Net Neutrality (which Mike Wendy calls a “Private Property Slap-Down” ) may not be any longer the top issue on the Obama administration’s side of things, but questions still remain. And the funny thing: all the Net Neutrality advocates in the world working in the White House were no big deal. But all of a sudden it’s a concern that a former AT&T President going to the White House is a problem . But yes, the FCC wants to change the subject . Now suddenly the press is to open up more bandwidth for wireless Internet access. Funny, I was assured during the Net Neut debate that wireless access didn’t effectively exist. Now the FCC wants to expand it. More spectrum isn’t necessarily a bad thing , but we do have to watch how it is acquired. The last time we had a big spectrum shift, it ended in a massive Digital TV subsidy boondoggle. We’d hate to have that kind of problem again. Of course, the left would never want to leave well enough alone by expanding the possibilities. Apparently we need more regulation of wireless providers . Here’s the problem: if wireless companies can’t charge people full and fair prices for over use, the only sensible alternative is going to be to cut off service. That is going to be a bigger shock to people than any oversized bill. Another thing the Obama administration is trying to stop talking about is high energy science. After years of Republicans being accused of hating science for failing to fund “basic research,” Democrats are making the same failure by ending the funding of the Tevatron device at Fermilab. Funny, that. Poor Google. You can add South Korea to the list of countries investigating the WiSpy Street View scandal. And one final but important note: Clipper is back, only instead of a mere key escrow system, government wants to track you online through the creation of an “identity ecosystem.” I’m no fan of anonymity online, but the idea that we’d give government enough power to do something about it is absurd and honestly scary.
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Tech at Night: Net Neutrality, FCC, Science, Google
Good night/morning. Yes, the world now waits on the FCC to see whether it will act to claim broad, unprecedented regulatory powers over the Internet, the pricing of services on it, as well as the content on it. Free Press is happy , of course, because that organization’s long-term goal is the total state control of all mass media. They recognize the FCC’s so-called Net Neutrality plans for what they are. The rest of us must recognize the same, and get loud against the FCC to make others see, as well. And then we must get Republicans in the House fired up to make refudiating the FCC’s plans a top priority come January. One more note: Germans are not happy with Google Street View , as so many Germans are taking advantage of Google’s offer to blur them, that Google’s own offices in Munich are blurred thanks to a neighbor jumping on the offer. Europeans are more sensitive about online privacy than we are, and maybe they’re right about it. About the privacy at least, if not their apparent desire to rely on massive state action to protect it, instead of basic common sense.
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Tech at Night: The world waits
So, while Google may have seen the light on Net Neutrality ( which is actually, amusingly enough, making the far left sound like me ), they still have other issues going on. The WiSpy Street View spying issue is still ongoing, with South Korea raiding their offices and Germany pressuring the firm to be more transparent and responsive to privacy complaints about the program. Because as I said earlier today , asking Eric Schmidt about privacy is like asking Phillip Morris about smoking. The conflict of interest is inherent. Everyone who hides his identity from Google Analytics, Google Adsense, and every other Google program is costing the firm money. Meanwhile, the EU and the FTC are targeting Apple for an incredibly ridiculous reason. You see, Steve Jobs has kept Adobe’s proprietary, intellectual property-protected Flash framework off of iOS (which drives the iPod Touch, iPad, and iPhone). Reasons given include CPU load which drains the battery, and no apparent need for it with the maturity of HTML 5 and CSS 3 technologies available in the Safari browser and its Webkit framework. So naturally the governments are claiming that this open embrace of open, unrestricted technologies… harms competition. Yeah. Seriously. As far as I’m concerned, any government entity that forces Apple to license a closed, monopolized technology, or punishes Apple for failing to do so, loses all legitimacy forever in anything it ever says or does. That’s how irrational this is, to question the abandonment of closed technology in favor of industry standard, open technology as anti-competitive. For crying out loud, Webkit is an open source framework. Anyone can grab the source and use it, even Adobe itself, thanks to its roots