Net Neutrality exposes Barack Obama’s not so well hidden inner Vladimir Putin

Loading

On Thursday the FCC moved to regulate the Internet via what’s commonly called Net Neutrality – although like Obamacare before it was passed, we don’t know everything that’s included in it! Net Neutrality is beyond a doubt the single most despicable thing Barack Obama has done as president. (The FCC is ostensibly an independent agency, but under Obama it’s been anything but.) The big push for Net Neutrality came from Silicon Valley content companies who were whining that ISPs such as Comcast, Time Warner and AT&T were slowing or threatening to slow content that sucked up massive amounts of bandwidth. They are after all the ones who have to invest to expand that bandwidth. These ISPs were at the same time telling companies like Netflix and Google that they could ensure timely delivery of their content if they paid for the extra bandwidth that was being used. The Silicon Valley companies squealed to Barack Obama and he started leaning on the FCC.

Now this should not be viewed as a defense of Comcast or Time Warner. Both are horrible companies when it comes to service and customer service. Terrible! And you might ask how can they survive if they piss off so many customers? Government, of course. In most places they reign as the result monopolies… imposed by government.

This might sound like it’s just about whether you can have House of Cards running simultaneously in three rooms in your house or in every home in your neighborhood. It’s not. It’s about the government seeking to control the Internet, the single most powerful vehicle for the advancement of the human condition in history. That might sound like hyperbole, but it’s not. Today, because of the Internet more people have access to more information, more quickly than at any point since… well, ever. Not only that, they also have access to more products and services, usually at lower cost than any generation ever enjoyed. And perhaps most importantly, they have a vehicle through which they can express their thoughts and share their ideas and highlight oppression & injustice more freely and to more people more quickly than has ever been possible in human history.

A decade from now much of that will be a mere distant memory. Not that the Internet won’t exist, it will. But it will be a government controlled utility rather than the Wild West platform for the free exchange of ideas that it is today. Don’t believe it? Don’t forget, a year ago this same FCC proposed sending “researchers to grill reporters, editors and station owners about how they decide which stories to run.” Six months before that Democrat Senators Dianne Feinstein and Richard Durbin were debating whether bloggers deserved 1st Amendment protections. And of course this is the administration that used IRS commissioners to stifle the free speech of opponents and the Justice Department to go after reporter James Rosen who just happened to be critical of it.

So now, we have Barack Obama’s FCC telling the country that the government gets to be the arbitrators of what can be said or done on the Internet. Imagine if the government decided that WiFi was a bridge too far when we were all hooked up to the Internet by those static filled phone lines. Imagine if the government put the kibosh on online music sharing when record companies complained about declining CD sales. Imagine if the government supported the status quo when Yahoo was the dominant search provider or MySpace was the dominant social networking site. In what universe would have any of that have been a good thing?

As bad as stifling innovation is, that’s not the worst of it. The worst? The death of free speech. Imagine if Richard Nixon had at his disposal the kind of control the FCC says it has now during Watergate. Ronald Reagan during Iran-Contra. Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinski affair. George Bush in reference to GTMO or Abu Ghraib.

Barack Obama no doubt wishes he had that kind of power during Fast and Furious, the IRS Tea Party Scandal, Benghazi and countless other times. Now he pretty much will have it through his puppets on the FCC. Unfortunately the spineless obsequious leadership in the GOP will likely do nothing to stop this abuse of power. The result will be something slightly less onerous than being perpetrated by Barack Obama’s hero, Vladimir Putin, in Moscow. Putin can simply kill his opponents with little worry of consequence. Here in the United States, thankfully, that’s unlikely to go over as smoothly, however with the FCC’s unconstitutional overreach such measures wouldn’t be necessary. Why kill someone and make a martyr out of them when it’s much easier to simply muzzle them, or if that doesn’t work, label them a criminal and jail them with arbitrary regulations that you’ve set up specifically to target opponents? When government gets to decide who can be its critics or what its critics can say, it’s not a long march to a dictatorship.

