Free Republic

A coalition of progressive groups is asking 2020 Democratic candidates to pledge to restore the Obama-era net neutrality rules repealed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) during the Trump administration. SNIP “The FCC’s net neutrality repeal ignored the voices of millions from across the political spectrum, in what ended up being one of the biggest and most undemocratic giveaways to the telecom industry we’ve ever seen,” Mark Stanley, a spokesman for the group Demand Progress, said in a statement. “For too long, phone and cable companies have exerted in an undue influence in Washington, by pushing unpopular policies that harm...

President Donald Trump promised he’d get rid of bad rules. “Remove the anchor dragging us down!” he said when campaigning for president. “We’re going to cancel every needless job-killing regulation!” Trump was a developer, so he knew that the thicket of rules government imposes often makes it impossible to get things done. But would he keep his deregulation promise? I was skeptical. Republicans often talk deregulation but then add rules. People called President George W. Bush an “anti-regulator.” But once he was president, he hired 90,000 new regulators! Trump has been different. When he took office, he hired regulation skeptics....

A California man was sentenced to 20 months in prison on Friday after pleading guilty for threatening to kill the family of U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai over the regulator’s successful effort to repeal net neutrality rules. The Justice Department said Markara Man, 33, of Norwalk, California, sent the email threats “in hopes it would cause (Pai) to reverse his position on net neutrality.” The FCC did not immediately comment after the sentencing by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. […] In November 2018, Tyler Barriss pleaded guilty for calling in a bomb threat...

Facebook and Google increasingly influence Congress as the social media giants censor conservative and alternative voices, dominate the Internet, and violate Americans’ privacy. Facebook announced on Thursday that they have banned several conservative personalities such as Infowars host Alex Jones, Infowars contributor and YouTube personality Paul Joseph Watson, journalist and activist Laura Loomer, and Milo Yiannopoulus. The social media giant also banned Louis Farrakhan from its platforms. Facebook said that they banned these personalities because they were “dangerous.” Amid calls for greater regulation of social media companies’ potential anticompetitive behavior, censorship of conservative and alternative voices, and privacy violations, Facebook...

Imagine that? We survived Net Neutrality's repeal and got fast internet in the process. Despite the doomsday forecasters' grim predictions for the Internet's future following Net Neutrality's repeal, here we are still alive and still breathing. Even more positive news: U.S. Internet speeds rose 40%. Ookla's latest Speedtest found that " US internet speeds rose nearly 40 percent this year.” Here were the winners and losers of fastest broadband and upload speeds per Recode:

For those who don’t pay particularly close attention to politics – those on the Left lie. A LOT. They lie about Donald Trump-Russia collusion. They lie about their Russia collusion. They lie about green energy being green and energy – it’s neither. They lie about government-run health insurance. They lie about government-run medicine. They lie about tax cuts. They lie about tax increases. We could cite examples of Leftists lying…until the crack of Doom

The legal fight over a 2016 lower court ruling upholding Obama-era net neutrality regulations aimed at ensuring a free and open internet - rules that have since been repealed by President Donald Trump’s administration - came to a formal end on Monday, with the U.S. Supreme Court declining to take up the matter. The Trump administration and internet service providers had asked to justices to wipe away the ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that had temporarily preserved the net neutrality regulations championed by Democratic former President Barack Obama. But the justices refused...

California agreed Friday not to enforce its new net neutrality rules - the toughest state-level internet protections in the nation - while court deliberations continue over the federal government’s underlying rollback of net neutrality. The Department of Justice and internet service provider trade associations, which sued the state for enacting a law that sets different ground rules for internet protections in California, have also agreed to put that lawsuit on hold until 2019. Gov. Jerry Brown last month signed a bill that in effect restored net neutrality rules put in place in 2015 under the Obama administration and overturned by...

For the fiscal year 2014, the foundation has reported assets of US$12.4 billion and approved US$507.9 million in grants. Edsel Ford the founder had another vision for this foundation which has never been met. His goal was: “to receive and administer funds for scientific, educational and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare.” During its early years, the foundation operated in Michigan under the leadership of Ford family members and their associates and supported the Henry Ford Hospital and the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, among other organizations. Since his presidency, Walker needs to fix the world and make...

The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Sunday night sued California over its new new neutrality law, a little over an hour after Gov. Jerry Brown (D) signed the bill. The lawsuit claims the California bill is "unlawful and anti-consumer" because it goes against the federal government's "deregulatory approach to the Internet." The bill signed by Brown (D) is the country's strictest net neutrality bill. The new California legislation bars internet service providers from slowing down website speeds, blocking access to certain websites and charging extra for large websites such as Netflix and Facebook. Attorney General Jeff Sessions in a statement...

