Obama’s Veiled Attempt to Control the Internet

(My wife Marilyn, no great fan of our President, is alarmed over the Administration’s veiled attempts to regulate and ultimately control the Internet. The supposed goal of providing “equal access” to everyone is the Trojan Horse here, and although we are confident Internet users are strong enough to defend the medium against whatever radical-leftist depredations Mr. Obama may have in mind, we are not so blithely unconcerned as to ignore the threat entirely. Marilyn’s essay explains what’s at stake. RA)

Why should the FCC regulate the internet? Well they shouldn’t, but that hasn’t stopped legions of media watchdogs, consumer advocacy groups and every talking-head panel on PBS from heralding the dangers to our public welfare if the Feds don’t take over the internet “for the people.” These do-gooders want the FCC to classify the internet as a telecommunications service, which would give the Feds the power to regulate who gets the service (everyone!), how much it can cost (profit should not be the issue here) and how each bit traveling through the pipes must be treated…(why, fairly, of course). Oh, and they can make the ISPs pay into a federal universal-service fund used to provide telecommunications services to poor areas. This must be done, they say, to keep the internet “open” and fair.

Hugo Chavez: Obama's role model for regulating the Internet?

What’s at stake? It appears a lot of hypothetical “threats” to our freedom to send and receive the information we want through the pipes owned by private, profit-mongering companies like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon. Charges that these capitalistic behemoths can’t wait to choose favorites and pick winners among content providers drives the social justice wonks to the perverse conclusion that an all-encompassing Federal regulation is the only solution to the problem. What problem? Apparently, there have been two breaches of bit-rate “neutrality” in seven years, one of them involving the notorious Bit Torrent file sharing case with spy-novel insinuations of content discrimination of material that was purported to be unpopular with some members of Congress (wonder which ones?) Both issues were resolved. Seven years later, all is swell. But…….it could happen again!

Pleasing the Customer

Given that the ISPs make their money providing what customers want, at a speed they want, for a price they’re willing to pay, it seems highly unlikely that they would pose a censorship-type threat to their own customers (Comcast could make Foxnews.com really slow-loading and choppy in an effort to lure browsers over to their own Msnbc.com, but if you look at the viewership numbers, Comcast would just be cutting off its nose…….by angering that many customers). Much more likely and believable is that Obama has his eye on the prize of internet control (achievable through FCC regulating its “neutrality”).

Obama has made it very clear that the internet carries too much information — information that has become  “a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.” That much of the information is just not very flattering to our thin-skinned Litigator-in-Chief, can’t be ruled out as a motivation to get more control and kick some ass.  Couple that with his FCC appointments — a roster that reads like the guest list at Hugo Chavez’ “Information for Everyone” dinner dance — and you start to see the logic in stopping someone from deciding what is “good” information and what we can do without. Can he do it? Of course not. Trying to regulate the internet would be like trying to regulate the tides.

Watchdogs Excluded

The FCC is currently in talks (“stakeholder meetings” – you know, like the Feds had with insurance companies before the passage of Obamacare) with AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and the other usual suspects, but they have excluded the watchdog consumer groups who know that the Internet must be “protected” from all that bad stuff that might happen. I wouldn’t let them in either. They give filibuster a whole new luster. What will likely happen is these stakeholders will sit in these meetings for a couple more months; come to some loop-hole filled “agreement” right before the elections; Obama can look like he reined them in and put boots on their throats; and then the Dems will get slaughtered, and life – with the internet intact – will go on.

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  • Phil C from NC July 24, 2010, 3:36 pm

    Fascism/Corporatism entering the digital media
    Getting uglier, presidency by presidency

  • Benjamin July 23, 2010, 4:08 am

    “Had you compared Bush/Cheney to Hilter I would be all ears.”

    Ha… aren’t both Bush and Obama noted for their big ears?

    “The hysteria over FCC control is reminiscent to the BP debacle. Much ado about nothing. BTW, what ever happened to the short lived attention span on that absolutely horrendous environmental disaster?”

    It is much ado about nothing, but the audacity of it, like so many other things, gets to me. As for the “short lived attention span”, what happened to it was extreme doom mongering, which is unfortunate because there are and will continue to be real problems. Case in point, I don’t think absolutely horrendous would be the words for it, as environmental disaster is adequate. The lies and illusions of peak oil have been far more damaging and has cost more lives than we’re going to see out of the Gulf.

