Obama Pushes Net Neutrality For Control Of Web

Editorial Cartoon by AF Branco

IBD Editorial: Tangled Web: While in China, where free speech is suppressed, the president again pitched net neutrality, in which a "free and open Internet" is regulated by a government that would be both gatekeeper and traffic cop.

Under net neutrality, a concept pushed by President Obama and his Federal Communications Commission, the regulators propose taking for themselves the power to control how Internet providers manage their networks and how they serve their customers. It would be up to the FCC to decide how and what information could flow through the Internet, all in the name of providing access to the alleged victims of corporate greed.

The Internet, perhaps as much as the first printing press, has freed the minds of men from the tyranny of those gatekeepers who know that if you can control what people say and know, you can control the people themselves.
The Chinese grasp this, and apparently so does Obama.

In a statement released Tuesday, the president of this free nation proposed rewriting yet another law — as he has done with the failed ObamaCare and proposes to do with blanket amnesty — by executive action. In this case, it is the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which defines the Internet as lightly regulated under Title I. "Lightly regulated" means no control of content or access by the federal behemoth.

Obama wants the FCC to unilaterally put the Internet under heavily regulated Title II, which would apply 1934 Telecom Act landline law to the formerly unfettered and free Internet, in essence making the Web a government utility. Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has justifiably called the president's proposal "ObamaCare for the Internet."

As Seton Motley, president of Less Government, points out, twice before has the FCC tried to impose net neutrality, and twice it has been smacked down by the D.C. Circuit Court.

In one instance, a three-judge panel rejected in the spring of 2010 an August 2008 FCC cease-and-desist order against Comcast's attempt to slow down what are called BitTorrent transfers. Judge David Tatel wrote that the FCC had failed to "tie its assertion of regulatory authority" to any law enacted by Congress.

In fact, the expressed intent of Congress had been to preserve Internet freedom, it having rejected no less than five bills that had been backed by such entities as Google, Amazon, Free Press and Public Knowledge, and that would have granted the FCC power to regulate what it considered net neutrality violations. The matter was not brought up again, even when the Democrats had control of both the Senate and the House.

"The Internet is absolutely as important as the president says it is — just as it currently is," Motley said in response to Obama's statement.

"Why is he insisting on fundamentally transforming it with this huge unilateral power grab?"

We would suggest that it is because Obama has long opposed the free flow of information as a hindrance to his ambitious big-government agenda, an animus that started with diatribes against cable outlets such as Fox News and conservative talk radio.

In a 2010 speech to graduates at Hampton University in Virginia, Obama complained that too much information is a threat to democracy.

"With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations — none of which I know how to work — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a means of emancipation," he opined.

"All of this is not only putting new pressures on you, it is putting new pressures on our country and on our democracy."
We said at the time that we disagreed with his views. Dissent, we argued, doesn't threaten our republic. But free speech restrains the tyrants and socialists who would steal our freedoms. The Internet is the direct descendant of the pamphleteers who energized the American Revolution. This time it's not the British coming as tyrants, but Obama and the FCC.

See also: Net Neutrality Is A Smoke Screen For FCC Power Grab

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