Chuck DeVore was a guest on Laura Ingraham’s radio program on Friday. She seems supportive of him in his primary fight against Carly Fiorina, in addition to in the general against Barbara Boxer.
Conservatives across the country are starting to see that Chuck DeVore is the choice for California. He’s a fighter who’s right on the issues and holds are best chance of winning.
The time is coming that the left is going to begin its drive for Single Payer Internet, and so the time has come for us to fight back. Finland is gradually nationalizing the Internet and declaring use of other people’s Internet hardware a “right,” and the left is cheering. Obama’s “Internet Czar” does not hide the left’s hopes for an end to freedom and markets for Internet service.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, President Barack Obama, and the rest of the radical left want to use the Net Neutrality movement as the crisis that gives cover to sweeping big government action, allowing the FCC to pick winners and losers and dictate to private individuals and firms how their private property must be run, putting government bureaucrats in charge of the Internet.
The dangers of the administration’s Net Neutrality plans are not theoretical:
Innovation will suffer, and America will no longer house the leading edge of the Internet technology. Wealth will be redistributed, as cash-rich, massive market valued Internet firms will bully and get a free ride on capital-intensive, smaller market valued telecommunications firms. Government will be deeply entrenched and be a costly burden to anyone who conducts business or pleasure on the Internet. One of the drivers of American economic growth will be crippled in a time when we most need new jobs.
Last, FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell warns of Internet censorship to come as Genachowski’s sweeping regulations would provide the basis for an Internet “Fairness Doctrine.” He sees what’s going on at the FCC and knows what it is capable of. Some conservatives have signed onto radical socialist groups like Save the Internet because they were led to believe that telecoms would censor them, when in fact they’ve jumped from the frying pan of big corporations to the fire of big government censorship. One can always get a new ISP in a competitive market if a particular firm becomes anti-Christian, anti-2nd Amendment, or anti-Republican in general. Choosing a new government is less practical.
Therefore, now is the time to act. We must tell the FCC to get its hands off of the Internet, allow competition to rule, and to protect the Internet from any threats to our first amendment rights. Everywhere government has taken an active role as Internet Nanny, such as in Australia or the People’s Republic of China, freedom and prosperity have suffered.
Please, Contact the FCC. Let’s flood the system letting them know our opposition to their plans. Google thinks we’ll believe their Orwellian formulation that an Internet under greater regulation will be more open. We know better. Let’s speak up.
20 House members are calling for the FCC to regulate Google Voice, in a parallel of similar calls for the FCC to regulate ISPs.
I’m going to go make some popcorn, because it’s going to be a blast as Google shreds the principles of non-discrimination and transparency when they apply to itself, but then promotes them when they apply to others.
Visit Blueshelled to see ways to get a free travel speaker.
Today was ‘Spend as much time with the nephew as I can’ day, so proper posts on these weren’t going to happen:
Don’t just take my word for it that the ‘Net Neutrality’ – as being pushed by the FCC Chairman and the left – would be bad. CMU Professor David Farber agrees and says Chairman Genachowski’s ideas would harm innovation. If government bureaucrats can dictate how we run our networks, then we won’t be able to innovate in how we run our networks, and everyone suffers in the long run. America will fall behind in Internet technology.
The Heartland Institute has more on Google hiring a former Free Press and current Senate staffer as its head of lobbying. Heartland is also bearing direct attacks attempting to shout it down. The left is not open to debate on this. They will make personal attacks on anyone who disagrees. We, in turn, must stop them.
I’m a conservative, so I have no problem with anyone using their rights to enter the public discourse, and I’m not allergic to corporations. So I when I call the latest from Google “astroturf”, I’m saying it purely to illustrate the hypocrisy of the left, because by their standard Google is becoming quite an installer of the fake grass roots.
I find it entirely unfair that the left gets to try to shout down our side while theirs goes entirely unnoticed. If we don’t at least speak up, then the left’s arguments might get some traction.
So let’s watch carefully. Google has hired Frannie Wellings, the telecommuniations advisor to Senator Byron Dorgan, North Dakota Democrat. Sounds boring, but dig deeper. Dorgan was the author and sponsor of the Senate’s Net Neutrality bill in 2007. Is Google buying access? That’s what the left would say if the parties were reversed.
They’d especially say that when the job that Wellings is taking was just created. She is to be Google’s “federal policy outreach manager.” In other words, she’s going to run Google’s lobbying operations in Washington. Which means either she or people accountable to her are going to be going right back into Dorgan’s office.
Further, before taking the job with Dorgan, Wellings worked at… yup, Free Press, the special interest group that founded and runs Save the Internet.
What a coincidence it is that Google, Save the Internet, and a Democrat Politican are linked like this! Free Press and Google must justify this if they are to continue their shameless attacks on our side, instead of arguing with facts and logic about the benefits and disadvantages of their goal: aggressive regulation of the Internet, centered on an FCC picking winners and losers in private network policy disputes.