    “Logic would dictate that a news agency that is not beholding to its parent companies best interest would have a broader open mind.”

    Again, so what if they are? Might as well get used to a genuinely liberal society because that is the solution. The fact that we have biased anything is going to be an eternal fact of life, as there is nothing to be done for it.

    The only possible context that net neutrality has is in regard to government websites hosted on private servers (if there is or would be such a thing). Access to government information should not be blocked, nor any content be altered by a private company, nor should the government silence anything hosted by an ISP that is not an official government site.

    As for access for the poor, no, that doesn’t fall within the rules described above. The government is under no more obligation to provide an internet for _anyone_ any more than it is obligated to provided everyone a newspaper in order to fulfill freedom of the press. Want a newspaper, you buy a newspaper. Want an internet, you buy the access. Besides, land ownership is ones right to vote, not mere citizenship. However, government best encourages ownership of land, access to newspapers, internet etc… by staying out of the market and just doing it’s job as put to word in the Constitution. The system of government given to us by the founders is truly a rich and wonderful thing. Too bad we don’t live by it, and that’s what gets to me. For all that this is much ado about nothing, it still ignores so much else, and serves only to remind that government still thinks it’s job is in ordering us around, rather than protecting our rights and borders.

  • Darren July 23, 2010, 4:05 am

    Great article. As someone who has lived in the US & Venezuela I can tell you that the governments of the 2 countries are more alike than different. Fascist dictatorships both.

  • CareAndBalanced July 23, 2010, 2:38 am

    Sounds like the choice is between banana republic “regulation” ala Bush (see SEC, CFTA, DOE, etc) or laissez faire greed incarnate ala well, Bush again (Enron, WorldCom, Halliburton, all the healthcare ins. companies, etc). That’s a hell of a choice for the consumer. Should I go thru a govt middle man to get screwed or just take it directly up the ass from the telecoms. Where’s the fairness? I remember about ten years ago I could open up my phone book and pick from about 100 different internet providers (granted, many were dial up). Today you get to pick from a whole 4 or 5. The ship is sinking peeps, you can either bail water til it goes down or pull up to the dock, kick the captain and crew off and fix the damn hull. Get the freaking money out of elections number one. Stop the non-stop elitist gang bang going on at our expense or kiss your life goodbye. This is go time, get it. F*$k the half measures, when are you gonna get a clue, when the top 1% has 99.99% of the $ and no tax burden? Maybe we should just pay them for being rich, like a tribute to the gods. Unchecked capitalists will steal until stopped, you can have fair and balanced regulation, just look at the scandinavians. Sure, the republicrats have screwed up every thing they’ve ever tried to regulate due to bribes, incompetence and just not caring. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done right. Screw this binary choice crap, keep it or kill it. How bout fix the damn thing. Ever thought of that?

  • gary leibowitz July 22, 2010, 11:57 pm

    Comparing Hitler to Obama? What have I missed?
    Had you compared Bush/Cheney to Hilter I would be all ears.

    The guy inherited a mess and is blamed as if his incompetence or mad desires caused all this.

    As for PBS, I will rather watch Bill Moyer’s interviews and specials then anything most privately held news companies say. Logic would dictate that a news agency that is not beholding to its parent companies best interest would have a broader open mind. At the very least it would be his own bias, and not a made up one to fit the parent companies views. FOX anyone.

    The hysteria over FCC control is reminiscent to the BP debacle. Much ado about nothing. BTW, what ever happened to the short lived attention span on that absolutely horrendous environmental disaster? It’s like a reality show where complacency has replaced empathy.

  • Larry July 22, 2010, 9:32 pm

    “Corporate media cultivates socio-political divisions to effectively incapacitate a public by mongering flames of latent racism and resurrecting cold war political terminology designed to retain a status-quo of non-regulation.”

    Wow. I couldn’t read all of that without moving my lips.

    Pre-programmed-paranoia, indeed. Here’s looking forward to the third way.

    • BDTR July 22, 2010, 11:03 pm

      Rich, today absolutely no one is electable to high office without expansive corporate sponsorship. None.

      The art of the office is in the ability to use every facet of political skill to balance competing interests against what actually needs doing. It’s difficult in the best of times. These, you may note, are not nor have they been for a decade.

