The chairman of President Obama’s Federal Communications Commission is no different than the communist leader of China’s information ministry, a full-page ad in Wednesday’s Las Vegas Review-Journal suggests.
The ad, paid for by the nonprofit group Protect Internet Freedom, features a vignette of FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s head fused with that of Lu Wei, the head of China’s State Internet Information Office. Beneath the portrayal is a quote from each.
“We’re for an open Internet,” but “there needs to be a referee with a yardstick,” the March quote from Wheeler suggests. The December quote from Lu says, “The Internet in China should be a free and open place … with rules to follow.”
The piece comes as Wheeler arrives in Vegas to address tech leaders at the annual Consumer Electronics Show. “PIF believes it is the ideal venue for FCC Chairman Wheeler to explain why he and Chief Lu Wei agree that Internet freedoms must be regulated and checked by a government-appointed referee,” the ad’s sponsor said.
Related Story: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2570147
“How long until the FCC follows similar censorship practices now that it has declared the Internet a government-regulated public utility?” the group adds. “Speculation already suggests that alternative political news websites like the Drudge Report could be subject to FCC ‘refereeing.'”
Last yr @TomWheelerFCC used #CES to give first hints of heavy-handed Internet regs–what are we in for this time? pic.twitter.com/tg2oXaRvTs
— Protect Net Freedom (@pronetfreedom) January 6, 2016
In February, Wheeler led the FCC in a controversial 3-2 vote that reclassified Internet providers as telecommunication utilities similar to telephone companies. Critics have said the next step likely will be to regulate “edge providers,” those that provide digital services online, such as Google or the Drudge Report.
Lu, who oversees China’s online censorship as part of the country’s “Great Firewall,” has more power than his counterparts in Washington, though there is often little daylight in rhetoric used between Beijing and Washington. “Freedom is our goal. Order is our means,” he explained last month.
Related Story: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2578065
Wheeler similarly explained that the FCC’s Internet takeover was necessary because Congress failed to act, saying the new regulatory regime was “the strongest open Internet protections ever proposed by the FCC.”
