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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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.
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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.