      Hitler was a thug that promoted hate. Ironically, behaving much like what many angry tea-baggers do in the street. Lashing out at a supposed phantom, biblical evil, abandoning reason and decency.

      I find no sense of hatred in Barack Hussein Obama, nor the ugly demagoguery of his most vehement detractors.

    • Model T July 23, 2010, 12:13 am

      “Ironically, behaving much like what many angry tea-baggers do in the street. Lashing out at a supposed phantom, biblical evil, abandoning reason and decency.”

      You might well be describing the ugly anti-semitic demagoguery of Obama’s estranged former spiritual leader, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

  • BDTR July 22, 2010, 7:28 pm

    Geez Louise, …a seeming endless litany of pre-programmed-paranoid ‘Barry Bashing’ against a massively beleaguered Prez who is either way too friendly towards big bidness in a fascist conspiracy, or the best thing socialism has seen since Groucho Marx. Amazing.

    That so many good, albeit ground-loosing, citizens seem to have lost their grip on common sense and given over rationality to reliance on masters of media hucksterism and barker nay-sayers to social justice amidst the ruins of a failed capitalist orgy of greed spanning three decades and the globe.

    Effective regulation of standards of service and access in communications, banking, basic and strategic resources, transportation, public safety, education, health and defence requires dedication to principles of common equity in the PUBLIC interest. That is precisely the responsibility of any democratic government serving a republic. Of, By and For the PEOPLE. All of us.

    The catastrophes in the Gulf, banking, Wall Street and five decades of failed special-interest-serving foreign policy is NOT the product of government ‘for the people’. They’re the product of a constant erosion of the public interest through a surreptitious and insidious corruption of government by business for the few over the many. They have destroyed anti-trust, fleeced our national wealth and are raping our life sustaining natural environment.

    Now, corporate wants control of the most promising tool of communications for interests in profit alone. If they succeed, it will be the same monopolist result as Goldman and the Fed cabal has on the monetary supply, wildly leveraged markets and economy, CountryWide’s predator lending, BP’s criminal negligence in one Gulf and apocalypto oil wars in another, GM’s massive design, marketing and management incompetence, big Pharma’s poison drug pushing culture, Monsanto/ADM mega-agri-welfare parasitism, Gasland’s Haliburton’s water ruinous well-fracking, HealthSouths’ med-fraud, Madoff, Enron, Worldcom, etc, all products of unbridled capitalism.

    If we suddenly find ourselves at the mercy of the likes of a AT&T or Verizon, companies that took hundreds of millions in tax breaks for building optic networks that never happened, then we can kiss any sense of free flowing information or unfettered communication at affordable rates bye-bye.

    The FCC, SEC, EPA, GAO, DoJ, DoE were all brazenly undone by Bush under the mantra of Dick Cheney in the interests of corporate profit at the expense of the American public. Fraud, waste and war dead sons and daughters for money.

    ‘Barry’ may not be your ‘boy’, but he is a president with a nightmare on his hands of corporate making in a political arena of unsurpassed Congressional corruption. Corporate media cultivates socio-political divisions to effectively incapacitate a public by mongering flames of latent racism and resurrecting cold war political terminology designed to retain a status-quo of non-regulation.

    It serves only the corporate jackals that will digest the bones of a consumer-slave America>

    • Rich July 22, 2010, 10:15 pm

      “a massively beleaguered Prez who is either way too friendly towards big bidness in a fascist conspiracy, or the best thing socialism has seen since Groucho Marx. ”

      Adolf Hitler started out as a National Socialist backed by big corps…

  • John B July 22, 2010, 6:56 pm

    I suppose leaving it all in the hands of private companies is the better solution? Letting industry draft their own regulations during the Bush frat-boy party of 8 years didn’t work out so well. And whenever I hear complaints about the deficit from supposed right-wingers, I remind them that Cheney said “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” Unless…they just happen to now. Obama isn’t “The One” by a longshot, but at least he isn’t hiding the war costs in “Supplementals” like Bushy. Didn’t hear any complaints from the GOP on that back in the day though…

  • Rich July 22, 2010, 6:03 pm

    Rick,

    I agree with the crux of the article but this control is not “leftist” . President Cheney had National Security Directives available for all to see at the White House web site . In one NSD the government could seize control of businesses , the media and state government in times of chaos such as another attack like 911. President Cheney with only right wing approval , suspended Habeas Corpus. That was just for “terrorists” of course…or whomever is “deemed” a terrorist. The Patriot act also siezed constitutional rights. Cheney and Bush shredded the constitution.

