"Net Neutrality": The Usual Suspects

Gee. Same old laundry list of lefties...but they raise an interesting question.

...The net neutrality vision for government regulation of the Internet began with the work of Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded the liberal lobby Free Press in 2002. Mr. McChesney's agenda? "At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies," he told the website SocialistProject in 2009. "But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control."

Ambition has to be big, I guess. Deleting 'capitalists' from phone/cable companies leaves.....exactly.....whom?

Well, you already know the answer: ObamaComm!!

(Yes, I put "ObamaComm" in red for a reason.)

Going on:

...Free Press and allied groups such as MoveOn.org quickly got funding. Of the eight major foundations that provided the vast bulk of money for campaign-finance reform, six became major funders of the media-reform movement. (They are the Pew Charitable Trusts, Bill Moyers's Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, the Joyce Foundation, George Soros's Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.)

No Rockefeller? No Tides? Geez. Small parties.

Source-selectivity counts, too!!

The FCC's "National Broadband Plan," released last spring, included only five citations of respected think tanks such as the International Technology and Innovation Foundation or the Brookings Institution. But the report cited research from liberal groups such as Free Press, Public Knowledge, Pew and the New America Foundation more than 50 times.

Not that Brookings is a RightyTighty outfit. It's just that their research was not, um, useful!!

So the "media reform" movement paid for research that backed its views, paid activists to promote the research, saw its allies installed in the FCC and other key agencies, and paid for the FCC research that evaluated the research they had already paid for. Now they have their policy. That's quite a coup

There are more ways to "coup", Mr. Genachowski.

Question for Paul Ryan: does the FCC actually serve a purpose in the 21st Century?