Posted on 12/22/2010 4:20:32 AM PST by Kaslin
When bureaucrats talk about increasing our "access" to x, y or z, what they're really talking about is increasing exponentially their control over our lives. As it is with the government health care takeover, so it is with the newly approved government plan to "increase" Internet "access." Call it Webcare.
By a vote of 3-2, the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday adopted a controversial scheme to ensure "net neutrality" by turning unaccountable Democratic appointees into meddling online traffic cops. The panel will devise convoluted rules governing Internet service providers, bandwidth use, content, prices and even disclosure details on Internet speeds. The "neutrality" is brazenly undermined by preferential treatment toward wireless broadband networks. Moreover, the FCC's scheme is widely opposed by Congress -- and has already been rejected once in the courts. Demonized industry critics have warned that the regulations will stifle innovation and result in less access, not more.
Sound familiar? The parallels with health care are striking. The architects of Obamacare promised to provide Americans more access to health insurance -- and cast their agenda as a fundamental universal entitlement.
In fact, it was a pretext for creating a gargantuan federal bureaucracy with the power to tax, redistribute and regulate the private health insurance market to death -- and replace it with a centrally planned government system overseen by politically driven code enforcers dictating everything from annual coverage limits to administrative expenditures to the makeup of the medical workforce. The costly, onerous and selectively applied law has resulted in less access, not more.
Undaunted promoters of Obama FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski's "open Internet" plan to expand regulatory authority over the Internet have couched their online power grab in the rhetoric of civil rights. On Monday, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps proclaimed: "Universal access to broadband needs to be seen as a civil right ... (though) not many people have talked about it that way." Opposing the government Internet takeover blueprint, in other words, is tantamount to supporting segregation. Cunning propaganda, that.
"Broadband is becoming a basic necessity," civil rights activist Benjamin Hooks added. And earlier this month, fellow FCC panelist Mignon Clyburn, daughter of Congressional Black Caucus leader and Number Three House Democrat James Clyburn of South Carolina, declared that free (read: taxpayer-subsidized) access to the Internet is not only a civil right for every "nappy-headed child" in America, but is essential to their self-esteem. Every minority child, she said, "deserves to be not only connected, but to be proud of who he or she is."
Calling them "nappy-headed" is a rather questionable way of boosting their pride, but never mind that.
Face it: A high-speed connection is no more an essential civil right than 3G cell phone service or a Netflix account. Increasing competition and restoring academic excellence in abysmal public schools is far more of an imperative to minority children than handing them iPads. Once again, Democrats are using children as human shields to provide useful cover for not so noble political goals.
The "net neutrality" mob -- funded by billionaire George Soros and other left-wing think tanks and nonprofits -- has openly advertised its radical, speech-squelching agenda in its crusade for "media justice." Social justice is the redistribution of wealth and economic "rights." Media justice is the redistribution of free speech and other First Amendment rights.
The meetings of the universal broadband set are littered with Marxist-tinged rants about "disenfranchisement" and "empowerment." They've targeted conservative opponents on talk radio, cable TV and the Internet as purveyors of "hate" who need to be managed or censored. Democratic FCC panelists have dutifully echoed their concerns about concentration of corporate media power.
As the Ford Foundation-funded Media Justice Fund, which lobbied for universal broadband, put it: This is a movement "grounded in the belief that social and economic justice will not be realized without the equitable redistribution and control of media and communication technologies."
For progressives who cloak their ambitions in the mantle of "fairness," it's all about control. It's always about control.
When newspapers were the major source of public information were they distributed universally for free?
The author is correct: it all about power. Always has been, always will be.
“Universal Service” is their goal, count on it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_service
Universal service is an economic, legal and business term used mostly in regulated industries, referring to the practice of providing a baseline level of services to every resident of a country.
Once that goal is attained, then regulatory oversight naturally follows.
“The parallels with health care are striking. “
It was the same with railroads, the electric grid, telephone and the banking system.
The railroad regulation was particularly harmful. The Hepburn Act, the legislation which completed the take-over of the RR industry, is believed to have caused the panic of 1907 since many owned railroad securities as their retirement nest egg which became nearly worthless. And of course that started the ball rolling for justification of the creation of the Federal Reserve.
It seems that nearly everyone has learned a lesson from that, except the Obama administration that still insists that doing something like this is for the good of everyone, when we know the unintended (or perhaps intended) consequeces produce the opposite results.
In addition to this, the lame-duck senate was confirming judges yesterday, nominees who would not have a chance of confirmation if they were punted to the 112th congress. It smacks a bit to me like the midnight judges strategy of the Federalists. This FCC thing might have something to do with it, although I think it might part of the broader startegy for Obama to do things by executive order without the consent of congress in general and have these guys rubber stamp whatever he happens to do.
Are you suggesting that information has to have a a price tag on it?
