So, the FCC put out another report (the “706 report”) that just pushes an agenda rather than reporting the true facts about high speed Internet in America. Commissioners McDowell and Pai tell it like it is. We’ve also got Broadband for America telling the story. I’m not even worried about the details: the FCC is saying what they feel they must say to justify expanding government.

Behold as CREW, of the tolerant and liberty-minded left, pushes for censorship of Fox as political retribution.

DoJ continues to fight copyright infringement, this time involving Android software. Note: without SOPA this can still be done. Anti-SOPA on the right never was the radical, anarchist, anti-copyright position the leftys were taking on the matter, which is why they lie freely about bills like CISPA, which aren’t like SOPA but would harm copyright infringers.

The Defense Department continues to watch what servicemen say online. Ubergizmo is a site I read, but the commentary there sadly misses the mark, and I suspect their comments reflect a common view online. Troops abroad must be monitored and the rules must be formal. Lives are at stake.

Another quick one tonight. Ah, the joys of there being no Internet crushing legislation or regulation under consideration right now.

Cue the dramatic music: While it’s true that both Oracle and Google were paying people online to write for their side (not that I was even offered a penny; I’m thinking it’s more because I’m unimportant than that I have some reputation of some sort), Google made the mistake of not complying with a judge’s order to reveal who. Uh oh.

Les ham handedly, it’s believed that Verizon played the game much better than AT&T did in muting popular opposition to their recent FCC case. Though I would argue that Verizon did have the advantage of going after AT&T, even if AT&T did apparently get caught flat footed.

Contrary to the opposition’s claims, Some now say that the Marketplace Fairness Act would help small business by simplifying the sales tax situation. I’m not sure I’d go that far, though I do believe the MFA taxameggeddon wouldn’t be as bad as the critics claim.

So with Cliff Stearns having lost his primary race for re-election, it’s time we started thinking about who to elevate on Energy and Commerce. I think Marsha Blackburn deserves a lot more prominence. She’s doing a good job there.

Ecuador: haven for serial rapists and spies. Julian Assange has fled from authorities in two countries now, taking asylum in the Ecuador embassy from the UK police. But remember: this isn’t about the Wikileaks. This is about him being a rapist according to Swedish law. Say what you want about contraception but it’s pretty unbalanced I think to manipulate women into getting pregnant against their wills.

Guys: Americans have great access to high-speed Internet. Quit throwing massive government subsidies at the fringe of people living in the middle of nowhere. And certainly not to add bad restrictions to industry efforts that are working.

Which is why, on that point, I’m glad the FCC decided not to stall the Verizon/Comcast spectrum deal even more. Ignore the biased BGR title there. Verizon ‘won’ nothing. Verizon spent money to allocate spectrum more efficiently.

Putting tech issues in the platform is well and good, but it’s the wrong fight. We need a fight for pro-liberty reformist regulators across the board, to undo the damage done by Obama’s regulators, and then some. That’s the real fight.

I guess legislatively it’ll be slow going the rest of this year, thanks to the elections. So Tech at Night just may be shorter for a while to come. That’s good for my sleep schedule, I believe.

Though the aftermath continues of Harry Reid’s failure to ram through the Lieberman-Collins Cybersecurity Act, as John McCain, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and other Republicans criticized Harry Reid for poor process. It’s a true and valid criticism.

Wow: After much stalling by the Obama administration, the Verizon/Comcast spectrum deal may go through the FCC

Some lefty group wants to influence the Republican platform. Heh. Must be nice to be funded for fruitless efforts like Demand Progress’s, eh?

Remember: your phone is broadcasting information. If you don’t want anyone listening to your phone, turn it off?

Remember the truth: Anonymous is attacking ordinary users while attacking Sony. They’re criminals, not activists. They need to go to jail. And Lieberman-Collins wouldn’t address that!

Time to defend Google: It’s unfair to attack them for excluding Youtube from its “anti-piracy” penalties, when they’re also excluding every other popular site driven by user-generated content. Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Youtube are four sites that, whether Google-owned or not, need to be indexed and valued to a degree. The point of the penalty is to punish illegitimate sites, not legitimate sites with some illegitimate users. So, yeah, lay off this time.

However I see I’m not the only one who thought Google got off easy over the Safari privacy hack perpetrated at Google, that led to the paltry $22 million fine of Google by the FTC. I still wonder if somebody should have gone to jail over it. Who was responsible? Where was the oversight that leads up to Larry Page and Eric Schmidt? Google should have named names.

Most analyses of the Marketplace Fairness Act, pro and con, seems to suggest that eBay will soon back the measure, as the firm looks at same-day delivery.

