General Chat (Non-Music-Related)

Whoda thunk it.?

The RINO party caved to Net Neutrality opening the way to censorship, taxes, and speed limits. The vote is scheduled for Thursday. Great!! Now a handful of tyrants will take away Internet freedom. This is the government we have always warned about. Google, Facebook and Netflix favor strong action of the FCC.

Hmmmmmmm. That should tell you something about who this tyranny favors They must be the underdogs that this law supposedly protects from the "big" companies. I thought this was supposed to be to protect the little guy. I guess it does in a way. It protects the little guy from low Internet prices, high Internet speed, freedom of speech, and freedom of privacy. At least it won't affect his voting rights and political speech. Well hell, If it does all that I guess it can't be that bad. After all, the repukicans approve it behind closed doors. I bet it truly was a "grueling fight" as depicted below.


http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/25/techn ... -vote.html

WASHINGTON — Senior Republicans conceded on Tuesday that the grueling fight with President Obama over the regulation of Internet service appears over, with the president and an army of Internet activists victorious.

The Federal Communications Commission is expected on Thursday to approve regulating Internet service like a public utility, prohibiting companies from paying for faster lanes on the Internet. While the two Democratic commissioners are negotiating over technical details, they are widely expected to side with the Democratic chairman, Tom Wheeler, against the two Republican commissioners.

And Republicans on Capitol Hill, who once criticized the plan as “Obamacare for the Internet,” now say they are unlikely to pass a legislative response that would undo perhaps the biggest policy shift since the Internet became a reality.

Oh yeah. Now the debate is on Internet taxes. But I bet that the repukicans will never fold on that one.

Internet Taxes, Another Window Into the Net Neutrality Debate
By Steve Lohr
February 20, 2015 5:30 am February 20, 2015 5:30 am

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/2 ... ty-debate/

Read the "fine print" on this one:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/haroldfurch ... -increase/

FCC Plans Stealth Internet Tax Increase

American politicians of all stripes clearly see and oppose the abuses of the Internet abroad. But our government officials are not aware that the Federal Communications Commission, without statutory authority, is proposing to expand its taxation and regulation of the Internet.

The relationship between the Internet and government has become a useful barometer of personal and economic freedom. Oppressive governments use the Internet to oppress political enemies, censor ideas, and spy on citizens. The United Nations and other international organizations see the Internet as an untapped opportunity for tax revenues and regulations to support political favorites.

Of course Congress can and does pass symbolic laws to protect the Internet, such as the recent extension of the Internet Tax Freedom Act that prohibits new state and local taxes on broadband access. Congress is eager to block state and local tax collection on the Internet on the reasonable theory that taxes will harm the Internet, one of the few engines of growth in our otherwise recession-prone economy.

Yet Congress is oblivious to Federal Communications Commission efforts to undermine the spirit if not the letter of ITFA by extending substantial new federal fees on broadband access. These fees could be as harmful, if not more so, than any that state and local governments might imagine. Yet many in Congress, unaware of the fees that might be applied to the Internet, applaud the FCC.

Under its “Open Internet” or “network neutrality” proceeding, the FCC would regulate the Internet and broadband service providers with rules similar to those that courts have not once but twice ruled unlawful. By statute, the FCC regulates telecommunications services, not Internet services. Rather than wait for Congress to give it authority to regulate Internet services, the FCC asserts that power for itself by some imaginative interpretation of the Communications Act.

One set of proposals considered by the FCC would classify Internet services, or at least Internet access services, as “interstate telecommunications services” bringing the regulation of those services exclusively to the FCC.

The FCC imposes fees of 16.1% on interstate telecommunications services that will generate more than $8 billion in federal universal service funds in 2014. Additional FCC fees on interstate telecommunications services raise $1 billion for federal telecommunications relay services. Although Congress mandates the general nature of the federal universal service fund and telecommunications relay services, it is the FCC alone that sets the budget size of the funds and develops the fee structure to raise receipts for the funds.

Even with all of its power, the FCC does not have the money to fund all of the new programs it seeks. For example, just in the past year, the FCC announced an ambitious multi-billion program to connect schools and libraries with Wi-Fi. Other advocates seek expansion of the low-income program. But where can the FCC find funds for new social programs not required by statute?

The FCC’s network neutrality proceeding may easily provide the answer. By classifying broadband access services as “interstate telecommunications services,” those services would suddenly become required to pay FCC fees. At the current 16.1% fee structure, it would be perhaps the largest, one-time tax increase on the Internet. The FCC would have many billions of dollars of expanded revenue base to fund new programs without, according to the FCC, any need for congressional authorization.

If the FCC succeeds in classifying some or all of broadband services as interstate telecommunications services, it would effectively exclude its bureaucratic rivals in both the states and federal government from competing to regulate and to tax the Internet. State and local governments do not have the authority to tax or regulate interstate telecommunications services. Moreover, the Federal Trade Commission, which increasingly seeks to regulate the Internet, has no jurisdiction over common carriers or “telecommunications services.”

To make their proposals palatable, network neutrality advocates suggest that the FCC might in its discretion “forbear” from various regulations. But FCC forbearance takes years with uncertain outcomes. And the FCC likely does not have the discretion to find that some interstate telecommunications services pay fees and others do not. Inevitably, network neutrality with “telecommunications services” will lead to new fees and regulations that will harm the Internet.

