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Don’t let them tell you they don’t want to censor the Internet

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  May 20th, 2010 at 01:46 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

They do. Oh boy do they ever want to censor the Internet. Why else would the FCC take the radical step of deem-and-pass Title II reclassification of ISPs to regulate them like phone companies? It’s because the endgame of Net Neutrality is total control.

Today I came across two slipups that give up the game, despite the FCC’s promises of “forbearance” and the greater left’s assurances that the War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength, and Regulation is Liberty.

Cass Sunstein, legal professor and currently the head of Obama’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, said this as far back as 2001, per Althouse:

Sites of one point of view agree to provide links to other sites, so that if you’re reading a conservative magazine, they would provide a link to a liberal site and vice versa, just to make it easy for people to get access to competing views. Or maybe a pop-up on your screen that would show an advertisement or maybe even a quick argument for a competing view. [break] The best would be for this to be done voluntarily, but the word “voluntary” is a little complicated, and sometimes people don’t do what’s best for our society unless Congress holds hearings or unless the public demands it. And the idea would be to have a legal mandate as the last resort, and to make sure it’s as neutral as possible if we have to get there, but to have that as, you know, an ultimate weapon designed to encourage people to do better.

Yeah, a member of the White House in charge of regulation thinks that a government mandate to control political content is something that could be done in a “neutral” way. And the FCC, a regulatory body, just claimed the ability to regulate content from Internet Service Providers in the name of Net Neutrality. File under “Things that make you go Hmm.”

I was all ready to post on just that tonight when I ran into something even more blatant. Don’t take it from me that the FCC has all this in mind. Take it from Jennifer Schneider via Reason. She is after all the legal adviser to FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, and she says that “Commissioner Copps would love to have jurisdiction over everything.”

Hmm. Yeah, some “jokes” are just too revealing, much like when Dick Armey made his little joke on Barney Frank’s name. Armey clearly had no love for Frank, and the Copps office has plenty of love for total Internet regulation.

We’ve got to get a Congress that will stop this runaway FCC.

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  • kchand

    just cannot stomach free and unfettered speech. Even ‘progressive’ is a misnomer; they are regressives.

  • Adjoran

    Al Gore didn’t invent the internet, but he was a leading voice in Congress for expanding it and making it available to the public. He didn’t coin the phrase, “information superhighway” either, but he did bring it into the popular lexicon. Read his passionate words from those days, envisioning free access to nearly limitless stores of knowledge for all people. They were truly inspiring, the only real contribution he made in his decades of “public service,” and one of the last times a liberal Democrat advanced an argument which could be described in any way as “classical liberalism.”

    Alas, the Grand Experiment didn’t turn out entirely to the far Left’s liking, though. As it turned out, pesky conservatives could also buy computers and pay for internet access, and freely compete in the arena of ideas – unlike the tightly controlled system of information management the legacy press provided, which ensured that conservative voices would be carefully supervised.

    Drat the luck!

    Of course “Net Neutrality” is the internet equivalent of the equally misnomered “Fairness Doctrine” for broadcast bands. As the practice of the latter before its invalidation by the Supreme Court demonstrates, the only truly “fair” or “neutral” speech is none at all – which would suit the Left, who already dominate the legacy “gatekeepers of knowledge” in near-monopoly fashion.

  • http://www.redstate.com/biggator5/ BigGator5

    Or maybe we need to get a President that can stop the FCC.

    The Net Neutrality thing, is starting to sound more and more like Fairness Doctrine.

  • Bill S

    on the air the other day.

    This is simply the “Fairness Doctrine” applied to the Internet. And it’s not at all surprising to hear it from the Kitten administration, especially from Sunstein.

  • http://www.scragged.com petrarch

    I wonder if this came about because the Left truly believed that most Americans want liberal statism, but were only prevented from getting it because of evil corporations, private interests, and lying Rethuglicans? So the Internet allows the “popular will” to be expressed and co-ordinated, thus allowing the Will of the People to triumph? And then… the Will of the People turned out to be not quite exactly what Al Gore expected it to be.

  • 4life

    This is brilliant: “the greater left?s assurances that the War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength, and Regulation is Liberty.” And applies to so much more than just the battle for continued internet freedom. For instance, the insane argument that ‘card check’ is more free than a secret ballot. Keep up the great work Neil! Gee, if only the MSM would wake up and report what is really going on. What are the chances that anyone from ABC, NBC, or CBS will dig into this and follow it to its logical conclusion? A big fat ZERO!