Posted on 09/22/2009 10:59:07 AM PDT by thouworm
There was a time, not so long ago, when the term "Internet Freedom" actually meant what it implied: a cyberspace free from over-zealous legislators and bureaucrats....
Those days are now gone; the presumption of online liberty is giving way to a presumption of regulation. A massive assault on real Internet freedom has been gathering steam for years and has finally come to a head. Ironically, victory for those who carry the banner of "Internet Freedom" would mean nothing less than the death of that freedom....
Here is the reality: Because of the steps being taken in Washington right now, real Internet Freedom--for all Internet operators and consumers, and for economic and speech rights alike--is about to start dying a death by a thousand regulatory cuts. Policymakers and activists groups are ramping up the FCC's regulatory machine for a massive assault on cyber liberty. This assault rests on the supposed superiority of common carriage regulation and "public interest" mandates over not just free markets and property rights, but over general individual liberties and freedom of speech in particular....
Over the last decade, a cabal of activist-minded cyber-law professors have successfully turned the world of Internet policy upside down by persuading an entire generation of law students, policymakers and a number of large Internet companies that "Internet Freedom" means the very opposite of what it used to mean. Borrowing tactics that would have made Orwell proud, they have convinced many in the public and the policymaking community that the old Internet Freedom is slavery, in that we are all just tools of Corporate Big Brother. Thus, they offer us a new Internet Freedom: Neutrality über alles! Their freedom, as in Orwell's Oceania, is not a freedom from the State, but a gleaming utopia that can only be created by the State.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
We knew this was coming. Free information is what these people fear the most.
It’s hard to believe that only 15 years ago most offices had typewriters. From typewriters to bloggers in 15 years.
And the propagandistic Left does NOT have the control over our minds that it once did. They have tried to replace that control by increasing the degree of propaganda, but they are only making more and more people aware of it.
Game on.
Equalization of Opportunity Act
It is sure funny that it’s happening now that a new Marxist FCC “czar” is in control.
The “lamestream” media is nothing more than a propaganda arm of the overthrow of this country to a Marxist regime. This is what Obama meant by change. Cripes, ABC has it’s nightly news studio in the White House—this is outrageous and in your face! How much more obvious is this going to be to the country?
The traitors know they’re losing the information war because a vast majority of Americans don’t trust this media and they know they are willfully not covering major issues (which would disclose the coup). Need proof? Where’s the rush for justice and story lines about the thugs and criminals running ACORN?
You’re witnessing the death of the Republic to traitorous tyrants. These Red traitors have made a mockery of all those who’ve fought and died for this country.
It won’t be long until you’re jailed for the comments posted on here.
I'm not sure where you work, but here in the private sector we've had computers for 22 years. We had portable computers from Compaq. Admins worked on Wang word processors 10 years before that.
The last time I even saw a typewriter was in 1983.
It's so much fun to reminisce. ;)
Stop me before I go on about tape readers...
Can someone summarize? The first three paragraphs were all blathering and don’t communicate anything, so I gave up.
I didn’t say there weren’t computers. I said most offices had typewriters, and they did! That’s hard to imagine now
So, Net Neutrality equals the Fairness Doctrine. It will be interesting to see how they try to enforce the concept.
Okay, maybe I am just incredibly dense about this...
I thought the idea of net neutrality only applied to preventing situations such as if you have Verizon as your ISP, they could not screw with your access to Skype (which competes with Verizon phone service) or streaming video on Versus.com (which is owned by their competitor, Comcast). If there is more to it in terms of regulating content, etc. I was not aware of that (though I don’t doubt they would desperately love to clamp down on free speech and tax web sales)
Satellite feeds, gives us what we needs.
Even regulation will not work.Too many ways around it, and too much demand for freedom.
Let them bring it on. It will be a riot.
That's basically it, in a nutshell.
The FCC is WAY out of its jurisdiction....
Brilliant.
That applies to almost everything I read. The art of writing has almost been lost.
I have firm rules on everything I *start* to read:
1. Basically ignore the title as it usually is just a sensationalized attempt to get you to read the article and has little to do with reality (especially when in ALL CAPS), like “THE DAY THE INTERNET DIED.”
2. If the first sentence doesn’t engage me, I’m done, especially in cases where nothing about the sensationalized title is explained.
3. If the first sentence test is passed I’ll read the first paragraph. If that doesn’t engage me, I’m done.
That takes care of about 97% of what catches my eye.
