The Democrat coalition may be fracturing more visibly along abortion lines in the Obamacare debate, but that’s not the only popcorn-friendly battle going on right now. ‘Minority’ groups are going after Net Neutrality now, and nobody is sparing the ‘race card.’
The Internet is a Frikkin Valuable Thing
USA Today this week ran a shocking story which revealed just how easy it was to buy one’s way into cherry appointments, reporting that 40% of his top bundlers have been awarded administration posts. Moe Lane highlights all the other perks and benefits being showered on “the money” as well.
Today Big Government highlights something worth reiterating.
USA Today goes on to report that one top-level fundraiser apparently awarded with a plum job is Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski.
The paper reports that Genachowski raised more than $500,000 for Obama—which critics charge may have helped him “buy” a position that now puts him at the center of one of Washington’s most heated policy debates, namely that regarding net neutrality.
Genachowski, a strong proponent of the policy and a darling of far left groups like Save The Internet, has recently garnered criticism for what some see as an effort to ram net neutrality through with little to no debate. The proposed policy has recently become the focus of criticism and concern from everyone from internet service providers to groups typically regarded as Obama administration-friendly, such as the Asian American Justice Center, National Council of La Raza, the League of United Latin American Citizens and the National Urban League. 72 House Democrats and three Democratic Governors have also raised concerns about the proposed policy.
And Genachowski isn’t the only net neutrality proponent buying in.
Google and Obama, Sitting in a Tree…
…plotting to pass Net Neutrality.
I’ve written in this space for a while about who the real Astroturfers are in the Net Neutrality fight. Google – and its puppets like Free Press – are promoting this idea that it’s a struggle between big telecommunications firms, and the little guys. Except the little guys are actually bigger Internet firms. The corporations pressing for Net Neutrality are Fortune 500 and even Dow Jones Industrial Average firms, with billions in cash ready to be spent on Net Neutrality, trying to defeat Proposition 8, or even promoting Barack Obama.
That last one makes the FCC’s rush to regulate look bad, given all the placements of Google people within the Obama administration as well as the nearly one million dollars that Google employees gave to the Obama-Biden campaign. How do we know that the secretive Obama White House isn’t directing the FCC to pay off Google?
After all, we know he’s giving donors special treatment. In fact, it has come out that FCC Chairman Genachowski himself was a major fundraiser for Obama, pulling in over a half million for the campaign. Why shouldn’t we believe that this is all a big circle of back scratching in the Obama adminstration, when he refuses to release the kinds of information we need to determine otherwise?
The President has played political games with information all along. He dangles his birth certificate on a string in order to distract the right. He’s keeping as little of the Obamacare agenda in writing as possible, because he knows if we read it and expose his plans, we can win the fight, so we end up with ridiculous spectacles like a Senate committee voting on a bill that hasn’t been written yet. And now he’s playing footsie with donors in secret.
We must encourage and join Senator McCain and Representative Blackburn in their fresh legislative efforts to stop the Google/Obama Net Neutrality scheme. We cannot allow this kind of quid pro quo to go unchallenged.
Act now against Net Neutrality
The time is coming that the left is going to begin its drive for Single Payer Internet, and so the time has come for us to fight back. Finland is gradually nationalizing the Internet and declaring use of other people’s Internet hardware a “right,” and the left is cheering. Obama’s “Internet Czar” does not hide the left’s hopes for an end to freedom and markets for Internet service.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, President Barack Obama, and the rest of the radical left want to use the Net Neutrality movement as the crisis that gives cover to sweeping big government action, allowing the FCC to pick winners and losers and dictate to private individuals and firms how their private property must be run, putting government bureaucrats in charge of the Internet.
The dangers of the administration’s Net Neutrality plans are not theoretical:
Incestuous Coincidences Surround Net Neutrality
I’m a conservative, so I have no problem with anyone using their rights to enter the public discourse, and I’m not allergic to corporations. So I when I call the latest from Google “astroturf”, I’m saying it purely to illustrate the hypocrisy of the left, because by their standard Google is becoming quite an installer of the fake grass roots.
I find it entirely unfair that the left gets to try to shout down our side while theirs goes entirely unnoticed. If we don’t at least speak up, then the left’s arguments might get some traction.
So let’s watch carefully. Google has hired Frannie Wellings, the telecommuniations advisor to Senator Byron Dorgan, North Dakota Democrat. Sounds boring, but dig deeper. Dorgan was the author and sponsor of the Senate’s Net Neutrality bill in 2007. Is Google buying access? That’s what the left would say if the parties were reversed.
They’d especially say that when the job that Wellings is taking was just created. She is to be Google’s “federal policy outreach manager.” In other words, she’s going to run Google’s lobbying operations in Washington. Which means either she or people accountable to her are going to be going right back into Dorgan’s office.
Further, before taking the job with Dorgan, Wellings worked at… yup, Free Press, the special interest group that founded and runs Save the Internet.
What a coincidence it is that Google, Save the Internet, and a Democrat Politican are linked like this! Free Press and Google must justify this if they are to continue their shameless attacks on our side, instead of arguing with facts and logic about the benefits and disadvantages of their goal: aggressive regulation of the Internet, centered on an FCC picking winners and losers in private network policy disputes.
