AUSTIN, Texas — Sen. Al Franken claimed Monday that big corporations are "hoping to destroy" the Internet and issued a call to arms to several hundred tech-savvy South by Southwest attendees to preserve net neutrality.
"I came here to warn you, the party may be over," Franken said. "They`re coming after the Internet hoping to destroy the very thing that makes it such an important [medium] for independent artists and entrepreneurs: its openness and freedom.”
Net neutrality, he added, is "the First Amendment issue of our time."
Receiving a hero`s welcome from the liberal crowd, Franken took repeated shots at big telecoms, singling out Comcast.
He said Comcast is looking to change the basic architecture of the Web by implementing a pricing scheme that allows moneyed interests to pay for faster speeds, leaving everyone else behind. That would be a particularly bad development for the independent musicians and artists gathered here, he said.
"The real end for Comcast is to put Netflix out of business entirely," Franken said, because of the threat that Netflix`s streaming video business could pose to Comcast`s cable franchise. "In the end, the American people will end up paying a lot more for worse service."
Comcast is now embroiled in a dispute with Level 3, a networking company that carries online video feeds for Netflix, over fees Comcast wants to charge to carry the high-bandwidth content.
In response to Franken’s comments, a Comcast spokeswoman said Monday that the dispute with Level 3 isn’t about net neutrality but is “a peering issue.” “Under the FCC order for the Comcast NBCU transaction, Comcast is required to comply with the FCC’s recent open Internet rules even if they are overturned in court. Our customers can access all Netflix content,” said Sena Fitzmaurice, Comcast’s vice president of government communications.
Franken, who was an aggressive opponent of the Comcast acquisition of NBC Universal, implored SXSW attendees to fight the political influence of the big telecom firms.
"Unfortunately one thing these big corporations have that we don`t is the ability to purchase favorable political outcomes," he said. "Big telecoms have lots of [lobbyists], and good ones, too. ... The end of net neutrality would benefit no one but these corporate giants."
Franken said talk of a "government takeover" of the Internet by net neutrality critics has as much credibility as claims of "death panels" in the health care legislation and claims that "Obama`s a Muslim," calling them a "pantheon of lies."
Franken finished up his half-hour speech by imploring the crowd to preserve net neutrality to avoid a future in which they`re "stuck listening to the Black Eyed Peas and reminiscing about the days before you had to sell out to make it.”
“Let`s not let the government sell us out,” he said. “Let`s fight for net neutrality. Let`s keep Austin weird. Let`s keep the Internet weird. Let`s keep the Internet free."
According to a recent Rasmussen’s poll, most Americans understand the FCC’s internet regulations will be used by the government to push a political agenda.
54% of respondents oppose the FCC effort to regulate the internet while 21% support it. 25% are not sure. By a 52% to 27% margin, Rasmussen reported on December 28, voters believe that more free market competition is better than more regulation for protecting internet users. Most Democrats see an unbiased regulatory approach, while most Republicans and unaffiliated voters fear a political agenda.
In April, a Rasmussen poll revealed that just 27% of Americans believed the Federal Communications Commission should regulate the internet like it does television and radio.
Internet regulation was the hallmark of Obama in 2008 as he ran for president. After installing Genachowski as FCC chairman, the Obama administration started to move on its promise to regulate the internet. The FCC began to act like a fiefdom and told a federal appeals court it had the power to impose regulation on broadband rates, even though Congress had not given the agency the power to do so.
In fact, 300 members of Congress, including a large number of Democrats, told the FCC in no uncertain terms to stop its attempt to grab power over the internet. The FCC temporarily changed tack and convened negotiations over the summer with a select group of industry representatives and proponents of internet regulation.
In August, the FCC worked with House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman on a draft bill codifying network management rules.
The FCC decided before Christmas to make its move. Obama said the new government regulation will “help preserve the free and open nature of the Internet.” In fact, it would do just the opposite.
