Free Republic

If you’re the customer of a major American internet provider, you might have been noticing it’s not very reliable lately. If so, there’s a pretty good chance that a graph like this is the reason:These graphs comes from Level 3, one of the world’s largest providers of “transit,” or long-distance internet connectivity. The graph on the left shows the level of congestion between Level 3 and a large American ISP in the Dallas area. In the middle of the night, the connection is less than half-full and everything works fine. But during peak hours, the connection is saturated. That produces...

Even though repeated losses in court are making the Net Neutrality folks have to compromise with reality, the fact is they’re still freaking out about the ability to charge more for better service, which is a good thing to have. The facts are though that we don’t need new laws, and the laws they do want would just pick winners and losers, which is why Netflix is pushing so hard. If the roles are reversed they’d be screaming that I was being paid by Netflix. Picking winners and losers is a theme in fights happening in cities across the country...

Out of 1.2 trillion Google searches in 2012, Trayvon Martin was the ninth most searched event. But the unarmed black teen who was fatally shot in Florida may have never become a household name if it wasn’t for Twitter, Facebook and the blogs that kept his story in the news until it reached a national level. Now black and Latino net neutrality advocates say it will be much harder, and maybe even impossible, to catapult stories like Martin’s to a national level if new Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ‘fast lane’ rules are implemented. Martin was shot dead by George Zimmerman...

The Federal Communications Commission is getting ready to propose new rules when it comes to net neutrality, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are reporting based on unnamed sources. Late Wednesday, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler called the reports of a turnaround “flat out wrong.” According to the Times and the Journal, the FCC is planning to allow Internet service providers to sell a faster pipe into people’s homes to content companies willing to pay for it. In other words, content providers could pay for preferential treatment into American homes. …

Three years before Matt Drudge changed the world and how news would be consumed, President Bill Clinton's White House feared that the Internet was allowing average citizens, especially conservatives, to bypass legacy gatekeepers and access information that had previously been denied to them by the mainstream press. The infamous 1995 "conspiracy commerce memo" tried to demonize and discredit alternative media outlets on the right to mainstream media organizations and D.C. establishment figures. The memo notes that the "Internet has become one of the major and most dynamic modes of communication" and "can link people, groups and organizations together instantly." "Moreover,...

Newly released Clinton document describes Internet as ‘right wing’ tool of ‘conspiracy commerce’ Posted By Giuseppe Macri On 6:01 PM 04/18/2014 In | No Comments A previously unreleased White House document among the 7,500 published by the Clinton presidential library Friday warns that the burgeoning Internet of 1995 is being “seized” by the “right wing” and turned into a “communication stream of conspiracy commerce.” The 1995 report, titled “The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce,” describes the Internet as a new method of communication ”employed by the right wing” and used to “convey their fringe stories into legitimate subjects of coverage...

Obama Drafting Bill to Take Control of the Internet!!! This is some freakin’ Orwellian stuff! If this bill goes through and gives power to Obama to control the Internet, you can rest assured that conservative bloggers and websites will be shut down left and right! Post a link to this article wherever you visit today and email it to everyone you know! This is war!!! A bill to shift cybersecurity to White House by Stephanie Condon - news.cnet.com Forthcoming legislation would wrest cybersecurity responsibilities from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and transfer them to the White House, a proposed...

The power-grabs from this Constitutionally-belligerent liberal government just keep rolling. Taking over huge sections of the banking industry wasn’t enough. Taking over the auto industry wasn’t enough. Taking over the energy industry wasn’t enough. Taking over the health care industry still wasn’t enough. Now they want to take control of the entire internet.

Hillary Clinton Speaks at NUSEUM Single Internet Freedom Cyber-Freedom! Secretary Clinton mentioned the launch of a competition to improve information exchanges: "We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas.....this freedom is no longer defined by whether citizens can go into the town square and criticize their government without fear of retribution....blogs have created new targets for censorship....we must also work against those who use the internet as tools of disruption and fear." Code word: CENSORSHIP!

A tech legislative priority of congressional Democrats, "net neutrality," threatens America's unique Internet success, because it would reverse America's 11-year, bipartisan policy to promote competition and not regulate the Internet. Democratic presidential candidates Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, are co-sponsors of Dorgan-Snowe (S.215), a net neutrality bill that for the first time would mandate broadband provide equal treatment to all Internet content. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also supports net neutrality as does House Telecom Subcommittee Chairman Ed Markey, who plans a series of hearings soon to promote net neutrality legislation. To justify massive new government intervention in the Internet...

