The Democrat coalition may be fracturing more visibly along abortion lines in the Obamacare debate, but that’s not the only popcorn-friendly battle going on right now. ‘Minority’ groups are going after Net Neutrality now, and nobody is sparing the ‘race card.’
Watching the FCC
They haven’t passed the Net Neutrality regulations, phase one of the push for Single Payer Internet, but the FCC is already plotting phase two: a National Broadband Plan. Call it what you will: a socialist Five Year Plan, fascist-inspired industrial policy, what have you. It’s a frightening step by this administration.
It’s so frightening, in fact, that Senate Democrats think the FCC needs to be more plain spoken about their plans, currently being hidden in overly-fancy language. It’s not impossible to speak about Internet policy in plain language. It’s just not possible to plan fascist takeovers of industries in plain language without scaring voters, is all. Which is why they don’t do it.
Meanwhile, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel refutes Net Neutrality proponents who claim that the practices NN is meant to oppose, are not theoretical:
Net-neutrality advocates raise the specter of providers censoring websites by slowing or cutting off access to them in the absence of new rules. Yet they cite only three isolated instances of this in the past five years. Each was quickly resolved.
Once again, we get more evidence that Net Neutrality is really just the crisis that progressives are using to grow government. We have to stop them.
Another Czar Bites The Dust
In the flurry of news this week, you may have missed another body tossed under the insatiable Obama bus: Internet Czar Susan Crawford.
The Obama administration has faced a vocal and growing opposition to the radical so-called net neutrality advocated by folks like Crawford and FCC Chair Julius Genachowski. Bi-partisan opposition, I hasten to add. The radicals in the administration, whose views are shared by the President, in true czar fashion avoid honest debate on the issue at all costs. Even, it would seem, internally.
America unites against Obama on Net Neutrality
What do you get when you combine an ISP active in Internet filtering with a left-wing group that is essentially the online ACLU? You get the broad, bipartisan opposition to the FCC’s plans for Internet regulation that are being sold as Net Neutrality.
It was remarkable enough when Governors left and right all wrote to the FCC against Net Neutrality. But now when Comcast is on the same side of a dispute as the Electronic Froniter Foundation, that’s a sign that nobody who is aware of the technical issues wants any part of what Barack Obama and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski are planning.
Google and Obama, Sitting in a Tree…
…plotting to pass Net Neutrality.
I’ve written in this space for a while about who the real Astroturfers are in the Net Neutrality fight. Google – and its puppets like Free Press – are promoting this idea that it’s a struggle between big telecommunications firms, and the little guys. Except the little guys are actually bigger Internet firms. The corporations pressing for Net Neutrality are Fortune 500 and even Dow Jones Industrial Average firms, with billions in cash ready to be spent on Net Neutrality, trying to defeat Proposition 8, or even promoting Barack Obama.
That last one makes the FCC’s rush to regulate look bad, given all the placements of Google people within the Obama administration as well as the nearly one million dollars that Google employees gave to the Obama-Biden campaign. How do we know that the secretive Obama White House isn’t directing the FCC to pay off Google?
After all, we know he’s giving donors special treatment. In fact, it has come out that FCC Chairman Genachowski himself was a major fundraiser for Obama, pulling in over a half million for the campaign. Why shouldn’t we believe that this is all a big circle of back scratching in the Obama adminstration, when he refuses to release the kinds of information we need to determine otherwise?
The President has played political games with information all along. He dangles his birth certificate on a string in order to distract the right. He’s keeping as little of the Obamacare agenda in writing as possible, because he knows if we read it and expose his plans, we can win the fight, so we end up with ridiculous spectacles like a Senate committee voting on a bill that hasn’t been written yet. And now he’s playing footsie with donors in secret.
We must encourage and join Senator McCain and Representative Blackburn in their fresh legislative efforts to stop the Google/Obama Net Neutrality scheme. We cannot allow this kind of quid pro quo to go unchallenged.
Ignore the Socialists Behind the Curtain!
Glenn Beck was right.