The Real Net Neutrality Astroturfers
The left is at it again. They know that in a straight-up battle of ideas, their socialist perversion of Net Neutrality could never win out. Nobody but the most blindly partisan supporters of Barack Obama wants a government takeover of the Internet, because everybody knows that when government takes something over, freedom in it tends to die.
That is why Save The Internet is resorting to dishonest smear campaigns in an attempt to shout down and discredit their opponents. They want to win by driving all opposition off the field, turning this debate into the Internet equivalent of the streets of Berlin in Weimar Germany. They must not get away with it.
Gallimaufry Open Thread
In honor of Fire Joe Morgan getting the band back together for a day, we bring you a gallimaufry Open Thread.
Moe Lane was interviewed at Blogometer. Teaser: “Why, Moe? Why?”
Google is not letting go of the Google Voice-to-iPhone Net Neutrality issue, having re-released an unredacted version of its letter to the FCC. It’s going to be delicious when T-Mobile USA bans Skype on its phones, and asks Google to uphold that ban.
It’s Follow Friday on Twitter! Many RedStater editors are on there, including @presjpolk (me), @moelane, @jeffemanuel, @ewerickson, @leonwolf, @baseballcrank, @brainfaughnan, @sorendayton, @haystack, @robertbluey, @kevinholtsberry, @krempasky, @cayankee, @paulfuller, @billstl, @jamesrichardson, @markimpomeni, @cianfrocca, @vladimirrs, @tobytoons, @calebhowe, probably more I’m missing in this quick survey, and of course @redstate itself. Gotta catch ‘em all!
Enjoy a peach of an Open Thread.
Google undermines the Internet [Updated]
Or: History Repeats
“Allowing broadband carriers to control what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the principles that have made the Internet such a success” – Vint Cerf, Google Chief Internet Evangelist and Co-Developer of the Internet Protocol
Updated at the bottom.
Attention leftists: hypocrisy is not a failure to live up to one’s own ideals. Hypocrisy is a willful professing of a belief, that one that does not truly believe. An outspoken Christian who commits adultery is not a hypocrite. An outspoken atheist who prays is a hypocrite. In today’s extended lesson Google must either accept that it is undermining the Internet, or be a hypocrite.
Conspiracy Where There Is None
Two posts in one day…the hell is wrong with me?
Anyway, sorry to be late to this particular discussion - but it looks like Google (specifically Blogger) had drawn a ton of flak this week over placing a blog behind Blogger’s “interstitial” content warning and accusations of political bias have followed quickly behind. Without rounding up all the links (Moe did that quite well here), I would like to weigh in on this: Rick Klau, the Product Manager for Blogger at Google has posted a response.
A couple things: first, I think that if the company Google can be attributed to hold political views, they probably (ok, pretty much certainly) aren’t mine. I think as a rule, conservatives have a lot to disagree with the way that Google sees the policy world. They do quite a bit to earn distrust on the right (come on, would it freaking KILL them to toss out a Memorial Day logo instead of Tetris’ birthday fercrissakes?)
Second - I’ve known Rick for years. While he was at Feedburner he was a great friend to RedState in its early years trying to scrap together a few nickels to keep the lights on and the beer flowing. Yes, he’s a Democrat - and he’s also an honest broker and I take him at his word.
And no, I wouldn’t believe for ONE SINGLE SECOND that he’d let political concerns affect the way Blogger is run. No way, no how. Everything else is just faked moon landings and forged birth certificates.
P.S. [insert likely unnecessary disclaimer about my employer having many clients in the technology arena]
Larry Summers Says The Economy Is On The Rebound
Google searchers no longer interested in \"economic depression.\"
We’re out of the economic woods. Things are looking up. Unemployment is rising. Manufacturing is moribund. Foreclosures are at all time highs. Foreigners are getting nervous about our bonds… and currency. But the crisis is over.
How do we know this? The Google Index.
Of all the statistics pouring into the White House every day, top economic adviser Larry Summers highlighted one Friday to make his case that the economic free-fall has ended.
The number of people searching for the term “economic depression” on Google is down to normal levels, Summers said.
Searches for the term were up four-fold when the recession deepened in the earlier part of the year, and the recent shift goes to show consumer confidence is higher, Summers told the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
One of the amazing things about this Administration is the way some really smart people will say disturbingly dumb things to defend it. One is uncertain of their motivation but the phenomenon is undeniable.
I can think of a lot of reasons why searches for “economic depression” might fluctuate that have nothing to do with predictions of the economic condition of the nation. Maybe they remembered the concept after one search? Maybe they’ve been evicted and longer have access to a computer? I can’t imagine there is a significant number of people out there who repeatedly search for “economic depression” because they remain worried about their jobs and being able to pay the mortgage.
Back in 2005 when Larry Summers launched into his ill-fated exposition on why women are inferior to men in math skills (and measuring distance, for that matter), MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins walked out of his talk later saying that if she hadn’t left, ”I would’ve either blacked out or thrown up.” I know how she feels. Right now I’d know I don’t know whether to crap or go blind and I can’t leave.