I don’t know if I believe that iPhone lacks backdoors for law enforcement. It may be true that iPhone (and Mac) encryption is good enough to defeat ordinary law enforcement, as opposed to NSA spooks, but I’m not quite sure I believe it. Then again I don’t know what algorithms and protocols Apple uses.

Silly wording aside, I believe FBI’s fears were well-founded that the mastermind of a large Internet-based criminal enterprise such as Megaupload may have the means to destroy evidence rapidly, and so raiding Kim Dotcom was perfectly reasonable.

I have a rule that I always oppose DDoS attacks and want the perpetrators to go to jail. Even when Wikileaks is the target. DDoSes (Distributed Denial of Service attacks, basically overloading a server and Internet connection) hurt the innocent far more than the guilty, due to the overloads affecting more than just the target’s Internet connection. The Internet is interconnected after all. We, the civilized world, should use legal means to shut down Wikileaks.

So the FTC is on a tear. Google is officially smacked for $22.5 million for hacking though Safari’s privacy protections to sell Safari users’ information to advertisers. Then Facebook got whacked for lying about what privacy protections it was giving users. Some are saying this is bad, as it’s expanding FTC power, but this is really a bad time to make that point. Google brought this on us. I’m not up on the Facebook issue, but the Google/Safari thing was a huge breach.

Had someone gone to jail, I would not have thought it wrong. If an ordinary citizen hacked through that many users’ privacy protections, we might have, you know.

Betcha FTC won’t go after Obama for America, though.

Just another reason the Google/Safari thing was an important issue to resolve: Microsoft is pushing ahead after all with defaulting Do Not Track to On in Internet Explorer 10. That’s huge and changes the advertising game, I believe.

It’s crazy to say Google doesn’t do anything about copyright, though Google is self-interested here, to be sure. By targeting copyright infringers, Google is also improving the quality of its own search results. This is win-win.

With the Cybersecurity Act on hold for now, it seems like a slow news week, so a quick one tonight.

We’re in a spectrum crunch, and as long as the Obama administration is restricting spectrum allocation, including the critical secondary spectrum market that firms like Verizon and AT&T are trying to operate in, it’s not going to get better. The Obama FCC claims to get it, but it’s not there yet.

Also, some have praised the Universal Service Fund reform the Obama FCC pushed through but if we listen to Don Young it’s a corrupt mess (just the way he likes it?).

Google still makes good money off of slavery and copyright infringement. Yeah, the same company that wanted ISPs regulated for its own benefit, while fighting regulation of itself. Unfortunate.

Remember when Kim Dotcom claimed he had proof of the vast conspiracy to get him, all led by Joe Biden? Well, oops, he changed the subject again, now claiming New Zealand Police were the ones out to get him, and beat him up. I’m sure we’ll see the proof of this any day now, too.

Like the poorly-behaved children they are mentally, Anonymous hasn’t gotten past banging on the table and screaming for what they want: free stuff, legal or not, this time from Demonoid. All that ‘for the children’ stuff was just a front, just as I said. They’re now back for selfish gangster behavior. Notice how they’re targeting Ukraine, when weakening Ukraine would only help Russia, eh? So much for fighting for liberty.

We had no Tech at Night on Friday becuase I was at the Gathering in Jacksonville. Hope those who went enjoyed it, and that those who weren’t able to attend can make it next year!

So, Harry Reid offered to let Republicans fix Lieberman-Collins. Republicans took him up on that, and he was unhappy. So he tried to ram it through after all. Republicans objected, and the cloture vote failed. I’d say my support for this tactic by Republicans has been vindicated.

Harry Reid, the embattled Senate majority leader under a cloud of serious allegations about his behavior lately, has continued to try to politicize the Cybersecurity Act. Republicans tried to be good legislators. That was embarrassing to Reid, so he had to cut it off.

Proof Democrats have been bargaining in bad faith the whole time comes from Barack Obama’s consideration of rule by decree on this. This of course is a bad idea.

At the Gathering I was fortunate enough to have a chance to remind Ron Johnson, who’s been great in this debate, that one of the largest Internet attacks was against the government. The government that couldn’t protect the privacy of our allies from the Wikileaks diplomatic cables attack, has no business trying to attack private business for not protecting credit card numbers perfectly, nor any business trying to lecture on the matter.

Mary Bono Mack and the House continue to fight for liberty online, trying to keep global government hands off of the Internet. This is bipartisan multistakeholder plan that even Google’s Vint Cerf supports.

Should the FTC be active against foreign infringers of copyright, trademark, and patent? I’m not sure. I think Darrell Issa showed during the SOPA debate in the House that we need to do that with existing trade authorities. Action certainly is needed, but let’s not continue to empower this radical socialist administration to attack private citizens online. Because guess what? when private business accuses NASA of stealing its own videos, IP holders do not have a good enough track record to be trusted to keep FTC in check on this.

