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Showing posts with label net neutrality. Show all posts

Monday, December 18, 2017

If The Left Loses Its Mind, That Is Great News

BREAKING: Net Neutrality Repealed, Left Loses Its DAMN MIND

ByBEN SHAPIRO

December 14, 2017

In an event that marked the end of Western civilization and the simultaneous destruction of capacity for human happiness, the FCC voted 3-2 to end net neutrality on Thursday. Immediately, Leftist Twitter leapt to the worst possible conclusions:

Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), whose state is covered with toll roads, tweeted this:

The level of panic set off by the end of net neutrality is utterly out of proportion to the actual effect that end is likely to have. The basic debate over net neutrality is actually a reasonable one: is the best way to ensure a better internet for consumers to ban internet service providers (ISPs) from charging certain content providers more for their use of bandwidth than others, or is it to free ISPs to charge what they want, thereby incentivizing ISPs to compete with one another to offer different services at different prices?

On the one hand, there are those who argue that the current ISP oligopoly that exists in many areas of the country must be curbed to prevent monopolistic practices; on the other hand, there are those who argue that regulating ISPs as public utilities prevents new, small ISPs from entering the market, and stops current oligopoly beneficiaries from investing in new technology to forestall such competition. Ajit Pai, current head of the FCC, argues that “among our nation’s 12 largest Internet service providers, domestic broadband capital expenditures decreased by 5.6%, or $3.6 billion, between 2014 and 2016, the first two years of the Title II era.” For making this point, Pai has been subjected to serious threats to safety.

This is a reasonable debate. Here’s what’s not reasonable: the suggestion that your internet use is likely to change radically from what it was in 2015, before net neutrality went into effect. Here’s what else isn’t reasonable: people of the Left who think that Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter operate fine in the free market, and that consumers don’t have to worry about discrimination thanks to open competition, but that the same doesn’t apply to ISPs.

In any case, the doom and gloom are wildly overstated. If we really wanted to open up the internet, we’d truly need to focus not on national policy and major corporations, but on local regulatory regimes that restrict the building of new broadband networks.

Thursday, December 7, 2017

Internet MUST Be Returned To The Entreprenurial Basis That Made It Great

The net neutrality noise machine turns violent

Posted on December 7, 2017 by Special To Personal Liberty

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 on 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 impeding 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 people 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.

— Phil Kerpen

Thursday, May 18, 2017

Anti-Right Haters Are Not Smart Enough To Understand if Censorship Starts Their Sites Will Be Next

DEMONSTRATORS AT FCC PUSH OBAMA-ERA “NET NEUTRALITY” CENSORSHIP WITH “BAN DRUDGE” AND “BAN INFOWARS” SIGNS

Protestors demand FCC regulate Internet

Jerome Corsi | Infowars.com - MAY 18, 2017 275 Comments

Demonstrators at FCC push Obama-era “net neutrality” censorship with “Ban Drudge” and “Ban Infowars” signs

WASHINGTON, D.C. – A group of Alt-Left demonstrators has already begun protesting in front of the FCC headquarters in Washington, in advance of next Thursday’s vote scheduled to repeal the Obama-era “net neutrality rules.”

Holding signs that say, “Ban Drudge,” “Ban Infowars,” and “Ban Breitbart,” the protestors are supported by Soros-funded Astroturf “public interest” firms that seek to preserve the ability giant gateway portals like Google, Facebook, and Twitter to censor conservatives, while demanding only that the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that connect users to the Internet follow rules that all Internet content providers are treated equally.

On May 15, Elizabeth Harrington reported in the Washington Free Beacon that members of the alt-left connected to DisruptJ20, with a history of participating in violent protests, have targeted the neighborhood where FCC chair Ajit Pai lives, leaving leaflets on the doors of Pai’s neighborhood and planning a “vigil to save the Internet” in advance of Thursday’s scheduled FCC vote.

