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Tuesday, October 06, 2009
The Fourth Quarter: Our Threatened Internet
Some political threats are more serious than others. Losing a contest over marginal tax rates is annoying, and could be very expensive, but that's a loss of a few contested yards in the middle of the game, not the loss of the game itself. There are far worse things the State can do to us, if permitted, that would make the descent into totalitarianism all but certain.
The three indispensable pillars of freedom are education, communications, and weaponry. Unless private citizens control all three, the State can run roughshod over them -- and it is a settled fact of history that when the State can do so, it will do so. So: how do those three pillars look today?
Governments are always hostile to the private ownership of weapons. Even in the United States, where the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear arms, governments have infringed the right massively, to the point of making weapons practically unavailable to millions of persons. Don't doubt that the process will be carried further, no matter what the Supreme Court has to say about it; "clear and present danger" and "compelling government interest" rationales can cover a lot of ground.
Our established educational system is badly, perhaps irremediably compromised, owing to near-total government control. Even our institutions of higher learning have been corrupted, largely through the adroit manipulation of "educational assistance" monies and government-directed research funds. But the Internet has afforded us access to an alternative means of learning. It's one of the Net's fastest growing uses...and one to which Washington and the educational establishment are violently opposed.
Non-Internet communications, owing to the cell phone, is freer than it was twenty or thirty years ago. But there's little argument that the Net is the freest and swiftest of all currently available communications conduits. Without the Net, the 9/12 demonstration in Washington could not have happened, nor would many of the "TEA parties" have been as well attended as they were. It's no exaggeration to say that the modern American movement for less government and greater freedom is wholly dependent on the Net.
Now have a look at what Obama's "top geek" and her allies have in mind for the Internet:
The Internet (perhaps our greatest free market success story in recent years) is squarely in the cross-hairs of the administration and it’s not waiting for Congress to act. The charge is being led by an eager, ideologically committed White House staffer named Susan Crawford. Officially, she is the Special Assistant for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy. Wired Magazine calls her, “the most powerful geek close to the president.” In recent weeks, bloggers and online activists have begun calling Crawford the "Internet Czar." The shoe fits.As Bill Collier of Freedomist has reported, Crawford has known ties to ACORN, which is one of the participating organizations of her "OneWebDay" project. Crawford self-consciously modeled OneWebDay on Earth Day and the radical environmental agenda that it propelled forward. As Crawford explained her mission to The Wall Street Journal in April: “We should do a better job as a nation of making sure fast, affordable broadband is as ubiquitous as electricity, water, snail mail, or any other public utility.”
In other words, the agenda of her organization is to transform access to the Internet into a government entitlement project, with all the necessary government intrusion and control in order guarantee it to everyone—in the world. Not surprisingly, listed alongside on the OneWebDay participating organizations list is a group called Free Press, which is the biggest advocacy organization pushing the Obama administration to adopt sweeping regulations of the Internet.
Free Press was founded by Robert McChesney, an avowed Marxist who is Washington’s leading advocate of so-called network neutrality regulations who recently argued—on a Web site called SocialistProject.ca—that this type of Internet regulation is a prerequisite for a socialist revolution: “Instead of waiting for the revolution to happen, we learned that unless you make significant changes in the media, it will be vastly more difficult to have a revolution.”
Crawford and McChesney apparently have the full support of the Obama administration and an FCC that is determined to move toward transforming the Internet into a Washington-controlled utility as quickly as possible. The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski, recently announced his pursuit of precisely the regulations they want.
"As ubiquitous as electricity, water, snail mail, or any other public utility.” The first two services are regulated, and in some areas municipalized, but only "snail mail" is uniformly government-provided and government-controlled. It's also the least satisfactory of the three, both in cost and service provided. But the real danger lies in thinking of the Net as a "public utility." That's the gateway through which nationalization would enter, followed shortly thereafter by content regulation -- censorship -- in the "public interest."
Your Curmudgeon trusts no one who seeks power. He's particularly cynical about claims of "public interest." These are on a par with "public service," which, by defining itself as government activity, implicitly excludes activities that serve the interests of others but are done by private persons for their own profit.
If the attempt to make broadband Internet access a federally guaranteed "right" should be forestalled, and the drive to enforce "net neutrality" should be defeated, there will still be dangers. Few people would resist a "public-private partnership," in which federal monies were directed to favored companies for the expansion of broadband access. Few people would quail at the imposition of mandatory "content warnings" on "controversial" Web sites, in the style of the "mature audience" warnings we see on many television shows. The tent is large; there are many places where the camel's nose might poke through.
America's freedom-oriented are fighting a rearguard action. If we're deprived of free and unfettered communications via the Internet, our chances of prevailing will dwindle near to zero. This is a contest we can't afford to lose.
Comments
According to an AP report Monday the 5th, the FTC has approved guidelines for the Web to take effect the 1st of December. One provision requires bloggers to disclose any considerations received for reviewing or promoting products. Aside from fines, $11,000 per violation, the FCC can order a blogger to compensate readers for financial loss.
Posted by Ol' Remus on 10/06/2009 at 02:36 PMThe motivation is the same as Hitler’s was, when he introduced “judicial advisors” into Germany’s courts (to “advise” the judges).
Posted by on 10/06/2009 at 06:03 PMI’ve put up an excerpt and a link to this over at CR. In my view this is the most important front in the war for liberty.
Yet-oddly-there seems to be little discussion around the blogs on how to circumvent government controls on the Net. Will we be reduced to samizdat publishing as the citizens of the USSR were?Posted by kg on 10/06/2009 at 06:56 PMIIRC, we heard the exact same thing when the Clinton--Gore administration took over.
Basically, this is a matter of the government trying to take credit for something the private sector is doing anyway.
The dangerous part comes a few years later when any resistance to regulation is met with claims that the capitalists are hypocrites for taking advantage of the government while resisting regulation. (For a typical example, see the claims that pharmaceutical companies should not reject price controls because their profits were allegedly made possible by government-funded basic research.)
Posted by Joseph Hertzlinger on 10/07/2009 at 12:28 AM
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