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The FCC voted today on a plan that gives the Federal government full control over the Internet. The plan passed by a 3-2 margin. A press release posted immediately after the meeting stated, in part, “Under the new rules, the Commission can investigate possible instances of discrimination of broadband access, work with companies to solve problems, facilitate mediation, and, when necessary, penalize companies for violating the rules. The FCC will review consumer complaints of digital discrimination of access through an improved consumer complaint portal and staff will meet monthly to assess trends in complaint patterns. Finally, the Commission adopted model...

Including the line ‘China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong’ discredits any piece of writing that discusses civil liberties and the rule of law. My former law professor Jack Goldsmith, now at Harvard Law School, and Andrew Keane Woods of the University of Arizona Law School, have a remarkable article in The Atlantic that defends technology companies’ surveillance and speech controls regarding coronavirus information. “Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet,” they write, “and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is...

The White House mocked GOP nominee Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz for trying to prevent the Commerce Department from transferring technical oversight of the Internet to an international body. "It doesn't withstand scrutiny," President Obama's spokesman Josh Earnest said on Thursday. "It also strikes me as a curious position for a self-described small government conservative to shut down the government to ensure that the federal government can continue to control the Internet," Earnest said of Cruz. "It doesn't make any sense." Cruz is trying to stop the multi-year transition that will leave the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and...

n a speech today in South Korea, Secretary of State John Kerry said that the Internet "needs rules to be able to flourish and work properly." This, according to Kerry, is necessary even for "a technology founded on freedom." Speaking on behalf of the Obama administration, Kerry said that Internet policy is "a key component of our foreign policy." Kerry made his remarks in the context of talking about how international law is applicable to the Internet. "As I’ve mentioned, the basic rules of international law apply in cyberspace. Acts of aggression are not permissible. And countries that are hurt...

The head of the nonprofit group that oversees the world's Internet addresses expressed confidence Thursday that it would be privatized and out of US government control by year's end. Fadi Chehade's comments came despite criticism in the US Congress, where some lawmakers have resisted the plan to end Washington's key management role in the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

Obama Exploits the Ignorance of Young People to Seize Control of the Internet BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: On Thursday the FCC is gonna vote on net neutrality. I have some people sending me e-mail, asking me what it is. I'll sum it up as best I can for you, but what is going to happen Thursday is a direct result of Obama hijacking the effort -- essentially, let me just put it to you this way. Do you own a website, do you operate a website? If Obama gets his way, you're gonna have to get a license for it just...

"I just Googled “America showtimes” and got one hit towards the bottom which redirects you to a different site that makes you have to click another couple times before finding showtimes. For pretty much every other single movie you google the title and showtimes and the first hit is showtimes at the theaters nearest you."

Paul Klane, a father of two, was headhunted to be a part of the elite group that would be able to reboot the internet in case of a major cybersecurity crisis. And the man’s wide eyes indicates that he is keeping careful watch over his special key — that he happens to store in a plastic bag. “Each of the 14 primary keyholders owns a traditional metal key to a safety deposit box, which in turn contains a smartcard, which in turn activates a machine that creates a new master key,” reports The Guardian. The master key is used to...

The decision was announced nonchalantly, in trademark Washington fashion on a Friday afternoon: The U.S. government will cede its last bit of control over the Internet. The government has maintained that influence through contracts with the organization that administers the Internet, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. But a Commerce Department agency announced Friday that it would relinquish control over ICANN, presumably when its contract expires in September 2015. The office said it wants the group to next convene "global stakeholders" to come up with a transition plan -- a transition...

The United States is planning to give up its last remaining authority over the technical management of the Internet.The Commerce Department announced Friday that it will give the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), an international nonprofit group, control over the database of names and addresses that allows computers around the world to connect to each other.Administration officials say U.S. authority over the Internet address system was always intended to be temporary and that ultimate power should rest with the "global Internet community." But some fear that the Obama administration is opening the door to an Internet takeover...

