Foundation

They do. Oh boy do they ever want to censor the Internet. Why else would the FCC take the radical step of deem-and-pass Title II reclassification of ISPs to regulate them like phone companies? It’s because the endgame of Net Neutrality is total control.

Today I came across two slipups that give up the game, despite the FCC’s promises of “forbearance” and the greater left’s assurances that the War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength, and Regulation is Liberty.

Having laid the groundwork for price controls and content censorship on the Internet in America, the FCC desperately needs to justify their reasoning for the Title II deem-and-pass reclassification of ISPs.

So, they’re just going to start lying about stuff. The latest lie apparently is that the wireless market isn’t competitive. Here’s why that’s a lie. Wireless market leader Verizon only has 31% of the market. AT&T/Cingular is at 25%. Sprint and T-Mobile are tied at 12.1% each. Add it all up and there’s a whole 19.8% not even covered by the national market leaders.

Consider this: one fifth of the market is completely unconsolidated and running wild in the weeds of the small companies nobody’s ever heard of. To me that’s the mark of free and open competition, especially when the number porting rules already make it very, very easy to switch from one provider to another.

The wireless market is wide open. The last thing we need is the boot of the FCC to come down on its neck.

Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com originally blew the lid off of White House Deputy CTO’s secret lobbying for Google from within the White House. He’s been vindicated, and can claim a partial scalp, for McLaughlin now receiving a reprimand for this misbehavior.

It’s now undeniably on the record that the former Google employee was abusing his White House position. What we don’t know are the depths he sunk to. Fortunately Rep. Darrell Issa, the man who brought down Gray Davis, is on the case to probe further.

P.S. We’ll be calling him Chairman Issa if we make sure to buckle down, give to the NRCC through the conservative-friendly Reverse the Vote campaign, and win in November.

This is going to be short and sweet. Very sweet.

Remember when I said this?

As if it wasn’t bad enough that Google is trying to ram through Net Neutrality, to give government control over every Internet-connected computer network in the country (which is almost all of them, these days). But now Google is scanning your home networks directly.

I was assured that I was being “paranoid,” that nothing actually private was being recorded, and that Google could be trusted to be reasonable on this.

Oops, I told you so.

Apologies for the pop psych buzzword, but that’s what comes to mind when I see the well-funded Think Progress accusing some MBA student activists of being a corporate conspiracy.

Sorry guys, but the No Net Brutality movement is just a group of six students who spent about $175 making their own website. Quoth CNet:

“The Think Progress article is hilarious,” David MacLean, the Canadian member of the six-person student team from four different continents, told CNET on Wednesday. “We’ve had a really good laugh in the last day over this. This is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.”

MacLean added: “It was a class project done at the Atlas think tank MBA program. We came up with the concept in a few days.” Part of Atlas’ curriculum on how to manage think tanks required creating the campaign on a $100 budget and “the goal was to make it launch,” said MacLean, who lives in Alberta.

Now I know there are no lefty grassroots movements (witness the failure of the Coffee Party idea), but rather everything that happens comes from Foundation and Soros money, but you guys shouldn’t assume that of us. Thanks though for revealing yourselves in your baseless accusations.

Americans for Prosperity, one of the Beltway area groups that really “gets it,” has come out hard against Net Neutrality and Title II classification of ISPs. They’re actually running television ads on the matter.

What’s most interesting to me though is that their ad has three different versions. There’s the generic one above, but their YouTube Channel also shows up with two specialized ones: one for Hawaii and one for Pennsylvania. What do those states have in common? The one thing that springs to my mind is the pair of special House elections featuring Charles Djou in Hawaii and Tim Burns in Pennsylvania.

Objective analysts are beginning to weigh in on the consequences of the FCC’s Net Neutrality-driven actions against the Internet. Guess what: they’re saying ISPs are looking worse off for it. Says Barron’s:

Bernstein Research analyst Craig Moffett, a long-time bull on the cable sector, this morning turned cautious on the group, downgrading Comcast (CMCSA), Cablevision (CVC) and Time Warner Cable (TWC) to Market Perform from Outperform.

How exactly is FCC Title II Regulation of ISPs going to improve competition and make things better for the little guy when it’s going to be harder for ISPs to make a profit, and therefore harder for new ISPs even to enter the market to begin with?

Because they were never for the little guy to begin with. Ever. The Obama administration never has and never will do anything but punish digital libertarians, and the rest of us are along for the punishing ride. Elections have consequences, after all.

When I said that Free Press, the fringe neo-Marxist organization pushing Net Neutrality, has as an end goal the nationalization of the mass media in America, I suspect some people thought I was exaggerating the threat. But look at this Media Bistro report about senior FCC advisor Steve Waldman:

On Monday night the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) senior advisor to the chairman Steve Waldman tried out the agency’s “Reboot” message … One area that came up as a possibility is the expansion of public media: radio, TV, and otherwise. Could Waldman be hinting at a government subsidized, local market version of ProPublica to fill in the gap? He’s testing the message.

This is what a push for state run media looks like, folks. All coming from Free Press Executive Director Josh Silver, via TV News Check:

So let’s not be delusional and pretend that the commercial sector is providing the information and the quality educational and cultural fare that this democracy requires.

Soon you will have a “right” to state run media just as you have a “right” to Obamacare, if they get their way.

I’ve been ill but please bear with me. Today brought some huge news for anyone who conducts business or pleasure on the Internet: The FCC has announced its plans to deem and pass Net Neutrality. Specifically, The FCC will defy a court order to stop regulating the Internet by nonsensically deeming the Internet not to be an information service, and regulate it under Title II of the Communications Act.

That sounds mild but it has disastrous consequences.