Genachowski and the FCC naturally try to make this unwarranted move look like a white knight government protecting consumers against greedy telecommunications companies and ISPs. Beyond the rhetoric about “net neutrality,” however, lies the real purpose of the FCC regulations – government control and censorship.
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“What governments around the world are suddenly beginning to realize is that a free internet is ultimately incompatible with government secrets, and secrets are essential to any government that wants to remain in power,” writes Mike Adams of Natural News. “As part of a long-term plan to control content on the internet, the FCC is now attempting to assert authority over the internet in the same way it has long exercised content censorship authority over broadcast television and radio.”
Adams argues that the FCC is attempting to assert its authority over the internet. “By asserting its authority with net neutrality, the FCC will establish a beachhead of implied authority from which it can begin to control and censor the internet,” he writes.
Obama’s FCC commissariat is not losing sleep over the First Amendment. It was the FCC’s Chief Diversity Officer Mark Lloyd who said that “blind references to freedom of speech or the press serve as a distraction from the critical examination of other communications policies,” namely converting the internet into the same government regulated medium as television and radio.
Prior to the FCC vote, the United Nations announced its plan to regulate the internet.
“The United Nations is also aiming to run the Internet for you,” warns Joseph A. Klein. “With the backing of governments around the world who don’t mind free-riding on American investment and know-how in the Internet while seeking as many ways as possible to usurp control over its governance, the UN establishment has been trying for years to move control of the Internet’s day-to-day management to some sort of global governance forum.”
Efforts by the FCC and the United Nations at the behest of the globalists are contrary to the model that has emerged since the technology was invented in 1973 and became public in the early 1990s.
“The beauty of the Internet is that it’s not controlled by any one group. Its governance is bottoms-up – with academics, non-profits, companies and governments all working to improve this technological wonder of the modern world. This model has not only made the Internet very open – a testbed for innovation by anyone, anywhere – it’s also prevented vested interests from taking control,” wrote Vint Cerf, who is often called the father of the internet, in response to the UN proposal to regulate the internet.
A free and open internet is anathema to government as it moves to control nations, populations, and telecommunications. In order to succeed and build world government and its accompanying control grid, the internet must be tamed and folded into the established propaganda apparatus.
The machinations of the FCC and the United Nations reveal once again how worried the establishment is about a free and open internet. The internet cannot be allowed to be a primary and growing source of alternative information that challenges daily the corporate media propaganda system that acts like a megaphone for a control freak government.
The Rasmussen poll reveals that while many Americans may not fully understand the underlying reasons for government control of the internet – to stifle opposition to the government in the same way the Chinese have – they are steadfastly opposed to more regulation.
Speculation is rife that Democrat activists or even the Obama administration itself may have been responsible for an attack which brought down a prominent Tea Party website right as the organization targeted was running a major fund-raising drive and on the day after Obama directed the Pentagon to attack “cyberthreats” within the United States.
The FreedomWorks website was attacked at 6:55am yesterday morning as the organization’s server was penetrated and completely wiped out by a “sophisticated hacker” on the very day of the group’s donation drive to support Tea Party candidates running in the imminent mid-term elections.
The attack also coincided with an endorsement by radio host Glenn Beck and the subsequent down time cost the group an estimated $80,000 dollars in lost donations.
“We think the idea was to take our site down until after the election,” Kara Pally, web developer for FreedomWorks, told the Wall Street Journal. “This was politically motivated.”
“It’s like the tea party movement’s been hacked,” said the group’s spokesman, Adam Brandon. “To us, it’s no coincidence this happened the day our Beck money bomb was announced.”
In an identical attack, another Tea Party-affiliated network, GCN Live, on which the Alex Jones Show airs, also had its servers penetrated and completely eviscerated the same day, with Infowars streaming servers also being knocked offline. GCN’s servers are still offline after a sustained and sophisticated attack that was certain to have been a deliberate hack. As in the case of the FreedomWorks attack, the server was professionally targeted, this was not merely a denial of service issue.
