The campaign for “internet fairness” — that is, a regulatory takeover of the internet that the courts have already otherwise ruled unconstitutional — was funded by a host of left-liberal organizations:
The Federal Communications Commission’s new “net neutrality” rules, passed on a partisan 3-2 vote yesterday, represent a huge win for a slick lobbying campaign run by liberal activist groups and foundations. The losers are likely to be consumers who will see innovation and investment chilled by regulations that treat the Internet like a public utility.
There’s little evidence the public is demanding these rules, which purport to stop the non-problem of phone and cable companies blocking access to websites and interfering with Internet traffic. Over 300 House and Senate members have signed a letter opposing FCC Internet regulation, and there will undoubtedly be even less support in the next Congress.Yet President Obama, long an ardent backer of net neutrality, is ignoring both Congress and adverse court rulings, especially by a federal appeals court in April that the agency doesn’t have the power to enforce net neutrality. He is seeking to impose his will on the Internet through the executive branch. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, a former law school friend of Mr. Obama, has worked closely with the White House on the issue. Official visitor logs show he’s had at least 11 personal meetings with the president.
The net neutrality vision for government regulation of the Internet began with the work of Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded the liberal lobby Free Press in 2002. Mr. McChesney’s agenda? “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.”
A year earlier, Mr. McChesney wrote in the Marxist journal Monthly Review that “any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself.” Mr. McChesney told me in an interview that some of his comments have been “taken out of context.” He acknowledged that he is a socialist and said he was “hesitant to say I’m not a Marxist.”
For a man with such radical views, Mr. McChesney and his Free Press group have had astonishing influence. Mr. Genachowski’s press secretary at the FCC, Jen Howard, used to handle media relations at Free Press. The FCC’s chief diversity officer, Mark Lloyd, co-authored a Free Press report calling for regulation of political talk radio.
Free Press has been funded by a network of liberal foundations that helped the lobby invent the purported problem that net neutrality is supposed to solve.
[…]
The FCC’s “National Broadband Plan,” released last spring, included only five citations of respected think tanks such as the International Technology and Innovation Foundation or the Brookings Institution. But the report cited research from liberal groups such as Free Press, Public Knowledge, Pew and the New America Foundation more than 50 times.
So the “media reform” movement paid for research that backed its views, paid activists to promote the research, saw its allies installed in the FCC and other key agencies, and paid for the FCC research that evaluated the research they had already paid for. Now they have their policy. That’s quite a coup.
A coup? That’s a bit hyperbolic, don’t you think? Not to mention unhelpful?
Pragmatism.
The left has become adept, in its stealth socialism campaign, at framing its policies in the language of freedom, even as it actively works to remove those freedoms and centralize authority in an effort to build its bureaucratic state.
Fortunately, some of us are able to see through this. And fortunately, too, Congress and the courts will have some say in the outcome of this attempted takeover of the ‘net by a rogue government and its use of backdoor bureaucratic maneuverings.
We must keep the pressure on, however. Or these most recent elections will have meant nothing in the long term.
(h/t JHo)
****
update: Oops. Looks like this had already been posted. My bad.
Fuck off, alex. You too, Julian.
A host of left-leaning orgs? How many of them can be traced back financially if not organizationally to Soros?
Like Voldemort leaving pieces of his soul in the seven horcruxes, Soros has scattered his hellish drop in hundreds of agitation organizations, all to the purpose of creating his “open society.”
Good luck finding and destroying them all, is what I’m saying.
WTF is Robert “I Hesitate to Say I’m Not Marxist” McChesney doing working at a public university? Would the University of Illinois employ someone who says “I hesitate to say I’m not a fascist”?
For that matter, why the hell is he able to find work ANYWHERE?
Paging alex…
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How long has Glenn Beck been after these guys?
Yeah, but Pablo, Beck once cried on camera. So, you know…
Pablo – you stole my thunder!
Anyway, it’s looking like Beck doesn’t seem so crazy after all, does he?
If you look at his track record, he’s Nostrafuckingdamus.
Guys– Van Jones was the Green Jobs Czar. That should pretty much tell you that all of Obama’s appointees are in a similar vein– die-hard socialists (and that’s being kind).
Very, very unhelpful, Soiled Sockpuppet. Tsk, tsk.
A “Free Press” report calling for regulation of political talk radio?
How can these people say or write stuff like this with a straight face? Or without their heads exploding from the dissonance?
Seriously, this all stems from the butt-hurt they feel over the wildly successful Limbaugh and Beck, both commercially and in getting out their respective “messages”, and the dismal failure that was air America and is MSNBC.
They start by redefining “free”.
The Endarkenment is really starting to pick up speed. Won’t be long now, folks.
Bob – Please spread it far and wide, but credit goes to Billy Beck, from way back in the days of Usenet.
It encapsulates so many concepts – an unwinding of the enlightenment and a return to the Dark Ages, among others. To my hard-wired engineering brain it represents the moment when all of the bureaucratic diktats in the world crash into physical reality, the grid fails, and we’re plunged, literally, into darkness.
Jeff – I’d like some neutrality as far as betting on football games. Can the government make things even, after all, who could have picked the Bears to be the best – worst team. — Please don’t have my legs broken.
College hoops is where I get even.
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