Saving the Internet

In California, Governor Jerry Brown just singed a bill rendering the repeal of Net neutrality . . . neutered in his state.  Internet service providers in California now have to respect Internet neutrality by not slowing down some traffic and speeding up some other traffic and charging more for the faster speeds.  And no blocking of content politically objectionable to the service providers!

The U.S. Justice Department has sued to stop the re-instatement of Net neutrality in California, citing the supremacy of federal deregulation over state regulation.  It figures that Jeff Sessions would suddenly forget the beauty of states' rights now.

But then, Congress does have the power to oversee interstate commerce, and the last time I checked, the Internet providers who are in California are in other states.  So the Tenth Amendment may not be applicable here. But the First Amendment is, since the repeal of Net neutrality involves free speech.  

Let the court battles begin.  Ajit Pai may have thought the battle was over when he scuttled Net neutrality earlier this year, but I predict that it's only just begun.          

An Immodest Proposal for Preserving Net Neutrality

I wrote last week about the end of Net neutrality as if it were inevitable, and it probably is. But maybe I'm wrong.

The only thing Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Ajit Pai understands is power.  That's why Pai laughs off comments on the FCC's message board pleading with him to preserve Net neutrality - "Look, I'm scared, I'm scared!"  Pai's allies in the telecommunications industry and their backers in Congress only understand power, also.  So don't waste your time writing to Uncle Charlie (i.e., the FCC) to demand that Net neutrality be preserved.   Here's a better idea.

Find a U.S. Senator - any U.S. Senator - on record for supporting Net neutrality.  If he or she happens to represents your state, so much the better.   Write to that senator and urge him or her to use the power every senator has to hold up legislation to block something important . . . like, say, the continuing resolution renewal. The U.S. government is operating on a continuing resolution in the absence of a real budget, and it is set to expire on December 9 if it is not renewed.  If it expires, the government will shut down.

Tell that senator to block a vote on the continuing resolution unless and until Congress agrees to enshrining Net neutrality into law. No free Internet, no continuing resolution.  Then find another senator and repeat the process.  Write to as many senators as you can.  Call their offices if you can.  Keep track of how many senators respond to you; follow up on the ones that don't.  

Do you remember that song that was a hit back during the 1979 oil crisis, the song suggesting that the U.S. withhold shipments of agricultural products to OPEC member states if they didn't lower the price of oil - "Cheaper Crude Or No More Food"?  Well, I'm proposing the same idea here.  We the people should have our senators hold the continuing resolution hostage to preserving Net neutrality.  If there's actually a completed budget to vote on (yeah, right), they should hold that hostage to ensure that Net neutrality is preserved.  Heck, they should block a vote on raising the debt ceiling, if that's possible, to get Congress and Trump to agree to preserve a free Internet.  Yeah - "Free the Net or no more debt!" :-D 

We ought to do something.  Anything.  Well, anything that's legal.  Because unless we do something, we're all going to get hit on December 14 with a Pai in the face.

Act now before the FCC board has its Net neutrality vote on December 14.

This Is the End of the Internet

Offer up your best defense, but it won't be good enough.

After a vote in May to begin the termination of Internet Neutrality, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is set to vote on a final set of standards in December to allow Internet service providers (ISPs) to do whatever they want with the World Wide Web - which means charging customers more for service, charging Web sites a premium for faster downloads, and blocking some Web sites - including blogs - altogether.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai says that companies will be free to innovate and to expand service without what he calls the government's "heavy-handed" regulation of the Internet.  The only thing the service providers have to, er, provide to customers in return for unlimited abilities to limit Internet access is an easily accessible Web site spelling out their content policy in an effort to provide "transparency."  Violations of this rule could allow Uncle Charlie (that would be the FCC) to fine the ISPs.

Any fines, of course, would probably be the equivalent of paying a 25-cent fine for dumping garbage on someone's property.  (Arlo Guthrie, remember, had to pay fifty dollars for that back in 1965, which would be about $390 today.)  

Regulation of the Internet would be transferred mostly to the Federal Trade Commission, an acknowledgement that Pai considers the Internet to be a commercial enterprise, not a public medium.  Just to make it clear - giving the Federal Trade Commission regulatory control of the Internet is like giving  an octogenarian security officer the authority to arrest a bank robber. 

