Dear Friends,
It seems to me that the political Elite are always searching for ways to control the flow of information, especially political information. Free flowing political information represents a threat to the power of the political Elite. They, being human, want to defend themselves from any threat, not least of which, to their political power, so it follows that they obey their self interest and seek to control information.
The new bill to come out of the Senate committee, ‘Net Neutrality’ is an thinly veiled attempt to control information on the internet under the guise of a legitimate function of government i.e., protection of property.
As I stated in my last blog, that not only is it important for government to protect the property of It’s citizens… it is an imperative. Because if government does not, the lot of everyone in that society, will go down… Intellectual property being the hardest to protect.
Net Neutrality is supposed to protect intellectual property, by allowing the US government to shut down any website, that violates any copyright protection, no matter how tangential. If a website has a link to another site that has been deemed to have been guilty of copyright infringement, the offending site can be simply turned off, by a government bureaucrat without du process… Simply by erasing the DNS entry.
If a certain political faction, that has a history of propagandizing, had control of that function of the government, for example, they could close a site that reported an inconvenient fact by finding a site several links away that violates copyright law no matter how tangentially, then follow the chain of links to the offending site without any supervision. Even a cashier at Wal-Mart has more oversight than government would under this bill.
The US government, under this bill, would be able to turn off websites that offend the political Elite no matter where the are, in any country or nation, on Earth. Putting the US government in the position of potentially being the gatekeeper of information to the World. No way that could go wrong…
The most interesting thing is the way this bill has been reported in the unbiased media. It has been reported as a technical bill to address bandwidth challenges posed by the carriers of internet traffic. Those carriers, (Verizon, ATT, ETC…), want to continue having the ability to choke off bandwidth hogging applications, if their network begins to bog down. This technical and erudite description totally misses the mark. Perhaps intentionally so.
The bill, as advertised, does seek to address a problem with the internet, the ability of internet users to exchange data, (often copyrighted), between each other. This has dramatically diminished the profit of the people who produce content. “Good!” Some anti capitalists might say. “Why should they get rich from music or from a movie?” Because they made it. Just like if you make a chair. It is your property. If someone wants to have it in their house they must reimburse you for your labor producing it to your satisfaction. To do otherwise is stealing. Intellectual property is no different.
Moreover, if intellectual property becomes impossible to profit from there will be less and less available. No one will spend millions of dollars and hours heaped on hours of time to produce a movie that will be stolen immediately. They will go hungry. No one would do that.
In meeting a truly legitimate function of government, our government is seizing an opportunity. An opportunity to snatch the reigns of the flow of information. Elegant in principle, overtly using an important function of government, to subvertly undermine that very function, certainly making Trasymachus proud!
Great politicians don’t necessarily make acceptable lawmakers…
