Historic vote set for Internet rules

If Obama wants it, the GOP leadership MUST BLOCK it.

Freedom on the internet: It was great while it lasted.

I’m genuinely concerned for my future. I’ve been in IT for 20 years, and I feel like this is the end of the line for all that we’ve worked to accomplish since the ascendance of the Internet in the 90s.

EIB - The Rush Limbaugh Show

Net Neutrality Is Obamacare All Over Again

February 25, 2015

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I’ve never felt more surrounded by ignorance than I am. I don’t mean here. I’m talking about opinion leaders and CEOs, tech leaders, industry leaders. I have never seen such ignorance in my life. I don’t know how to deal with it. This net neutrality features almost as much ignorance as there was going into Obamacare, and to me there’s no excuse for the ignorance anymore.

We’ve got seven years, six and a half years now — let’s count the year of the campaign, make it seven years. Seven years, there is no excuse for not knowing who the man is leading the country. There’s no excuse for not getting it. There is no excuse for not being able to open your eyes and see what’s right in front of your face. And yet with every issue, with every issue that comes up, it’s like nobody’s learned anything. Or even worse, if they have learned it, they don’t care.

The government is taking more and more freedom and liberty away from individuals and organizations and groups than ever before. And they’re not even having to fight for it. In some cases they’re buying it, cronyism, socialism, capitalism. In some cases they’re buying it with welfare checks, but they’re buying it.

I have here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers an op-ed piece at TheHill.com, of all places. It’s by Randolph J. May, who is a communications lawyer, and he has been a general counsel for the FCC, among other things. He cannot believe what he’s seeing.

“This Thursday, Feb. 26,” my father’s birthday, by the way, “will be a fateful day for the future of the Internet,” so begins his piece. “In the nearly 40 years that I have been involved in communications law and policy, including serving as the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) associate general counsel, this action, without a doubt, is one of the agency’s most misguided.”

He’s being polite when he calls it misguided. It’s not misguided. This is what I mean. They know exactly what they’re doing. They’re not bumbling fools here at the Regime. And why do people continue to afford them and extend to them that possibility. They’re not a bunch of bumbling fools. They’re not a bunch of misguided kids running around. These are people knowing full well what they’re doing. It’s exactly what they’ve intended to do. Bumbling around, it’s not misguided behavior going on here.

Anyway. “The sad reality is that,” he continues, “without any convincing evidence of market failure and consumer harm, the FCC is poised, on a 3-2 party-line vote, to expand its control over Internet providers in ways that threaten the Internet’s future growth and vibrancy.”

Well, so far, so good. Without any convincing evidence of market failure, the Internet is a shining example of entrepreneurism on the march. It’s a shining example of competition, technological advancement, my God, the things the Internet has made possible, no wonder the government wants control of it. No wonder the left wants control of it. People like it more than they like the government. People like the Internet more than they like Obama. Can’t have that.

“Here is the nub of the matter,” according to Randolph J. May. “By choosing to regulate Internet providers as old-fashioned public utilities in order to enforce ‘neutrality’ mandates, the commission will discourage private-sector investment and innovation for many years to come, if only as a result of the litigation that will be spawned and the uncertainty that will be created. And the new government mandates inevitably will lead to even more than the usual special interest pleading at the FCC, as Internet companies try to advantage themselves and disadvantage their competitors by seeking favored regulatory treatment.”

You know, it’s so simple. We’ve been down this road I don’t know how many times just most recently with Obamacare, and Obamacare is the model, by the way, for net neutrality. The Regime is using the exact same model.

“From all indications, the FCC contemplates that the new rules will be sufficiently burdensome and costly — and sufficiently ambiguous — that affected parties will be invited to seek exemptions from the new mandates through ‘waiver’ requests or other administrative mechanisms.”

So they’re gonna knowingly implement a bunch of arduous, complicated, punishing regulations, and then they’re gonna invite injured parties to come up and ask for exemptions or waivers. Knowingly this is going to happen. To the uninitiated who may be shouting, “Why, why?” Because this is how you get control. This is how, if you’re Obama and the government, you simply take control of the Internet and make it yours. And then you implement all of these burdensome regulations.

But, for most favored supporters you can get an exemption, but your competitors may not. How badly do you want to support the Regime? How badly and how loyally will you support the Democrat Party? “Oh, forever. Whatever you need.” Fine. You’ve got your waiver. But your competitor doesn’t. We’ll help you put your competitor out of business in exchange for your loyalty to the Democrat Party. And that’s how it’s gonna go.

