Showing posts with label FCC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label FCC. Show all posts

Thursday, July 5, 2018

Read about the steps the FCC has taken to protect consumers against illegal robocalls and robotexts

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Monday, June 11, 2018

Today, the @FCC's Restoring Internet Freedom Order (RIFO) effectively rolls back Obama-era Net Neutrality regulations. We debunked a few of the left's scare stories on this topic

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Saturday, December 16, 2017

FCC chairman Ajit Pai drops truth bomb on Jimmy Kimmel after ‘hysteria’ over net neutrality repeal

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Friday, December 15, 2017

The Internet Is Free Again: Killing Obama-era rules will remove the FCC as political gatekeeper















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Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Why Ajit Pai Is Right on Net Neutrality









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Tuesday, March 28, 2017

House passes bill undoing Obama internet privacy rule



The bill passed 215 to 205, with 15 Republicans joining 190 Democrats voting against it.

The FCC rules would have given consumers greater control over what their internet service provider can do with their data by requiring those companies to get permission from customers before using their information to create targeted advertisements.

The rules had not yet gone into effect....

The opposition to the regulations was led by Republicans and the telecom industry, who argue that they are too costly and confusing. They say the rules would have subjected internet service providers to restrictions that do not apply to websites like Facebook and Google, which also collect consumer information for data-driven ads....

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, a Republican who opposed the rules as a minority commissioner in October, applauded the vote in a statement, saying that he will work to impose a technology-neutral privacy regime.

“Moving forward, I want the American people to know that the FCC will work with the FTC to ensure that consumers’ online privacy is protected though a consistent and comprehensive framework," Pai said.

"In my view, the best way to achieve that result would be to return jurisdiction over broadband providers’ privacy practices to the FTC, with its decades of experience and expertise in this area.”

Democrats and activists waged a furious campaign against the bill, trying to peg Republicans as anti-privacy....

MEANWHILE:



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Thursday, November 12, 2015

FCC rules in favor of snooping by #tech giants

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Monday, April 13, 2015

More than a dozen Republicans move to block the FCC's new net neutrality rules

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Sunday, March 15, 2015

FCC Plans Stealth Internet Tax Increase

◼ American politicians of all stripes clearly see and oppose the abuses of the Internet abroad. But our government officials are not aware that the Federal Communications Commission, without statutory authority, is proposing to expand its taxation and regulation of the Internet. - Harold Furchtgott-Roth/FORBES

One set of proposals considered by the FCC would classify Internet services, or at least Internet access services, as “interstate telecommunications services” bringing the regulation of those services exclusively to the FCC.

The FCC imposes fees of 16.1% on interstate telecommunications services that will generate more than $8 billion in federal universal service funds in 2014. Additional FCC fees on interstate telecommunications services raise $1 billion for federal telecommunications relay services. Although Congress mandates the general nature of the federal universal service fund and telecommunications relay services, it is the FCC alone that sets the budget size of the funds and develops the fee structure to raise receipts for the funds.

Even with all of its power, the FCC does not have the money to fund all of the new programs it seeks. For example, just in the past year, the FCC announced an ambitious multi-billion program to connect schools and libraries with Wi-Fi. Other advocates seek expansion of the low-income program. But where can the FCC find funds for new social programs not required by statute?

The FCC’s network neutrality proceeding may easily provide the answer. By classifying broadband access services as “interstate telecommunications services,” those services would suddenly become required to pay FCC fees. At the current 16.1% fee structure, it would be perhaps the largest, one-time tax increase on the Internet. The FCC would have many billions of dollars of expanded revenue base to fund new programs without, according to the FCC, any need for congressional authorization.
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Friday, March 13, 2015

FCC Cites Soros-Funded, Neo-Marxist-Founded Group 46 TIMES In New "Net Neutrality' Regs

◼ New internet regulations finally released by the Federal Communications Commission make 46 references to a group funded by billionaire George Soros and co-founded by a neo-Marxist. - Chuck Ross/Daily Caller

...The FCC received more than 4 million public comments as it was weighing the net neutrality initiative, but Free Press and other activist groups have received the most attention by pressuring the FCC and the White House on behalf of their cause.

One argument made against the FCC’s regulatory push is that the general public is largely happy with its internet service. Support for net neutrality was seen as the domain of special interest groups like Free Press.

The activist group has big money behinds its effort. It has received $2.2 million in donations from progressive billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and $3.9 million from the Ford Foundation.

And one of Free Press’ co-founders, Robert McChesney, a communications professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has not been shy about his desire to see the internet regulated heavily....