Those so-called libertarians who wish to take Google and Facebook dollars to destroy property rights online in favor of a Richard Stallman-like collective socialism of ideas plan, they must be defeated. We need to do something, and there are good ways to act that don’t regulate the Internet for all of us.

You want to create jobs, Mr. President? Stop being a backwards obstructor on spectrum, because spectrum creates jobs.

Regulators need to just stay away from the whole Internets thing. ISP competition is tremendous. Prices are low, and even Comcast just doubled my bandwidth for free last week. Just spontaneously. That’s competition. They have to work to keep me off of fiber or wireless, and they know it.

When I see this story about Anonymous using kids as a PR tool, I’m reminded of stuff like this.

Looks like Michael Reagan is trying to create a secure, private alternative to Google mail for conservatives at reagan.com. I haven’t paid the $40/year to try the service, but it appears they offer secure IMAP access as a rebranded emailsrvr.com service. I’ve never used that service but the technology is a solid way to offer email accessible from anywhere and anything. They also offer a web-based option.

I conclude they’re worth a shot, but of course keep backups! The cloud is not a backup.

Twitter-based Political polling reminds me of the Literary Digest poll that predicted the Alf Landon-slide would defeat President Franklin Roosevelt in 1936.

Lieberman-Collins is in trouble! There is apparently some misinformation going around. I’ve seen people claiming that gun control is in the bill, when it’s just an amendment possibly to be added, along with an anti-Obamacare amendment going around. Further, The Hill posted and pulled a story saying Harry Reid postponed the Cybersecurity Act.

But it looks like I was right to respect Republican attempts to modify the bill, because it’s going as it should, according to reports.

The Obama administration is admitting this is about more power for government, as Democrats are scapegoating their apparent coming failure to make that power grab. They clearly had no intent of allowing the bill modified into a compromise, so they’re instead backing off on supporting any compromise. Republicans who voted to proceed called Reid’s bluff, and now even if he’s not postponing the bill, it’s clear his party is ready for the bill to fail.

Pass SECURE IT next Congress, guys. Or some other bill to facilitate critical information sharing, because “Ron Johnson is right” is not a line from Blazing Saddles. It’s the truth.

The libertarian wing of the House GOP continues to take the lead on tech issues with Jason Chaffetz’s SHIELD Act which would target Patent trolling specifically in computer hardware and software patents. I think I like this. Especially with the ABA-friendly first-to-file system in, finding ways to discourage patent litigation is probably good. I suspect if the bill has problems it will be in defining terms.

How about some Google? A barrage of stuff for the Don’t Be Evil company. After the UK found that Google hadn’t destroyed all the fruits of the Wi-Spy Street View program, France is demanding the see the data. Hard to think the keeping of information is accidental though, given reports that Google demands the right to use information of its partners’.

US regulators are busy too, looking to fine Google $22.5 million over the Safari spy hack. However I would have supported a much larger fine. I suspect that they made good money off of the tracking while it lasted. For those who may not recall: Google found a way to defeat Safari’s anti-tracking features to track users. That ought to bother people.

However there is a bright sot for Google customers as they’re starting to impose more Apple-like control over Google Play, the Android answer to the App Store.

Hey Al Gore? Barack Obama? When it comes to the Internet, You didn’t build that. Industry did.

Here’s an interesting news bit: Verizon’s blocking tethering apps apparently violated its C Block license. That’s actually more great news for Android users on Verizon, at least until Verizon alters its terms of service to compensate. AT&T has long been taking countermeasures to block tether abusers, and Verizon will do the same I’m certain. Though actually with the move toward family/group plan communal data, that may be less of an issue now. Pay for what you use: that’s the American way, and how you avoid a Tragedy of the Commons.

So it turns out that the Obama administration’s spectrum consolidation and sharing schemes are all frauds. Mitt Romney must make this a priority: appoint effective, reformist regulators across the board to effect meaningful change at FCC, EPA, NLRB, FTC, and everywhere else, too.

Heh. Anonymous logo to get trademarked in France. I hope the Anonymous people don’t realize that the French government has no patience for radical leftys. Having sank the Rainbow Warrior, they will punch Anontards in the mouth if they have to. Greenpeace, they ain’t.

Having decided to give amending Lieberman-Collins Cybersecurity Act a go, Republicans now engage in that amendment process. Though, is it unfair of me to point out that it would be against Symantec’s best interests for American Internet security to improve?

Why not to trust Senate Democrats on cybersecurity, in a nutshell: We’re criminalizing victimhood with this new Patrick Leahy proposal. Insane.

