Good evening. We’re now off to a good start with this new Monday-Wednesday-Friday column, because this time I’m getting it published before midnight on both coasts.
So let’s get right to it. The two big stories I’m seeing are that Google’s Street View spying troubles are coming home to the US, and the NSA is apparently expanding its mission to protect US communications from foreign agents in a new and potentially troublesome direction.
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Welcome to Tech at Night. For a while now my second writing job at RedState* has been covering tech issues at night. Mostly it’s Internet issues these days, because that’s where the grabbing hands of the government have been grabbing all they can lately. But now I’m making it official, with a logo and a schedule. From now on I expect to be posting Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays late, but don’t hold it against me if occasionally I leak past midnight**, okay?
The basic goal of Tech at Night is to expose all the ways that the radical left wants to use government to bring us into the same kind of tech darkness that North Korea (pictured in the logo) suffers in a literal sense.
And now, on to business: Tonight we check back in with Sunlight Foundation and Free Press.
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I keep harping endlessly on the fact that Free Press wants centralized, nationalized media in America, and one logical consequence of their Internet plans is to have single payer Internet. Well, this isn’t a theoretical problem. Finland just implemented it. Quoth Boy Genius Report:
Thanks to a new law that comes into effect today, every single citizen of Finland now has a legal right to a wired broadband connection with a minimum speed of 1Mbps.
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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.
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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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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.