But internet regulation appears to be only part of McChesney’s more radical agenda of completely revamping how the media operate in the U.S.

“In the end, there is no real answer but to remove brick by brick the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles,” McChesney wrote in a 2009 essay.

“Only government can implement policies and subsidies to provide an institutional framework for quality journalism,” he said.

“The news is not a commercial product. It is a public good, necessary for a self-governing society. Once we accept this, we can talk about the kind of media policies and subsidies we want,” McChesney once argued.

Sentiments such as these have raised questions about whether the FCC’s new regulations will eventually lead to oversight of internet content.

“The unthinkable has become thinkable, and the free-market Internet – one of freedom’s greatest triumphs – is set to be reduced to a public utility, subject to pervasive economic regulation and, in turn, to content control,” American Commitment’s Kerpen wrote in an open letter to McChesney after the FCC voted 3-2 in favor of the regulations.... KEEP READING
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Thursday, March 12, 2015

FCC releases 313 pages of #NetNeutrality regulations

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Thursday, February 26, 2015

FCC Approves Net Neutrality in Straight Party-Line Vote

◼ In what one Republican called a “monumental shift toward government control of the Internet,” the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday approved a proposal granting the federal government the authority to regulate Internet broadband providers under the same law as public utilities. - The Blaze
The five commissioners voted 3-2 along party lines in favor of the proposal known as net neutrality. The 317-page plan, which has not yet been publicly released, bans broadband providers from blocking, throttling or prioritizing certain Internet pages over others. The FCC has said the proposal will not seek to impose any new taxes or fees.
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Wednesday, February 25, 2015

‘Net Neutrality’ Is a Problem, Not a Solution

◼ The oldest trick in the collectivist playbook is to create a problem through government regulations, let it stew for a while, and then propose even bigger government as the only possible solution to the “crisis” it planted, nourished, and harvested. - John Hayward/Breitbart @Doc_o

We watched government tinkering in health care make it more expensive and complicated, year after year… until the time was ripe to stuff the biggest, sloppiest, most poorly-thought-out Big Government power grab of the modern era down our throats. Are we really going to fall for that again with the FCC’s new Net Neutrality regulations?

Net Neutrality is a problem, not a solution, and it won’t take long before we’re told that even more extensive and intrusive government control of Internet service is necessary to address all the “unintended consequences” it produces. The big difference between the government takeovers of health care and the Internet is that the latter will happen much faster, because everything happens faster on the Internet.

Mark Cuban, a longtime critic of the Net Neutrality push, went on Glenn Beck’s TV show Tuesday to talk about those “unintended consequences,” which one suspects are going to come as a surprise to the suckers who think the Obama Administration is heroically trying to make their telecom bills lower by fiat, rather than huckstering them into with a massive con job...

The mainstream media is risibly attempting to portray Net Neutrality as a David-vs.-Goliath victory of the Little Guy over evil mega-corporations with a regulatory slingshot. It’s more like David inviting Godzilla into the ring to take out Goliath, without much thought for what Godzilla’s going to do afterward.

They’re about to find out that Godzilla’s appetite for power will be whetted, not sated, by the meal they’re offering. Activist government uses its power to create crises that can be exploited to accumulate more power. It’s the most reliable process in the world, but smart people keep fooling themselves into being surprised by it. KEEP READING



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FCC CHAIR REFUSES TO APPEAR BEFORE CONGRESS AHEAD OF INTERNET TAKEOVER

◼ “So long as the chairman continues to insist on secrecy, we will continue calling for more transparency and accountability at the commission,” Chaffetz and Upton said in a statement. “Chairman Wheeler and the FCC are not above Congress.” - National Review



◼ LEFT GROUPS NOW FEAR: GOV'T NET GRAB GOING TOO FAR! - Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
Unfortunately, if a recent report from Reuters is correct, the general conduct rule will be anything but clear. The FCC will evaluate “harm” based on consideration of seven factors: impact on competition; impact on innovation; impact on free expression; impact on broadband deployment and investments; whether the actions in question are specific to some applications and not others; whether they comply with industry best standards and practices; and whether they take place without the awareness of the end-user, the Internet subscriber.
◼ Plan Could Lead to UN Takeover of Internet
Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune of South Dakota argued that by claiming more authority over Internet access for net neutrality, the Federal Communications Commission will undermine the ability of the U.S. to push back against international plots to control the Internet and censor content.
◼ SOROS CASH BEHIND PUSH - Paul Bedard/Washington Examiner
“The Ford Foundation, which claims to be the second-largest private foundation in the U.S., and Open Society Foundations, founded by far-left billionaire George Soros, have given more than $196 million to pro-net neutrality groups between 2000 and 2013,” said the report, authored by Media Research Center’s Joseph Rossell, and provided to Secrets.