Mike Wendy muses on telecom topics, and in the process explains why the Obama administration was wrong on AT&T/T-Mobile. To the detriment of America.

Nope, We don’t need new privacy regulations.

I love competition. Apple’s App Store is a haven of great competition, making even the big boys compete based on good product at good price, rather than coasting on name and reputation. Watch ‘em weep, and smile at how competition works.

Senate Republicans have decided to take Harry Reid at his word that Republicans will have the opportunity to amend the Lieberman-Collins cybersecurity bill. So, many Republicans voted for advancing the bill, which passed 84-11.

And oh boy it needs amending. Who are you going to believe? For it is Barack Obama. Against have been Kay Bailey Hutchison, John McCain, Marco Rubio, Ron Johnson, Heritage, and IBM.

Privacy is a red herring. The problems are in the mandates and power grabs. So if this bill isn’t effectively amended into SECURE IT, they must vote no on passage.

Something Senators should consider as well regulation is harming our security as it is, which is important to note as attacks increase.

And the next time you hear them talk about privacy with respect to this, remember that your supposed privacy guardians… lie. as Google did by retaining its Wi-Spy Street View data.

So a counter to the poorly-conceived Internet Bill of Rights going around and backed by Rand Paul is the Declaration of Internet Freedom. What’s nice about this is that it’s written like a proper Bill of Rights in that it mostly tells government what not to do. I can support these principles driving a Romney administration’s Internet policy.

Principles like this ought to drive a more active conservative movement in tech policy. All too often we see conservatives complaining about how they don’t see a difference between Republicans and Democrats. Thats’ because they’re not looking closely enough, particularly at the radicalized Obama administration and its regulatory policies. So I hope that we get more conservatives active on this stuff.

It takes a really warped perspective to think that massive private investment making America great somehow is a bad thing, but Harvard’s Susan Crawford manages it.

Kim Dotcom is getting desperate and now claims his site wasn’t as bad as the other guys. This has nothing to do with what actually stayed up though, his claims that he was taking things down. If he’s so innocent, why does New Zealand have to rig the courts there by stacking the deck with biased, anti-American judges to keep him from justice? Why does he keep changing the subject with conspiracy theory talk, claiming that Obama and Biden are personally out to get him?

Right now the top issues are both getting lots of attention in the Senate. One is the cybersecurity bill. It’s been difficult for me to find out much about what’s going on with it, and it turns out there’s a reason. Sources familiar with the situation indicate to me that Harry Reid has been negotiating with Republicans in bad faith. Even Republicans who love to negotiate with Democrats, and are well known for producing major pieces of legislation with Democrats, are being stonewalled.

Lieberman-Collins is even worse than I thought, too.

Even with the changes, which Harry Reid and co. negotiated with ACLU and ‘privacy’ groups (not Senate Republicans, not industry, not even tech experts out there), it’s actually a detriment to security. DoD is hindered in its efforts to work with industry for security, despite having great resources to bring to the table like NSA and DARPA. DHS is put in charge, so the bill essentially brings TSA to the Internet.

Guys like Ron Johnson proved you can work with a range of groups – privacy, tech, and industry – to refine bills like SECURE IT. Harry Reid has chosen not to, and is instead ramming this bill through without Committee markup, and he may even disallow Republicans to to get a chance to amend the bill at all. A bill that creates an incentive to regulate the Internet, placing a reporting burden on the executive branch only if it chooses not to regulate. And on top of that it gives a big reward to John Edwards types, creating huge opportunities to trial lawyers to start suing deep pockets when foreign attackers strike innocent businesses.

Lieberman-Collins, backed by Harry Reid and Barack Obama, reduces information sharing while increasing government mandate. Heritage opposes it, security experts criticize it, and John McCain opposes Reid’s rush to action. Instead of working with Republicans, he’s making this a partisan political issue as he rushes the vote.

Every Republican must vote against cloture on this. I don’t expect Susan Collins to do so, as she’s become an active tool of Barack Obama and Harry Reid on this, but everyone else ought to join with the range of Senators from Lisa Murkowski to McCain to Johnson, and step up to defeat a bill that threatens rather than shores up our Internet security.

A Senate committee is taking up the so badly named Marketplace Fairness Act. I know, the fairness thing is garbage. The big box retailers pushing the bill have chosen such whiny, horrible rhetoric and arguments to support this bill. But there are good reasons to support it which is why joining those looking for a fix on this are Republican Governors Nikki Haley (SC), Chris Christie (NJ), Mitch Daniels (IN), Butch Otter (ID), Paul LePage (ME), Bill Haslam (TN), Brian Sanodval (NV), Robert Bentley (AL), Terry Branstad (IA), Bob McDonnell (VA), Nathan Deal (GA), Rick Snyder (MI), and Tom Corbett (PA).

