You have a President who has surrounded himself with ideological clones his entire life. He has no comprehension of anything other than the extreme leftist victim mentality or the extreme leftist control mentality. Nothing else exists. He has never be outside of that circle. His brain is not programmed for leadership of a Republic.

I have never seen him make a decision on what is good for the country as a whole. The entire prism is what is good for his ideology and his constituency. And the most unnerving part is he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and isn’t the least bit curious.

As I have said before, NN is all about control. The potential for sinister games with internet traffic and ideological push and propaganda is huge.

It is time to re-establish the use of search engine aggregators to insure competition. Interesting MS’s bing.com pulled up the site.

Google, changing the DNA of society’s interaction.

should never be used in any legislation at any time. I guarantee the Left’s definition of “reasonable” will be different than mine.

When you start typing letters into the google search box it usually automatically tries to anticipate what you want to search for and “auto-suggest” the most likely searches. This is supposedly driven by frequency algorythms. “Climategate” is one of the heaviest searched terms in Google right now but it does not come up as an auto-suggestion. It did for a while and then it was removed and then it did for a while and it seems to have been removed again. Google is definately weighing in on the politics.

This has all been heavily discussed over at the Watts Up With That science blog.

This is a good example of the dems arguing over what the word “is” is. The fundamental issue was whether or not ISPs should be a “dumb pipe” to the internet, instead of blocking certain types of data. Data refers to the 1s and 0s of the data stream, not to be confused with “information” which is data that has been interpreted by someone.

I don’t know if Google is the bad guy here. They seem to be using the rules to their advantage in order to be commercially successful, which is what we capitalists have been forced to do during every democrat administration. Some call them “loopholes”.

Once the government gets involved in a technical issue, it becomes a political issue and you need to use a different dictionary of terms.

I think (government enforced) net neutrality is a lot of garbage and falls well outside what the government should be involving itself in. Much like subscriber-supported cable/satellite TV, content producers, content carriers, and content consumers should be left alone to work out what content is delivered, how, and at what price.

But the hypocrisy charge falls flat on its face from the get go, at least unless you intend to argue that Google is a ‘carrier’ (so-called common or broadband) maintaining a geographically large, physical network infrastructure over which information traffic is routed, transported, and delivered – which is the sector that net neutrality advocates are targeting. Rather, Google is an end point on the carrier networks, sitting on one “side” attempting to attract consumers to visit its varied online sites and services. They’re not any different in that respect than eBay, Microsoft, or even the online division of Wal-Mart.

Now you may dislike the fact that they are competing hard and using every legal means available to them – including working to gain competitive advantage (or more likely in this case, mitigating risk) through government lobbying – to tilt the present and future market to their advantage. As a for-profit company that’s what they’re supposed to do. The problem in this scenario isn’t Google. it’s the fact that we have had and currently have legislators and politicians in general who use their power to trade policy for favor. Ideally, no company, including Google, should be able to wrest any favorable policy or legislation through lobbying. That is not the reality right now. I’d very much like to see the next (R) administration that gets in power actually put an end to this and reduce/eliminate FCC and other federal interference (subsidies, tax breaks for specific industries, and all the other shenanigans) in the market, they had that chance recently and didn’t take it.

AT&T, of course, is working the government too. It’s not as though they aren’t willing to call for net neutrality and petition the government for FCC enforcement themselves when it could work to their present or future advantage.

This is what happens in the market. Companies jab and parry and try to win. Our market has a long standing cancer in the form of government interference. Google and AT&T are doing exactly what they should be for their shareholders by attempting to take advantage of the lack of discipline and poor governance by our elected officials.

I’ve said before that Google was treading dangerously near to hypocrisy in the contrast between its promoted public policy and its own internal policy, but now the large, wealthy firm has gone well over the line.

What does being a “large, wealthy firm” have to do with anything? It’s almost as if you’re suggesting there’s something wrong with being a large, wealthy firm in America. How do you feel about “large, wealthy firms” in general?

However, we can see in the case of Studio Briefing that Google is anything but neutral. Studio Briefing has been shut out of all of Google’s services, and has been forcibly removed even from the search, so searching for Studio Briefing would never turn up the company’s webpage.

Studio Briefing isn’t the first website to be delisted by Google and anyone who’s worked with Google and AdSense knows that, for example, simply not having a privacy policy is terms for having your Adsense account terminated with no further explanation. So if you have evidence that Studio Briefing is being treated differently than any of the other online sites that have been delisted by Google, for example, that they have fully complied with all Google terms of service or otherwise have not engaged in behaviour that Google has delisted other sites for, bring that forth!

Fortunately for Google they’ve exempted big, rich companies like themselves from the Net Neutrality plan, only targetting smaller, more vulnerable companies like Verizon and AT&T (who of course has no connection to the monopolist of old, actually being the former Cingular with a new name). Fortunate and completely hypocritical.

Again with “big, rich companies” bit. You know, I guess it was only a matter of time after seeing the inexplicable drive by some (R)’s to find a corporate boogeyman they could tilt at in the same model as liberal’s irrational disdain for Wal-Mart, that we should also see some (R)’s start aping liberals when describing American corporations as big, rich, and wealthy in an clumsily obvious attempt to foment angst against them. Disappointing, nonetheless.

The other problem here is your complete mischaracterization of the relative sizes of these companies. Let’s be clear: AT&T is 8th on the Fortune 1000 with revenue of 124B. Verizon is at 17th with 97B. Google isn’t even in the top 100, sitting at 117th place with revenue of 21B, 1/6th of AT&T and almost 1/5th of Verizon (and, by the way, also trailing far behind Microsoft which comes in the list at 35th). So I hope it was ignorance that led you to characterize Verizon and AT&T as “smaller, more vulnerable”. Maybe you can also explain why you didn’t call AT&T and Verizon “big, rich companies” too?

Maybe using the tactics of your enemies sounds like a good idea at first, but when you start to look like them too, the approach causes more negative than positive for your side.

Imagine Google’s hysterical shrieking had AT&T wiped a Google site off of the map for all users of its services.

Google removed a site from search results on one search engine (theirs) and there’s nothing that says the site cannot be restored as others have in similar circumstances in the past. Access to the Studio Briefing site hasn’t been disrupted and as you well aware there is vigorous competition in the search engine sector such that Studio Briefing continues to appear in other popular indexes. AT&T actually did “wipe an Internet site off the map”: “wiped an Internet site off the map”. No consumer of AT&T broadband services could reach the sites that AT&T blocked (or let’s say, in your odd choice of words, “blockaded”, [rolls eyes]).

So who actually has more power to “wipe a site off the map”? Who is more vulnerable to actions by the other. Google or AT&T? I assert that Google does not have the power to disrupt AT&T in any noticeable manner, but AT&T, were it to take similar measures as it did in the cited story, could severely disrupt Google’s revenue producing activities.

Which get us back to why Google would be trying to mitigate that risk in the first place. Good for them, it’s what a responsible company should be doing! I absolutely disagree that the government should regulate or otherwise meddle with the situation as Google would like them to. If AT&T wanted to deliberately block Google because they saw it in their advantage to do so, fine, tough for Google. In a free market, consumers of AT&T would be free to complain to their vendor or seek a different broadband provider and this would work itself out one way or the other. But that decision to meddle or not is up to the government.

Note: As of right now this posting is the number one result on Google News for “google net neutrality” (screengrab). So maybe the boogeyman doesn’t really hate you after all.