FCC Chairman: Internet to be a Public Utility

[RonPaulFanInGA]

http://www.breitbart.com/news/fcc-chairman-internet-to-be-public-utility/


WASHINGTON, Feb. 4 (UPI) — The Federal Communications Commission will seek more influence on Internet regulation to ensure net neutrality, its chairman said Wednesday.

In an editorial published on {link:the website of the magazine Wired: “http://www.wired.com/2015/02/fcc-chairman-wheeler-net-neutrality?mbid=social_twitter”,nw}, Tom Wheeler explained new rules, proposed this week, “to preserve the Internet as an open platform for innovation and free expression. This proposal is rooted in long-standing regulatory principles, marketplace experience, and public input.”

The new rules will cast {link:high-speed Internet service as a public utility: “http://www.cnbc.com/id/102376526″,nw}, an unidentified person, who was consulted the FCC {link:on the proposal, told CNN: “http://money.cnn.com/2015/02/02/technology/net-neutrality-fcc/index.html”,nw}. The change would give the FCC more power to regulate arrangements between Internet and content providers, and would change current policy in which Internet providers charge content companies, such as Netflix, for direct access to customers through broadband.

The FCC would have the power to ensure broadband companies do not create “slow lanes” for public internet traffic, a concept known as net neutrality.

[Ronin Truth]

What, just plug into the wall and there it is? Makes the spying and tapping job of the NSA much easier.

[VIDEODROME]

I need to get a VPN

[muh_roads]

I need to get a VPN

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/

Buy with BTC, no personal info collected.

[robert68]

Billionaire Mark Cuban Says Net Neutrality Will ‘Fuck Everything Up’ (Video) (http://recode.net/2015/02/18/billionaire-mark-cuban-says-net-neutrality-will-fuck-everything-up/)



Billionaire investor and ABC “Shark Tank” star Mark Cuban unloaded on the Federal Communications Commission’s plan to fundamentally change how it oversees the open Internet.

“That will fuck everything up,” said the voluble Cuban in remarks Wednesday at the Code/Media conference at The Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel, Calif.
...

Cuban, who parlayed his windfall from the 1999 sale of Broadcast.com to Yahoo into an array of ventures that include the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, AXS TV and the Landmark Theatres chain, said there is no evidence (beyond an isolated 2008 case) that Internet providers have throttled access to certain websites.

The executive dismissed Netflix’s claims that subscribers endured slower speeds until the company paid Comcast for direct access to the Internet provider’s broadband network. Comcast claimed that Netflix had used an inferior middleman to deliver video to Comcast’s network.

“It’s a battle between two fairly large companies,” Cuban said. “[They] worked it out, just like happens in business every day.”

Cuban said he does not want a group of political appointees at the FCC regulating the Internet.

“Having them overseeing the Internet scares the shit out of me,” Cuban said.
...

[Anti Federalist]

Welp, had to figure this was coming.

An "unregulated" internet, with kooks running around spewing all sorts of anti-government hostility, had to be brought under control.

[HVACTech]

the very word, " Utility" is not very Anarchistic.

I mean, why would anyone need one of those?

"Anarchists unite!" yeah...

I did know how stupid that would sound... :o

[Anti Federalist]

the very word, " Utility" is not very Anarchistic.

I mean, why would anyone need one of those?

"Anarchists unite!" yeah...

I did know how stupid that would sound... :o

http://i.imgur.com/ucYnq.jpg

[acptulsa]

The days of the government being our great anti-trust protectors are truly dead. Here is an industry which clearly does not need to be a monopoly, because it isn't a monopoly yet it works just fine, being made into a monopoly.

We need to call this out. Government is there to protect us from the monopolies which have to be monopolies and to prevent other monopolies from forming. So why is it doing this crap?

[kpitcher]

I need to get a VPN
If you use a VPN then feds will just assume you're worth snooping since that's bad ya know.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/01/20/1540241/fbi-seeks-to-legally-hack-you-if-youre-connected-to-tor-or-a-vpn


The specific rule the FBI is targeting outlines the terms for obtaining a search warrant. It's called Federal Rule 41(b), and the requested change would allow law enforcement to obtain a warrant to search electronic data without providing any specific details as long as the target computer location has been hidden through a technical tool like Tor or a virtual private network.

[Czolgosz]

rock the vote.

it'll work, this time.

[heavenlyboy34]

The days of the government being our great anti-trust protectors are truly dead. Here is an industry which clearly does not need to be a monopoly, because it isn't a monopoly yet it works just fine, being made into a monopoly.

We need to call this out. Government is there to protect us from the monopolies which have to be monopolies and to prevent other monopolies from forming. So why is it doing this crap?
For fun and profit, as usual.

[DamianTV]

Internet Regulation = Internet Censorship = Monopoly of Belief = Department of Truth

Everything Govt touches, it ruins.

[Carlybee]

Utility=they can charge for it and add untold hidden taxes.