Taking a cue from Twitter:
- Bob Uecker’s Celebrity Tic Tac Toe
- Yoshi Touch and get sued for Sexual Harassment
- Lego Fail Safe
- Rock Band: The Wiggles
- Call of Duty 8: Malibu Coast Guard
- Mavis Beacon Teaches Shaking Your Wii
- Tom Clancy’s Economic Sanctions Task Force Zeta
Following up on my earlier piece on Save The Internet, it’s clear that its founder Free Press has been in bed with Google for a while.
If corporate involvement makes an effort ‘astroturf’, then it’s laughable even to consider the notion that Save The Internet isn’t as turfy as the Metrodome.
So I’m replacing my big, old fashioned home server with a simple little router device, moving all the stuff I’m hosting here offsite to ThePlanet.
Naturally I’m being very, very picky about what router I get. I’m starting with Linksys since that’s what my whole network is right now, Ethernet and 802.11g. But their routers are advertising as features the uses of 3DES and SHA algorithms. This is disturbing because the former is slow and was superseded years ago by the AES version of the Rijndael cipher, while the latter has been compromised.
It will be nice to give up the manually-assigned static IPs I’ve been using forever, in this age where every single video game and gadget wants an IP address these days. I’ll take the DHCP, I’ll take the VPN, but I’d hate to lay down good money on the new hotness for my home network, only to rely on old and busted cryptography!
The left is at it again. They know that in a straight-up battle of ideas, their socialist perversion of Net Neutrality could never win out. Nobody but the most blindly partisan supporters of Barack Obama wants a government takeover of the Internet, because everybody knows that when government takes something over, freedom in it tends to die.
That is why Save The Internet is resorting to dishonest smear campaigns in an attempt to shout down and discredit their opponents. They want to win by driving all opposition off the field, turning this debate into the Internet equivalent of the streets of Berlin in Weimar Germany. They must not get away with it.
Save the Internet is a diverse coalition of mostly radical socialist groups like SEIU, ACLU, PIRG, select AFSCME locals, PETA, Democrat Underground, MoveOn.org, AfterDowningStreet.org, and Common Cause, but also a number of corporations and ISPs both foreign and domestic, and even foreign interest groups. There are some mistaken right-wingers and libertarians in there like Glenn Reynolds, the Christian Coalition, and the Gun Owners of America. I would urge them to leave, because the movement has been hijacked, ladies and gentlemen. You are now being used to promote a radical left wing movement.
Their website is full of blatant lies. They claim that Net Neutrality would not be a new regulation, when in fact the whole point of the push is to get new regulations in place backed by the so-called Internet Freedom Preservation Act currently in the House. Obama’s FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski also made that much plain in a recent speech, that he wants the FCC to be an active, aggressive force on the Internet, picking winners and losers in private network policy disputes.
Further, they blatantly lie about who’s on their side, claiming that big corporations are only on the side against Net Neutrality. And while it’s true that the socialist vandals of Save the Internet want total state control over the multi-billion dollar private investments made on the Internet (including Two billion or more that AT&T, Verizon, and others will spend deploying LTE and WiMax high-speed wireless Internet), the fact is there are dozens of corporations part of their coalition, and by their own admission some titans of the Internet are on their side. “Amazon.com, EBay, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Facebook, Skype, and Yahoo” are all on their side. Some of those are small companies, but Intel and Microsoft are members of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Microsoft’s market capitalization stands at over 220 billion dollars today, and Intel’s at half that, $106 billion. The big, bad AT&T itself is only worth $1.2 billion, or about half of one percent of Microsoft. Google, Amazon, and EBay are also featured in the Fortune 500. You cannot tell me only side has the big bucks in this fight for state control over the Internet.
But despite such blatant falsehood, Save the Internet presses on to accuse its opposition of being ‘astroturf,’ that is, fake grassroots involvement. Now I would love for someone to accuse me of that, because I and anyone familiar with my financial situation would never stop laughing. Of course, they don’t mention the Open Internet Coalition backed by the above Internet titans, oh no. Only opponents like Broadband for America, a group promoting greater Internet access across America, gets that tag. I mean sure, when I think ‘corporate astroturf’, I think of BfA members like the National Black Chamber of Commerce, Child Safety Task Force, Hispanic Leadership Fund, the Livestock Marketing association, and the Jewish Energy Project. That’s just the corporate Axis of Evil right there, Save the Internet wants you to think.
I do disagree with some of its members, notably AT&T which wants to exclude its wireless Internet from the same rules that wired Internet providers would have to play by. This even though the FCC severely limits competition with its wireless services, and grants legal protection to its broadcasts from interference.
LTE and WiMax are most likely a glimpse of the future of last mile Internet into American homes. And while I don’t think its government-backed (by FCC or by franchise monopoly) providers should be able to set network policies to harm competitors such as Skype or YouTube, I think competition in that field is vital to our well being. The last thing we need is competition-killing regulation of every router and wire in America, increasing the costs of business high enough that only the richest companies can compete, and paving the way to the Socialist dream of Single Payer Internet in America.
So we all need to look hard at just who is pushing this agenda, and note that every time they point a finger, three fingers are pointing back at themselves.