This article is a major FAIL on all accounts.
I tend to agree with this assessment. Throughout history governments have tried - no matter what they say otherwise - to control the distribution of information. This is a camel/nose/tent move.
Hopefully the courts will protect the internet as we’ve known it.
“if you have Verizon as your ISP, they could not screw with your access to Skype (which competes with Verizon phone service)”
(a) That’s always the kind of argument they use for more regulation, than once the bill’s in, it’s more & more, you should know that.
(b) why shouldn’t they give whatever service they like, and disallow Skype as long as they are upfront about it? They could make it a cheaper service because it helps their phone business. Why the hell shouldn’t they be allowed to do that in America?
It didn't get any better. There is something we are supposed to be afraid of but it is either a secret or the writers are unable to communicate well enough to explain it.
>> The FCC is WAY out of its jurisdiction...
Astonishing is the audacity of Communism.
However, the internet seems to be a self-regulating type of beast and if it isn't, the people who keep it humming are doing just fine thank you very much.
The FCC and Gubmint in general needs to be told to shut up and sit down when it starts to flex its muscle in order to squash free speech they don't happen to like. A very slippery slope here folks. The Net Neutrality crap has GOT to go.
Just my 2¢
There may be an assault on internet freedom but that article did not explain how. All I got from it is that one single regulation is disasterous because it will lead to many regulations.
The article was a waste of time - a space filler.
Articles from Brit Hume used to be like this. Nothing new, sometimes even a week behind the news, but what was new was that the issues were being promoted from a quasi-mainstream pulpit.
Especially considering he wrote that book in 2003. I guess dissent is no longer needed....
“A very slippery slope here folks. The Net Neutrality crap has GOT to go.”
- I dont think so. There is nothing wrong with Net Neutrality. There IS something wrong with my overpriced ISP capping my PREMIUM (i.e. PRIVATE) Usenet provider, throttling my bandwidth, and shoving a 60gig cap down my throat every month. ANd the thing is..I have no other choices of ISPs because they ALL cap at 60gigs (30 gigs upload, 30 gigs download).
Net Neutrality is here to stay. Get used to it.
I pitched my Model 15 teletype with typing reperf in 1981 and upgraded to a Heathkit H8. An Epson MX80 printer soon graced the desktop. That was the end of typewriters for me. I had a Selectric in the closet at the time, but the accuracy of editing with a full screen word processor beat the pants off the Selectric. It has been 28 years since I ditched type writer. By 1983, I was telecommuting using a 103 modem at 110 baud to save a 30 mile drive to the office to fix a trivial software problem on a UNIVAC mainframe.
Where are all liberal ‘geeks’ now?
Hey, Leo Laporte, your leftist leaders are ready to shackle your internet. Do you care? You useful idiot!
What about all the other 0bama-lovin’ nerds? Why so silent?
They’re just a bunch of brainwashed nutjobs now.
Who needs freedom? Judging by the actions of Americans lately they just don’t want to be bothered with fighting freedom. They have forgotten, or were never taught, that you fight for freedom, or you end up fighting for your life.
Stupid, stupid people. What a ship of fools we’ve become.
Can we make our own internet?
We had portable computers from Compaq
Remember those portables!
Conservatives are getting rope-a-doped on this issue. Net neutrality is a positive - keeping local ISP monopolies from roadblocking and/or throttling traffic.
Also applies to the iphone/ATT partnerships of the world, keeping them from tolling and/or blocking use of data in ways that threaten monopolies - think vonage, skype or Gtalk over the Iphone/ATT data connection — which still costs $70-100 or more per month.
Corporate greed is a misused and overused rant by the lefties of the world - but consumer protection is at play here.
Any wonder Google has been building a dark fiber network / parallel internet for years? Visionary.
“The monthly bill will be proportional to use.”
- Already experience this with the monthly caps. 30 gigs download for 40 bucks a month.
“All that spam in your mailbox will make you exceedingly angry as you pay to transfer crap you didn’t want in the first place.”
- Bell already does this and has for some time now. Comcast can also get stuffed. And so can every other capping, throttling, choking, cesspool who rips off, lies, and cheats their customers out of their hard earned money.
If I had somewhere else to go, I’d have gone by now. In any event I hope they get what is coming to them. If I pay 15 bucks a month for unlimited premium Usenet access, then by God I want what I paid for.
