Posted on 12/23/2010 5:38:18 PM PST by Halfmanhalfamazing
RUSH: I want to talk about this net neutrality business. We have dealt with this on this program before. The FCC has just asserted its authority to regulate the Internet, this "net neutrality" is a bogus name just like most legislative titles. Well, most titles of legislation are bogus. "Net neutrality" does no such thing. It does not promote neutrality and lack of bias or any such thing. We noted on this program back in September of 2009: Net neutrality is a solution in search of a problem. It's just a bunch of liberals wanting to get their hands on something that is massive, that can harm them. They have to control, as much as they can, the free flow of information. They have to be in charge of it, they have to be able to censor it, and that's what this is all about.
There is no problem on the Internet. None. In fact, in most of life, there wasn't a problem until the liberals went in search of one so that they could control people's behavior and try to legislate the outcomes of individuals in life. The only problem here appears to be too much freedom, at least in the minds of the government. There's too much freedom on the Internet in the minds of Obama and his FCC people. All you really have to know about net neutrality is that its biggest promoters are George Soros and Google and MoveOn.org, which is heavily funded by Mr. Soros and Google. It is also promoted by a number of other radical left Soros fronts, such as the Free Press, the Center for American Progress, and a couple of additional groups improperly named.
The Center for American Progress is about the opposite. They're not about American progress. And Free Press is not about a free press. So what we're doing here is neutering the Internet. It's another private industry. It's another gleaming aspect of free speech, free market, private industry, that Obama has decided to take over as a Christmas present to himself and the Democrat National Committee and to Mr. Soros. He's even beaten Hugo Chavez to the punch. Chavez is just talking about taking over the Internet in Venezuela. Obama has got it done. They want you to believe it's about search engines, making sure that every possible result gets exposure. They want to try to tell you it's about money, and it's not. Well, it is about money but not in the way that you would think when that is offered as a reason. It's about control.
Here is a gleaming artifact of unabridged free market everything -- speech, commerce, you name it -- and they want to control it. They want to control who gets to say what on it, they want to control who gets found on it, they want to control pretty much everything about it. Monday afternoon, two Democrat commissioners on the FCC, Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn (the daughter of James Clyburn), "signaled that the order was not as strong as they would have liked but they wouldn't oppose it. Their votes along with Mr. Julius Genachowski's would be enough to approve the order or the takeover. Now, Copps," one of the Democrat commissioners, "said that he wanted to ensure that the Internet doesn't travel down the same road of special interest consolidation and gatekeeper control that other media and communications industries like radio, TV, film, and cable have traveled."
They are worried to death that the Internet is gonna become the next conservative talk radio and Fox News, and that's what they're not gonna permit. That's what so-called net neutrality is all about: To make sure that the voices of minorities and the displaced and the dis-financed and the disabused and the whoevers are equally heard. "What a historic tragedy it would be," Copps said, "to let the fate," that fate, meaning what's happened to talk radio and Fox News, "befall the dynamism of the Internet." That's from an earlier app story. Yeah, so we would really hate to see that -- and by the way, they don't have any regulatory authority over cable TV and they haven't asserted it, and that's what galls 'em about Fox. They are trying to control Fox on the basis that Fox does news.
Interesting,
See page 14 - Roosevelt’s Special Relationship With Radio
The book is:
Manipulating The Ether: The Power Of Broadcast Radio In Thirties America
By Robert J. Brown
It’s a hair worth splitting. If the autocrats go after apps, they lose.
VERY interesting!
Thanks for that abb, I didn’t know about this.
Makes the neutrality doctrine look like child’s play.
Re-link up..........
“Comcast to Offer $9.95 Broadband to Low-Income Households”
That’s how the revolutionary always works. Class warfare to the bitter end. There’s no way this is a coincedence.
It's part of the Comcast/NBC merger deal. This would be happening even if net neutrality were not an issue. I swear, 99% of debating net neutrality with opponents is swatting down their strawmen and misdirection.
You’ll want to read some history of the relationship between government regulators and AT&T. History credits Alexander Graham Bell with inventing the phone.
In reality, this is the man who put it all together and made it into a network. This is what the Statists want for the internet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Newton_Vail
Theodore Newton Vail (July 16, 1845 – April 16, 1920) was a U.S. telephone industrialist. His philosophy of using closed systems, centralized power, and as much network control as possible, in order to maintain monopoly power, has been called Vailism.[1] He served as the president of American Telephone & Telegraph between 1885 and 1889, and again from 1907 to 1919 (the company was named American Telephone & Telegraph before 1894). He convinced President Woodrow Wilson that the telephone as a medium of communication would spread more rapidly if brought under one monopoly so as to ensure uniform provision of services throughout the country. He called this “one system, one policy, universal service”.[2] This was formalised in the form of the Kingsbury Commitment of 1913.