    Obama reinstated the Patriot act and has left habeas corpus suspended. When rights are given up they are very tough to get back. The overall plan of diluting the Constitution has been going on long beforte Obama.
    Obama is just carrying the baton.

  • Steve July 22, 2010, 5:55 pm

    Leave the internet up to the comm companies? Haven’t the comm companies being charging a surtax for years as fees to upgrade us to high-speed internet access? So what did the executives do with the money collected? Put it in their bonuses!! That’s what you get when you leave it up to them – Japan and S Korea with faster, cheaper, abundant internet access when it was invented in the good ol U.S. of A!! So now let’s trust them to do right by us without any intervention – oh yeah… BTW – the control and intrusiveness really kicked into high gear after 911 with the Patriot Act – but I guess that was ok enough to not complain about. (sarcasm – hypocrisy)

  • Larry July 22, 2010, 5:23 pm

    Ah yes, PBS’ Bill Moyers…architect of the infamous Daisy ad that torpedoed the Goldwater campaign. But there is no bias at PBS, because they are taxpayer funded, and because they have people that talk in stentorian tones.

    • gary leibowitz July 22, 2010, 6:24 pm

      Victor Gold and Bill Moyers were both major players in the 1964 presidential campaign. I guess it’s guilt by association?

      On PBS? Can you give me any article or instance where PBS showed a blatant lack of understanding or bias? I know they are considered left-wing news, but when you match them up with all the other news agencies they come out lilly white.

    • Benjamin July 22, 2010, 6:52 pm

      Mr. Liebowitz,

      I just have one question for you… If you know someone is being biased, then what is the problem?

      You have a brain. They have a brain. Two brains will think different thoughts, and neither is under any obligation to take the word of the other. Maybe I’m missing all my marbles, but seems to me that what you’re arguing is that the state should enforce a game of scorekeeping.

      Who’s the least biased? Who’s the most biased?

      It’s like celebrity talk about who’s hot and who’s not for cryin’ out loud!

      Not that I’m not bashing your PBS. I’m not blessing Fox. I don’t even watch the news, except for sports, weather, and traffic when I’m going to the city. Why? Because I long ago got tired of yelling at the TV or having that feeling that I’m not being told quite what the story may or may not be. And they all SOUND like idiots even when they something smart! How anyone can stand the voices of TV news commentators, I’ll never know. Makes me puke. Anyway…

      As for the internet, *I’m* in control of where I go and don’t go on the net. I can go anywhere and see all that there is to see. But anyone can choose to sensor me on their site or blog. And yes, a private company can decide that they don’t want certain content. The first amendment guarantees our right to free speech against _government_ censorship. The private sector can censor all it wants. But really, they do that and as said, they know that they’re only screwing themselves out of customers. Money talks, people walk when it doesn’t talk loud enough. And if they decide to keep censoring anyway, our best protection lies in free market competition.

      There’s no law, nor should there ever be one, that disallows someone on the net or TV or radio or whatever because they aren’t another fair weather know-it-all. We have a right to be stupid and biased if we want to. We have a right to not put up with it if we don’t want to. That’s all we need.

  • jack286 July 22, 2010, 5:08 pm

    Gee, they did such a good getting everybody into their own houses! Now maybe they can get internet in every house before or after the foreclosures.

  • gary leibowitz July 22, 2010, 4:20 pm

    Is this the same FCC that regulates the air waves? I wish they would. We have Mr. Murdoch that controls well over 50 percent of news dissemination in certain parts of the United States. He gets a free-pass in breaking the FCC rules. We have reality TV. There doesn’t seem to be much censorship there.

    As for the Internet, if PBS is all for FCC control then so am I. I trust 2 unrelated entities when it comes to honest opinions where there doesn’t seem to be a hidden agenda; PBS and Consumer Reports. Both from time to time get it wrong, but never from bias or intentionally misleading the public.