Aaaaarrrrrghhh. How can this be happening and no one is challenging it in court?
What are you talking about?
Are you a victim of being conditioned to read only snippets or listen to only soundbites? Can you break that habit and read big chunks -- such as essays, thorough articles, or entire chapters of books at a time?
The US Constitution is only a few pages but over 99.99% of people have never read the entire Constitution. People who won't read longer, more in depth articles or books are victims of their own making.
Hardly. This is supposed to be an essay, a form which has a long literary tradition in English and which has its own rules. If the reader has no clue what an essay is about after four paragraphs, other than that something is Bad, Bad, Bad, that's atrocious writing. This has nothing to do with "conditioning"; on the contrary, this is something that sixth-graders in English Composition class should know.
The Constitution is a legal document rather than an essay, so it's not fair to compare it, but the Declaration gets down to facts in the second paragraph and follows it with factual bullet points.
Even if I agree with the writers, and I can’t tell if I do, this is a poorly written article.
Exactly what is the FCC doing ? Yeah, they’re regulating the internet, but what IS the regulation ? Is it something like stop signs, or something like Obamacare ?
Anybody got a clue ? Me, I’m clueless.
Nice editing approach. My own approach goes like this:
1. Title: Does the subject interest me?
if no, then done.
2. Title + author: Do I know as much as the author and do I agree with their position?
if yes, then done
3. Title: If I disagree with their position, start to read the article. If there are no new facts (usually determined within the first paragraph) then done.
4. Read remaining articles. Note new arguments and facts for and against my positions and learn. Adjust my positions as necessary.
This IS the internet as we've known it. You pay for a pipe and download what you want (ideally) as fast as you paid for. What its trying to restrict is your ISP deciding that the movie you're legally downloading from Netflix is taking too much bandwidth and so they throttle downloads speeds from Netflix to, say, a quarter of the speed you paid for. Or your ISP giving slower or faster, or no access to certain websites depending on if the corporation that owns the site pays the ISP. To protect their consumer of course. BTW, you can bet that conservative sites like this would be paying through the nose for the speed that, say, The New York Times would be getting.
That is not the internet as you've known it. Seriously, based on the comments I've read I wonder if many even know what Net Neutrality refers to, or if they're just objecting to it because its Obama's FCC thats pushing it. This doesn't include those here that are taking a principled stand against government telling private ISP's they can't screw their customers.
Regulations never stop nor do the regulators. The same argument works with health care. It is not perfect, big companies dominate, but better to suffer a little, than a lot.
You know as well as anyone that more government = less liberty. Let the market work out the kinks.
eww! i remember those! luckily for me, i did not enter the workforce (not counting part-time jobs) until 1988... i went straight to a PC... and we also had those tiny little macs--the ones with the 9-inch monitor... in 1990 we moved to Windows... instead of LOTUS 1-2-3, we began using Excel... instead of Word Perfect, we began using MS Word...
Hopefully the courts will protect the internet as we’ve known it.
We need a real blockbuster ruling from SCOTUS. It'll take some brass for them to read the riot act to this administration. But fundamentally the FCC is illegitimate, and the FEC is worse.The FCC is illegitimate because it promotes broadcast journalism as if it were objective - whereas the very claim of objectivity by homogenous journalism is actual proof of its subjectivity. The definition of objectivity must be that the person attempting it must take full account of every reason why he or she might want to form the opinions which he/she finds him/herself espousing. And thus the person who claims to be objective is the very last person who might actually be objective.
Thus the claim of one's own objectivity is inevitably only a smoke screen for sophistry. And sophistry is what Homogeneous JournalismTM delivers.
Google has been building a massive set of data centers and and as-yet unused redundant internet backbone for years - buying up unused infrastructure that became available for pennies on the dollar after the dot com bust.
Best best are they’re going to evolve into a converged web 3.0 of mobile devices, on-demand television, telephony and “print” internet over the next decade.
The phone companies, cable/tv satellite companies, movie theaters and newspapers are all potential victims of the next phase of media evolution. They won’t all survive, if any.
I think the argument of net neutrality will eventually be moot as the local ISPs may become “last mile providers” and commoditized or localized as utilities. This is where government intervention may eventually become problematic, but we’re talking about issues, business models and infrastructure that aren’t fully online yet.
Or Google is building Skynet and we’re screwed in an entirely different way.
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