Alas, our freedoms aren’t being taken from us by some foreign power with a gun pointed at our collective heads. No, staggeringly, American freedoms are being taken away by the very government a majority of brain-dead voters somehow sent to Washington. What’s worse, the opposition in Congress seems more than willing to capitulate and let the president get away with whatever he does, regardless of what’s in the Constitution, so long as they can stay in power in their little fiefdoms. With Obamacare and what the WSJ dubs the Obamanet, Barack Obama has succeeded in gutting both economic freedom and the freedom of speech in less than six years. Things that largely survived for 220 years… down the drain in six years! The consequences of the mistake that is Barack Obama in the White House will haunt Americans for decades to come, including those who were smart enough not to hand the keys of the greatest kingdom in human history to a petulant man more than willing to lie to get what he wants and a disdain for the very Constitution he swore to uphold.

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
15 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

On the internet, one must be careful with what you read; some stories, no matter how much they align with one’s narrative, must be checked out. Anything can be presented as a confirmed fact, such as the gay Barack Obama killing his lover. However, since news one gets from the major networks must now also be researched and confirmed (sadly and disgustingly), the internet is the best and most reliable source of the ability to confirm or discount stories.

Woe to this nation if that is ever restricted and controlled by the same characters that brought us “the video” and the IRS targeting; the MSM is already corrupted to the point as to resemble 1930’s Germany’s Ministry of Propaganda. People that are untrustworthy (to put it VERY mildly) should not even be in office, much less in control of a vital source of information.

If this was just about bandwidth, we would know this by the rules recently instituted. The fact that the facts are kept from us are all the facts we need to be aware of.

If Obama gets his way Operation Choke Point will have an Internet version.
Using Operation Choke Point Obama has shut down any business he doesn’t like, as long as the business used cash to deposit on a regular basis.
Even a poor Republican old lady who ran a small Mexican restaurant was shut down supposedly because her ”business model” looked like a drug lord’s.
Seems poor people buying lunch for cash is now a criminal activity, IF you are a Republican donor.
Obama’s FCC can cast its gaze across the web and find a pattern of behavior that they will use to justify shutting down sites they don’t want us to read.

Ideal timing for this article, Vince, in perfect tandem with the one I posted below on the incomprehensible power that will be held by the likes of Google over “perceptions” of the masses when they unleash their new systems.

“Screwed” aptly describes it.

@James raider:

Hey James, I haven’t seen your piece and I didn’t see a link. Actually the below is how I started out this piece but it was WAAY too long so I had to leave this on the cutting room floor.

Google is considering ranking search results based on facts, not on the number of links that link to a page. That sounds interesting. Traditionally Google has returned search results based on an algorithm that weighs heavily the number of sites that link to a page in connection to that term. The number of sites that link to a page have no quality control on the content of that page however and how that page is returned in search results. This means that a site or a page that is often rife with popular but untrue rumors might return higher than a less popular site that presents accurate facts.

In an attempt to address this, Google has decided that it is going to adjust their algorithm to diminish the weighting of links and introduce the accuracy of the information on a page or site. In order to know what is accurate and what is bogus, Google plans on harnessing its Knowledge Vault, which is a trove of factual information it has collected.

While this idea sounds good in theory, it has the potential to be a disaster… for the simple reason that Google is very much a left leaning organization, and that bias will likely come to color its results. One would expect that sites that seek to expose and neutralize the global warming hoax will find themselves lower on the results than sites that drive and profit from it.

The great thing about the marketplace is that Google is welcome to change their results any way they want. Their customers in turn are free to respond as they wish, which means that if users are happy with the results they will likely keep using Google. If not, perhaps they will switch to Bing or DuckDuckGo or some other search site. As powerful as Google is, they can’t force us to use their products, so they have to succeed on their merits.

Not so much with the government. The government has the police power to force people to do lots of things. From paying taxes to apparently buy healthcare to provide services to people even though it goes against your religion. Unlike Google, the government can change the rules and force you to play along. There is no competitive marketplace to ensure the things they do are effective, efficient or even meet the needs of the people they are supposed to help.

@vince: #4
Vince, my concern is that the “output” of systems like the one Google has developed, will be very subtle in its insidious pretence of being truthful in fact.

There’s no such thing possible, regardless what they profess to bestow in their algorithms.

@James Raider: I agree… which is why I’m glad there still exist competitors… despite the fact that they mostly suck.

What the so called “Net Neutrality” Trojan horse canard really exposes is all libcultists inner totalitarian. The democRATs and all libcultists are selfish, narcissistic and have no allegiance to, love of, or respect for anything that lies beyond their own personal POWER.