Under the Obama administration, the Democratic Party supported effort funded by Soros and Google, spending $72 million since 2006 to impose government control of the Internet under the guise of “net neutrality,” co-opted the language of an “open Internet” by seeking to regulate the ISPs as “common carrier” trucks or buses under Title II of the Communications Act.

At the same time, Soros and Google defined the Obama-era “net neutrality” rules to allow the Internet gateway portals, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter, to design “Fake News” rules, to bar conservative content deemed by the Google, Facebook, and Twitter censors to be somehow or other “unacceptable” for Internet broadcast.

On April 3, President Trump signed a bill repealing the “Internet Privacy” rules that the Obama-controlled FCC had passed in October 2016, laying the groundwork for the imposition of draconian privacy rules that would only apply to broadband competitors of Google, Facebook, and Twitter, leaving the three Internet gateway giants free to extend “Fake News” censorship bans to “protect the privacy” of leftists claiming abuse from conservative and libertarian news content.

Ajit Pai, elevated to FCC chair by President Trump, is pursuing a strategy designed to remove Internet regulation from the FCC, to transfer the regulatory responsibilities to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), where anti-trust actions could be brought against Internet giants like Google, Facebook, and Twitter that have the size and economic power to censor alternative conservative news sites, including Drudge Infowars.com, and Breitbart, as well as dozens of smaller conservative and libertarian Internet news outlets.

Infowars.com has warned that Google is running a silent campaign to make sure President Trump appoints as permanent chair of the FTC a candidate the tech giant is certain will never press an antitrust investigation of the company, after previously lobbying for a Republican favorable to Google to be nominated by President Bush as the third GOP FCC commissioner.

Although the FTC is authorized to have five commissioners with no more than three of the same political party, at present the FTC has only two commissioners: Maureen K. Ohlhausen, a Republican appointed by President Obama in 2010, who President Trump elevated to be Acting Chair on Jan. 25, 2017; and Terrell McSweeney, a Democrat, appointed by President Obama and sworn in on April 28, 2014.

Behind the scenes, Google is quietly pushing for Ohlhausen, a life-time career bureaucrat, to be appointed permanent FTC chair.

Google calculates that Ohlhausen’s Republican views favoring robust open-market competition in a deregulated environment will be enough to get President Trump to appoint her as permanent FTC chair.

But Google’s true calculation is that Ohlhausen as FTC chair would protect Google from being forced to undergo renewed antitrust inspection.

Google knows that Ohlhausen dissented to an FTC settlement reached in 2013 to an antitrust complaint that involved various Google business practices, with the settlement requiring Google to share patents on critical standardized technologies needed to make popular electronic devices, such as smart phones, laptops and tablet computers.

Friday, April 10, 2015

Obama Should Learn From The Chinese In How They Censor The Internet. Betcha, It Would Reduce The Complaints About Him! Is This The Reason For Net Neutrality?

Report Sheds Light on New Cyber Weapon Used By China on US Sites

Friday, 10 Apr 2015 11:18 AM

By Jennifer G. Hickey

China employed a previously unknown cyber weapons system in its attack on GitHub, an American coding site, according to a new report released Friday.

A team of researchers from the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Toronto concluded the Chinese were able to use a new system, known as "The Great Cannon" to launch attacks on websites and inject malicious viruses on computers worldwide.

"On March 16, GreatFire.org observed that servers they had rented to make blocked websites accessible in China were being targeted by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. On March 26, two GitHub pages run by GreatFire.org also came under the same type of attack. Both attacks appear targeted at services designed to circumvent Chinese censorship," said the report.

The discovery of the system, the researchers said, was a dangerous development since the tool could allow China to monitor Web users that visit Chinese websites or sites with advertising content hosted in China.

The report also provides new insight into the Chinese government's cyberwarfare efforts and the lengths to which officials will go to censor information.

"The operational deployment of the Great Cannon represents a significant escalation in state-level information control: the normalization of widespread use of an attack tool to enforce censorship by weaponizing users," the researchers said.