Posted on 09/20/2014 8:09:30 AM PDT by Kaslin
An incredible thing happened in the recent reply-comment period regarding the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposal to regulate the Internet like old-fashioned monopoly telephone service: the side telling the agency not to regulate carried the day.
The radical left, demanding federal regulatory control of the building blocks of Internet, brought all the usual hype and hoopla and had free-spending corporate backers in Google and Netflix, who want regulators to force you to pay the costs of their downstream bandwidth, so they won’t have to.
This campaign by liberal special interests like MoveOn and the Sierra Club converted forty thousand websites into campaign advertisements urging visitors to support Internet regulation.
The websites participated in a stunt called “Internet Slowdown Day.” These sites lied to visitors, claiming that without unprecedented new government regulation, broadband providers would start slowing down and degrading service.
Of course, such a thing has never happened, even without politicians in charge of the Internet. If a broadband provider ever tried such a stupid move, they’d lose customers in droves, and the board of directors would fire the CEO. The very fact these sites had to fake a slowdown should serve as proof that liberals are engaging in pure fantasy.
My organization, American Commitment, refused to let these rent-seekers and ideologues claim to speak for the American people.
For years, these groups had played a double game, acting as if they only wanted reasonable, “light-touch” regulation when talking to the general public, but boasting among their fellow travelers that, in the words of the founder of “slowdown” organizer Free Press: “the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.”
So we rang an alarm bell. Loud. We launched StopInternetRegulation.org to mobilize comments from regular Americans who oppose the Internet being reduced to a government-controlled public utility.
When all was said and done, the huge liberal pro-regulation campaign, which dubbed itself “Battle for the Net” claimed they sent 777,364 comments to the FCC.
StopInternetRegulation.org, in just three weeks, beat them by more than 30,000 comments. Our total was 808,363. We won the battle for the net.
Does it matter? Should it?
Would the FCC, which is supposed to be an expert agency, actually make policy decisions of enormous consequence for the U.S. economy based on an email plebiscite? It appears they fully intended to, which is frightening.
Liberal activists embedded inside the FCC have been cheering on their allies and planned to tout the number of pro-regulation comments in a self-serving effort to increase their own power. Probably because stoking the liberal mob is easier than engaging in a substantive debate proponents of regulation can’t win.
At the height of the “slowdown” campaign, Gigi Sohn – a longtime leader of pro-regulation group Public Knowledge who is now a senior FCC staffer – tweeted: “If you're participating in #InternetSlowdown pls consider filing your comment via openinternet@FCC.gov. It's faster & each will be counted”
She didn’t say each would be read and considered on its merits. She said each would be “counted.” It was a numbers exercise, and the liberals lost.
Now that the agency has been denied the cover of pretending the American people want the Internet regulated, they should turn to their actual jobs – undertaking a sober analysis of the actual merits of the proposal – which are severely lacking.
The idea of reducing a vibrant, competitive, well-functioning, privately-funded market to a government-controlled public utility has been dubbed the “nuclear option” on Wall Street because it would obliterate the private sector capital investment that has made the Internet a remarkable engine of economic growth, innovation, and creativity.
Now the FCC should give up its desire to regulate and allow the Internet to keep improving as it has for decades.
And the astonishing thing is that there are lots of conservatives that actually support more regulation out of some unfounded fear that ISPs will start charging people to access conservative websites.
These companies won’t jeopardize their bottom line doing something so foolish no matter how many people think they are evil
There’s a terrifying incestuous relationship between telecommunications companies and the FCC/gov’t, with cable company execs moving back and forth between the two.
Neither can be trusted. Hands off the internet — including (especially) TAXATION! Let the free market drive innovation and improvement.
Be on the lookout for collusion between them, causing slowdowns an outages, which will be blamed upon their inability to ‘fix things’ via regulation.
Yeah. Like idiot “conservatives” who support Homeland Security, NSA, and the “Patriot Act”.
Either you oppose an all powerful, all intrusive state or you don’t.
Stopped reading right there. Most people have no option to ditch their monopoly ISP, and whatever the merits of the author's position, he loses his credibility when he claims otherwise.
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You know this is getting boring. No one forced you to read the article
Globalist monopolist elites would love nothing more than to use their US government to control the internet to turn it completely into a propaganda tool for themselves.
All dissent would obviously be criminalized.
The elites happily impose this type of control in all their communist countries.
If enough of the sheeple in non-communist countries are stupid enough, they’ll lose all their freedoms one by one.
If the sheeple turn to God and bow the knee to Jesus Christ and live according to his Word, he will bring them victory, and destroy the wicked people he has caused to harass the sheeple as chastisement for rejecting his Word.
If we the people ask for secular humanism, God gives us what we ask for, which shows us how miserable and ungodly it is.
The Psalms are excellent reading in regards to these ideas. God’s perfect hymn book.
This article is utterly misguided. There SHOULD be some regulation. You give it over to the Corps and you think sites like this will survive? When profit only is the motive, you really think that America comes first?
Not regulating would be a disaster. This has cut across partisan lines. Only those in the pocket of the Corps claim otherwise.
I am no fan of big government, but at least it is elected. And the problem isn’t big government, it is that it is a Liberal government. Privatize everything and let “the market decide” and you will kill a Nation. These are multinational corps with NO allegiance to America.
Sometimes the rush to demonize the Dims (trust me they deserve it) blinds us to the other enemies in our midst.
You are quite confused. Big government is the damn problem. We have no king, not even the king you like.
Not a chance.
That is bullcrap. Most conservatives are against more regulation out of knowing that such regulations can and will be used to suppress the conservative side of public discourse.
Really?
Everyone has the option of satellite internet (HughesNet and the like).
Nearly all people have the option of internet service through their land-line phone company. Nearly all people have the option of internet service through their cell-phone provider. And, nearly all have the option of internet service through at least one cable-TV provider.
I myself do not have the option of Cable Internet, but I do have the other three options, including 4G LTE cellular internet service.
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