That’s how it’s gone with Obamacare, and that’s exactly how this is imagined. We haven’t even gotten to the nature of the burdensome regulations, the punitive nature of them and how they’re gonna bottleneck the Internet, and how they’re gonna stifle innovation. And when he writes here, “The commission will discourage private-sector investment and innovation,” why would you invest in a company that’s gonna be more and more regulated by the government? Why would you invest in such a company when you can’t have any idea what’s gonna happen? The company’s fortunes are gonna be directly tied to the government’s opinion of it.

So you got a great company, company XYZ Widgets, and they manufacture products and services that enhance everybody’s usage of and enjoyment of the Internet, here come some new rules, gonna make it tougher for them to do business, tougher and tougher for them to do business. Their profit margins are gonna shrink. They may not be able to continue to do the business they’re in at the same costs. It may be tougher and tougher for outside investors to invest in the company to help it grow.

Add to that the company then may not be favored by the Regime, in which case it will not get exemptions from some of these punitive regulations. Therefore, why would anybody invest in a company like that? Now, multiply that times however many hundreds or thousands of companies that do business on the Internet. Wait ‘til the day comes where you are forced to get a license for your website based on the content of your website.

Say the content of your website’s judged to be political. And the political content on your website is judged by the regulators to be an in-kind political donation to either a candidate or a party. You have to get a license to be able to do that, then you have to get an exemption from campaign finance laws. And all you’re doing is running a website exercising your First Amendment rights. But not anymore. No, no, no. Not anymore. Now you’re being studied. And what you say is going to be judged. Is it friendly or unfriendly to the powers that be at any given time?

And what are you gonna be made to pay to change an unfavorable relationship to a favorable one? This is Obamacare redone. This is Obamacare all over again, and yet the same people are falling for it hook, line, and sinker. And maybe not so much falling, you know what’s even worse than falling for it? What’s even worse is all of these companies seeing what’s coming and instead of trying to fight it, just considering it to be a fait accompli, the new way business is gonna be done on the Internet. No sense in fighting it. We can’t stop it. And they’re gonna start maneuvering now for most favored nations status with the regulators, with the government, or whatever, in which case the relationship the business has to the government is its number one concern, not its relationship with its customer base.

Does that sound like hospitals and doctors to you? You’re the patient. Where do you rank when it comes to the insurance company, the government, the provider, the hospital, where do you rank in all that? You’re not at the top of the list. And neither are these business owners gonna be.

“But this likely flood,” as I resume the piece now, “But this likely flood of waiver requests should raise serious questions concerning the lawfulness of the agency’s mode of operating. As Philip Hamburger discusses in his book, Is Administrative Law Unlawful?, one of our Founders’ objectives was to control, if not eliminate, what in England was known as the ‘dispensing’ power. Simply put, the dispensing power — which is much discussed in English constitutional history — was a form of exercise of royal prerogative under which the king could excuse himself or his favored subjects from complying with particular laws enacted by Parliament. As Hamburger explains, today’s administrative agencies, in essence, have resurrected the dispensing power by the way they so often use waivers to grant favored treatment.

“Here is the way Hamburger puts it: After administrators adopt a burdensome rule, they sometimes write letters to favored persons telling them that, notwithstanding the rule, they need not comply. In other words, the return of extralegal legislation has been accompanied by the return of the dispensing power, this time under the rubric of ‘waivers.’ Like dispensations, waivers go far beyond the usual administrative usurpation of legislative or judicial power, for they do not involve lawmaking or adjudication, let alone executive force. On the contrary, they are a fourth power — one carefully not recognized by the Constitution.”

So a way of translating this for you, the dispensing power is a way around Constitution. You write burdensome regulations over an industry or an entity that heretofore is free and unfettered. These burdensome regulations cause angst and hardship for some. Some of them are your friends, but you get hold of your friends and say, “Don’t worry, don’t worry, this for everybody else but you are gonna get a waiver. Apply here.” This is how it happens.

Now, in exchange for this waiver, you’re gonna be loyal to me, and whatever I need from you from here on out. We don’t need Congress to get involved. These waivers are not gonna be debated by the representatives of the people. These waivers are gonna be handed out from on high using power not vested in the Constitution, but nobody’s gonna stop us because they haven’t stopped us up ‘til now.

Now, Comcast happens to be very, very, very tight with Obama. And I just want some of you out there who think that net neutrality is gonna make sure Comcast is made to deliver Netflix with no buffering at 200 megabytes down for eight bucks a month — he-he-he-he-he. Right.

