ObamaNet: If You Like Your Broadband, You Can Keep Your Broadband
By Burnie Thompson
The writer hosts The Burnie Thompson Show Saturday mornings on Fox 28 WPGX, and weekdays from Noon – 2 p.m. on burniethompson.com. Email him at burnie.thompson@gmail.com.
President Barack Obama’s FCC just voted itself the power to regulate “every aspect of how the Internet works,” says Commissioner Ajit Pai. All in the name of fairness and responsibility.
Commissioner Pai is not happy with his FCC colleagues who voted for sweeping new regulations. He said they’ll strangle innovation, cost billions in taxes, and profit trial lawyers. He called it “a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.”
Pai was recently outvoted as the FCC begins to micromanage the Web by invoking the 1934 Telecommunications Act to “preserve” the Internet and move it forward. Let that sink in for a moment.
The FCC said they had to vote on the secret 317 pages of regulations before we could see what was in it. Net Neutrality is supposed to ensure that data is transmitted equally over the Internet.
It’s the same set-up we got with ObamaCare: (1) It’ll be more affordable; (2) We’ll have better quality; (3) We’ll have more access.
But who believes that Obama’s lawyers and bureaucrats will do a better job with the Internet than the engineers and technologists who’ve been doing all along? Obama’s FDR-era Broadband-in-Every-Pot Promise will no more preserve the Internet than ObamaCare made healthcare affordable.
Net Neutrality’s rationing of bandwidth is so unpopular that two-thirds of the House and Senate are on record opposing it. That’s why Obama is doing yet another end-run around Congress, which continues to allow him to rule by edict.
The Internet has thrived as a bastion of freedom and innovation largely because regulators have not taken a heavy-handed approach. Milton Friedman often explained how politicians and bureaucrats pervert incentives, leading to higher prices and worse.
“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.”
Bandwidth is a scarce resource that Big Cable Companies have Jones’d to control for years. They joined forces and sued the government to implement these rule changes, and Comcast spent nearly $20 million lobbying for it.
Obama has been colluding with Big Cable to ration bandwidth to control more of the Internet for years. Alarm bells should’ve rang in 2013 when he appointed their top lobbyist to head up the FCC. Talk about the Fox guarding the Henhouse.
With a GOP Congress continually abdicating its legislative power to the executive branch, this can be seen as Obama’s reminder of just how much we’re at his mercy. He has become emboldened to put more of our social and economic lives under his thumb.
Benito Mussolini called for everything to be “all within the state; nothing outside the state.” Obama is moving us in that direction.
George Soros and the Left have referred to these new Internet regulations as “media reform” in their effort to fundamentally transform America into Omerica. Robert McChesney is a professor at the University of Illinois who calls the new FCC regulations a win for the “broader struggle” toward “social justice” and “socialism.”
Like ObamaCare, ObamaNet is a pretext to monitor us everywhere and always. Without checks and balances, now Obama is set to unleash the Federal Election Commission to troll websites and monitor political activity in order to “reveal donors” and stop “dark money.”
Obama himself built a political career opposing this kind of government encroachment. He was against secret FCC votes before he was president. In the early 1990s, Democrats like President Bill Clinton worked with Internet innovators to keep regulators at bay. Those days are gone.
Too many Democrats have become Obama’s Nincompoop Bobbleheads who hate Republicans more than they love America or common sense.
What they’ll get for their loyalty are higher prices, slower broadband, and less access to the Internet.
Published in the Bay Bullet, Volume 7, Issue 10