Something else of interest.
FCC, CBS Continue To Battle Over Janet Jackson Reveal
Third Circuit Court of Appeals reviewing its earlier decision on FCC’s fine of CBS
By John Eggerton — Broadcasting & Cable, 12/27/2010 9:22:46 AM
The FCC, backed by the Justice Department, says that ***broadcasters give up full First Amendment status when they get a government license,*** and so should be subject to government regulation of swearing and nudity when kids could be watching.
That was the gist of the FCC’s supplemental brief to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which is reviewing its earlier decision that the FCC’s $550,000 fine of CBS for Janet Jackson’s partially exposed breast on the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show broadcast was arbitrary and capricious.
snip
Not true - Comcast's customers will assume all of the costs.
Yes. From each according to his means...
More yet.
http://www2.tbo.com/content/2010/dec/23/coming-soon-to-tampa-public-housing-free-internet-/
Coming soon to Tampa public housing: Free Internet access
By RACHEL PLEASANT
The Tampa Tribune
TAMPA Jackie Dones and her three daughters recognize the value of the Internet.
They have homework and class projects, job searches and employment applications all waiting for them in cyberspace.
But for Dones, a part-time cashier at Family Dollar and a resident of the North Boulevard Homes, a public housing project, paying $90 a month for cable, phone and Internet is a struggle. Evidence of the struggle: the family was without Internet for two months until just before Christmas, when Dones managed to pay the late fee on her account, providing at least a brief reprieve.
“They’ll probably turn it off tomorrow,” she said.
Dones is about to get a break.
The Tampa Housing Authority has secured a $2.1 million federal grant to provide broadband Internet access to 23 public housing sites. Details are being finalized with Bright House Networks, which will provide the service, and residents will be connected beginning March 1.
The project will be the first such one in Florida and one of the few in the nation.
snip
Yes, it’s clear that it’s part of the merger deal; but that’s only one aspect of the picture.
You appear to be incapable of understanding revolutionaries. Or at least, you don’t take them at their word.
Yes, they really can and do want to silence us. And they will.
BTW, I said ‘there’s no way this is a coincedence’ because of the government angle of the story.
Vailism and........ Woodrow Wilson.
I find it interesting how everything ends up in one way or another going back to Wilson.
The sharpest attack on our first amendment ever was done on his watch. The espionage/sedition act.
Come he** or high water, we need to be silenced. Be it sold under the banner of “fairness” or “neutrality” or some other orwellianism. *sigh*
The truely scary part of this is that so many people have been scared by the boogieman called corporate america that they can’t see the revolutionary nature of it all.
Thanks for that link. That wikipedia pages are very telling. For both Vail and Kingsbury commitment. One line in particular:
-—————The Commitment did not settle all the differences between independents and Bell companies and averted the federal takeover many had expected.-—————
I read this page twice, the second time I read it with my ‘revolutionary cap’ on.
The government benefits from monopoly in the end, because they can nationalize it and silence anyone that stands in their way.
Welcome to Net Neutrality in 1913. It’s amazing how history repeats itself. They still ultimately ended up nationalizing toward the end of Wilson’s terms, but due to the nature of progressives they don’t immediately act. They do the whole frog/hot water situation. Just like their fabian cousins.
Check this out. This might be something I’ve posted about in the past, but this is very well written.(and clearly written)
http://reason.com/archives/2011/02/08/internet-cop/3
==========The Trouble With Title II
And then there was the most extreme option. Instead of pursuing net neutrality through ancillary jurisdiction, as it had already attempted, the commission could move broadband service into the same regulatory category as telephone lines. Rather than regulating broadband providers under Title I of the Communications Act, as information services, it could regulate them under Title II, as telecommunication services. After Randolph’s decision, Democratic Commissioner Michael Copps immediately signaled that he favored this route.
It sounds like a small change, but in fact it would be enormous. Title II was designed for legacy phone networks and was written before broadband existed. If the FCC could pull off this shift, it would have far greater power than before. The Net’s core would effectively be transformed into a public utility subject to the whims of regulators.=============
The big winner is Comcast, who has already done some of the initial positioning necessary to cash in as the government’s new utility provider.
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