Good evening. Darrell Issa is stepping up the pressure on the FCC. He wants to tie spectrum reallocation incentives to Net Neutrality repeal. Many of us want to be able to reallocate spectrum from television stations to multipurpose wireless data, since we as a society are demanding more and faster data these days. If Darrell Issa makes the FCC’s ability to facilitate that, contingent on Net Neutrality repeal, then we’re playing a game of chicken. Issa: “Until net neutrality is rolled back, I don’t believe Congress is going to be willing to give the FCC any new power.”

It’s a fair position, and I’m ready to back him.

The FCC needs to be put in its place. It can’t even announce a staffing change without pushing a left-wing agenda, judging by this note about Michael Copps replacing his Chief of Staff. Of incoming CoS Mark Stone, the FCC release says “In his
current role as Deputy Chief of the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau, Mark has
been deeply involved in core consumer protection matters including bill shock, truth-in-billing
and disability access.” A phrase like bill shock might as well come off of a left wing advocacy flyer.

Quick hits: Google’s new algorithm changes are hurting honest websites at the expense of spammers. But is it truly the algorithm, or just a failure of manual intervention? I myself used to think Ubergizmo was an aggregator, and not a producer of original articles. I read it anyway, but that’s what I thought. I was wrong as it turns out, and I could see a Google droid (get it?) make the same mistake.

And to toss out another Ubergizmo link, your phone is not as secure as you think, say the makers of this tool marketed to police. All the horror expressed at the iPhone caching your locations for speed and battery efficiency ought to pale in comparison with what we think of your entire phone’s contents being pulled, bypassing any login, in a quick and efficient way. Encrypt valuable data, folks. This thing may be marketed to police, but it won’t stop there.

Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg pretends he wants to pay more taxes (I say pretends because we don’t exactly see him volunteering to write bigger checks than he legally must), and Facebook itself wants to get into China and India. We know this because Facebook’s Adam Conner has signaled the firm will censor what it needs to censor, as long as it gets access to more markets. I’ve already pulled personal data from Facebook and don’t actually use it anymore.