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Tech at Night: Red Alert

Tech at Night

I know it’s a big day for Net Neutrality when I wake up and my Email Inbox is jammed full with links, so many basically saying the same thing: The FCC is on the move. I’m told it all goes back to a November 15 speech by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, in which he expresses an urgency for the FCC to pass a bunch of new rules quickly. It’s a crisis, he says.

He then called out Google and Verizon, saying that their temerity to contribute to the debate “slowed down some other processes.” You see: the whole process of talking to industry is apparently a sham, and the only speech that counts is speech that leads the FCC closer to the Obama administration’s predetermined outcome.

And it’s that Net Neturality outcome we may be nearing after all. That’s the Red Alert.

Tech at Night’s good buddy Seton Motley at Big Govenrment brings us the key story: He’s now claiming that we must pass industry-crippling Net Neutrality restrictions in order to expand broadband access in America, and using that as the leverage to justify Title II reclassification. “That’ll happen,” he says. And further he’s going to gun hard for wireless services, something that Henry Waxman’s bill didn’t dare do, proving once again that the FCC is far outside the mainstream of even Congressional Democrats. Here’s Politico on the story, as well.

And worst of all: The plan is to launch it while Republicans are home for Thanksgiving, and then pass it two weeks before Christmas, three weeks before Republicans take control of the House. These dates and times are designed to minimize public debate on the matter as well as to minimize the impact of the 2010 elections on the process. Everything is chosen to silence and thwart popular will.

Hold on and get loud. This is crunch time.

Some more Net Neutrality? You betcha. Precursor Blog chimes in, arguing against the recent speeches by Julius Genachowski and for the need for freedom online, not government-dictated “neutrality.”

House Republicans of the Energy and Commerce Committee, led by Ranking Member Joe Barton, have also written a letter to Genachowski, warning him that his plans to circumvent Republican victory are “a mistake.” They know when their rightful Constitutional powers are being subverted.

Quick hits to round out the night: I’m told that the currently-in-progress SB 3804 is a dangerous bill to watch, giving the government expansive new powers online in the name of copyright protection. Copyright used to be a matter of civil law, before the MPAA convinced the feds to start doing their dirty work for them. That’s why FBI notices appear on home releases of movies. Now it’s increasingly criminalized, even as copyright is also increasingly extended. Copyright today would be unrecognizable to the founding fathers, who put the concept into the Constitution with the express warning that copyright be limited in duration.

Having gotten tired of serving up waffles to the FCC, Free Press radicals are now writing bad poetry for Net Neutrality. It’s theater. It’s not debate.

Oh, and I hate to end on a downer, but the White House CTO says the administration will step up tech efforts next year. Whoever we have head the House committee, whether Barton or someone else, had best be ready to fight back.

COMMENTS

  • http://www.redstate.com/etcartman Kenny Solomon

    Neil:

    To me, the CTO thing is starting to connect the dots – right through Sunstein’s office. He’s a necessary catalyst to the visible officials – an insulation level between The Oval Office and it’s out-government string-pullers.

    But as I said before, our current administration would never stoop to something this subtle and devious. I mean, if legislation fails, our humble but lovable Dictator In Training Pants? would never even remotely consider running up this kind of Totalitarian stuff on an E.O., right ?

    By the way Neil, if I wasn’t such a good sport, I’d have dropped off the grid a long time ago. ;)

  • Scope

    It’s more like a running duck session. With the walloping the Dems. got earlier this month, it was bound to happen.

    Listening to a speech made by Dem. Daddy Soros a few days ago, when he suggested that maybe the O was just not up to the job, I saw that as a warning to the O to step it all up.

    I read an article where John Podesta, head of Center for American Progress, and Soros footsoldier, recommended that the O just sign EO’s, and to use his federal, unelected but selected goons, in order to increase the pace to Socialism/Totalitarianism, and to by-pass the newely elected Republican majority in the House.

    James Carville said that if Hillary gave the O one of her balls, they then would both have two.

    Rockafeller said that he has a bug in him, that wants to say, just shut down FOX and MSNBC already. He craves “good accurate news” and he just has no where to go for that. Apparently he doesn’t need to listen to NPR, as, he knows what they will say, before they even say it.

    To me, that all adds up to a loud and clear message, to the O, to just git r done already. I believe he will, and, it will be necessary to silence the mentally ill population in order to do that. Ha, right after Thanksgiving, when the stories about the pornographic scanners, and the sexual assaults on our persons will be at a thunder rate I suspect.

  • fpete13527

    Whereas the Lame Duck is clearly going to be their most Roaring Lion radical work, probably rivaling and surpassing the devastation of O-Care travesty.

    Not only are O and the Dems not shifting, but rather they are going to go exponentially more radical in this cowardly session. They are excited about ruining yet another Thanksgiving and Christmas for the American people.

    I sure would like to see some Christie type speaking and fighting over the next weeks though, even if it didn?t stop them. I say it would make a difference, even if just spoken.

    I doubt it will happen though. Who is going to speak??? The House may show so promise??we?ll see. The Senate, however, is unfolding to be worse than pitiful, IMO, at least as of now.