    BTW, the market looks like my SPX target of 1140 will be hit. The VIX is the most complacent I have ever seen, given the recent volatility. This suggests everyone is in the camp of a rip-roaring rally. can’t wait to pull the trigger.

  • Shpfee July 22, 2010, 4:07 pm

    Amen!!!! Amen!!!! Amen!!!!

    The I see things working from a governmental control perspective is that first they come in and state that they need to regulate a specific facet or process of the private sector to make it equitable for everyone. They then pass a regulatory bill that in all appearance looks like it is regulatory reform, but they hide language in the reform that allows them to then come back in and create revisions via admentments.

    This then sells there general idea of great prosperity to all, but it hides the fact that once no one is looking they then can admend the regulatory bill to take more control of that facet they they truely want to control. The internet is a perfect example. Sell the general masses that it is in there best interest to have the Government regulate there access to the internet and make it good for all, but behind the scenes after the mass’s fall in line they then admend the bill and hand control of content over to a shadow, less regulated entity, namely FCC to then come in and say what is best for the masses and what is inapproriate or does not comform with they (FCC, Governmental Officials agenda).

    Any regulation of the internet is a step towards communist control of the masses. You will no longer be able to go where you want on the internet nor will you be free to express yourself as an independent individual, but will be forced to accept another person’s opinion on what he deems is approriate for you to consume to believe, or to express. The idea is more control. George Orwell was absolutely correct, big brother is watching and controling you!! You are not an individual you are a member of the collective. You are not unique, and independent, but dependent, and and incapable of making decisions for yourself, or incapable of making a valued decision by looking at both sides of the argument.

  • Celty July 22, 2010, 3:22 pm

    Several holes here from the arguement that wants the poor to have internet access. Benjamin hit on the first. The attention should be on phone service, so they have access to to 911 services. A service I would find more important living in a poor area, than internet, but the bonus is, if you get phone service, you can get internet service.
    The other glaring hole is; great I am poor and now have internet access, but now, how do I afford a computer? Maybe the gvt will furnish that for me free as well in the guise of fairness. I might as well lobby the gvt as well for that big screen TV and video game console to fully experience the internet and entertainment experience.
    We are on a slippery slope here when socialism is being peddled in the clothing of fairness.

  • Forrest July 22, 2010, 3:08 pm

    Whoa Rick (Marilyn), you two have been drinking way to much Tea. I should not be so surprised by you two Obama haters to hear you say you are against helping the poor gain access to the internet. This is much the same way the Tea Party feels about affordable and accessible health care for the poor. Just in case you forgot, the stimulus plan is pouring money into helping ISPs spread high speed internet into rural areas where there has been none. These are many of the poor who have at best had a 24k connection speed forever. I am one of them. Wouldn’t want you rich tea party types to keel over from seeing me be able to get 50MB download speeds! Man you guys are so paranoid.

  • Cameroni July 22, 2010, 10:34 am

    Makes perfect sense to me.

    Route everyone who uses the internet through subscription services, put an end to anonymity on the net for good, make a list of names of all the trouble makers, round ’em up and hold trials to make an example of any who look like they have leadership capabilities or sound threatening (or are just too critical of government) and then ship them off to prison.

    A whole new kind of McCarthyism.

    • Benjamin July 22, 2010, 12:43 pm

      Yeah, it’s hard to not see it that way, but if the UK is anything to go by, it’ll just keep growing into a madhouse of nannyism and bullyism. Fines, bans, taking away our “privileges” as if we were naughty children…

      …and, perhaps coming soon to America, at some point putting people into prison because it’ll be touted as for the better good, for all the people that have nowhere else to go and nothing to do even if they could get there.

      The way I see it, it’s going to be the opposite as this unfolds. People can hate the government all they want and bad mouth them all they want (angrily if deservedly or intelligently). Most of them would be going to camps anyway. And so long as the rest are powerless to do anything about it, it won’t matter what they think. And really, without lots of gold and a way to get it into circulation to revive civilization, what can they really do that would threaten the State?

      It will be the increasing poor and displaced who go off to the gulags if there are going to be any of those. No better way to kill off debt than by killing the people it’s associated with, right?

      All the while, the banking system will keep gold elevating as inconspicuously as they can, and if Obama ever does have to throw the kill switch, they will have gotten away with everything, leaving us in the chaos to figure it all out. And the most chaotic places, I believe, is where they’ll launch their new world order currency from. No better time to buy than when blood is running in the streets, and what better thing to buy with than some other worthless currency that the hellishly conditioned will be desperate for?

