Posted on 01/31/2015 1:30:59 PM PST by Olog-hai
Whose Internet is it anyway?
Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, says he’s keeping that question in mind as he pitches the biggest regulatory shake-up to the telecommunications industry since 1996, when people still used noisy modems and referred to the “information superhighway” as a fun way to buy books or check the weather.
Wheeler has not publicly released his plan yet, and might not for a few weeks. But he has suggested that Internet service has become as critical to people in the United States as water, electricity or phone service and should be regulated like any other public utility. […]
That has the industry sounding the alarms, warning consumers of an inevitable $72 annual tax increase on each U.S. wireless account. …
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
This is a back-door to political censorship.
Al gore says he invented it.
One sure way to kill the internet is to let government get its filthy self into the game!
Haven’t we learned yet that government is the destroyer of FReedom and Liberty?
The Internet obviously does not belong to the government. It is the Free Press of We the Free People. If it belonged to them, it would support Obama. Then it would NOT be a thorn in his side and he wouldn’t want to control it. duh.
At the time of its writing, the word regulate meant to make regular. Only with progressives, beginning with Teddy Roosevelt, extended by Wilson, FDR, LBJ, Nixon, Carter, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama do the meaning of words change. Yes, I included Republicans in this list, and perhaps I should have included Reagan too, since there was a fair amount of regulation under his administration as well.
In its original context, regulate was to make sure that commerce had no barriers. It is the essence of pure competition; a fundamental element of capitalism. (My ancient economics courses from college being recalled.) Other parts of the US Consistitution work in concert with making commerce regular, including "To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;". This was so that one currency could be used in each of the several States, and that a pound of apples was a pound of apples in each of the several States.
Our Founding Fathers had a strong notion of what would work. Now F'n progressive/socialists that are so F'n stupid to see the failure of socialism everywhere it has been tried want to change the fundamental essence of what it is to be American.
Total Bull Shiite and the modern equivalency of the Telecommunications Act of 1934, The MFJ of 1984 and the Telecom Act 1996 with a tad bit of Lobbying by the two biggest, Anti-Competitive, Aholes ever:
The Death Star(ATT)
and
ComCrap-tic.
Amazon and Netflix are in collusion as well.
The whole universe of Internet and wireless users should not be compelled to pay for services that the carriers could sell as premium routing and priority.
Further, they will claim this enhances CALEA and HIPPA. You do want Law Enforcement to catch criminals don’t you? Your medical records should be portable and secure. Who is against that?
/S(Obviously)
RICO, Patriot Act 1 & 2 and let’s not forget FISA will also be heavily funded by an onerous tax that has never before been contemplated.
They only want to tax each cell phone $6? Well, times the number we already know are in service, 327,577,529(2014) that would amount to some $23.6 billion in new taxes over the course of 12 months or $240 Billion in the next decade!!!!
What will the average consumer get for $23 billion a year?
About as much as they get now for being taxed $1.50 per month that would supposedly enhance PSAP services, making it more ubiquitous, faster and GPS to assist emergency services dispatching, which is a crock.
In every state this has been proposed as the pitch and benefit of this particular tax, those “revenues” have largely gone to the general fund of state budgets and used for a variety of social programs that have nothing to do with enhancing PSAP.
In fact, almost all the enhancements to wireless services and e911 have come directly from the carriers who do not get a slice of the e911 tax and have funded those enhancements out of their bottom line.
Another boondoggle that will enhance nothing except for the top two jack wagon companies and the various BGP providers, which essentially are less than 10 and puts them at odds with competitiveness, while ensuring they become or remain dominant, reducing competition.
Whazzamatter???
Ya never heard of the phrase “If it WORKS, don’t F#@k with it”???
Water is a limited resource. The internet is not.
The infrastructure for electric power isn't easily duplicated, in the same way that 1950's land-line phone service wasn't duplicable, either.
Yet, the politicians "de-regulated" the "phone company", decades ago. Today, in many places, there are numerous choices for a person who wants cell phone service.
If home-sized solar panels ever become ready for prime time, we might see a deregulation of the electricity business, as well.
Big companies like Google are looking for Mercantilism. Big Gov is looking for Fascism.
Best to leave the internet as unregulated as possible.
There’s nothing that isn’t broken that the left does not want to fix.
Welcome to the “undernet”...
Don't you mean big companies like the telcos and cable who want to double dip.
The companies that control the pipes can charge the consumers on how much bandwidth they consume, but they want to be able to also charge the content providers. They want to make money coming and going.
Them, too.
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