    I am a stand that the new blood in the House, and even the minimal new blood in the Senate will make a difference to turn this Obamination around.

    There will be lots of work to do though. Lots! The next level of the “sleeper must awaken” ,,,,,and it must awaken even stronger, faster, and bigger.

  • earlgrey

    Once passed is there any means for the wireless companies to fight back through the courts.

    Are there any Republicans that are being vocal about this? My congresswoman was on the energy committee, Marha Blackburn. I believe they were on the ones that rejected the original Waxman bill that you wanted them to consider (although now that seems like a trick).

  • runner12

    about this? I do not want to just stand by and let the 1st Amendment be destroyed. Where are our representatives?

  • gamechange11two

    When the dems took control in ’07, Dingell and Markey used the threat of budget cuts to bring the FCC to heel. Public hearings are also an effective tool for exposing bad public policy.

    I found this memo from an organization called kmbvideojournal. It’s a response to another piece that I can’t track down. It’s a little wonkish and discusses the secretive nature of the FCC. This paragraph, from 2008 jumped out when I read it:

    “If you were talking about an agency which operated openly — like the NLRB, FEC, or FERC — that’d be one thing. But 95% of what the FCC does is done in secret. We don’t like that, obviously. So far, we’ve only persuaded one politician — Senator Obama, who’s said of the FCC, “The public’s business should be conducted in public.” ”

    http://www.kmbvideojournal.com/download/commentaries/08/FCCBudget_Feb10.pdf

    Looks like Obama, with his usual flare for the political head fake, was training his sights on the communications infrastructure long ago. Notice the current coverage of the whole net neutrality thing in the LSM, yawn.

  • earlgrey

    THey don’t see it as a big issue and they are all conservatives, although it can be safely said that I am about 20 times more conservative than my family. Maybe more coverage would help, but I can’t get people riled up about this.

  • izoneguy

    My wife thinks I am nuts. OK I am a little nuts….
    But she says everything is going to be fine.
    I ask her what her definition of fine is?

  • http://www.theprecinctproject.wordpress.com ColdWarrior

    runner12, are you a precinct committeeman yet? If not, that’s something you can DO.

    Thank you.
    ColdWarrior

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    Spread the word about how bad these plans are.

  • http://www.voterubio2010.com nelsa

    the “Underground Internet” will be…

    With millions of violations, it would be hard to detect a savvy user… Just sayin’

  • earlgrey

    net neutrality will protect people from Identity theft on the internet. I would really appreciate an easy way to describe this boondoggle to people. I think the only way I can make this argument simpler for people is

    Look what TSA has done to airport security
    Look how Fannie and Freddie created a housing bubble that left people and taxpayer losing out. All in the name of affordabel housing (how does a housing bubble make housing affordable?).
    Look what Obmacare is doing to insurance rates.

    Government oversight is not desirable. Keep them out.

    Remember when people used to joke about the army paying way too much for toilet seats, screwdrivers, etc.? We will put up with that for our national defense because that can’t be made private, but for everything else — more government creates more waste, more restriction and a complete lack of commonsense.

  • pbp68

    “Nice budget ya got there…shame if something happened to it.”

    …And I mentioned that I’m a committeeman…

  • gamechange11two

    Truth be told, this battle will not be fought on the front pages. When it’s done, the public will get another story about another victory or defeat for Obama. That’s all the significance NN will receive from reporters who know better. That, and stories about enhanced identity protection, and greater access to the net (ha-ha).

    I’ll be emailing my congressman about this, MIke Rogers (MI-08). He’s on Energy & Commerce, too.

    When they want to cut out the parts of the dialog that they don’t like, it’s personal. It’s time to rattle some cages.

  • Finrod

    UUCP is a suite of programs that was the backbone of the Internet before TCP/IP was created, and all the things built on top of TCP/IP: host and domain names (.com, .net and .org, they’ll get you pretty far), IP addresses and ports, and all the things built on top of *that*: telnet, ssh, the Web, email with @ addressing, every chat server that’s ever existed, ftp, and pretty much everything that makes up the Internet nowadays.

    Email addresses back then were in the form of ‘bang paths’, e.g. ..!host1!host2!host3!yourhost!yourusername: what that means is that host1 was expected to be a well-known host that other people knew how to get to, so others would fill in their path of how to get to host1, and would send email to you with something that looks like myhost!host7!host8!host9!host1!host2!host3!yourhost!yourusername — that tells myhost to send the email to host7, which sends it to host8, to host9, to host1, to host2, to host3, finally to yourhost to deliver it to the user yourusername. You can see why this was supplanted by TCP/IP and @-style email addresses, it was pretty cumbersome.

    The good news is that sendmail, the most common mail sending agent, still has all that UUCP code in it. A group of determined geeks could set up their own UUCP network and send email to each other using their phone lines and never even use the public internet. It’d be slow and cumbersome, but it would be doable, and it would be a difficult network to break into; in order to get onto a network like that you have to know someone already on it that’s willing to relay your mail for you. This is how the Internet was formed back in the 1970s, and it would still be doable today if necessary.

  • runner12

    you where you find out about becoming a local precinct committeman or woman in my case.