The attack came in the aftermath of a hacker openly posting on You Tube how he planned to derail last week’s Infowars money bomb by illegally distributing denial of service software intended to crash the Infowars servers. Another You Tube user documented how the hacker tried to recruit him to help with the hack attack.
Alex Jones, Infowars and GCN have been vehement supporters of Tea Party candidates like Rand Paul and Sharron Angle.
Several respondents to the Wall Street Journal article blamed Democratic operatives for the hack attack.
“George Soros had something to do with this…he has been throwing his money around this week to take out anyone who is associated with the Tea Party,” wrote one.
“Look into the Tides Foundation, Media Matters, Moveon.Org, the NAACP and the DNC. They ALL should be raided today and investigated. Bet it comes from one of them or their fringe subs,” added another.
As we previously documented, the cybersecurity mantra has been exploited by Democrats before to target political websites in an effort to dissuade people from visiting them.
The timing of the FreedomWorks attack was crucial, right on the eve of the election and right at the start of a fund-raising campaign. To believe that this was anything other than a political ploy launched by ideological opponents of the Tea Party movement would be naive.
While we have gone to great lengths to point out how many elements of the Tea Party have been hijacked by Republicans, this once again reminds us of a slogan that Andrew Breitbart has become famous for using – Democrats and liberals don’t play fair – rather than engage in a fair debate on a level playing field they almost always resort to dirty tricks to shut down free speech.
Expect to see many more Tea Party websites targeted as the Obama administration intensifies its cybersecurity power grab, which as we have documented, and as its proponents have even admitted, amounts to nothing less than an underhanded ploy to seize control over the world wide web and create a Chinese-style system of Internet policing.
Doomsday scheme will silence independent voices for good
The net-neutrality ending deal with Verizon is just the beginning of Google’s plans to kill the open and free Internet as part of their takeover agenda to completely control the world wide web and force independent media websites, radio and TV shows out of existence for good.
Google’s agreement with Verizon to speed certain Internet content to users opens the door to the complete sterilization of the world wide web as a force for political change. Under Google’s takeover plan, the Internet will closely resemble cable TV, independent voices will be silenced and the entire Internet will be bought up by transnational media giants.
People who want to run a simple blog will be priced out of existence, online TV and radio shows will cease to exist as the Internet is swallowed up by the corporate borg.
True net neutrality means that independent news outlets who attract an audience by telling the truth can compete on an even keel with corporate giants like ABC, CBS and CNN. The Google-Verizon pact will end that level playing field and in turn eliminate everything that is outside of the mainstream.
“A non-neutral Internet means that companies like AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and Google can turn the Net into cable TV and pick winners and losers online,” writes Josh Silver. “A problem just for Internet geeks? You wish. All video, radio, phone and other services will soon be delivered through an Internet connection. Ending Net Neutrality would end the revolutionary potential that any website can act as a television or radio network. It would spell the end of our opportunity to wrest access and distribution of media content away from the handful of massive media corporations that currently control the television and radio dial.”
The deal will also split the Internet into a two-tier system, a cyber toll road, where satisfactory speeds and service will only be obtainable by those willing to pay substantial fees.
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The pact also gives Google and huge ISPs the leeway to block certain websites on wireless networks, meaning Prison Planet and Infowars will ‘go dark’ for millions of people.
Once Google’s fiercest critics have been silenced for good the company can then set aboutimplementing its CIA-backed total information awareness program, which will scour Twitter accounts, blogs and websites for all sorts of information left by individual users, aiming to use this data to “predict the future” and completely direct and control people’s lives and behavior.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt has announced that Google, in conjunction with the CIA, is set to become the ultimate Big Brother entity that “will know so much about its users that the search engine will be able to help them plan their lives” by constantly tracking their location via smart phones and telling them where to go and what to do.
The recent scandal involving the company’s street view roaming vehicles accessing the wi-fi details of internet users and mapping their online activities has also raised serious questions over intelligence links and abuse of privacy laws.
Watch this important new video in which Alex Jones breaks down Google’s plan to kill the web and explains why it’s the end of the Internet as we know it unless we stand up now and say no.
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