Sorry for missing Tech at Night on Monday, but I had to rest up for Election Day. And of course, as you may have heard, Republicans ended up having a good night. What you may not have heard though, was that the forces of radical Internet regulation had a very bad night. Democrats went for broke on Net Neutrality but as covered by Moe Lane and RS Insider, support for unilateral regulation of the Internet killed Congressional jobs. Every single member who signed the PCCC pledge to support the FCC on Title II reclassification, lost. Every one of them!
It’s time the FCC owned up to the rejection the American people dealt their plans, and pledged to wait for Congress to act.
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Good evening. Through the magic of Claritin, my favorite drug, I’m able to bring you tonight’s edition. On the Net Neutrality front, the progressive left is getting delusional. They’re pretending that it matters what their members of Congress think when their President has done not one thing to stop his FCC from going off on its own to break the law, defy the courts, and go ahead with Title II Reclassification. This is not Sparta. This is madness.
Of course, the online petition? Meaningless of course except as a trap to build mailing lists. And it’s not me who says that, it’s Clay Johnson who says that, founder of Blue State Digital and the New Media Director of Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee’s petition is nonsense upon stilts.
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Opinions differ on the Cato Institute, but they’re right on when it comes to the ACLU’s deceptive arguments on Net Neutrality. Case after case of alleged net neutrality “violations” are raised and demolished. And remember, this is the case being used to justify urgent action by the FCC in defiance of the law and the courts.
It’s all a bunch of garbage.
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Yes, we’re talking about Google again tonight. Of course they never did delist Daily Kos after the Chris Bowers manipulations, despite having gone after Kay Bailey Hutchison for breaking their rules. But we have more to ride them about:
They’re blocking pro-life ads again. These ads are running on local television in DC for Republican Missy Reilly Smith who is challenging Delegate Holmes Eleanor Norton, or Norton Eleanor Holmes, or whatever her name is. I mean really, she doesn’t even get a vote. Local television will run the ads, but Youtube will not. Interesting, eh?
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Apologies for missing the last two Tech at Nights. But unlike the paid staff of the well-funded Free Press, every word I’ve ever written here on technical issues has been on my own time, for free, because I care about the issues. And when work overwhelms me, as it did last week as a huge deadline approached, something had to give. And what gave was what I had to do at night when I just wanted to sleep.
So we start tonight with an update on the Waxman Net Neutrality bill. I wrote of it before in support of it, and proved prophetic as Henry Waxman used Republican opposition to justify radical, illegal FCC action on the issue.
It’s not too late, though. We can still build momentum to stop the FCC’s end run around the Congress, the Courts, and the Constitution. We need to talk up the Waxman bill because it is more limited than any other major proposal we’ve dealt with during this debate, because it would strictly, expressly forbid the FCC from doing the disastrous Title II reclassification which would give the FCC broad powers, and it’s just possible that the Congress taking the baton on this would encourage the FCC to back down until the process runs its course.
Politics matters, and there’s going to be a lame duck session. We can judo the Democrats on this, and use their bill in a bipartisan way to get the Congress behind a clear majority of the nation against massive Internet regulation. But we have to step up to the plate, ignore the Waxman name, and use the decent language of his proposal to make it happen. It’s time to put country first.
Especially when it gives even Barack Obama an out from a divisive issue, even as it gives American an out from regulation potentially more devastating to our economy than Obamacare, if it chokes off the Internet, one of our high growth, high potential areas.
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Hello. The longer the Democrats are in Washington, the more the mask slips with respect to their true beliefs regarding freedom online. They claim they don’t want a government takeover, they claim they don’t want to regulate content, they claim they don’t want a kill switch, they claim they want to respect privacy, but time and again all of these issues just keep coming up.
Witness the new disaster coming out of the White House which would force private firms like Facebook, Skype, and RIM to assist the government with spying on you. They are to cripple, deliberately, any safeguards they have on your privacy to make it easier for government snoops.
Remember: already nothing prevents them from listening in on the Internet. What they are demanding now is a huge expansion of power to require encryption in America to be crippled for the benefit of domestic Internet spies. Or at least, that’s the phrasing the left used throughout the Bush administration, so I’m going to throw it back in their disingenuous faces every single chance I get.
Remember when fining Janet Jackson’s breast was the worst thing going on in Washington with respect to this stuff, and how horrible that was? As the sign goes, “Miss me yet?”
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I’ve worn myself out tonight making last minute preparations for my trip out to Austin for the RedState Gathering this weekend, so this will be brief. Additionally, Tech at Night will not appear on Friday because I will be in Austin and away from Safari, whose great RSS reader is the most important tool I use to complete my Tech at Night research.
First off, the Google backlash is well underway. The firm seems to operate under the assumption that there will be no serious objections from the technical community to whatever they do, because of that “Don’t be evil” mumbo jumbo. But when articles like this at IT World show up with no purpose but to question the attitude displayed by Google and CEO Eric Schmidt, it’s time for a new plan.
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Good evening. A story I expect to hear more about is this a proposed subsidy for radio stations and the RIAA both of some sort of legal requirement for new cellular phones to include an FM radio receiver.
Such a requirement would raise costs on everyone, lower innovation and even basic differentiation options, and be nothing but a detriment to anyone who shops for cellular phones in America. We’d best raise awareness against this before it’s too late.
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So, while Google may have seen the light on Net Neutrality (which is actually, amusingly enough, making the far left sound like me), they still have other issues going on. The WiSpy Street View spying issue is still ongoing, with South Korea raiding their offices and Germany pressuring the firm to be more transparent and responsive to privacy complaints about the program.
Because as I said earlier today, asking Eric Schmidt about privacy is like asking Phillip Morris about smoking. The conflict of interest is inherent. Everyone who hides his identity from Google Analytics, Google Adsense, and every other Google program is costing the firm money.
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Good evening. It’s going to be short tonight, because I don’t actually have anything new to say about G—– or F— P—- tonight, as against freedom as they both are.
But I will say this about Net Neutrality: competition from new technology is the way out of any problems we have with the ISP monopolies and duopolies that state and local regulators cram down our throats. It’s not theoretical, either: Sprint is deploying 4G WiMAX service over more and more of the country.
Technology, not Net Neutrality regulation, is what we need.
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