There are many Leftist groups that rightly hail the Internet as the free speech, free market Wonderland that it most certainly and currently is.
Leftists who then schizophrenically demand absolutely radical increased regulatory control of it.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has long been a member of this confused gaggle. And they have just released a whiplash-inducing report entitled:
Network Neutrality 101: Why The Government Must Act To Preserve The Free And Open Internet.
The title could use a bit of a rewrite. How about:
Network Neutrality 101: The Internet is Free and Open – Why Must The Government Act?
Their heading certainly begs a question. If the Internet is free and open – they assert that it is and, again, almost everyone agrees – why mess with it?
Imagine the Internet is – I don’t know – a highway. Let’s say a super one. You’re flying around in your car (Internet Service Provider [ISP]). Your vehicle is running really, really well and you love its performance. You love also the roads on which you travel – and they get faster and faster and run better and better with each passing day.
You know lots of other cars are tooling around right along with you (95% of Americans have access to the Internet), but the highway is well managed and maintained and you never encounter other motorists unless you wish to encounter them – like at a Facebook rest stop or a Twitter roadside diner.
Now imagine that the Media Marxist contingents at the ACLU, Free Press, Public Knowledge and others are all auto mechanics and highway repairmen – albeit without any knowledge of or skills for vehicular or road repair. And the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is the hapless, helpless Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV).
These people have little to nothing to do with the wondrous Information Superhighway. And that bugs them. And they mostly sort of dislike how happy nearly everyone is on it – without benefit of their regulatory assistance and guidance.
To busy their idle hands, the Media Marxists hatch a plan. They will require each and every driver install a governor (net neutrality) – to cap everyone’s speed at a dramatically lower rate than the ones at which they have been happily traveling. All in the interest of “fairness” and “progress,” you understand.
But the Leftists have another problem – the FCC (again, think DMV) doesn’t have the authority to order people to do this. They WANT to, but Congress must first give them the power – and that has not happened.
I’ve pointed this out, but don’t just take my word for it. 299 members of Congress have said it – a large bipartisan majority. More than 150 organizations, state legislators and bloggers have said it. So have seventeen minority groups – that are usually almost always in Democrat lockstep.
So have many additional normally Democrat paragons, including several large unions: AFL-CIO, Communications Workers of America (CWA),International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW); several racial grievance groups: League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), Minority Media and Telecom Council (MMTC), National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Urban League; and an anti-free market environmentalist group: the Sierra Club.
So too has the unanimous D.C. Circuit Court – led by a Democrat Bill Clinton-appointee – ruling in April in the Comcast-BitTorrent case that the FCC doesn’t have the authority to regulate the Internet.
Most importantly, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has himself said it. In an interview with the Washington Post, the Chairman readily acknowledged “(W)e have a Communications Act that wasn’t written for broadband.”
So you’re a regulatory agency with no authority to implement something you REALLY want to implement. What do you do?
If you’re this FCC, you simply vote yourself the authority – via a 3-2 Democrat Party-line vote – known as Internet reclassification. And not just to mandate the speed caps – they will be electing themselves Internet Overlords.
The FCC – the DMV of the Internet – would then have the usurped authority to regulate Internet speed (net neutrality) and price (Internet price controls the way the FCC price controls telephones).
They will have willed themselves the power to tax and toll the Internet (just as they do telephones). They will have authority over all traffic – they will control the stoplights, signals and signs. And a whole host of other new federal Internet powers.
How will the Information Superhighway then run? Just like your local branch of the DMV.
And we haven’t even touched upon the content control implications of this. Imagine how well your local Tea Party group’s website will do once the government they’re protesting the (over)size of is running the Web. You want a First Amendment issue, ACLU? THERE’S your First Amendment issue.
The FCC could execute this Internet power grab as early as November 30th. This simply must not be allowed to occur.
Seton Motley is the President of Less Government and the Editor in Chief of StopNetRegulation.org, a project of the Center for Individual Freedom.