This marks the end of the Internet as we know it - and I feel awful.  Money-making companies that provide Internet service - I ain't namin' names! - now have carte blanche to restrict and block Web sites and blogs that they don't like.  Do you have a Black Lives Matter advocacy site?  Sorry, your Internet service provider's CEO may have a problem with black people making trouble over the police.  Does your site advocate for high-speed rail?  Whoops, your ISP owns a television network with a lot of ad accounts from automakers.  Forget about it.  Do you oppose Trump?  You get the idea.

Oh, your ISP might let you access some sites they find questionable - for a price.  So if you see a 50 percent increase in your Internet connection fee, that will explain it.  Of course, you might be able to buy a premium package to get the same basic service you get now.  You just won't be able to afford the mortgage on your house.  And if you live in a state with a Democratic governor, don't expect him or her to try to regulate the Internet and preserve the old regulations within your state's borders; Pai has made it clear that state enforcement of Internet neutrality will not be allowed.

If I may use another analogy, ISP control of the Internet will be the equivalent of the anecdotal story I heard about newsstands in a hotel chain run by Mormons (again, I ain't namin' names!); it is said that the chain's bosses ensure that magazines such as the Atlantic, the New Republic, and Harper's don't appear in the newsstands in their hotels' lobbies.  (They apparently contract the Mormon Church's Word of Wisdom.)  A lot of people don't like Pai's rule change, but they are too powerless to stop it; the Republicans have a majority on the FCC's board and so hold all the cards.  I've heard about threats to file suits against the dismantling of Net neutrality, but whom can anyone sue?

I really don't know if my blog, given all of the controversial opinions I've expressed on it (like my hatred for rap), would be subjected to censorship, but my gut tells me that my ISP may not have a problem with it.  But yours might.  If it turns out that too many ISPs are blocking my blog, I suppose I could terminate it and start a new opinion blog under a pseudonym - say, "Kevin McClaine" - but as soon as Kevin McClaine started posting numerous blog entries supporting Martin O'Malley's presidential prospects in 2020, they'd know it was me.       

So I don't know what to tell you.  Except, welcome to the new era of Internet censorship.  When you go online after December 14, you may not get to access the Web sites you want.

But you'll get to look at a lot of this. :-(

(Note: To make it clear, www.action-now.com is not a real Web site.  But this is what you might start seeing from a lot of Web sites that are real. >:-(   )

Uncle Charlie Declares War On the Internet

The rule established two short years ago by the Federal Communications Commission - affectionately known as Uncle Charlie in CB radio slang - establishing a free and neutral Internet is dead.  This past Thursday, the FCC voted two to one to end Net neutrality and allow your Internet service provider (ISP) to have more leeway over the Internet, which means that the big company that lets you access the Internet could (will?) decide that certain sites - like streaming services from companies owned by rival ISPs or any sites that your own ISP may find politically offensive - will take more time to upload or won't load at all.  And if you want faster lanes for some Internet traffic, you'll have to pay more.  It's not going to happen right away, but the decision begins the process of dismantling yet another achievement of the Obama administration.

The FCC's chairman, Ajit Pai, a former Verizon lawyer,  says that the rules keeping the ISPs' filthy hands off our Internet are too burdensome and too cumbersome to allow more services and more choices for consumers, and he says that they also hobble innovation.  He also believes that the Internet is a commercial, not a public, enterprise (proof once again that the only public entity in America anymore is Eliot Spitzer's sex life) and so should be regulated by the Federal Trade Commission.  Except that the FTC wouldn't have the ability to enforce rules of fair play even if there were any such rules to speak of.  Small wonder that Pai got praised by one communications company executive for "remaining focused on creating a light-touch regulatory environment that is pro-consumer, pro-investment, and pro-innovation."  And anti-freedom. 

Pai (above) is all but forcing Congress to decide how Internet access would be governed.  There's a possibility of creating new legislation to determine who writes the rules for the Net, which Pai seems to want to make Congress do, but the deadlock on Capitol Hill renders that possibility unlikely.  And, oh yes, in case you're thinking that a Democratic President will reverse Pai's reversal of Net neutrality in 2021, rest assured (rest assured, that is, if you work for AT&T or Verizon) that the Republican caucuses in Congress, having already established themselves as permanent majorities through gerrymandering and voter restriction laws, are now working to pass a law that would make it illegal for a presidentially appointed agency to change regulatory rules without congressional approval.      

