Posted on 05/21/2010 3:52:58 AM PDT by Erik Latranyi
The Obama administration has announced plans to regulate the Internet through the Federal Communications Commission, extending its authority over broadband providers to police web traffic, enforcing “net neutrality.”
Last week, a congressional hearing exposed an effort to give another agency—the Federal Election Commission—unprecedented power to regulate political speech online. At a House Administration Committee hearing last Tuesday, Patton Boggs attorney William McGinley explained that the sloppy statutory language in the “DISCLOSE Act” would extend the FEC’s control over broadcast communications to all “covered communications,” including the blogosphere.
The DISCLOSE Act’s purpose, according to Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Chris Van Hollen and other “reformers,” is simply to require disclosure of corporate and union political speech after the Supreme Court’s January decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission held that the government could not ban political expenditures by companies, nonprofit groups, and labor unions.
The bill, however, would radically redefine how the FEC regulates political commentary. A section of the DISCLOSE Act would exempt traditional media outlets from coordination regulations, but the exemption does not include bloggers, only “a communication appearing in a news story, commentary, or editorial distributed through the facilities of any broadcasting station, newspaper, magazine or other periodical publication…”
(Excerpt) Read more at reason.com ...
No, you’re thinking about it wrong. Why try to put a radio station on the Internet if that’s what they are controlling. Get yerself a shortwave receiver. The best they can do is try to jam it, but if the transmitter is frequency agile enough, it can be a bit difficult. I believe that Rush already threatened to park a transmitter ship off-shore if they try to shut him down.
He said that the FCC does not have the authority to implement it under the current law, but made no ruling whether it would be Constitutional under new laws.
They are starting to do so, as each new day comes.
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