David Asman, Fox News, wrote yesterday, “Of all the government interventions by the Obama administration, the plan released Thursday by the Federal Communications Commission to regulate the Internet is the worst.
“Yes, ObamaCare is massive and is clogging one-sixth of the economy. But even before ObamaCare, government had a huge imprint on the health care industry with Medicaid and Medicare. Also, regulations on pharmaceutical and insurance industries led to their energies being focused as much on pleasing government bureaucracies as curing illnesses.”
Given the new rules, this and other public policy web sites both local and national may well go dark, but never fear, the FCC knows what you need to know and when and how you need to know it.
Asman continues:
But the Internet is young, fresh, alive and untainted. The FCC’s plan to muddy the pure waters of the Internet pollutes the one free flow of information on the planet. And what hurts as much as witnessing the pollution of the Internet with bureaucratic interference? With the exception of the Republican FCC commissioners, most are being blasé about the whole thing.
Make no mistake. The greatest tool for freedom of expression to come along in our lifetime is in danger. One cannot have genuine freedom of expression with a government monitor, an overseer, a censor prepared to immediately shut down any “threats” to the state.
The two Republican FCC Commissioners (out of a total of five) know exactly how important this new plan really is. Commissioner Ajit Pai has called the new FCC plan “a massive shift in favor of government control of the Internet…everything from your wireless service plan, to your wire line connection at home.”
These new rules would not only affect your services, it would also give FCC regulators the power to decide what content on the Internet was “just and reasonable.” Commissioner Tom Wheeler makes the absurd comment that the FCC would never use those powers. But in a February 4 issue of Wired, he already hints at ways bureaucrats could start dictating what they view as “threats” on the Internet:
“…my proposal includes a general conduct rule that can be used to stop new and novel threats to the Internet. This means the action we take will be strong enough and flexible enough not only to deal with the realities of today, but also to establish ground rules for the as yet unimagined.”
In other words, they want to establish new rules and regulations for stuff that hasn’t even been imagined yet!
Equally galling is the process by which this government takeover is happening. The 332 pages of new FCC rules have been held in secret, and even after Thursday’s vote, they are not being released. Like Nancy Pelosi said of ObamaCare, “We can read it after we vote on it.”