in KDE . Apple does virtually everything it can to open up Webkit and Safari, while Adobe has done nothing. And yet Adobe is the good guy here, per the FTC and the EU. What a joke. I cannot express enough how much this burns me up. Meanwhile, at the FCC, the FCC has caught onto the latest buzzword that the rest of the Obama administration uses when it wants to grab power online: “Cybersecurity.” Hold onto your CAT-6 cables, because the government is coming, and it’s here to help. The FBI isn’t here to help , though, unless you’re a big corporation making millions of dollars. According to TechDirt, the FBI has made missing persons a lower priority than copyright infringement cases, which aren’t even supposed to be criminal at all, but rather civil matters. This is a subsidy, pure and simple, but in this case is literally coming ahead of people’s lives and safety. Shame on the FBI. Yet while the FBI goes nuts over copyright, TSA is going wild with file sharing as it saves half-naked pictures of travelers, despite promises that those pictures would not be stored in any form. That claim was of course laughable from the beginning, when even plain, old copiers store data these days. Do we miss the time before the TSA yet? And to finish up tonight, let’s just get a reminder of the hypocrisy of Free Press . As much as they demand transparency for thee, they themselves tell plenty of lies and keep plenty of secrets. Free Press is having many meetings to lobby for its agenda that it’s not even bothering to disclose under the Lobbying Disclosure Act’s requirements. Oops. Good catch, Daily Caller.
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Tech at Night: Google, Apple, Adobe, FCC, FBI, TSA, Free Press
Good evening. Once again we see shoddy thinking from the FCC as they continue the push for the National Broadband Plan. Not all Americans have equal access to high speed Internet connections they complain, ignoring the fact that some Americans choose to live out in the middle of nowhere, and that choice comes with costs. Chairman Julius Genachowski and the rest of his socialist team on the FCC don’t care, and just want to pass those costs onto the rest of us, it sounds like. Watch out as they try to declare a right to a good Internet connection, even if you’re off in the hills. The fight against the runaway FCC has a new ally, though: Jim DeMint . He has proposed the Freedom for Consumer Choice Act, which would not only slow down the FCC’s rush to grab power, but would force a sunset on FCC regulations. The FCC Act sounds good to me and I think we should support it. Free Press , our favorite band of extremist neo-Marxist “media reform” radicals, is under increasing fire, too. Even the left is starting to wake up and oppose their socialist aims . When you’re losing Oliver Willis and Markos Moulitsas, and you were only popular on the left to begin with, you’re losing any semblance of grassroots support in America, and that’s the spot Free Press is in. Couldn’t happen to a better bunch, eh? Google has enough problems as well that you’d think they’d avoid making stupid mistakes, but read this article . Google is begging the FTC not to regulate them away from innovation. But it won’t stop them a second from begging the FCC to regulate ISPs away from innovation. Self-seeking, hypocritical statists, that’s what the bigshots at Google are. If it’s not evil it’s at least dishonest, and we have to make them pay for it by exposing them. They’re going to get some of theirs, though, as Connecticut opened up an investigation into the Street View WiSpy scandal and 37 other states have since joined in. The opening request of Google is plain, simple, and should be answered if Google wants to assure people they aren’t a bunch of snoops. Quoth PC World: The letter, organized by Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, also asks Google if the company’s Street View cars recorded any Wi-Fi data for more than 0.2 seconds. The letter, sent to a Google attorney Wednesday, asks the company how it was unaware that the code in the software was able to collect data from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks. I’d prefer not to say anything kind about Richard Blumenthal, as I absolutely oppose him in his race for the Senate, but in this case he and the other 37 Attorneys General are right and there’s nothing I can do about that. And lastly, does Darrell Issa ever sleep? He apparently doesn’t have enough on his plate calling out the White House, so he’s laying into the House Democrats as well , exposing how hearings are being rigged to have entirely pro-Obama slates of witnesses, all lined up to praise the administration’s policies each in turn. Seriously: an entire panel of witnesses was set up to be all from the administration. No opposition at all was scheduled. What kind of oversight is that?
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Tech at Night: FCC, Jim DeMint, Google, Free Press, Darrell Issa