But what about all of those pro-Net-neutrality e-mails and comments to the FCC that crashed Uncle Charlie's Web site?  Pai blamed it all on hackers.  End of discussion.

I guess it's time for me to finally start doing what I've been threatening to do here for awhile - stop talking about politics so much.  If I keep going after Trump, many of you might never get to read what I think about him, because any anti-Trump page will probably take so long to load (if it loads at all) that you won't even bother trying to read it.  My Family page and my beautiful-women picture blog likely won't be affected, but I'll have to take former George Walker Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer's advice and watch what I say in this space.  I might just stop discussing politics altogether.  Maybe I'll just talk about classic rock here. 

I know that anything I write about classic rock won't be blocked by ISPs.  Because classic rock is overwhelmingly white, mostly male, familiar, and out of step with the times - just like the folks who provide our Internet service.   

No Fake News Here!

This past Sunday I saw a report on "60 Minutes" on fake news and the sites that promote it.  Scott Pelley showed how fake-news sites proliferate across the Internet and how they're designed to get the attention of ideologically charged audiences by using fake Twitter accounts known as "bots" to spread them as far and wide as possible.  They have people on the left and right believing the worst about each other's political opponents - I'll grant that not everything reported about Donald Trump is true - and that's pretty much how that story about a Washington pizzeria that was reported to have been the center of a child sex-slave operation run by Hillary Clinton got started.  That, of course, led to a person who believed the worst about Hillary going there and shooting up the place.

One of those "fake news" purveyors, Mike Cernovich, defended his work in an interview with Pelley, saying that his information about the Clinton campaign and the Democratic left (which, remember, are not one and the same) is a counterpoint to the official line from the Democratic Party, his "facts" based on his own "reporting" - like having a doctor Hillary has never met examine her based on a clip of her showing signs of fatigue (from an illness) and attributing it to Parkinson's disease.

Well, you won't find any fake news here.  Because, apart from a piece on a Swedish Christmas fair that I reported on here because I had no other place to publish it, I don't report news stories on this blog, and I have made it clear that this blog is not meant to be a news source.  It's just social and cultural commentary, essays about personal experiences, and the occasional book or record review.  And my blog "Pictures of Beautiful  Women" is just that and nothing else.

You know, the world would be a whole lot better if those of us who write blogs without any news value remembered that we are just reporting opinions and hearsay without presenting them as the facts.  I merely comment on what I've heard, and if it sounds fishy or fake, I either say so or refuse to even dignify the story with commentary. Look, the Internet is meant to spread free speech, but free speech is a responsibility that has to be taken more seriously.  I am responsible for saying that what you read on this blog is not the gospel, just me mouthing off about whatever happens to be on my mind.

That's why this blog is called "Miscellaneous Musings."

Below The Fold

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, having published in Washington State's largest city, folded its print edition last week after 146 years in business. The newspaper is now only available online, which must be cold comfort to staffers at the P-I (was Seattlites call it) who were downsized as a result.

With more people inexplicably choosing to read their news off the Internet, and having to boot up and then scroll down to read an article while in an uncomfortable position to do so, those of us who appreciate a newspaper you can hold in your hand and read leisurely and at a relaxed pace are feeling very lonely. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is now online only, the Rocky Mountain News folded completely, and the San Francisco Chronicle could follow, leaving San Francisco without a major daily paper (the Examiner long since gone). The Philadelphia Inquirer and even the New York Times are also endangered.

I always thought there'd still be a market for newspapers, wonderful sources of investigative reporting and assets to local communities that the Internet would only supplement, not replace. But more and more people are getting their news from online news videos from CNN or MSNBC, as well as blogs that opine more than report. The news they get is selective, biased, and poorly researched at best. This kind of news dissemination, encompassing the most amateurish forms of journalism, is not what the Internet was meant for.

Everyone knows that the Internet was meant to be a repository for pictures of hot women. :-D

I have never presented this blog as a legitimate news source. :-D