12/20/10
The FCC's Threat to Internet Freedom
'Net neutrality' sounds nice, but the Web is
working fine now.
The new rules will inhibit investment, deter innovation
and create a billable-hours bonanza for lawyers.
| By ROBERT M. MCDOWELL Tomorrow morning the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will mark the winter solstice by taking an unprecedented step to expand government's reach into the Internet by attempting to regulate its inner workings. In doing so, the agency will circumvent Congress and disregard a recent court ruling. How did the FCC get here? For years, proponents of so-called "net neutrality" have been calling for strong regulation of broadband "on-ramps" to the Internet, like those provided by your local cable or phone companies. Rules are needed, the argument goes, to ensure that the Internet remains open and free, and to discourage broadband providers from thwarting consumer demand. That sounds good if you say it fast. Nothing is broken and needs fixing, however. The Internet has been open and freedom-enhancing since it was spun off from a government research project in the early 1990s. Its nature as a diffuse and dynamic global network of networks defies top-down authority. Ample laws to protect consumers already exist. Furthermore, the Obama Justice Department and the European Commission both decided this year that net-neutrality regulation was unnecessary and might deter investment in next-generation Internet technology and infrastructure. * * * * * I remember exactly when and where I first read about "DARPA-Net" the amazing new communications project designed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to be robust and self-healing, able to get messages through even when multiple nodes were destroyed by nuclear explosions. DARPA never designed it to survive the greatest threat known to mankind though, the U.S. Fucking Federal government. Tomorrow, mankind will begin the descent into a new Dark Age of ignorance, superstition and privileged information. There will be two classes of people: the government bureaucrats who control and suppress knowledge, and the ignorant masses who sit drooling in front of their TVs, subsisting on what the government subsidized networks tell them to think and to know. The most evil acts in the history of mankind, worse even than the despicable acts of genocide, have been the destructions of knowledge. The loss of the Library of Alexandria, the sacking of Rome and Constantinople, Hitler's book burning. The FCC's hobbling of the internet will go down in history with these other attrocities. Meanwhile, I am amazed that Americans continue to accept one indignity and insult after another. Holder was right. You're a nation of cowards. You're losing everything your ancestors sweated and bled to give you. Generation after generation, you send your children to foreign countries to fight and die and be maimed to protect ungrateful foreign wretches from their fucking enemies. But when domestic enemies come in and steal your country out from under you, you sit on your fat asses and let it happen. Some of you whine about it and march for causes and give speeches, but nobody is willing to fight for their freedom. Well, when you don't have anything that's worth dying for, you don't have anything that's worth living for either.
This will be my last entry. It's been nice talking to you. Sorry you didn't understand anything I was talking about. EnemyoftheState
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