Seems to me all we’re missing are Rick Scott (FL) and Bobby Jindal (LA) to have all the big Tea Party heroes behind this. That tells me there are reasonable alternatives here, such as trying to get every state to move from taxing based on the buyer’s location to taxing based on the seller’s location, and then creating a compact based on that. But it also tells me it’s reasonable to see MFA as a path to avoiding new and higher taxes in the states that depend on sales tax.

I love your work Darrell Issa, but if Public Knowledge and EFF are joining with you, then you’re doing something wrong for the cause of liberty online.

However I do agree that Issa needs more support from the right, which is why I’m hoping that Republican Study Committee efforts by Steve Scalise and Marsha Blackburn will be fruitful. I’m doing what I can to help from outside, but a decent small government, pro-liberty, pro-Constitution base inside Republican circles in the Capitol would also help. I don’t want guys like Issa to have to work with Dems to do good things.

Another group besides Issa’s Internet Defense League I’m uncertain about is the Internet Association, a new lobbying alliance including eBay, Facebook, Amazon, and Google. I fully expect this association to go along with self-serving regulatory expansions when it suits them, unfortunately.

Reason #1 to support Jim DeMint/Steve Scalise video reforms: the Retransmission Consent scheme is not a free market, period. That’s why you see John Kerry largely defending the current system apart from a desire to force cable companies to say yes, which is the only way to avoid channel ‘blackouts’. Kerry would take us even further from a functioning market.

ITU’s WCIT is not a transparent international gathering. Barack Obama meanwhile does nothing. Not surprising given his administration’s active efforts to keep the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations also secret.

It’s easy to see why there’s sudden, strong opposition to the Marketplace Fairness Act, as yet another Republican governor, Terry Branstad, backs the bill.

I again state my opposition to the lousy language backing the bill, including “fairness” and “loophole”. Yes, that language is being driven by marketplace losers, but both sides of this debate are ponying up cash.

I favor the bill on its merits, not because of who’s spending. I’m not even used to seeing Republicans equating business backing of a bill with the bill’s wrongness. Democrats? Yes, but not Republicans. I don’t think it should be a factor at all. I want to save the sales tax from becoming obsolete, and from having to be replaced by “progressive” taxation, as it probably will, since as people shift from local to national and global, firms not called Amazon still aren’t going to have distribution in every state.

Limited government does not mean no government, particularly at the state level. The money’s got to come from somewhere. Either we shore up the sales tax or we raise other taxes, all else being equal.

TIA joins the chorus against version 3 of Lieberman-Collins, the Barack Obama-Harry Reid-Senate Democrat backed cybersecurity power grab. Again, the claims that ‘privacy’ issues are fixed are a red herring, as privacy was never the problem. The government mandates and control of the Internet are. We need a light touch. Pass CISPA, the House bill, or SECURE IT, the bill with support across the Republican caucus. We need government to work with business, not dictate to it.

Because you know what? Computer security is moving too fast to regulate anyway, as DARPA shows.

Yes, our networks are vulnerable, as Michael Chertoff points out was a lesson of Google’s massive Wi-Spy Street View network spying operation. But note that regulation of the Internet won’t secure local networks! It won’t even address the problem of poor private sector decision making! That’s why tools like the DARPA power strip work!

Some say we need more information on what Google did anyway, as this is becoming part of a pattern of bad behavior of Google’s.. Now, I think some of those Google worsts just come from being the biggest. It’s easy to strike out more than anyone else if you have the most at-bats. But there are real problems there.

Also, Mobile is it, and we need real spectrum reform to keep FCC, FTC, and DoJ from being a three-headed impediment to efficient, market-based spectrum allocation.

I find it interesting that the Obama administration is making a public fight over the Apple/iBooks case instead of just fighting it in court. Why do that if this is just a matter of enforcing the law, and not motivated by some need to get attention and single out Apple? Remember: Apple may be a favorite of hippies, but Google is the favorite of the Obama administration, going back to the early days when then-CEO Eric Schmidt was directly involved as an adviser in the campaign.

Breaking: Kim Dotcom is now blaming Barack Obama and not Joe Biden for the vast conspiracy against him. Wait until he finds out that President Romney will be even more pro-copyright… I guess fatty will have to claim that the conspiracy got to Mittens.

A great point: Mutual corporations make great sense for utilities, including Internet access. Let private coordination happen in the marketplace, without government picking winners and losers.

Coordination stops the bad guys online. That’s why The Democrats are wrong in their push for a power grab, led by Barack Obama. We just need better information sharing. Pass CISPA or SECURE IT. Not Lieberman-Collins, the former Internet Kill Switch bill.

because the problems with the bill Have never been about privacy. They’ve been about property rights and the role of government. So I’m thinking the Chamber of Commerce has it right here. Information sharing. I can tolerate a boondoggle of research and development for if we get the right stuff on information sharing.