“As the agency gains even more control over various participants in the Internet marketplace, pressures will increase for it to use its dispensing power to grant this or that company (or particular market segment) favored treatment. The commission already has announced it will adopt a so-called ‘good conduct’ rule to assess Internet providers’ practices. Under such an inherently vague standard, the agency necessarily will be granting dispensations to some firms and not others based on the exercise of discretion untethered to any intelligible standard in any law enacted by Congress.”

This is unrivaled power that Obama is demanding via the FCC and the Federal Election Commission, by the way. They’re part of this. So your good behavior as an Internet entity is gonna be under the microscope. They know that they’re going to enact burdensome regulations. They’re doing it on purpose to get concessions of loyalty. They’re happily going to grant waivers. The waivers are not an admission they’ve overreached, just like they weren’t in Obamacare. Many people looked at the waivers, “Man, don’t they understand what they’ve done? Look at all the waivers they have to give, otherwise —” it’s on purpose.

The purpose of the waiver is not to fix a mistake in the law. The purpose of a waiver is not to correct something that somebody got wrong when they put it all together. The purpose of the waiver or the dispensation is to grant most favored status. It is an unrivaled power. Your business depends on certain circumstances existing on the Internet. The new regulations make those circumstances impossible. But, you can get a waiver from those new regulations if you do X, Y, and Z. And it’s up to the grantors of the waiver to determine what you have to do, and you’ll do it, especially if your competitors aren’t granted the waiver.

Remember the story about why in the world did Walmart, of all people, support the Regime on Obamacare? Why did Walmart support the Regime on raising the minimum wage? Because that was the fastest way to hurt Costco. The power of the government helping you and not helping your competitor. And that’s what’s shaping up here.

END TRANSCRIPT

“GOP leadership”

GOP leadership?

The GOP doesn’t have the guts; too many RINOs in leadership.

Now we are on the time honored path to the destruction of good internet service. First the Govt makes up a problem in order to regulate it. The regulations cause new problems, thus we need more regulation. Those regulations cause new problems so the Govt says: “we tried but obviously the market doesn’t work here so we need to take it over completely.” This is just how it happened with health care.

Present GOP "leadership" = not our representatives in Washington but rather our overlords.

2-26-2014 - The Hill: Disgruntled right wing keeps Boehner coup talk alive "Tea Party conservatives failed to oust Speaker John Boehner last month, but they’re threatening to try again if the Ohio Republican caves in the fight against President Obama’s immigration actions.

While there’s not a coordinated effort yet, chatter of another coup attempt has grown louder now that the Senate is moving to pass a funding bill to avert a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) without the immigration riders.

Conservatives on and off Capitol Hill are pressuring Boehner not to relent unless Democrats agree to gut Obama’s executive orders protecting millions of illegal immigrants from deportation.

But Boehner and his allies are concerned that partially closing one of the top national security agencies could do lasting damage to the party.

Some of the 25 Republicans who tried to strip the Speaker’s gavel from Boehner on the House floor in January are having informal discussions about ways they might overthrow him if he brings a clean bill to the floor, according to one conservative lawmaker who voted against Boehner in January.

“I think the political repercussions both for him and the Speakership are going to be pretty substantial,” said another House conservative, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the issue. “He knows that it would be a big political mistake, and he doesn’t want to throw away all of his political capital on this.”

While Democrats would certainly help get the clean bill to Obama’s desk, bringing it up would likely violate the GOP’s informal Hastert Rule, which states that a bill should only receive a vote if a “majority of the majority” supports it.

“If it happened, conservatives would be outraged,” said another conservative Republican who also voted against Boehner last month but said a coup wouldn’t necessarily take place immediately. “It’s a long year. It is only the end of February.”

Ousting a sitting Speaker in the middle of the session is extremely difficult. But after two attempts on his Speakership in as many years, Boehner is on high alert.

He’s reacted cautiously to Senate Republicans’ plan, refusing to say whether he’d even bring a clean DHS bill to the House floor.

And he’s distancing himself from Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), telling rank-and-file members in a meeting Wednesday that he hasn’t spoken to his Senate counterpart in two weeks, even with an agency shutdown just days away. The two met later that day, and aides to the two leaders have been in close contact.

Asked at a news conference Wednesday whether he believed a clean bill could mean the “end of your Speakership,” Boehner dodged the question.

