Oh for crying out loud. For all that Washington talks tough about getting Americans access to high speed Internet, the “supercommittee” wants to tax new spectrum licensees. That’s just what we need: make it more expensive to build out America’s wireless infrastructure in order to pay for the President and his Cabinet to hand out money to their friends and political supporters. Isn’t that special? Here’s a joint letter against it from a number of industry groups.
Then you’ve got Dick Blumenthal, Al Franken, and Amy Klobuchar, leading the charge for the Democrat-controlled Senate that hasn’t passed a budget in 900 days, but wants to get government involved on what can or can’t be called 4G wireless Internet. Great prioritization here.
Spectrum’s important, though. Merely having access to a solid Internet connection lets Americans ave lots of money every year. Not just from being able to buy online, but also from gathering information, and simply from being able to stay at home. IIA did the math and American families each can save thousands of dollars a year online. And we’re busy regulating, taxing, and harassing firms like Google and AT&T, instead of getting government out of the way of investment. Yes, I’m frustrated.
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Sorry if you’ve been missing Tech at Night this week. Monday I just ran out of time as I had to do a whole bunch of housekeeping*, and tonight I’m running late. So let’s go.
In classic Tech at Night style, let’s talk about the FCC. They took forever to get the ball rolling on Net Neutrality, but it’s coming now and it’s a vehicle for censorship, says Seton Motley. As he says, “As every place we get our news and information continue their rapid migration to the Internet, Net Neutrality will lord larger and larger over the free market – and our free speech. Which is why we must rid ourselves of it as rapidly as possible.”
More fuel for the FCC reform fire: Free State Foundation points out the FCC has known for years of its problems with the intercarrier compensation system, which is how money changes hands when phone calls are carried across different private phone networks. They knew in 2001. That’s a long time coming. Though if they do tackle it now, we need to watch out for the Universal Service Fund becoming an Internet Tax.
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Even as Mary Bono Mack and Republicans fiddle with the pointless SAFE Data act that won’t actually do anything to prevent or even to deter online crime, the Internet burns with a string of further attacks. The Senate was hit twice, and the CIA was hit as well.
I thought we were the party that likes to solve crime by putting the criminals in jail? Why don’t we drop this reporting theater and get back to catching criminals blackmailing the US government and private enterprise?
Seriously? We want to jail kids who upload music to YouTube, and create a Communist China-style Internet censorship blacklist, but we’re blaming the victims of online attacks?
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The United States of America keeps the United Nations afloat. In 2009 we were assessed 22% of the budget of the UN, and paid out slightly under 24% of what was collected, thanks to the Tax Equalization Fund system*. So in practice we paid about a quarter of the UN budget. Without us, the UN has to do some serious belt tightening.
So if we’re going to keep alive the UN as we know it, spending $598,292,101 in a direct assessment and surely more in other expenses, we’d best make sure we’re getting our money’s worth. The Obama deficit has gone through the roof and we simply cannot afford frivolous luxuries anymore. If the UN is not achieving its mission, it’s time we stopped paying for it.
This month I believe the UN has finally crossed the threshold of uselessness, and it’s time we defund it.
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