Government regs do a poor job with fast moving technologies.
I live in a rural, farming area. I also have about half a dozen reasonable broadband options (cable, two flavors of terrestrial wireless, several reasonably priced cell options, satellite) ... pretty much everything but DSL.
Many of us remember that the big dial-up providers (AOL, CompuServe) had favored their own private offerings. In the case of AOL, they were uniquely qualified to cache and mirror high traffic news sites. It should not surprise anyone that the fastest loading dense site was CNN.
Near the end, providers were talking about limiting usage, as some people were online ALL day, and previous models clocked usage. The market made those plans shrivel up into a three day old wad of chewed Trident strawberry twist chewing gum.
Unlike electricity and natural gas, broadband Internet access is NOT a natural monopoly. There is also a fair amount of hypocrisy here. The cell providers have all sorts of crazy restrictions on what their phones can and can’t do, based on marketing and intellectual property control, NOT technical features.
Capacity will be even LESS of a problem in the near future. Cisco has developed technology that will allow speeds of greater than a gb per second download, and backbone features with massive upgrades over the current acceptable speeds.
Those who cannot afford broadband in their area need only get a $100 used laptop and head down to the library, most Burger Kinds, (get a buck double and water for their trouble) Borders, etc. etc.
The FCC did not get involved with porn on cable because the final transmission did not go over the public broadcast airwaves. Why do they even have jurisdiction here? By the time the FCC had tried to give good ol’ UHF equity with VHF on home televisions (first by mandating that UHF tuners be included, then by requiring all click stop VHF TVs also have click-stop UHF knobs), cable was already in half of the households, on the way to rendering the matter moot.
Besides the raw assertion of control, this is more of the same.
Sheesh, if anything those "nappy headed"(1) kids need a GUN more than an iPod in order to survive. And THAT 'right' is in the Constitution! /s
(1) NOT my words.
No fan of the FCC here and I think they are overstepping their authority BUT...if your electric company upped the voltage to 180 volts, because they wanted to force you to only buy compatible appliances from them...AND you couldn’t go anywhere else for your electricity (most people can’t go anywhere else for their Internet access or are technical enough to do so), wouldn’t the gov’t be helpful in making the electric company maintain 120 volts?
No fan of the FCC here and I think they are overstepping their authority BUT...if your electric company upped the voltage to 180 volts, because they wanted to force you to only buy compatible appliances from them...AND you couldn’t go anywhere else for your electricity (most people can’t go anywhere else for their Internet access or are technical enough to do so), wouldn’t the gov’t be helpful in making the electric company maintain 120 volts?
“When newspapers were the major source of public information were they distributed universally for free?”
I never saw them for free, but they were cheap, 5 cents, the same as a coke. Newspaper stands, with a simple coin box, were on the honor system.
Home delivery was the standard for morning and evening paper.
I never had a paper route but I knew many kids that did.
This was circa 1950-1960 in Memphis.
In the early 50s, Memphis had only one TV station, WMCT,
an NBC affiliate.
I would return to the USA in a heartbeat if we could go back to those “good old days”.
Oh, we also had the luxury of home delivery dairy products (early mornings before we woke up), laundry and dry cleaning service, even grocery delivery.
There’s no where in the country, that has phone lines, where you don’t have alternative internet access.
This “universal access” is nothing but another de facto reparations program.
The government wouldn’t be nearly as helpful as the fact that by doing this, the utility would be guaranteed to be bogged down in the cost of replacing many expensive components on their system as a result of the overvoltage. Not to mention that your lawyer would have a field day with them.
Fact is, the only reason a utility would do something so stupid would be because the government coerced them into doing so. Do you think that utilities WANT to buy wind-powered generation at 10X the cost of coal-fired generation? Do you think that utilities want to build their plants out in the middle of nowhere instead of near the load center which would make considerably more sense from an engineering and cost standpoint? Do you think that your local utility wants to continue providing power to a deadbeat all winter in spite of the fact that the deadbeat hasn’t paid a bill since September? In each of those cases, it is/was the government that caused them to do the wrong thing.
The same is happening with the FCC trying to take over the internet - the ISPs will be coerced into doing things that will cost you plenty as a subscriber, and will bring them no benefit. They will be burdened with a mountain of paperwork that they will need to process in order to be compliant with the latest regulatory fad. They will have to make you and I pay more so that some homeless deadbeat can have Wi-Fi in his favorite dumpster.
“Are you suggesting that information has to have a a price tag on it?”
Information is free if you can obtain it through your own efforts. On the other hand, information has always been a commodity. One pays tuition for a university education ostensibly so that you can obtain more knowledge (i.e. information). When you seek the services of a professional who had to study to obtain information that they use to provide opinions to you, you are paying for information. The list goes on and on.
>>Are you suggesting that information has to have a a price tag on it?
>>
And that it needs to be regulated by Big Brother?
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