Commemorating June 6
While Skanderbeg offers an appropriate tribute to the heroes of D Day, not everyone is commemorating the day the same way. If you click over to Google for example, you’ll find an unusual and unexpected tribute:
I can conceive of Google choosing not to pay tribute to the heroes who saved freedom, and who bravely gave their lives. But it’s stunning that they could decide not to commemorate the sacrifice of D Day, and instead to celebrate to 25 years of Tetris - a game that no one has played in 10 years, anyway.
Warner Todd Huston has thoughts on this over at Newsbusters as well.
ATR/CEI update on Internet access
The FCC is currently in the process of developing a National Broadband strategy. Being that this is under the Obama administration, this strategy is unlikely to be a sensible one. Early word suggests that the administration plans to take the Internet in this country and consolidate it into a single, centralized, government-run entity. ‘Competition’ will be allowed, but only under strict government controls and over government wires. Just like in China.
There’s no coincidence there, either. Obama’s good buddy and source of advice Google is well-acquainted with being a tool of totalitarianism. I’m all for the profit motive in general, but Google lets it trump basic human rights when it does whatever the fascist dictatorship in China tells it to. Google loves it because the reduced competition acts as a subsidy for favored firms such as itself, and now it wants the same to happen in our country through its ‘Net Neutrality’ plan, which the Obama FCC just might start to promote.
Americans for Tax Reform and the Competitive Enterprise Institute held a conference call today to detail their opposition to such efforts.
Never Gonna Give You(tube) Up
I admit it. I go to YouTube a lot. A LOT. I can’t help it! There are some pretty funny videos at YouTube, along with the weird, the bizarre, the just plain disturbing, and the seriously creepy. I have a YouTube channel of my very own, in fact. Some of my videos are pretty funny too, as well as disturbing. But the relationship between YouTube and conservatives has been rocky and remains so. And of course, they are owned by Barackoogle.
Moe wrote recently about a copyright issue Leon and I experienced with a video at YouTube. It was resolved satisfactorily. They put their ads on our video and will make money from it. Nice.
Well it seems that now other labels are catching on to this. You can’t stop people ripping your music, why not profit from it? And who better, I ask you, to profit from than one Rick Astley? Hmm? Rick-rolling is a phenomenon unparalleled at YouTube, so the potential number of videos they will be able to advertise on and sell music downloads or ringtones from is huge. And apparently, they’ve recognized this. I received another one of those emails from YouTube today, and sure enough they are now profiting off the video … or more specifically the song. Nice, I thought.
But then I had another thought. Didn’t Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi recently Rick Roll the YouTube-viewing nation? Why yes, yes she did. So I wondered, is the official YouTube channel for the House of Representatives going to be sporting cheesy ringtone ads and download links now?
Google takes 4 years to address Bush Googlebomb, 4 *days* to fix Obamabomb
It took four years for Google to address the “Google bomb” that was lobbed at former President Bush.
But it took the Internet behemoth only a few days to defuse the same attack on President Obama. …
In 2003, President Bush’s detractors successfully gamed the Google search engine by arranging to have countless Web sites link the words “miserable failure” to Bush’s official biography on the White House Web site.
The result was that when someone typed the search term “miserable failure” into the Google search box, Bush’s bio rose to the top of the search results. …
Google greases the skids for the GDrive
Google is readying for what is possibly their most bandwidth-intensive Internet service yet: The Google Drive is reported to be a planned service to let people store all their data on Google’s servers, but access it all like a disk drive from their own home computers.
Services like Youtube and Picasa already transfer large amounts of data, but the GDrive conceivably would mean the continuous, two-way transfer of gigabytes of data, rivaling Bittorrent in the strain that an ordinary user might routinely put on an Internet connection. Clearly, any plans ISPs have to make their users pay for what bandwidth they use would put a crimp into this plan.
Enter the Google’s ever more cozy relationship with the Obama Administration. After leaving “Miserable Failure” as a search term that leads to President Bush for about four years, Google took less than four weeks to disarm the “Googlebomb” now that it’s aimed at President Obama.
Is there any serious question that this change in speed was motivated by a desire to curry favor with the new President on “Net Neturality,” or specifically plans that Google promotes that would prohibit ISPs from charging customers for what they use? I think not.
Google’s non-evil pose: Hand out, palm facing up
Google may be a name that evokes thoughts of flashy, new Internet technologies, or of a friendly relationship with the greater Internet community, but us critics have seen what they were up to all along. Just like any other industry titan, it takes what it can get, with government help when it must. What’s news, though, is that even the LA Times is taking notice:
“Google is not just a benign corporate entity. It has a variety of special interests,” said Jeff Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, who has sparred with Google over data-privacy issues. “They’re in a great position to push their agenda through with the support of the [P]resident and the Democrats in Congress.”
….Competitors worry about Google’s close relationship with the Obama administration, said Bill Whalen, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
“The question going forward is: Will Google turn into just another business entity looking for favors in Washington, or will it manage to keep the 767 flying at 30,000 feet above the political din?” he said, a reference to the Google founders’ private plane.
Going forward? Going forward? They’ve been this way all along.