It is easy to see government abuses of the Internet abroad. It is time we took a closer look at home as well.

Harold Furchtgott-Roth is a former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission. He is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and founder of the Center for the Economics of the Internet.

the verdict comes out today, I can hardly wait!.. will the reptilians running our government , taking prayer out of school, promoting pornography, trying to induce a Communist form of gov't/ in our dear land, hiding behind the curtain of corporate sponsorship win?

It is now the illegal law of the land. Goodbye free speech, that is coming down the pike. After all it is important to America that you do not speak freely. The Fuhrer has declared illegal immigration by fiat. He said that "Congress can oppose his immigration reform, but he will veto it." In other words, he is in Full dictator mode. The tyrants have won.

I Don't bring up politics with the wife very often (if I know what's good for me), but how can I lose with this one?. This isn't as nebulous as our medical system, so we will see, in real time; prices go up, speed slows to a crawl, freedom of speech gets eliminated. She can't blame insurance companies, lobbyists, republican antagonism. It's all right in front of your face. Either your Facebook works, or it doesn't.
As much as this will suck, I will enjoy that aspect, thoroughly?

Schmed,

For your wife. How we were screwed with net neutrality. Bought and paid for by Soros. But who didn't know that? Dirty trick politics as usual, no surprises here.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/4 ... -john-fund

The powers behind the FCC’s muscling of the Internet

Today’s vote by a bitterly divided Federal Communications Commission that the Internet should be regulated as a public utility is the culmination of a decade-long battle by the Left. Using money from George Soros and liberal foundations that totaled at least $196 million, radical activists finally succeeded in ramming through “net neutrality,” or the idea that all data should be transmitted equally over the Internet. The final push involved unprecedented political pressure exerted by the Obama White House on FCC chairman Tom Wheeler, head of an ostensibly independent regulatory body.

“Net neutrality’s goal is to empower the federal government to ration and apportion Internet bandwidth as it sees fit, and to thereby control the Internet’s content,” says Phil Kerpen, an anti-net-neutrality activist from the group American Commitment.

The courts have previously ruled the FCC’s efforts to impose “net neutrality” out of bounds, so the battle isn’t over. But for now, the FCC has granted itself enormous power to micromanage the largely unrestrained Internet.

Back in the 1990s, the Clinton administration teamed up with Internet pioneers to promote a hands-off approach to the new industry and keep it free from discriminatory taxation. Many still prefer that policy. Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab and the charity One Laptop Per Child, says that net neutrality “doesn’t make sense” because “the truth is, not all bits [of data] are created equal.”

Will Marshall, head of the Progressive Policy Institute (which was once a favorite think tank of Clinton Democrats), issued a statement that net neutrality “endorses a backward-looking policy that would apply the brakes to the most dynamic sector of America’s economy.”

But such voices have been drowned out by left-wing activists who want to manage the Internet to achieve their political objectives. The most influential of these congregate around the deceptively named Free Press, a liberal lobby co-founded in 2002 by Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor.

His goals have always been clear. “At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies,” he told the website SocialistProject in 2009. “But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.” Earlier in 2000, he told the Marxist magazine Monthly Review: “Our job is to make media reform part of our broader struggle for democracy, social justice, and, dare we say it, socialism.” When I interviewed him in 2010, he admitted he is a socialist and said he was “hesitant to say I’m not a Marxist.”

In essence, what McChesney and his followers want is an Unfree Press — a media world that promotes their values. “To cast things in neo-Marxist terms that they could appreciate, they want to take control of the information means of production,” says Adam Therier of the blog TechLiberation.

Certainly McChesney seems blind to the dangers of media control on the left. In 2007, he co-authored a remarkable survey of the media under Hugo Chávez’s already clearly thuggish regime in Venezuela: “Aggressive, unqualified political dissent is alive and well in the Venezuelan mainstream media, in a manner few other democratic nations have ever known, including our own.”

Despite his astonishingly radical goals, McChesney’s Free Press group was able to leverage foundation cash and academic “research” into an influential force behind net neutrality. Julius Genachowski, President Obama’s first FCC chairman, hired Free Press’s Jen Howard as his press secretary. The FCC’s chief diversity officer, Mark Lloyd, has co-authored a Free Press report demanding regulation of political talk radio. The FCC’s National Broadband Plan cited research from Free Press and other left-wing groups backing net neutrality more than 50 times.

The battle for control of the Internet isn’t over. Over two-thirds of the House and Senate are on record as opposing FCC regulation of the Internet, and a new president could change the policy overnight in 2017 even if the courts don’t block it.

But for now, the “media reform” movement led by McChesney and his allies can claim bragging rights for their Saul Alinsky–style outflanking maneuver on Internet regulation. They financed the research behind the idea, installed their political allies in power, got the government to consider them experts on the issues they cared deeply about, and finally ran roughshod over both Congress and an initially reluctant FCC chairman. Conservatives should study how the Left won on this issue even as they acknowledge and fight the illegitimacy of many of the results.

Slaul Alinsky rules for radicals # 13

…The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. — Rules for Radicals

…The twelfth rule: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.