“I’m waiting for the Senate to act. The House has done its job to fund the department and to stop the president’s overreach on immigration,” Boehner said. “Until the Senate does something, we’re in a wait-and-see mode.”

Conservatives probably had their best shots at taking out Boehner at the beginning of the past two Congresses. But during the surprise coup in January 2013, some members backed out at the last minute, leaving dissidents shy of the number needed to force a second ballot.

In January, a record 25 Republicans voted against the GOP leader, but they, too, fell short of denying Boehner another term.

The mechanics of ousting a sitting Speaker in the middle of a legislative session aren’t clear. Neither the Constitution nor House rules spell out exactly how a Speaker can be removed.

The last time it was tried was against Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) in 1997. The effort faltered before it even got off the ground, doing severe political damage to the party and many of the key players involved.

Boehner, then the House GOP Conference chairman, has disputed reports of his involvement in the 1997 coup, but he lost his No. 4 leadership job just a year later.

“It’s incredibly difficult and it’s very undesirable,” conservative Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.), who took part in the bungled Gingrich coup, said of the process of deposing a sitting Speaker. Salmon added, however, that he wasn’t aware of any discussions now about trying to remove Boehner.

One option that the current conservative rebels have studied is presenting a privileged resolution on the floor calling on the Speaker to vacate the chair. “I’ve explored it fully,” said one conservative.

But any Boehner ally could quickly make a motion to table or kill the resolution with a simple majority, said Donald R. Wolfensberger, the director of the Congress Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Wolfensberger served as the staff director of the Rules Committee when Gingrich was Speaker.

Infuriated Republicans could also hold a vote of no confidence in Boehner in a closed-door conference meeting. It would be “less challenging but it would have the same effect,” Wolfensberger said.

Rep. John Fleming (R-La.) warned that if Boehner were to put a clean DHS funding bill on the floor, the backlash from the right could be harsher than what the Speaker faced after moving the “cromnibus” appropriations bill in December. Conservatives at the time were outraged that the government-wide funding bill didn’t include provisions to block Obama’s immigration moves.

“Our base would be extremely angry,” Fleming said. “So this is very, very delicate territory for our leadership.”

Fleming was one of 216 Republicans who voted last month to give Boehner another two years. But the Louisiana congressman said he had received more calls urging him to vote against Boehner than when he voted against ObamaCare in 2010.

“So there was a huge swell, huge spike of calls. And that all goes back to the cromnibus,” he said. “To cave at this point, on this bill … I think our leadership sees real danger in doing that.”

RE :”Without statutory protection, the net neutrality guarantees can be swept away in the next presidential election,” he added, assuming a Republican wins the White House in 2016 and nominates FCC commissioners opposed to the new rules.....”

There ya go, add this to the long list of things the GOP can end if they win the WH.

Without Net Neutrality, carriers could decide to relegate more available bit-rate to MSNBC at the expense of Free Republic. The government is saying that it should be equal, that regardless of whether or not you go to Free Republic or MSNBC, you should have the same loading speeds.

I have to agree with the government here.

I agree with Net Neutrality. We all pay for bandwith equally anyway.

“GOP leadership” is progressives that have hijacked conservative votes to maintain control of the “the party of smaller government” in the hands of progressives. Doesn’t cost them a dime to keep the gravy train rolling along to the tune of the left, while they wring their hands pleading for our donations to the GOP.

If only that was all there was to it...

Sooner or later, the house of cards will come down. It’s only a matter of time.

Yes we’ll be hurt by it when it does crash but we’re the ones already being hurt by it. I believe it will have less impact on most of us because we’re the ones already carrying the load.

They are no longer the RINOS, we are. The majority of elected and powerful GOP players are left-leaning moderates. They want the same thing as the Democrats, and are becoming more open about it.

Have you read the 300+ pages of regulations? You should post them on the internet if you have. Otherwise I doubt what you think will be the simplistic outcome.

“GOP leadership MUST BLOCK it. “

Ha! Ha! Ha!!!!

Good one.

If you like your freedom of speech, you will be able to keep your freedom of speech. Period.

If you like your internet, you will be able to keep your internet. Period.

No one will take them away. No matter what.

Implicit in Boucher’s statement is the admission that there is no statutory authority for the FCC’s action.

“GOP leadership”

GOP leadership?

LMAO. Sadly.

You are kidding, right?

Flemming said he got more calls urging him to vote against Boner than he did on obamacare. Yet he still voted for Boner. Tells me he doesn’t care what his constituents want.

They say they want to regulate the internet like a common utility. Look at how they regulate cable? Comcast owns them.