It’s not just new right-wing FCC commissioner Ajit Pai making waves with comments. New left-wing commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel is talking about supporting incentive auctions allowing for legacy spectrum users to voluntarily putting up their spectrum for auction, using sound economic principles to make the most efficient use of a limited resource. And better, she’s including government, not just private users, in this concept.

Peter Thiel reminds me of an angry, bitter Internet poster saying nasty things in reply to a post just because he can, getting uppity with a big name to make himself feel good. Only he did it in person. Look, I’m not at all a fan of Eric Schmidt, but if these quotes are representative, it sounds like Thiel was taunting more than he was debating. The monopoly stuff is particularly weak. Does Thiel even understand the Intertubes?

Weird story of the day, and I saw it from two sources so I’m assuming it’s real: Chuckie Schumer of all people realizes that government picks winners and losers, pointing out that if the government comes after Apple’s iBooks too hard, then Amazon gains. Good, Senator, now apply it everywhere else you people on the far left operate.

So, the Marketplace Fairness Act. Ben Domenech and Francis Cianfrocca recently went off on it on Coffee and Markets, which is a great series to listen to. Having an opportunity to block out time to listen to it is probably the best part of having a 2.5 hour commute from Arlington to Purcellville (and then 2.5 hours back).

I support the bill, and the interstate compact it approves, and I’d like to explain why.

I support it because I think a sales tax is a tax worth saving, and also I think if the sales tax falls off in this new era, then states will eventually be forced to raise and/or impose new taxes to compensate.

The sales tax is a tax worth having because it bucks the trend of ‘progressive’ taxation, that is skewed against higher income earners, in favor of the lower incomes. However the sales tax goes after consumption, not income. This can make it slightly ‘regressive,’ which gives more Americans a stake in funding our government. That’s a good thing to do.

However the sales tax is at risk. To be clear, I think it’s a good thing, and not a problem in itself, that innovators modern technology are putting pressure in old big box firms while giving customers better service at lower prices (lower prices pre-tax both ways, mind you). The problem is that this shift is reducing sales tax revenues. With local governments already in trouble, that doesn’t help. If we can use a limited, Constitutional interstate compact to tweak the sales tax to restore at least some of the old revenue, then we can possibly preserve the sales tax in opposition to other, ‘progressive’ forms of taxation.

Notice: I agree that the ‘fairness’ argument is idiotic. I agree that the big box retailers backing this are doing so because they mistakenly believe that Amazon’s success is due to the tax issue and not great strides in business model and technology. I agree Amazon itself is much better equipped to deal with multistate taxation than smaller competitors are ( though the states have an eye on helping with that anyway).

Another argument against the bill is that it won’t actually raise revenue. However I would suggest that the reason single-state, unconstitutional attempts to raise this revenue are failing (most notably in Illinois and California) is that their unconstitutionality has fueled evasion. A Constitutional compact with buy in from many states plus the feds, is a different matter. Enforcement becomes easier.

Lastly, Ben Domenech has suggested that the left wants to use this as a stepping stone to further taxation. Hey, fair enough. But when don’t they do that? I mean, do we think they’re not going to try for a national sales tax, a digital download tax, or whatever if we don’t pass this? No, this is just pretext. Whether MFA passes or not will have no influence on what the left will do. So I stand with Nikki Haley, Haley Barbour, and other conservative Republican governors and former governors who back the plan.

And having spent all my Tech at Night time writing that up way more in depth than I intended.. quick hits time.

Hey NAB: Aren’t you essentially bragging about your own government-granted market power here? You are the government-protected cabal, which is why I support Retransmission Consent/video reform by Steve Scalise and Jim DeMint.

Regulation: fixing issues the market fixed long ago.

There’s no doubt in my mind Google’s automated systems are being gamed in taking down Republican stuff, but a case where actual infringement happened is a terrible test case to prove that, in my view. It’s possible this was automated!

I strongly urge Mary Bono Mack to review carefully the FTC’s powers in the Safe Web Act. Barack Obama has proved regulators need tight leashes.

In fact they have an adversarial, anti-transparency attitude at FDA, and do we really think FDA is alone on that?

New FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai is gaining fans.

Remember the New Zealand court system trying to shield Kim Dotcom from prosecution? One judge has already admitted a prejudice against America. No surprise they’re trying to shield him from American prosecution. Time to reconsider ANZUS?

Remember when Barack Obama and Eric Holder blocked the AT&T/T-Mobile merger? Guess what the result of that was? Yup, shipping jobs overseas. Forward.

