Posted on 12/06/2017 10:16:14 AM PST by Kaslin
The perpetual outrage mob on the left has adopted an unlikely target of late – the brainy, affable head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Chairman Ajit Pai. Pai is now flanked by a Homeland Security protective detail everywhere he goes because of a deluge of specific, credible threats of violence toward him and his young children. He's also facing an onslaught of racist smears and attacks too obscene to quote – including an image asserting that Pai is Osama bin Laden after shaving his beard.
Members of Congress are coming under similar attack for supporting Pai's signature proposal. The most outrageous example resulted in a criminal indictment after Congressman John Katko received a message threatening: "I will find you and your family and I will kill you all. Do you understand? I will literally find all of you and your progeny and just wipe you from the face of the earth."
So what is the apocalyptic, world-changing Pai proposal that is inspiring violent, unhinged attacks from the left? He wants to rescind Obama Internet regulations that have only been in place for two years and return to the approach that was in effect since the Internet was privatized in the mid-1990s until 2015, treating net neutrality as a consumer protection and antitrust issue.
Personally, I recall the Internet improving pretty dramatically over those two decades, but the consensus on the left is that it was a hellscape.
How did that happen? How did so many people become passionately convinced of the plainly illogical proposition that the Internet would be destroyed if we went back to the light-touch regulatory approach that was in place for nearly all the Internet's commercial history until just two years ago?
For over a decade, professional liberal organizers told the bizarre scare story that without heavy-handed government regulation, Internet service providers (ISPs) will start blocking what websites you can go to and impede free speech on the Internet. No such thing happened. To the contrary, robust competition between phone and cable companies – and later wireless companies – drove speeds dramatically higher and consumers benefited from an Internet that innovated beyond our wildest dreams.
Nonetheless, in 2015, ultraliberal advocacy groups (fueled by $196 million from the Soros and Ford Foundations) and Silicon Valley giants like Google (which cycled a shocking 250 personnel through the Obama administration and saw regulating ISPs as a way to guarantee themselves access to below-market-rate downstream bandwidth) succeeded in getting the FCC to reclassify ISPs as regulated public utilities.
This was done under a Depression-era law designed for the old Ma Bell telephone monopoly. Thousands of requests to micromanage every aspect of the Internet piled up at the FCC Enforcement Bureau and the commission was set to adopt a sweeping new broadband tax to replace the private investment it scared off – with strings attached of course – during a Hillary Clinton administration.
The liberal organizers of the phony scare campaign had even bigger plans; Robert McChesney, the founder of Free Press – the group that was cited 46 times in the Obama net neutrality order – openly bragged: "At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies. We are not at that point yet. But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control."
It wasn't meant to be.
The American people elected President Trump who in turn elevated free-market champion Ajit Pai to undo the mischief of the Obama FCC.
Of course, the noise machine won't go down without doing what noise machines do, so the hysterical claims from the left are proliferating.
One puzzler is an image of deeply discounted limited data plans offered by a mobile carrier in Portugal. People sharing the image fail to note the same carrier also offers unlimited plans, and that limited data plans are legal here even under the Obama regulations. But those simple facts aside – would banning six-dollar limited data plans for people who can't afford unlimited offerings be a good idea? It's hard to see why it would be, but if you say that publicly you could face threats of violence.
Liberal money to demonize and attack Chairman Pai and his allies is flowing like water. Gigi Sohn, a top adviser to the Obama FCC, is now on the payroll of George Soros's foundation, no doubt helping shovel head-spinning amounts of money to liberal advocacy groups out of the $18 billion Soros recently donated in one of the largest tax dodges in history.
Let's just hope sanity can prevail before somebody gets killed, and the Internet can go back to innovating and improving without micromanagement from bureaucrats in Washington.
We need to destroy all the communist polices that the Great imposter set in motion.
Here are the more detailed stories from Ars Technica:
It is primarily techies, not leftists, who are supporting net neutrality.
Soros is putting his $18 Billion to use with Rent-A-Mobs and BLM thugs. We should wrap Soros in a blanket and send him back to his country so they can deal with him......properly.
It is worrying how easy it is to whip lefties into a fury with fake news.
Only after we seize 100% of his entire family’s assets.
And spay and neuter his kids and grandkids.
The Noise Machine won't be quiet until the change is made. Then it will find something else to be noisy about.
Communists protesting because they want to be regulated by the government and have their free speech rights removed while holding up Orwellian signs saying the opposite.
more frenzy from a clueless crowd of idiots whipped up by faceless leaders exploiting the protestors stupidity.
Net-Neutrality Bookmark
It’s amazing how many people think this April 2015 rule has been in place since the internet began and something dramatic is taking place if something that never before existed prior to April 2015 gets rolled back. It’s ridiculous.
There, is that loud enough? No, but it's a start...
Who cares what that criminal soros wants
I have said many times that he should have been deported long time ago.
I am a “Techie” and have been for over 20 years. I spent my first three years as a general consultant before moving into network engineering as a junior, then senior, then architect. Now I manage a multi-discipline “SWAT” team of engineers for a large datacenter provider with over 20 sites worldwide.
And neither I nor any of my friends in this industry support Net Neutrality or any other government initiative to regulate the Internet. Then again, all of us have been around a LONG time.
I was there when AOL and CompuServe were the big “ISP”s. There was not World Wide Web - there was Archie, FTP, and a few other programs for gaining access to information stored primarily by universities.
Nearly all of the innovation done in the early years of the web and the HTTP protocol was fueled primarily by porn. Almost all of the fancy stuff you see now on websites was thought up and invented because geeks wanted better access to naked women (or men I guess).
In those days, there was no regulation. It was a “fad” and no one gave it much thought. ISPs came and went - some were bought by others, some were merged, some went bankrupt due to poor business decisions.
Throughout all of this, everyone figured out that the *last* thing any ISP would do is arbitrarily block their customers from something. There are many failed ISPs to attest to that fact. It’s far too simple to switch to someone else to get your access. That’s called a “free market”.
As with pretty much all things government these days “Net Neutrality” had nothing to do with “neutrality.” Instead, what “Net Neutrality” was all about was rewarding big donors to politicians (Amazon, Netflix, Google...etc), and their investors, by preventing downstream providers from charging more to stream movies and music - all things that take up far more bandwidth than anything else and put the highest burden on the downstream provider networks.
Without being able to charge the upstream providers or content providers more for the bandwidth, the downstream edge provider has no choice but to raise their prices for all their customers (the end users) thereby subsidizing the content provider’s market. This is because *everyone* has to pay for the added bandwidth, not just the content provider’s customers.
So the political donors and their investors are happy, and the people at the bottom - who’ve been told that without this “feature” they will all be censored - like that *ever* happened before it was implemented - honestly believe that is the case. I’ve argued with hundreds of them and nearly all of them simply refuse to understand reality.
Crazy world. Somebody oughta sell tickets. I’d buy one.
Thank you for a clear overview of this. I admit I have limited understanding of it all but as experience has shown me, anything my arrogant and over educated (2 masters, woo hoo) brother in law is for, I’m against.
Cause Soros is paying for the violence... and the press help and the PR, and very few of these people understand why...
Excellent summary.
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