole, wide-eyed observers at Big Government noticed that McLaughlin was still very cozy with Google through his Gmail account. This led to a FOIA request for those emails, and now I’m reading them from an InsideGoogle.com release.
On to Part III of that release.
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We continue now from Part I and Part II of the series. InsideGoogle.com has the emails between Andrew McLaughlin and his contacts in Google, all the while serving as Deputy White House CTO, in a 3 PDF set, and I’m now starting on the second file.
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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.
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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.”
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