As we have covered before in this space, the far left does anything possible to avoid having a straight-up, honest debate over ideas. Much like the old Communists and Fascists on the streets of Weimar-era Berlin, they’d rather use muscle than ideas to get a victory.
As we’re all aware, one of the current targets is Glenn Beck. In particular, Free Press wants to make him out as a paranoid McCarthyite.
Supposedly he’s seeing socialists, Marxists, and communists everywhere. Even though Senator McCarthy was right, and Communists had infiltrated our government all the way up to Alger Hiss, we’re supposed to think badly of Red hunting. But let’s look at the people themselves at Free Press, leading special interest promoter of the Fairness Doctrine, ownership diversity rules, and of course Net Neturality. Are they as socialist as Beck thinks?
Act now against Net Neutrality
The time is coming that the left is going to begin its drive for Single Payer Internet, and so the time has come for us to fight back. Finland is gradually nationalizing the Internet and declaring use of other people’s Internet hardware a “right,” and the left is cheering. Obama’s “Internet Czar” does not hide the left’s hopes for an end to freedom and markets for Internet service.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, President Barack Obama, and the rest of the radical left want to use the Net Neutrality movement as the crisis that gives cover to sweeping big government action, allowing the FCC to pick winners and losers and dictate to private individuals and firms how their private property must be run, putting government bureaucrats in charge of the Internet.
The dangers of the administration’s Net Neutrality plans are not theoretical:
Incestuous Coincidences Surround Net Neutrality
I’m a conservative, so I have no problem with anyone using their rights to enter the public discourse, and I’m not allergic to corporations. So I when I call the latest from Google “astroturf”, I’m saying it purely to illustrate the hypocrisy of the left, because by their standard Google is becoming quite an installer of the fake grass roots.
I find it entirely unfair that the left gets to try to shout down our side while theirs goes entirely unnoticed. If we don’t at least speak up, then the left’s arguments might get some traction.
So let’s watch carefully. Google has hired Frannie Wellings, the telecommuniations advisor to Senator Byron Dorgan, North Dakota Democrat. Sounds boring, but dig deeper. Dorgan was the author and sponsor of the Senate’s Net Neutrality bill in 2007. Is Google buying access? That’s what the left would say if the parties were reversed.
They’d especially say that when the job that Wellings is taking was just created. She is to be Google’s “federal policy outreach manager.” In other words, she’s going to run Google’s lobbying operations in Washington. Which means either she or people accountable to her are going to be going right back into Dorgan’s office.
Further, before taking the job with Dorgan, Wellings worked at… yup, Free Press, the special interest group that founded and runs Save the Internet.
What a coincidence it is that Google, Save the Internet, and a Democrat Politican are linked like this! Free Press and Google must justify this if they are to continue their shameless attacks on our side, instead of arguing with facts and logic about the benefits and disadvantages of their goal: aggressive regulation of the Internet, centered on an FCC picking winners and losers in private network policy disputes.
The Real Net Neutrality Astroturfers
The left is at it again. They know that in a straight-up battle of ideas, their socialist perversion of Net Neutrality could never win out. Nobody but the most blindly partisan supporters of Barack Obama wants a government takeover of the Internet, because everybody knows that when government takes something over, freedom in it tends to die.
That is why Save The Internet is resorting to dishonest smear campaigns in an attempt to shout down and discredit their opponents. They want to win by driving all opposition off the field, turning this debate into the Internet equivalent of the streets of Berlin in Weimar Germany. They must not get away with it.
On Julius Genachowski and Net Neutrality
I am in danger of becoming a broken record on the issue of Net Neutrality in this space, but as aggressively as the Democrats are pushing the issue, it is a danger we all will have to live with. Once again, I will summarize the issue with a minimum of technological impediments to understanding:
Net Neutrality started out as a broad-based movement on the Internet. It wasn’t a left-wing thing at all, but rather was something most of us could support, because it was merely a movement to ensure (usually government franchise-backed) ISP firms could not abuse their monopoly or oligopoly power to coerce their customers to use other services by the firm, such as phone service in the case of AT&T or television service in the case of Comcast. I believe this is a reasonable request. It doesn’t prevent investors in Internet technology from profiting, but rather merely prevents them from abusing government-granted market power to benefit other businesses.