They are libcult.

Net Neutrality is beyond a doubt the single most despicable thing Barack Obama has done as president.

The opponents of Net Neutrality have depicted it so falsely that they’ve pretty much turned it into the complete opposite of what it actually is.

As bad as stifling innovation is, that’s not the worst of it.

How, exactly, will requiring service providers to charge all customers the same amount for moving identical volumes of data stifle innovation? Logic suggests that this will have the exact opposite effect.

It might be worth noting that cable deregulation has brought U.S. consumers cable prices that have risen at 3 times the rate of inflation or higher every year since the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Some of the things cable companies do without regulatory interference seem a bit questionable. High definition television, for example, is now the U.S. broadcasting standard. Nearly all television stations now transmit their programming in HD. Cable companies routinely dumb the signal back down to the former 480p low definition standard before distributing it to their customers, and then encrypt the high definition signal. You’ll have to fork over an extra $10 or $15 per month to get back what they took away to begin with.

Most sweetheart deals between the big telecom companies and government aren’t taking place at the federal levels, but at local levels. Cable companies pay local governments a franchise fee in return for being granted a de facto monopoly in the area. The cable company, in turn, passes that fee on to its subscribers. The cynical view? If a cable company wants to do business in a town, they’re required to run a shakedown operation for the local government.

@Greg: Greg, you were not paying attention. The biggest issue with Net Neutrality isn’t the pricing… although that is a problem because the reality is, the ISPs have to invest to upgrade the pipes because YouTube and Netflix are using so much of it. As such, they should have the right to charge those customers more.

The critical issue however is that the FCC now believes it can decide what is said on the Internet and what things can be done on the Internet. Follow some o fthe links. They essentially think they can control everything. When the government controls who is “qualified” to criticize them, to report the news, to comment about anything… then there is no freedom and only sycophants seeking favor with the king. We already have that with the mainstream media without the police power of the FCC getting involved. Now imagine how the landscape will look when the President decides that FOX or Drudge are not “real” media and therefore can be put out of business.

I suspect industry opposition to Net Neutrality is all about the money, with freedom of speech concerns being little more than an angle worked to stir up public resistance. What indications are there that the government is attempting to restrict the public’s freedom of expression, other than in areas where it’s been claimed as a rationalization for intellectual property theft?

As it presently stands, the more money, the louder the voice. The prevailing trend has been to move further in that direction, not the other way. It seems to me that a failure to ensure Net Neutrality would have put the trend totally over the top.

Hate speech is admittedly a controversial area, but I don’t really see that as primarily having to do with access to a soapbox. It’s always going to be a problematic area. Freedom of speech does require a measure of personal responsibility.

Golly gee! If Google starts rating websites on truth. FA may seriously have to consider banning our resident trolls and look to the purging all their disingenuous dissembling and leftist trollish propaganda in order to retain a continual high reputation of truthfulness.

@Greg:
There is not going to be anything “neutral” about net neutrality.
You never surprise anyone. You just jerk your knee and in a typical Pavlovian move you are for more government. It’s the only solution you know for everything.

@Greg:

with freedom of speech concerns being little more than an angle worked to stir up public resistance.

Two words: Fairness Doctrine. Look it up if need be and then tell us how the FCC has never wanted to intrude on free speech.

Thinking about the business side, this is a win for any bandwidth heavy service provider and a lose for broadband customers generally, because, in effect, all customers will be forced to subsidize the users of heavy services. As an example, consider Netflix and Comcast. If Netflix needs more bandwidth and therefore more physical infrastructure to meet demand, then either they’ll have to pay for it and charge their customers more, or Comcast will be obliged to pay for it and charge all customers more, whether they use Netflix streaming or not!
Thinking about the tax side, if any of you still have a landline, take a look at the long list of fees and taxes imposed on that service, which are easily half the total bill. Most of these are to support government programs e.g. “universal service”. Look for your ISP bills to be jacked up to pay for the network equivalent of ObamaPhones. Just sayin’

@Bill:

If this was just about bandwidth, we would know this by the rules recently instituted. The fact that the facts are kept from us are all the facts we need to be aware of.

You have to pass it to know what’s in it! But don’t worry, you can keep your policy and doctors.

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
NET NEUTRALITY