“These left-wing groups not only impacted the public debate and funded top liberal think tanks from the Center for American Progress to Free Press. They also have direct ties to the White House and regulatory agencies. At least five individuals from these groups have ascended to key positions at the White House and FCC,” said the report which included funding details to pro-net neutrality advocates.
◼ Commisioner: 'Independence of agency has been compromised' - Reason Magazine
◼ Lawless? - The Hill
From all indications, the FCC contemplates that the new rules will be sufficiently burdensome and costly — and sufficiently ambiguous — that affected parties will be invited to seek exemptions from the new mandates through "waiver" requests or other administrative mechanisms.

But this likely flood of waiver requests should raise serious questions concerning the lawfulness of the agency's mode of operating. As Philip Hamburger discusses in his book, Is Administrative Law Unlawful?, one of our Founders' objectives was to control, if not eliminate, what in England was known as the "dispensing" power. Simply put, the dispensing power — which is much discussed in English constitutional history — was a form of exercise of royal prerogative under which the king could excuse himself or his favored subjects from complying with particular laws enacted by Parliament. As Hamburger explains, today's administrative agencies, in essence, have resurrected the dispensing power by the way they so often use waivers to grant favored treatment.





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Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Obama’s Internet Power Grab: FCC Commissioner: ‘Unprecedented Involvement Of Executive Branch In Our Decision-Making’

◼ In a completely unsurprising development, one of the two Republican Commissioners on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has made it clear the Obama administration’s effort to regulate the Internet is nothing more than another government power grab. - Arnold Ahlert/Front Page
“President Obama’s plan marks a monumental shift toward government control of the Internet,” said a statement released by commissioner Ajit Pai. “It gives the FCC the power to micromanage virtually every aspect of how the Internet works. The plan explicitly opens the door to billions of dollars in new taxes on broadband… These new taxes will mean higher prices for consumers and more hidden fees that they have to pay.”
◼ FCC Commissioner: ‘Unprecedented Involvement Of Executive Branch In Our Decision-Making’ - Kerry Pickett/Daily Caller
How will content possibly be censored when the government moves in on this and treats the internet as a utility?
◼ FCC Keeps Its 'Open Internet' Plan Hidden From View 0 JOHN MERLINE/IBD
How's this for irony? The Federal Communications Commission, which wants to regulate the Internet heavily to make it more "open," is refusing to let the public see its proposed rules before the commissioners vote on them in two weeks.

Perhaps it's because, while talking publicly in reassuring tones about how the FCC merely wants to secure "net neutrality," it's planning to do much, much more.



FEDS EXPLORE REGULATING WEBSITES...
FCC Commissioner: 'Mimics Obamacare'...
'Massive Power Grab, Government At Its Worst'...
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Sunday, February 8, 2015

How a Ragtag Band of Activists Won the Battle for Net Neutrality

◼ Despite fierce opposition from the major Internet providers, the FCC is poised to seize expansive new regulatory powers.

It was completely hopeless.

That's what Marvin Ammori, a net-neutrality advocate and consultant for tech companies, told Ari Shahdadi, the general counsel of Tumblr, over burgers in New York City in January 2014.

A federal court had just sided with Verizon and struck down the government's net-neutrality regulations, potentially giving Internet providers the green light to block websites or carve up the Internet into "fast lanes" and "slow lanes."

Ammori and Shahdadi feared the future of the Internet as an open and free platform could be in danger. But the only way to restore net neutrality would be for the Federal Communications Commission to do the politically unthinkable, what some called the "nuclear option."

They would have to convince the FCC to declare the Internet a "telecommunications service" under Title II of the Communications Act. That move, they believed, was the only way the FCC could enact real net-neutrality protections that could hold up in court. But it would provoke the full wrath of some of the most powerful companies in Washington. Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, and Time Warner Cable would all argue it would strangle their industry with outdated utility-style government controls.

How could a handful of start-ups and some feisty Internet activists beat multibillion-dollar corporations with hundreds of well-connected lobbyists?

Shahdadi managed to talk Ammori back from the ledge. A few years earlier, Shahdadi reminded him, they had helped organize a huge online uproar over the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. Thousands of websites shut down in protest over the anti-piracy measure. Despite the vocal support of Hollywood and the music industry, lawmakers were forced to drop the legislation in the face of the massive public backlash.... KEEP READING

◼ On the other hand: FCC Commissioner Slams ‘Obama’s 332-Page Plan To Regulate The Internet’ - Daily Caller

Republican FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai on Friday raised the first of many criticisms to come about FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s aggressive net neutrality plan distributed to commissioners Thursday, which Pai described as “President Obama’s 332-page plan to regulate the Internet.”