However on Monday, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski went beyond that when he outlined his six principles of Net Neutrality in a speech to the Brookings Institution. What he proposes is an intrusive, never-ending government hand in the growth and management of the Internet, one that is clearly aimed at the Socialist goal of “single-payer Internet,” run with the same agile reactiveness as the DMV or the TSA.
Google undermines the Internet [Updated]
Or: History Repeats
“Allowing broadband carriers to control what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the principles that have made the Internet such a success” – Vint Cerf, Google Chief Internet Evangelist and Co-Developer of the Internet Protocol
Updated at the bottom.
Attention leftists: hypocrisy is not a failure to live up to one’s own ideals. Hypocrisy is a willful professing of a belief, that one that does not truly believe. An outspoken Christian who commits adultery is not a hypocrite. An outspoken atheist who prays is a hypocrite. In today’s extended lesson Google must either accept that it is undermining the Internet, or be a hypocrite.
ATR/CEI update on Internet access
The FCC is currently in the process of developing a National Broadband strategy. Being that this is under the Obama administration, this strategy is unlikely to be a sensible one. Early word suggests that the administration plans to take the Internet in this country and consolidate it into a single, centralized, government-run entity. ‘Competition’ will be allowed, but only under strict government controls and over government wires. Just like in China.
There’s no coincidence there, either. Obama’s good buddy and source of advice Google is well-acquainted with being a tool of totalitarianism. I’m all for the profit motive in general, but Google lets it trump basic human rights when it does whatever the fascist dictatorship in China tells it to. Google loves it because the reduced competition acts as a subsidy for favored firms such as itself, and now it wants the same to happen in our country through its ‘Net Neutrality’ plan, which the Obama FCC just might start to promote.
Americans for Tax Reform and the Competitive Enterprise Institute held a conference call today to detail their opposition to such efforts.
Google greases the skids for the GDrive
Google is readying for what is possibly their most bandwidth-intensive Internet service yet: The Google Drive is reported to be a planned service to let people store all their data on Google’s servers, but access it all like a disk drive from their own home computers.
Services like Youtube and Picasa already transfer large amounts of data, but the GDrive conceivably would mean the continuous, two-way transfer of gigabytes of data, rivaling Bittorrent in the strain that an ordinary user might routinely put on an Internet connection. Clearly, any plans ISPs have to make their users pay for what bandwidth they use would put a crimp into this plan.
Enter the Google’s ever more cozy relationship with the Obama Administration. After leaving “Miserable Failure” as a search term that leads to President Bush for about four years, Google took less than four weeks to disarm the “Googlebomb” now that it’s aimed at President Obama.
Is there any serious question that this change in speed was motivated by a desire to curry favor with the new President on “Net Neturality,” or specifically plans that Google promotes that would prohibit ISPs from charging customers for what they use? I think not.
Google’s non-evil pose: Hand out, palm facing up
Google may be a name that evokes thoughts of flashy, new Internet technologies, or of a friendly relationship with the greater Internet community, but us critics have seen what they were up to all along. Just like any other industry titan, it takes what it can get, with government help when it must. What’s news, though, is that even the LA Times is taking notice:
“Google is not just a benign corporate entity. It has a variety of special interests,” said Jeff Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, who has sparred with Google over data-privacy issues. “They’re in a great position to push their agenda through with the support of the [P]resident and the Democrats in Congress.”
….Competitors worry about Google’s close relationship with the Obama administration, said Bill Whalen, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
“The question going forward is: Will Google turn into just another business entity looking for favors in Washington, or will it manage to keep the 767 flying at 30,000 feet above the political din?” he said, a reference to the Google founders’ private plane.
Going forward? Going forward? They’ve been this way all along.