Exposing the UN's International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Youtube:Should the United Nations be Given the Power to Control the Internet? Related Articles: UN to Seek Internet Kill Switch Next Month, Documents Show 15 November 2012 - The United Nations is drafting a plan to give a little-known UN agency control over the online world, including an Internet "kill switch."Secret UN Document Lays Out Plan to Seize Control of Internet16 November 2012 - A draft proposal of a document by the International Telecommunications Union lays out a plan for greater government control of the Internet.U.S. Reps. Introduce Resolution to Bar UN...

Leo Tolstoy once said, “Imagine Genghis Khan with a telephone.” Imagine Genghis Khan, or a gaggle of Genghis Khans, running the Internet, and you have a sense of the ideas that will be percolating in Dubai at the World Conference on International Telecommunications in December. Delegates from 120 countries will gather under the auspices of the United Nations to consider a plan to take administrative control of the Internet away from the United States and hand it over to an international body run by the UN. In short, governance of cyberspace will pass from the country that has kept it...

Next week the United Nations' International Telecommunications Union will meet in Dubai to figure out how to control the Internet. Representatives from 193 nations will attend the nearly two week long meeting, according to news reports. "Next week the ITU holds a negotiating conference in Dubai, and past months have brought many leaks of proposals for a new treaty. U.S. congressional resolutions and much of the commentary, including in this column, have focused on proposals by authoritarian governments to censor the Internet. Just as objectionable are proposals that ignore how the Internet works, threatening its smooth and open operations," reports...

Plans for tighter EU rules on Internet service providers have been pushed back to 2013 after the European Commission this week launched a public consultation lasting until mid-October. The EU executive is seeking information about whether service providers manipulate online traffic management to promote their own products, and give web users sufficient power to easily switch operators, as part of its response to the "net neutrality" debate. The move comes weeks after BEREC, the pan-European group of national Internet regulators, published a report claiming that between 20 and 50 percent of Internet providers in Europe use software to block or...

Amnesty Intentional, Oxfam, Reporters without Borders as well as internet rights groups and the Council of Europe all spoke out against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) at a European Parliament hearing on Wednesday (11 April). "The vision set out by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is at stake," warned Marianne Mollmann, senior policy advisor of the London-based organization human rights group Amnesty International. Mollmann said the trade agreement threatens the right to the freedom of expression, the right to health, the right to due process and fair trial, and the right of an author to benefit from the protection...

This is one bowl of alphabet soup that’ll make you sick. Before the dust has even temporarily settled on SOPA and PIPA, the House and Senate anti-Internet-piracy laws that stalled in Congress last week under intense public pressure, the White House is at it again. This time it’s the ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) treaty. And, according to Constitutionalist attorney Gary Kreep, President of the United States Justice Foundation (USJF), the threat against American free speech is even greater. Unlike the House and Senate bills, ACTA is an international treaty that has been developed without Congress, serves New World Order interests...

Now that Obama Information Czar Cass Sunstein is making spoon-fed government propaganda mandatory on political websites, Canada Free Press (CFP) is introducing balancingtherightmessage.com. Forcibly including government propaganda on political blogs gave us the idea for balancingtherightmessage.com, a dumping ground for the right to do the same thing to the left.

...While the FCC waits for a federal appeals court ruling in a Web traffic case that could decide what authority it has for regulating the Internet, it's sifting through public comments on its attempt to regulate Internet service providers. So it's possible that with everything going on, it has missed the dust-up in which Google is threatening to quit China if Beijing continues to insist on Web censorship...

One of the nice things about internet bulletin boards is the anonymity of each poster. Of course it isn’t perfect since the board owner has enough information to positively identify everyone and TPTB can (and probably will) demand that data whenever they choose. In the meantime there is one way our paranoia can be used against us. We all swear that our “line in the sand” is the confiscation of our guns. We say that if and when it happens we will get the word out on the internet and thus mobilize thousands of patriots. Good idea. But what if...

During the opening ceremony of the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis on Wednesday, delegates from across the globe were amazed when the Swiss president, Samuel Schmid, directly criticised Tunisia for its policy of restricting free speech. "It is, quite frankly, unacceptable for the United Nations to continue to include among its members states which imprison citizens for the sole reason that they have criticised their government on the internet or in the media," he said.