[muh_roads]

If you use a VPN then feds will just assume you're worth snooping since that's bad ya know.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/01/20/1540241/fbi-seeks-to-legally-hack-you-if-youre-connected-to-tor-or-a-vpn


The specific rule the FBI is targeting outlines the terms for obtaining a search warrant. It's called Federal Rule 41(b), and the requested change would allow law enforcement to obtain a warrant to search electronic data without providing any specific details as long as the target computer location has been hidden through a technical tool like Tor or a virtual private network.

Then lets make their job harder. Now is not the time to be a pussy about it. Using encryption should always be a right and the more people that do it, the more useless their tools become.

[Lucille]

Fred!

Cometh The Censor
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-02-16/cometh-censor


I see with no surprise that Washington is stepping up its campaign to censor the internet. It had to come, and will succeed. It will put paid forever to America’s flirtation with freedom.

The country was never really a democracy, meaning a polity in which final power rested with the people. The voters have always been too remote from the levers of power to have much influence. Yet for a brief window of time there actually was freedom of a sort. With the censorship of the net—it will be called “regulation”—the last hope of retaining former liberty will expire.

Over the years freedom has declined in inverse proportion to the reach of the central government. (Robert E. Lee: “I consider the constitutional power of the General Government as the chief source of stability to our political system, whereas the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it.” Yep.)

Through most of the country’s history, Washington lacked the ability to meddle, control, micromanage, and punish. In 1850, it had precious little knowledge of events in lands such as Wyoming, Tennessee, or West Virginia, no capacity to do much about them, and not a great deal of interest. People on remote farms and in small towns governed themselves as they chose, not always well but without rule by distant bureaucracies and moneyed interests.

For a sunny few years, local freedom rested substantially on principle, a notion inconceivable now. The Thomas Jeffersons, George Washingtons, and Robert E. Lees genuinely believed in freedom, and worried about the coming of tyranny. Justices of the Supreme Court often upheld the tenets of the Bill of Rights. As human affairs go—poorly, as a rule—it was impressive.
[...]
Today, that has changed. Washington has learned to avoid dissent from its wars by using a volunteer army of men about whom no one of influence cares. The use of “drones” further reduces public interest, and today the major media, owned by corporations aligned with arms manufacturers and manned by intimidated reporters, hide the results on the battlefield. For practical purposes, today’s press is an arm of government.

The old checks and balances, however modest in their effects, have withered. The Supreme Court is now a branch office of Madame Tussaud’s, Congress a two-headed corpse, the Constitution a scrap of moldering parchment remembered only by hopeless romantics, and Washington a sandbox of unaccountable hacks inbred to the point of hemophilia. Obama has discovered that he can do almost anything, calling it an executive order, and no one will dare challenge him.

In its rare waking moments, the Supreme Court has shown little inclination to protect the Bill of Rights, which Washington regards as quaint at best and, usually, an annoyance to be overcome by executive order and judicial somnolence. The obvious reality that having the government read every email, record every telephone conversation, monitor every financial transaction and so on is a gross violation of the Fourth Amendment bothers neither the Supremes nor, heaven knows, the President. It is clearly unconstitutional, but we do not live in constitutional times. Governments aggregate power. They do not relinquish it, short of revolution.

Today the internet is the only free press we have, all that stands against total control of information. Consider how relentlessly the media impose political correctness, how the slightest offense to the protected groups—we all know who they are—or to sacred policies leads to firing of reporters and groveling by politicians. The wars are buried and serious criticism of Washington suppressed. That leaves the net, only the net, without which we would know nothing.

Which is why it must be and will be censored, sooner if Washington can get away with it and later if not. The tactics are predictable. First, “hate speech” will be banned. The government will tell us whom we can hate and whom we cannot. “Hatred” will be vaguely defined so that one will never be sure when one is engaging in it and, since it will be prosecutable, one will have to be very careful. Disapproval of favored groups, or of their behavior, will be defined as hatred. National security will be invoked, silencing whistle-blowers or, eventually, anything that might make the public uneasy with Washington’s wars.
[...]
I suppose it can be debated whether the current enstupidation of the rising generations is deliberate or merely the consequence of a return to peasantry inescapable in a democracy. The petulance and immaturity running through so much of society may be inevitable in a spoiled people who have never had to do anything and have never been told “no.” Certainly things today resemble the end games of other once-dominant cultures.

Mental darkness facilitates authoritarianism, and darkness we have. Many college graduates can barely read. Their ignorance of history, politics, and geography (and practically everything else) is profound, and they see no reason why they should know anything. They seem not to suspect that there might be things worth knowing.

I am hard pressed to think of a society in such internal decline that has turned itself around, and I cannot imagine how ours might do so. One sure thing is that, once the internet is gelded, there will be no hope at all. And the assault has begun.

And there will be those who say turning the internet into a public utility does not mean censorship, and those who doubt this will called paranoid conspiracy theorist nujobs. But in the end, the nutjobs will be right again.