Imagine an internet in which users can't freely blog, parody, share material, or remix content – an online experience in which linking, code-sharing, and the unfettered use of art and images would be nearly impossible due to legal limitations. Unfortunately, this scenario – a restrictive internet culture – may soon be a reality in the European Union with the recent passage of the European Unions Copyright Directive.

Verizon started letting people sign up for its new wireless 5G Home high-speed internet service this week. It doesn't just mark the start of the next internet revolution. It obliterates the case for net-neutrality regulations. On Tuesday, Verizon said that people can start signing up now for its 5G Home, with service starting on Oct. 1 in Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles and Sacramento, Calif. Speeds will, the company says, be as fast as 1 Gbps, which is about as fast as Verizon's FIOS gets. It's more than 10 times faster than what the average home gets today. What's different about...

Transcript: Net Neutrality means that the government will--one day--control the internet. "Wait a second!" I can you hear you saying. "That sounds bad." But almost everyone you know says that Net Neutrality is good. Doesn't "neutral" mean that no one is picking winners and losers, that everyone is equal? Maybe according to the dictionary, but not according to the people behind the Net Neutrality movement. For them, "neutral" means the government regulates the internet like a public utility--and that means bureaucrats making key decisions about how the internet is run. And that's exactly what happened in 2015. The Federal Communications...

Investor’s Business Daily charged in an editorial on Thursday that net neutrality advocates unintentionally “made the case” for regulating Google and Facebook. This week a coalition of large tech giants, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter, urged a U.S. appeals court to challenge the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) repeal of the agency’s 2015 net neutrality rule. The editorial board found regarding the agency’s Obama-era net neutrality, “Those 2015 rules were supposed to protect the ‘free and open’ internet by forbidding ISPs from, as the filing puts it, ‘engaging in discriminatory practices that limit consumer choice, competition, and innovation online.'” The business...

Lawmakers in California are sending legislation to Gov. Jerry Brown that would put net neutrality regulations into state law. California's Senate approved the measure, called SB 822, by 27-12 Friday, a day after colleagues in the Assembly approved it 61-18. The Democratic governor, Jerry Brown, hasn't said if he will sign it. He has until the end of September. "We passed the strongest net neutrality standards in the nation," San Francisco Democrat Scott Wiener, who co-wrote the bill, said in a statement. "This is about a level playing field and an Internet where we as individuals get to decide where...

A net neutrality bill that would prohibit internet providers from a host of discriminatory practices cleared the California Assembly on Thursday, setting up a potential showdown with the Trump administration over the rules of the road for the internet. The legislation, which passed in a 59-18 vote, will now go to the Senate, where a vote is expected next week. It would then go to Governor Jerry Brown. California is also the largest state to pass net neutrality legislation in response to the Republican-led FCC’s move late last year to dismantle many of the existing rules. Democrats have seized on...

Just days after the massive Mendocino Complex Fire ignited in Northern California, fire officials were getting desperate in their emails to Verizon Wireless. As Santa Clara County firefighters mobilized, they discovered that Internet access had slowed to a crawl on the vehicle they were using to coordinate their response. "Please work with us," Daniel Farrelly, a systems analyst for the Santa Clara Fire Department, entreated the company in an email dated July 30. "All we need is a plan that does not offer throttling or caps of any kind." A few hours later, the Verizon accounts manager suggested they get...

There's no doubt about it: President Donald J. Trump has breathed new life into the American economy! With record-breaking 4.1% growth in GDP, what anti-Trump critics said was impossible during the 2016 campaign just became reality. Unemployment is low, business is booming, and billions of dollars that were sitting offshore are now re-entering our borders. Why were so many so-called expert commentators in 2016 wrong about President Trump? We were told that Trump's tough Queens, New York style and relentless counter-punching tweets would harm markets on a global scale. Even I had concerns. But as we now see, President...

A man was arrested in Los Angeles on Friday on charges of threatening to murder the family of Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, according to the Justice Department. The department alleged in a news release that 33-year-old Markara Man threatened the FCC chairman's family because he was "angry" about the repeal of net neutrality regulations and hoped to "scare" the chairman. In court documents filed with the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, a police officer with the Arlington County Police Department said there is probable cause to believe that Man sent a series of emails...

Gun-control activist David Hogg took to Twitter on Tuesday to spread a conspiracy theory about the end of so-called “net neutrality.” He stated that the companies that provide internet services and “the politicians” will conspire against websites that help register voters. “Just wait till ISPs start collaborating with the politicians to slow down vote registration websites to suppress peoples right to vote. The survival of #NetNeutrality is up to you this November,” he wrote.