Posted on 10/20/2009 4:09:02 PM PDT by yoe
Advocates of imposing "network neutrality" say it's necessary to ensure a "free" and "open" Internet and rescue the public from nefarious corporations that "control" technology.
Few proposals in Washington have been sold employing such deceptive language -- and that's saying something. But few public policy ideas can boast the unashamedly socialist pedigree of net neutrality.
The modern Internet is a creation of the free market, which has brought about a revolution in communication, free speech, education, and commerce. New Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski apparently doesn't like that. He stated last month the way Internet service providers manage their networks -- in response to millions of individual consumer choices -- is not sufficiently "fair," "open" or "free."
The chairman's remedy is to claim for the FCC the power to decide how every bit of data is transferred from the Web to every personal computer and handheld device in the nation. This is exactly what the radical founders of the net neutrality movement had in mind.
The concept can be traced to an iconoclastic figure, Richard Stallman, a self-described software freedom activist who introduced the term "copyleft" in the mid-1980s. In his 2002 essay "Free Software, Free Society," Stallman fiercely attacks the idea that intellectual property rights are one of the keystones of individual liberty, so important that patents and copyrights are affirmatively protected in the body of the Constitution.
According to Stallman, "we are not required to agree with the Constitution or the Supreme Court. [At one time, they both condoned slavery.]" Like slavery, he says, copyright law is "a radical right-wing assumption rather than a traditionally recognized one." Rebuking those who might find a Marxist flavor in his call for a "digital commons," Stallman turns the tables, writing: "If we are to judge views by their resemblance to Russian Communism, it is the software owners who are the Communists."
Eben Moglen's 2003 treatise The dotCommunist Manifesto is more honest about the thinking behind net neutrality -- it's sprinkled throughout with the language of communism's great and bloody revolutionaries. The people must "struggle" to "wrest from the bourgeoisie, by degrees, the shared patrimony of humankind" that has been "stolen from us under the guise of 'intellectual property.' "
How does one bring this about? The professor of law and legal history at Columbia University would start with the "abolition of all forms of private property in ideas."
Most bold and radical of the neutralists is Robert W. McChesney, founder of Free Press -- the leading advocacy group in Washington pushing for net neutrality. In an August interview with a Canadian Marxist online publication called the Bullet, McChesney rejoices that net neutrality can finally bring about the Marxist "revolution."
"At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies," McChesney said. "We are not at that point yet. But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control."
He's right: Net neutrality divests control over the Internet from the private sector to the government. And in typical Marxist fashion, innocuous words -- the language of neutralism and liberty -- cloak an agenda that would crush freedom.
That's the agenda President Obama's FCC is pushing.
James G. Lakely is co-director of the Center on the Digital Economy for the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank. His policy study, "Neutralism: The Strange Philosophy Behind the Movement for Net Neutrality," can be found at www.heartland.org.
Please don’t “reply” to me anymore. You’re not even reading my posts. I don’t admit anything about “franchise monopolies.” You haven’t the slightest idea of what you’re writing.
Tweets.
Save me.
People whose memories go back to the day before yesterday are lecturing me about this despicable Commie's "license agreement."
Nice come back very impressed!
Copyright has been extended since 1978: http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf
Under the law in effect before 1978, copyright was secured
either on the date a work was published with a copyright
notice or on the date of registration if the work was reg
istered in unpublished form. In either case, the copyright
endured for a first term of 28 years from the date it was
secured. During the last (28th) year of the first term, the
copyright was eligible for renewal. The Copyright Act of 1976
extended the renewal term from 28 to 47 years for copy
rights that were subsisting on January 1, 1978, or for pre1978
copyrights restored under the Uruguay Round Agreements
Act (URAA), making these works eligible for a total term of
protection of 75 years. Public Law 105298, enacted on Octo
ber 27, 1998, further extended the renewal term of copyrights
still subsisting on that date by an additional 20 years, provid
ing for a renewal term of 67 years and a total term of protec
tion of 95 years.
If Comcast started their own for-profit web forum, and decided to make it more difficult for me to access Free Republic over my Comcast broadband connection, would that simply be the “free market” at work?
“Save me”
You do admit, then, that you are in trouble.
I admit that anybody defending the FSF, Stallman, or the GNU GPL doesn't belong on FR.
I’m not going anywhere. Your move!
No. 124 Neutralism: The Strange Philosophy Behind the Movement for Net Neutrality
Policy Studies > 2009
Info Technology > Internet
Info Technology > Network Neutrality
Telecom > Network Neutrality (See Info Tech)
Written By: James G. Lakely
Published In: Policy Studies > 2009
Publication date: 10/05/2009
Publisher: The Heartland Institute
The election of Barack Obama as president ushered in a new era of regulatory zeal in Washington, with both Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) determined to solve alleged problems with access to and management of the Internet. Advocates of “network neutrality” have the federal government’s ear and seem closer than at times past to achieving their goal of greater government control over the Internet. Their success would change the online experience of every American.
This study examines the philosophy that underlies the movement for network neutrality, which telecom expert Scott Cleland has dubbed “neutralism.” Neutralism stands in striking contrast to the innocuous-sounding Internet “freedom” its advocates call for. Understanding neutralism helps explain why network neutrality would have consequences that are quite the opposite of what its proponents claim. Not all advocates of network neutrality believe in neutralism, and some aren’t even aware that the policy arose from such a strange philosophy. One purpose of this paper is to inform those neutrality advocates of the radical agenda they have unwittingly bought into.
http://www.heartland.org/publications/policy%20studies/article/26061/
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