More Net Neutrality! With the oral arguments having happened, people are chewing on what happened. Some are confident the FCC will lose, which is unsurprising since they’ve lost on this before. Hence this title, Net Neutrality Returns – As Farce.
We need an FCC that will stop just trying to take power and instead will adapt to rapidly-changing technology in a smart and humble way. From what I’m hearing, Michael O’Rielly is a good choice for that, though of course I have no high hopes for Tom Wheeler.
Though apparently it’s not just FCC that’s terrible about this stuff. SEC writes regulations it can’t even follow itself, Darrell Issa points out.
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More proof people don’t care about privacy: Google announces a service is ending, and the competitor I use to prepare Tech at Night becomes flooded to the point of unusability Wednesday night. People just don’t care what Google is doing.
The Street View WiSpy scandal didn’t scare people off, even as Texas hits Google for those offenses. Glass excites them. The shift toward human biases doesn’t raise questions. People love Google’s services, and privacy doesn’t enter into the equation. So keep regulation out.
Make sure you catch my recent RedState post on Aaron Swartz, and how the blame casting against his prosecutor is not only unfair, it’s wrong.
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Lieberman-Collins is in trouble! There is apparently some misinformation going around. I’ve seen people claiming that gun control is in the bill, when it’s just an amendment possibly to be added, along with an anti-Obamacare amendment going around. Further, The Hill posted and pulled a story saying Harry Reid postponed the Cybersecurity Act.
But it looks like I was right to respect Republican attempts to modify the bill, because it’s going as it should, according to reports.
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Senate Republicans have decided to take Harry Reid at his word that Republicans will have the opportunity to amend the Lieberman-Collins cybersecurity bill. So, many Republicans voted for advancing the bill, which passed 84-11.
And oh boy it needs amending. Who are you going to believe? For it is Barack Obama. Against have been Kay Bailey Hutchison, John McCain, Marco Rubio, Ron Johnson, Heritage, and IBM.
Privacy is a red herring. The problems are in the mandates and power grabs. So if this bill isn’t effectively amended into SECURE IT, they must vote no on passage.
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Having abandoned the seemingly-endless series of patent lawsuits in the new America Invents Act era, Tech at Night will be quick tonight. Google allegedly knew about the Wi-Spy Street View snooping for two years before ending it. Oops. No wonder FCC claims Google obstructed government investigations into the program.
Gotta love the Media Marxists: FCC ventures into campaign finance chilling effects regulation, and they claim it doesn’t go too far enough! Further, when Net Neutrality regulations force Hulu to adopt new business models, they also flip out. Never mind it’s their fault Hulu can’t simply make deals with firms like Comcast.
And finally, the Barack Obama/George Soros-led attempts to use CISPA as a distraction from Lieberman-Collins are not entirely successful, as some like Microsoft refuse to be bullied from their pro-CISPA positions.
How harmless is CISPA? Despite irrational attacks by association, because we’re apparently supposed to think Republican bills bad, even though the Democrats in the Senate had kept PROTECT IP alive months before Lamar Smith brought SOPA to committee, CISPA has already has been modified to remove mention of copyright infringement. And yet the rage continues.
I figured it out, though. The reason CISPA, a previously unknown bill, is under attack is to give cover for the Lieberman-Collins cybersecurity bill, the one that had the Internet Kill Switch in it. If the leftys are all a-twitter about Republicans, then nobody but us conservatives will pay attention to the power grab in the Democrat-controlled Senate being pushed by the Obama administration including DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano.
CISPA is not a threat. It looks like CISPA is a red herring.
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Correction on the title of this piece: His campaign advisory role carried over to a ongoing Presidential advisory role, so “Former” isn’t quite accurate.
Google Chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt tried to use his influence within Google to gain privacy from searches about him, specifically trying to hide his political donations through secret “whitelists” whose existence has only recently been admitted.
This revelation from Steven Levy’s new book In the Plex is not surprising given Schmidt’s high level of political activity, advising candidate Barack Obama on tech issues, and now rumored as a candidate to be the next Secretary of Commerce. He’s in deep politically, and probably doesn’t want that to hurt him personally or in business.
But given Schmidt’s history, he’s now exposed as a massive hypocrite.
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On Monday I did the first half of my catchup work. Now we’ll do the second half. And one of the big issues coming up is copyright. Over the last thirty years, copyright in America has been radically reformed. While traditionally it worked as patents still do work, as a temporary grant of monopoly enforceable in civil courts, we’ve gradually moved them into the realm of criminal law enforced indefinitely. And I believe we’re gone too far in that direction.
So when I hear about the COICA, a new copyright and counterfeiting law promoted by the Obama administration, I’m concerned. At a fundamental level, the COICA would give too much power to government to solve a problem that doesn’t actually exist. No, copyright is not at serious risk in America today. It is simply certain business models that are failing, and it is not the place of government to try to prop them up.
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Net Neutrality (which Mike Wendy calls a “Private Property Slap-Down”) may not be any longer the top issue on the Obama administration’s side of things, but questions still remain. And the funny thing: all the Net Neutrality advocates in the world working in the White House were no big deal. But all of a sudden it’s a concern that a former AT&T President going to the White House is a problem.
But yes, the FCC wants to change the subject. Now suddenly the press is to open up more bandwidth for wireless Internet access. Funny, I was assured during the Net Neut debate that wireless access didn’t effectively exist. Now the FCC wants to expand it. More spectrum isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but we do have to watch how it is acquired.
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Next week the FCC meets to make a decision on Net Neutrality. So there’s plenty going on as all sides press the FCC to do one thing or another. Some are lobbying more competently than others, though. Doing well are the Senate Republicans who prepare to fight and the incoming House Committee leadership who are getting loud on Net Neutrality and the runaway FCC.
Doing not so well are the forces of regulation caught this week making bad mistakes. First is the fringe neo-Marxist group Free Press. The Free Press tech brain trust made a terrible technical mistake on its website by sending anti-Comcast letters when they promised to send pro-Internet Takeover letters. Second we have radicals Media Access Project and Public Knowledge lying about Amazon’s Net Neutrality position, making the firm out to be taking a hardline pro-Internet Takeover position when in fact the firm supports a modest compromise.
If the radicals can’t even run their own lobbying efforts correctly, why should we trust them to run the entire Internet?
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