      The other thing is, if they get rid of the competent by throwing them into murder camps or just prison, that leaves the growing mass of poor outside, where the State will not be able to deal with it. To play devil’s advocate here for a minute, perhaps it would be better to throw the relatively few into jail, if only so that Atlas would finally shrug and end the god-awful system. But for that reason, I don’t think that’s what they have in mind.

      That said, I’m not sure they have the opposite in mind either. From the way things are being talked about, seems to me that they have every intention (not to be mistaken as a solid plan of course) of keeping the welfare system up and growing.
      Immigration reform, for example. They never talk about it from the root of the problem. The war on drugs, among other factors, ravages places like Mexico and since we have such attractive welfare up here, well, of course that’s where they go. But that is never mentioned. They go about all these other superficial “constituional” arguments while bashing each other. But since that is what it is, we can draw some conclusions… In order to (in their eyes) keep the system going, they need the competent “free” so they can bleed them. They need the growing poor kept “free” because that’s their only protection: getting re-elected on the illusion that they actually helped anyone.

      The thing about tyranny is that it’s Achilles heel is it’s own pathetic dependence and overly high need for security. There really is only so much that it can do before it can’t do what it would rather do. IF we go from that assumption for now, the question becomes… what happens after the whole thing collapses?

    • Steve July 22, 2010, 3:47 pm

      McCarthy called em communist, ya all call em progressive, in 1897 they were called U’Ren, and in 1776 they were called torri. Today we call em Republicrats and they all dance to the prince. Propaganda works because people do not want change, they only want to have it easy.

    • mikeck July 22, 2010, 8:00 pm

      Benjamin wrote:
      “Yeah, it’s hard to not see it that way, but if the UK is anything to go by, it’ll just keep growing into a madhouse of nannyism and bullyism. Fines, bans, taking away our “privileges” as if we were naughty children…”

      Not if we follow the lead of Utah, passed a law to use eminent domain to retake land that was stolen by the feds, and of Arizona where the speed cameras were taken down recently because the good people refused to pay the fines.

      These are our leaders!

  • Benjamin July 22, 2010, 5:03 am

    “Oh, and they can make the ISPs pay into a federal universal-service fund used to provide telecommunications services to poor areas. This must be done, they say, to keep the internet “open” and fair.”

    I just started reading this, but simply _had to_ chime in with a comment over this before I forgot it.

    Too true! I mean, how else would the poor know if they won the UK lottery or that their long-lost uncle in Nigeria was giving them their 10 million inheritance so that they wouldn’t be poor anymore? Sheeze… I’ve noticed that that those scams have picked up again, of late. My spam folder is just filled to the brim with them!

    Point is, there’s no reason to provide what would be essentially garbage to a person who least needs more of it. Besdies, if the internet-less want an internet, they have options already. They can go to the public library, to friend or relative who does have the internet, or, heaven forbid, they can go to internet kiosks at a truckstop or something (I used to do that myself, when I was on the road, and all sorts of people that weren’t truckers would get on there for a couple bucks for half hour or so).

    And while the net is greatly useful, I don’t think it is as essential as it’s made out to be. How many people can really, truly claim to have, for example, landed a job through an internet job-hunting site? It all still works the way it always has… the help wanted section and personal contacts, of which email is one way to keep in touch with one’s contacts. But it’s not _essential_, imo, to even have an email account in order to keep in touch. Everyone that one knows and can know is just a phone call away. And speaking of which… Why no big cry of “foul!” when the poor people didn’t have telephones? I never heard of any such campaign to get everyone hooked up to the lines. You had phone or you borrowed your neighbors or used a pay phone.

    I’m so sick of the poor being used a pretext for “justice” and “fairness”. It’s so full of bull that we’re practically Spain during bull-running season! THE POOR ARE NOT HELPLESS! They’re quite resourceful and always have been. If they weren’t, they would be dead for the want of something important. They would be even more resourceful if there wasn’t so much BS done in their name (only). If we didn’t have to pay to keep them poor, we could invest our money in helping them becomesricher, rather than to satifiy the immature views of the bleeding hearts or to give the control-freakishness of Officialdom its undeserved sense of security.

