It’s Independence Day, which was very nice for me since I kept on resting and feel just about healthy now. No Tech on Monday thanks to my cold that wiped me out since Sunday.

Unfortunately Google decided today was the day to celebrate a song that, while American, was specifically designed to carry political meaning as well as to reply to the Christian and patriotic God Bless America. Google apparently can’t even do Independence Day right.

But, Google does drive economic growth, which is why we need to keep a light regulatory touch with them. I just wish they’d realize that when they pushed for Net Neutrality, they were pushing for heavy regulation of firms that also drive economic growth.

Remember when the George Soros extremist left sued the FCC because its Open Internet order (the Net Neutrality rule) allegedly didn’t go far enough? The goal clearly was to try to make the FCC’s actions look centrist, rather than the extreme power grab that they were, because Free Press dropped the suit out of the blue.

More FCC? Some people love to write about the many ways the Obama EPA is out of control. Others detail the NLRB. The FTC, SEC, FDA, and others surely have their faults. We’ve even got a BOEMRE writers at RedState. But the FCC is mine. Let’s list a few problems with it real quick:

It’s proposing unconstitutional regulations with respect to 700MHz interoperability. It’s got the spectrum allocation process hindering investment, universal access, competition, and economic growth. It’s maintaining a blackout rule that’s purely a subsidy for big business. Congressional Democrats are cowardly folding on the blackout issue, but Verizon is fighting on spectrum/

Meanwhile, internationally, the ITU is trying to be even worse than the FCC, so we really have no reason to believe the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations are going any better. So it’s interesting that Barack Obama lost 132 Democrats on TPP transparency, on the heels of the administration blocking a request by Darrell Issa to monitor the sessions.

I think the fat is getting to Kim Dotcom’s brain, because he’s convinced Joe Biden is the mastermind of a vast conspiracy against him and his former criminal enterprise Megaupload.

A bill of rights should not be “a litany of goodies”, indeed. That was my initial reaction, though not so colorfully put, to these Digital Bill of Rights ideas. So yes, I lean against these proposals.

Because you know what? Sometimes people just want to sell their privacy in limited ways to get cheap stuff.

I still adamantly oppose the Lieberman-Collins Cybersecurity Act as a massive power grab, but of course Senate Democrats continue to fight for it. CISPA or SECURE IT would be fine thank you.

Here’s an interesting development: Euro court deals a blow to EULAs, those draconian software license agreements that many believed could never withstand court challenges.

Gotta love it when incompetent people write technical laws. This black box proposal in the UK is insane. Read generously, it merely proposes to require ISPs to do the impossible and install man-in-the-middle snooping attacks on secure Internet protocols. Read otherwise, it makes no technical sense at all.