Watching the FCC


They haven’t passed the Net Neutrality regulations, phase one of the push for Single Payer Internet, but the FCC is already plotting phase two: a National Broadband Plan. Call it what you will: a socialist Five Year Plan, fascist-inspired industrial policy, what have you. It’s a frightening step by this administration.

It’s so frightening, in fact, that Senate Democrats think the FCC needs to be more plain spoken about their plans, currently being hidden in overly-fancy language. It’s not impossible to speak about Internet policy in plain language. It’s just not possible to plan fascist takeovers of industries in plain language without scaring voters, is all. Which is why they don’t do it.

Meanwhile, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel refutes Net Neutrality proponents who claim that the practices NN is meant to oppose, are not theoretical:

Net-neutrality advocates raise the specter of providers censoring websites by slowing or cutting off access to them in the absence of new rules. Yet they cite only three isolated instances of this in the past five years. Each was quickly resolved.

Once again, we get more evidence that Net Neutrality is really just the crisis that progressives are using to grow government. We have to stop them.


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.

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On Julius Genachowski and Net Neutrality


I am in danger of becoming a broken record on the issue of Net Neutrality in this space, but as aggressively as the Democrats are pushing the issue, it is a danger we all will have to live with. Once again, I will summarize the issue with a minimum of technological impediments to understanding:

Net Neutrality started out as a broad-based movement on the Internet. It wasn’t a left-wing thing at all, but rather was something most of us could support, because it was merely a movement to ensure (usually government franchise-backed) ISP firms could not abuse their monopoly or oligopoly power to coerce their customers to use other services by the firm, such as phone service in the case of AT&T or television service in the case of Comcast. I believe this is a reasonable request. It doesn’t prevent investors in Internet technology from profiting, but rather merely prevents them from abusing government-granted market power to benefit other businesses.

However on Monday, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski went beyond that when he outlined his six principles of Net Neutrality in a speech to the Brookings Institution. What he proposes is an intrusive, never-ending government hand in the growth and management of the Internet, one that is clearly aimed at the Socialist goal of “single-payer Internet,” run with the same agile reactiveness as the DMV or the TSA.

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