    • Benjamin July 22, 2010, 5:24 am

      Well, that we have “representatives” that figure there is “a little too much information in that thar collective cyber-brain” is… Someone tell me again WHY these people have a job doing _anything_, especially “speaking on our behalf”?!

      Then they get all “oh no, no, no, no, no (ad infinitum, ad nauseum with the nos)! We’re not Nazis at heart! That’s that Tea Party koolaide you’ve been drinking! No, what we want is some vague thing called neutrality and the way we figure it, there’s too much stuff on the net to make happy and neutral!”

      It’s like free speech, where it’s okay to say whatever you want so long as it doesn’t offend anyone. And they can look you straight in eye and say all this without once stumbling over the illogic of their assertions. They practiced this! And then they expect you to believe this BS of theirs, but will let their genies out of their bottles whether you do or don’t buy it.

      Yet for all that, it’s just their ego trip. Yes, I think life will go on too. They can’t possibly control the net any more than they can control a mind on it. But here is one thing… I read about an internet “kill switch” that Obama wanted, which would shut down all traffic whenever there was a threat perceived to be big enough. And what could THAT possibly be, I wonder? Could it be when markets and currencies are finally ready to tank? Gee, I wonder…

    • Wyz July 22, 2010, 4:14 pm

      Benjamin,
      “And speaking of which… Why no big cry of “foul!” when the poor people didn’t have telephones? I never heard of any such campaign to get everyone hooked up to the lines. ”

      You start your comment with a quote from the article about Fed’s Universal Service Fund. Do you not know that funds’ purpose is provide phone service for everyone?

    • Benjamin July 22, 2010, 4:32 pm

      “You start your comment with a quote from the article about Fed’s Universal Service Fund. Do you not know that funds’ purpose is provide phone service for everyone?”

      Let me put it to you like this, Wyz: No, I didn’t. What I do know is that I’ve been in households without them. More so when I was younger (born in 76, grew up in the 80s and 90s), but I knew people even as far into the mid to late 90s without a phone, not even a cell.

  • JohnJay July 22, 2010, 4:33 am

    Internet censorship, whether a trial balloon or a plan waiting to be implemented is just another signpost up ahead on the road to tyranny. TSA mission creep, multi agency raids by the Fed’s on dairy farms for selling raw milk, the lawsuits against Arizona for trying to stop foreign invaders, no fly zones over the Gulf oil spill, no photo zones for the same, etc. On and on it goes, with increasing frequency and increasing severity.
    It seems the Brave New World of 1984 is upon us at last!
    Now for myself, I love Big Brother and the two minute hate!

  • Tom Paine July 22, 2010, 3:41 am

    Hmmm. I don’t get it. First it sounds like you are saying Obama wants a state run internet, but then his FCC is only going to meet with the private sector stake holders and give them everything they want in some sort of sham regulatory bill? I’ll buy the part about sham regulation written by the corporations supposedly being regulated, but how is that like Chavez’s socialism?

    BTW: Sorry for leaving w/o saying goodbye. For some reason I thought my subscription ran out on Monday, and I was going to say goodbye over the weekend. Anyway, just want to say I miss the gang in the chatroom and rubbing elbows with Rick, too. Also, my leaving has nothing to do with the quality of the service.

    Good trading y’all.

  • Erin July 22, 2010, 3:18 am

    Well…As much as I enjoy Ricks commentary here, I am now completely convinced that the brains of the outfit probably lie with his better half. Nice rant Mrs. Ackerman!!! You have now been exposed Rick…. 🙂

  • Martin Snell July 22, 2010, 2:25 am

    Net neutrality is the ONLY way to go.

  • VegasBob July 22, 2010, 2:19 am

    Although I have come to disapprove of Obama for any number of reasons – bailouts, stimulus programs, Afghanistgan, ObamaCare – assuming that the Republicans stand for Internet freedom is, in my opinion, a dreadful miscalculation.

    Both political parties support expansion of the electronic police state and suppression of free thought and dissent, although for different reasons.

    Trusting either of the 2 major political parties, which are just different sides of the same coin, to uphold First Amendment protections will prove to be a tragic mistake.

    FoxNews has every right to lie through their teeth, and MSNBC has every right to call them out, and vice versa.