Thursday, October 09, 2014

Obama’s FCC Poised To Seize The Internet

by JASmius



If Congress won't act to nationalize the Internet, Barack Obama will:

There has been mounting evidence in the last two weeks that the Internet, one of the last unregulated venues for communication, might well be headed for federal regulation.

What makes the specter of Internet regulation (or "net neutrality," as its proponents prefer to call it) all the more ominous is that it might become law through rulings by the Federal Communications Commission rather than a vote of elected representatives in Congress.

Of course, it will.

Kinda dunselizes next month's midterm elections, doesn't it?

On September 24th, the Washington Post reported that the FCC was working with [extrem]ists seeking to generate comments in favor of tough, 1930s-style regulation of telephony. In what the Post’s Nancy Scola dubbed "an unusual collaboration," supporters of net neutrality "were keeping up a round-the-clock watch of ECFS’s [Electronic Comment Filing System] health. Headquartered in Southwest Washington, D.C., the FCC’s technologists were doing the same.

Governmental opacity - check; corrupt Regime collusion with hard-left special interests - check.

Noting that the ECFS system for public engagement on communications issues is seventeen years old and "isn’t up to the age of digital engagement," reporter Scola noted that "all involved saw the deluge coming and [extrem]ists — planning a one-day ‘Internet Slowdown’ that called on the public to contact the FCC — reached out to the bureaucrats to see how they might keep the system afloat."

By the time the September 15th deadline rolled around for public comments on "so-called net neutrality," Scola reported, 3.7 million comments had been recorded by the federal government, more than the FCC has gotten on any debate in its eighty-year history."

Corrupt collusion carried out furtively so as not to alert the public until it's too late - check.  And I'm going to go way out on a limb and surmise that the vast majority of those "public comments" weighed in favor of the Obama Regime confiscating the Internet.

Sounds like how they run elections in this country, doesn't it?

Futiley pissed off yet?  Mike Wendy certainly is:

Opponents of "so-called net neutrality" hit this hard.

"If the Post’s report is accurate," wrote Mike Wendy of MediaFreedom in an open letter to the FCC Inspector General, then his organization "believes this ‘unusual collaboration’ undermines the Commission’s open rulemaking process, revealing in it a bias that defeats the needed reason and factual underpinning for a lawful rule to result."

Well of course, Mike.  The purpose of the FCC's "open rulemaking process" isn't to make rules in the open; it's to ensure that the Left gets the Internet, after which any and all dissent will be summarily cleansed from it, now and forever.  And, yes, any and all e-commerce plundered and eradicated.

Now you know why I'm composing this post so furiously.

Wendy called on the Inspector General "to look into this matter to ensure that the public interest was not harmed by the reported actions."

Which will have one of three outcomes: (1) Mr. Wendy's request will be ignored; (2) Mr. Wendy's request will be honored and the I-G will be swiftly terminated for doing what's supposed to be his job; or (3) Mr. Wendy's request will ostensibly be honored and the I-G's "looking into this matter" will be concluded sometime before the dawn of the twenty-second century.  Whichever way that turns out, we won't know about it, because the Regime will forbid any reporting on it from being posted to its Web.

Other groups raising unshirted hell with the FCC include the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Center for Individual Freedom, FreedomWorks, and the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.  Which will avail us nothing, of course.  But there's something to be said for exercising one's First Amendment rights to the greatest extent possible in the short time we still retain them, I always say.

Exit question: Does this mean that The One will rule the country with his pen, phone, and mouse?

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