Please read: A personal appeal to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

You mad, bro?

With that business out of the way, back to Tech at Night. I for one am glad that Jon Kyl and Sheldon Whitehouse are having trouble coming up with a compromise. The Lieberman-Collins bill favored by Harry Reid and Barack Obama is terrible and just an awful, huge power grab. We’re better off waiting to see if we get a Republican Senate next time to pass something along the lines of CISPA or SECURE IT, than passing bad bill in compromise.

Well, it looks like some Anontards haven’t learned from Lulzsec and want to go to prison. And yes, there are already laws against this stuff, despite the Senate’s problems with getting a new Cybersecurity bill passed.

Senator Enzi sums up well my best argument for passing the Marketplace Fairness Act, or by some other amendment to a bill ratifying the interstate compact implementing interstate sales taxes, especially for online sales: “If Congress fails to authorize states to collect tax on remote sales, and electronic commerce continues to grow, we are implicitly blessing a situation where states will be forced to raise other taxes – such as income or property taxes – to offset the growing loss of sales tax revenue. We do not want this to happen.”

This is why Republican governors are lining up behind the compact and the bill: they don’t want to raise taxes or impose new ones. The Marketplace Fairness Act is a Constitutional means of fixing the sales tax problem by restoring the originally intended revenue stream of taxing purchases by people in a state.

Hey House Small Business Committee: the answer to your question is that the role of the federal government is to deregulate, particular the secondary spectrum market, allow increased competition, and then free up more spectrum currently held by government. Wireless is the answer to rural access where wired access just isn’t practical.

This Risk Response Continuum, describing ways to deal with risks posed by new technologies, is thought-provoking. Biased toward minimal government, to be sure, but still worth thinking about.

Mike Wendy is right: if we let the grabbers grab real estate, they will grab other property, including copyrights.

Good news: The Cable Act is getting hearings which could lead to support for the Jim DeMint/Steve Scalise bill reforming regulations in the industry, opening the market to negotiation and competition.

Riddle me this: we’re both supposed to be concerned about police requests of phone records and that wireless firms are compensated for executing these requests? Time and resources aren’t free, but I don’t expect House Democrats to get that. They have no freaking clue about the real world, and want us all to be unpaid socialist drones working for free for Dear Leader Obama, apparently.

It’s clear that the Obama administration wants the Safe Web Act renewed, what with the big showy announcement over at ICE (though if ICE is going after “Copy Cats,” how long until Samsung gets nailed?).

I’d want to look carefully though. We don’t have to just renew it. We can examine it and change it in any ways that make sense given the Obama administration’s pervasive abuse of regulatory powers.

Given these and other fights for greater power, it’s kinda funny that the very same Obama FCC is criticizing the efforts by Russia to censor the Internet along the same lines as the administration’s PROTECT IP proposal.

That’s right, never forget: SOPA was just the House version of a Dem Senate/Obama administration idea.

And um, yeah, quick hits.

The authoritarian, capricious Obama administration continues to use double and triple teaming selectively against disfavored firms, such as Verizon trying to buy spectrum on the secondary market. On orders from George Soros and his funded organizations, using regulation to pick winners and losers, not to protect the interests of the public.

It’s all about spectrum, and government is hoarding it to the detriment of jobs and growth.

Aereo survives preliminary injunction on the grounds that it’ll probably win. Wow. I wasn’t sure if the service (which is innovative and neat) would survive on the technicality of law it found. I’m glad innovation could triumph, though.

The corrupt, anti-American IOC is insane, but apparently the London Olympics people also don’t understand the Internet at all, besides, and let that misunderstanding drive a totalitarian instinct. Because they claim that you can be prohibited by law from linking to their website with derogatory comments. Heh. Oops. Choke and die on my American First Amendment, suckers. U S A. U S A.

I agree that the free market must win out in the DirecTV/Viacom standoff.

Jimmy Wales (egotistical Wikipedia co-founder who tries to steal sole credit as founder) is a radical extremist apparently opposed to property rights and Constitutional liberty, and is possibly also a Paultard, so I have to side with MPAA against him. And I hate the rent-seeking MPAA.

US attempts to extradite Kim Dotcom have been delayed until 2013. It is unconfirmed whether the delay is related to the need to send a reinforced tanker to New Zealand in order to have a vehicle strong enough carry his weight back to the United States. In the meantime, the hubris (and food) filled man is trying to dictate terms to the US. That won’t go over well with prosecutors, I don’t think.

I can’t think of who’s really hurt by Marketplace Fairness Act and the interstate compact it ratifies. Sales tax free states don’t get a sales tax. Low tax states remain low tax states. High tax states just get what they should be used to. Yes, the ‘fairness’ rhetoric is annoying and wrong, but the policy itself is sound.

