The mostly regulation-free Internet has become a free speech, free market Xanadu.
So of course President Barack Obama and his Left want to regulate the daylight out of it. In their efforts to do so, they will spin any tale to try to engender any public support for new Web regulations.
For instance, the Barack Obama Administration is likely about to totally fabricate a U.S. mobile broadband assessment report. In which they will say that the unequivocally astounding success that is our Internet – is at best uncertain, if not an utter failure.
If any of this nonsense sounds familiar, it’s only because it is. In May 2011 we had this:
Which brings us to the looming annual broadband deployment report from the (Barack Obama Administration’s) Federal Communications Commission (FCC) (called the 706 Report).
In which they are going to again give U.S. broadband deployment a failing grade – just as they did last year.
Which is completely “DC Disingenuous.” In other words, the FCC is lying through its bureaucratic teeth.
We bet you weren’t aware that Internet access has for the last four years stunk on ice. That is, of course, because it hasn’t.
98% of Americans have access to wireline or mobile broadband, from cable companies, phone companies, satellite companies, wireless Internet access providers (WISPs) and from 3G or 4G mobile wireless providers.
Does all this access success beget commercial success? Indeed it does.
E-commerce sales accounted for 5.4 percent of the total $1.1 trillion retail sales in the final three months of 2012, representing the highest percentage since the Census Bureau started keeping track of online sales more than a decade ago.
And the Web’s free speech advancement has been, if possible, even more astonishing.
The Internet has made the First Amendment almost completely horizontal. Anyone, at virtually no cost, can publish their thoughts. Or collect the thoughts of themselves and others. Or find like-minded others to begin to gather together.
Online publishing has been a fundamental component of the break down of the Left’s news and media monopoly. The Genesis, Exodus and Deuteronomy of the conservative Tea Party – the greatest political rising of the last quarter century – has been on the Web.
If the Right is to succeed, the Internet must be their vorpal weapon. The Left currently has it all over them there – that must change.
Of course the President and the Left won’t wait around for the Right to figure it out. They’ll instead preemptively regulate the Net into oblivion. They’d like a return to the 1960s media monopoly status quo – that’s just the way it is. And they’ll say and do anything to reverse this remarkable free speech, free market progress.
Like issue serial ridiculous Web “assessment” reports.
[First published at RedState.]
Seton Motley is the president of Less Government, a DC-based non-profit organization dedicated to reducing the power of government and protecting the First Amendment from governmental assault.