In a statement released Friday, Pai lamented the fact that the 332-page plan, which he tweeted a picture of himself holding next to a picture of Obama, won’t be released to the public until after the commission votes on its implementation later this month....

“President Obama’s plan marks a monumental shift toward government control of the Internet. It gives the FCC the power to micromanage virtually every aspect of how the Internet works,” Pai said. “The plan explicitly opens the door to billions of dollars in new taxes on broadband… These new taxes will mean higher prices for consumers and more hidden fees that they have to pay.”

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Thursday, January 29, 2015

FCC raises threshold for high-speed internet as service providers cry foul

◼ New benchmark means 55 million Americans currently lack broadband access after chairman derides internet companies’ advertisement claims - The Guardian

...The definition of broadband is set to be raised from 4 megabits per second (Mbps) to 25Mbps for downloads and 1Mbps to 3Mbps for uploads.

With that speed as the benchmark, significantly fewer Americans have access to high-speed broadband. Under the previous definition, 19 million Americans were without access; the new definition means that 55 million Americans – 17% of the population – now do not have access to high-speed broadband, according to the FCC’s 2015 Broadband Progress Report, which is in the final editing process but was cited at the hearing....
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Sunday, August 31, 2014

Just What Exactly Is Net Neutrality? And Why You Should Be Worried About It.

◼ As always, the problem can be traced back to a Obama administration bureaucracy... - RedState

...the ultimate irony of the FCC’s discriminatory approach to net neutrality. It has been sold as a means of protecting Internet startups when its real purpose is to protect existing or emerging non-ISP monopolies in mobile operating systems, search engines, online advertising, and online video distribution. In addition to stifling competition with their direct rivals, these monopolies could become so powerful that they stifle competition among mobile ISPs as well. The end result wouldn’t protect the ‘open Internet’ — it would merely shift net neutrality advocates’ concerns over gatekeeper control upstream from ISPs to other participants in the Internet ecosystem.

If the FCC wishes to preserve competition in the mobile Internet segment, its best bet is too maintain a light regulatory touch that maximizes opportunities for market negotiation. If the FCC won’t do that, then it should apply whatever net neutrality rules it adopts to all mobile Internet gatekeepers, ISP and non-ISP alike.

Reinstating the FCC’s ISP-only approach to Internet regulation is by far the worst option for regulating the mobile Internet. We already know where that market distorting road leads: To new monopolies in the middle.
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Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Meet Ajit Pai

◼ Commissioner who blew the whistle on the FCC policing the newsroom has more work to do - Washington Free Beacon

...Pai’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal was published on Feb. 10. Two weeks later the study was dead. The article had taken a life of its own, drawing outcry across the political spectrum from Fox News to the Atlantic.

“One of the things that all of us prize, whether we come from a particular political persuasion, is the fact that freedom of the press is just that, that the government does not decide for the American people what information is critical and what is not,” Pai said. “The notion that a contractor tasked by the government identifying critical information needs and then studying how independent, private news organizations meet those needs, that’s a notion I think has a lot of resonance with anyone in this country.”

“And I think that’s what you saw.”...
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Tuesday, February 25, 2014

For Obama’s supporters, what matters is not what he does, but what he says and represents.

◼ When Failure Is Success: - Victor Davis Hanson/National Review

...For elite rich liberals, whose money and privilege exempt them from the consequences of Obama’s policies, and their own ideology, he will always be their totem. He is iconic of their own progressivism and proof of their racial liberalism, and thus allows them to go on enjoying their privilege, without guilt and without worrying too much about how they got it or whether they might lose it.

For the vast new millions on federal disability insurance, food stamps, and other entitlements, Obama is their lifeline to government support. Who would risk losing that by worrying that the world is becoming a very dangerous place? If the IRS has to become politicized, better that it become politicized by going after right-wing tea-party types who would cut government. And if the media are to be investigated, at least the target might be Fox News, which — as the president just complained again to Bill O’Reilly on Super Bowl Sunday — is a thorn in the side of the president’s progressive agenda. And if the country is going broke, at least those who will raise taxes are preferable to those who might cut government.

In short, there can be no scandals, or even good or bad news, just what Obama represents — an exemption from normal protocols of public and media scrutiny of his actual record....
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