Thank you, thank you, thank you John Shimkus. The Obama administration is being hypocritical, complaining about Internet regulatory attempts on a scale of its own Title II Reclassification scheme, to gut the Telecommunications Act 1996 by regulatory fiat, and impose massive government censorship and regulatory control online.

Another interesting note from the big FCC grilling at the House: Fiber to get a light touch for now? Interesting when copper gets more regulation than wireless. Fiber to get less than copper as well? Why don’t we now just deregulate copper?

More FCC? The FCC’s power grab of a move into campaign finance law is going to court as broadcasters make an emergency challenge, now during election season when it matters most.

I’m all for a light touch on regulation, but there’s no doubt in my mind that Google deserves to be hammered and hard for its outright hack of Safari‘s privacy settings. That was a gross breach of security, and to be honest I’m not sure how far it should be considered to be from a criminal breach. Note: existing law works here. No new privacy laws needed.

Republicans looking to make government work better: freeing up spectrum to fix the spectrum crunch, and getting transparent with the DATA Act.

The spectrum thing is important because more spectrum will increase popular access to the Internet, which is so important these days. the Internet connects people, lowering costs of activity, creating opportunity and paving the way to prosperity.

Regulators are falling behind. As they go on their Search Neutrality Jihad, search personalization is well under way. Though, not everyone wants bubbled, and in a free market like we have, we have that choice without government action. (I use Duck Duck Go and I’m very happy with it.)

Laws aren’t the solution to every problem, including viruses and other such security threats online.

Finally, child pornography laws that make sense. No new regulation, no privacy threat, simply greater penalties for criminals and greater protection for the judicial process. Works for me. Lamar Smith was forced to get in line with reasonable Internet policies. Limited government won this battle, despite it being For The Children™.

Darrell Issa’s House Energy and Commerce is going to have a special hearing with all five members of the FCC, including newly confirmed members Jessica Rosenworcel and Ajit Pai. The FCC is expected to be questioned about issues ranging from wired phone competition to spectrum. I hope Mitt Romney’s people are listening, because the hearing should also highlight regulatory reforms needed across the executive branch after the Barack Obama expansions.

Expansions which include yes, picking winners and losers in the marketplace.

Looks like I was right: an early draft ‘compromise’ by Jon Kyl and Sheldon Whitehouse on the Cybersecurity debate int he Senate was too regulatory, and a new draft is coming out. What is wrong with Jon Kyl that he has to go further left than McCain, Murkowski, and others on this?

I begin to think that the radicals equate anything a firm does to improve its competitiveness, with being anti-competitive. I would also suggest that if the radicals want spectrum to be less of a competitive issue that they should open up the secondary spectrum market and get more spectrum onto the market to begin with. The answer is not to make spectrum even more scarce and even more hard to acquire.

Kim Dotcom’s brain must be getting sweaty and feverish under all those layers of fat the man acquired building his multi-million dollar criminal enterprise known as Megaupload, because he really did think Joe Biden was the mastermind of a vast conspiracy against him, now denied by the government and the MPAA. He claims he has more information to back up his allegation but chooses not to release them now. Now, when his life is on the line in the form of criminal prosecutions against him.

Things that are compatible with Google’s values: Prostitutes. Websites for copyright infringement. Illegal drugs. Pornography. Mortgage scams. Spying on people’s wireless networks. Things that are incompatible with Google’s values: legal exercise of Second Amendment rights.

Apparently one idea for getting more spectrum in use for wireless Internet is to have government share what it’s hoarding.

Of course, we don’t expect innovation from FCC. Regulators are slow, which is just one reason I like the idea of adding sunsets to laws. Not just “technology proposals,” even. All laws.

So, a guy named Richard O’Dwyer ran a website called TV Shack organizing mass copyright infringement as a for-profit venture through advertising. He was making money getting traffic as an aggregator of illegal content. So naturally extremists like apparently Jimmy Wales are against him being prosecuted. This is socialism, people. It’s no wonder Wikipedia has a leftward tilt when its head is a socialist.

It’s weird when a group says its top issues are going to be attacking the Federal Reserve and opposing the big government agenda online, but it’s interesting to see from Campaign for Liberty. I just hope Ron Paul doesn’t start spouting crazy conspiracy theories about the FCC. There’s enough real problems with that body that we don’t need any grassy knolls.

You know another phrase for “blocking phone use while driving?” “Impeding emergency communications”. This is why we ban phone jammers, people. It’s dangerous.

ACLU in New Jersey is starting something interesting: helping people record police encounters. I’m of the opinion that with modern technology, all police activity should be recorded for everyone’s safety, the police included. Gathering evidence only harms those doing wrong.