Posted on 10/09/2014 7:35:33 AM PDT by xzins
There has been mounting evidence in the last two weeks that the Internet, one of the last unregulated venues for communication, might well be headed for federal regulation.
What makes the specter of Internet regulation (or "net neutrality," as its proponents prefer to call it) all the more ominous is that it might become law through rulings by the Federal Communications Commission rather than a vote of elected representatives in Congress.
On Sept. 24, the Washington Post reported that the FCC was working with activists seeking to generate comments in favor of tough, 1930s-style regulation of telephone. In what the Post’s Nancy Scola dubbed "an unusual collaboration," supporters of net neutrality "were keeping up a round-the-clock watch of ECFS’s [Electronic Comment Filing System] health. Headquartered in Southwest Washington, D.C., the FCC’s technologists were doing the same.
By the time the September 15 deadline rolled around for public comments on "so-called net neutrality," Scola reported, 3.7 million comments had been recorded by the federal government, more than the FCC has gotten on any debate in its 80-year history."
Opponents of "so-called net neutrality" hit this hard.
"If the Post’s report is accurate," wrote Mike Wendy of MediaFreedom in an open letter to the FCC Inspector General, then his organization "believes this ‘unusual collaboration’ undermines the Commission’s open rulemaking process, revealing in it a bias that defeats the needed reason and factual underpinning for a lawful rule to result."
(Excerpt) Read more at newsmax.com ...
Get the GOP House to pass a law against this and let the Senate Dems blow it.
Shouldn't this just be presumed for every government power grab?
It comes from the presumptuous philosophy that government can make us safe.
Then you’d be wrong, twice.
activists = potential dictators............
That will work until a few weeks later when some idiot says, “There oughta be a law” and some bureaucrat hears him. Let private property rights govern the spectrum. Good bye FCC and don’t come back.
“...As an independent, expert agency, the FCC...”
I’d like to see how they are believed to be an ‘expert’. By their OWN authority? You’d think EXPERTS could define ‘pornography’ vs. ‘art’ vs. 1st Amendment vs. ....for instance.
And NOBODY in D.C. in independent; it all works for the benefit of...D.C. They, and the rest, know where their bread is buttered (from our wallets, but I digress).
What I find most worrisome is implementation of an ‘Internet ID#’ one would use to access internet. Use of passwords would be eliminated but individuals could EASILY be tracked and traced by the gov’t. ‘Internet ID#’ such as SSN or some other number issued to each user by the gov’t MUST BE FOUGHT AT EVERY TURN. Anonymous postings would be impossible in this scenario.
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