Poe's expose focuses on how Hillary Clinton and the left's "shadow government" have labored to put her and her far-left agenda in the White House by controlling the still-uncensored flow of real news to Americans – via the Internet. If that sounds too fantastic to be true, read on. On Feb. 11, 1998, Hillary Clinton told reporters that the Internet needed an "editing" or "gatekeeping" function. The World Wide Web was out of control, she said. It needed to be reined in. Five years later, Hillary's dream is on the verge of being realized. The McCain-Feingold Act of 2002 empowers...

China on Sunday imposed new media restrictions designed to limit the news and other information available to Internet users, sharply restricting the scope of content that can be posted on Web sites. Hillary Rodham Clinton said IN 1998 during a meeting with reporters said that "we are all going to have to rethink how we deal with" the Internet because of the handling of White House sex scandal stories on Web sites. Clinton was asked whether she favored curbs on the Internet, after the DRUDGE REPORT made headlines with coverage of her husband's affair with a White House intern. "We...

HILLARY'S SECRET WAR Hillary's plan to silence Internet journalists Posted: July 6, 2005 1:00 a.m. Eastern Editor's note: The following is an eye-opening sneak preview of New York Times best-selling author Richard Poe's revealing book, "Hillary's Secret War." Whereas Edward Klein's book on the New York senator reveals previously unknown aspects of her personal life, Poe's expose focuses on how Hillary Clinton and the left's "shadow government" have labored to put her and her far-left agenda in the White House by controlling the still-uncensored flow of real news to Americans – via the Internet. If that sounds too fantastic...

NO GATEKEEPING Our president's latest scandal was broken by Internet columnist Matt Drudge, who reported that Newsweek had spiked a story about Monica Lewinsky. Some people see that as a black eye for the print media and a victory for the Internet. Not First Lady Hillary Clinton, who was asked about the Net's role in dissemination of news at a press conference on February 11. "As exciting as these new developments are there are a number of serious issues without any kind of editing function or gate-keeping function. What does it mean to have the right to defend your reputation,...

A proposal to lay an undersea cable between Portugal and Brazil to circumvent US snooping has been praised by Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. Rousseff on Monday (25 February) in Brussels at the annual EU-Brazil summit told reporters that privacy, human rights, and the sovereignty of nations must be respected. “The internet is one of the best things man has ever invented. So we agreed for the need to guarantee … the neutrality of the network, a democratic area where we can protect freedom of expression,” she said. Brazilian state-owned telecom provider Telebra is reported to have cut a deal last...

The Federal Communications Commission said Wednesday it would again issue rules to prevent Internet service providers from blocking or slowing down access to content providers that don't pay a toll to reach consumers. snip Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit threw out FCC rules barring providers from blocking or slowing down websites, but it acknowledged the FCC has some authority to regulate broadband-company practices under a section of the 1996 Telecommunications Act that gives it broad authority to encourage U.S. broadband service. The FCC said Wednesday it won't appeal the D.C. Circuit's ruling....

Comcast will announce a deal to acquire Time Warner Cable in an all-stock deal worth more than $45 billion that will unite the biggest and second largest cable television operators in the country, according to people briefed on the matter. . The surprise merger — expected to be announced on Thursday — is likely to bring to an end a protracted takeover battle that a smaller cable rival, Charter Communications, has been waging for Time Warner Cable, and will be the second major deal for Comcast in recent years to radically reshape the American media landscape.

Netflix reported higher profit for the fourth quarter as the company added 2.3 million customers to its TV and movie streaming service in the United States, sending its shares up more than 17 percent in after-hours trading. (Click here to get the latest quote.) The company on Wednesday reported net income of $48 million for the quarter, up from $8 million a year ago. Earnings-per-share were 79 cents, Netflix said in a statement.

What the net-neut obsessives refuse to recognize is that anticompetitive intent isn't worth worrying about if an anticompetitive result isn't possible. If AT&T were "double-dipping," or charging sender and recipient for the same data, as some allege, its rivals would quickly copy its innovation and compete away any excess revenues. If AT&T were to degrade websites that don't pay up, its rivals would pounce and steal AT&T's dissatisfied customers.

How would you like to have to pay a fee to be able to stream YouTube videos at full speed? What if you liked downloading music from, say, Last.fm or Soundcloud, but those sites suddenly became infinitely slower than bigger sites like Amazon or iTunes? Those are the kind of major changes to the Internet some folks are envisioning after a federal court ruling this week on what's come to be called "net neutrality." This stuff can get really confusing, with all the government jargon, Internet lingo and competing arguments mixed up in it. But it's also really important and...