WSJ – "The Net Neutrality Coup" *Updated*

December 21, 2010

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*John Fund will be on the Victoria Taft Show today at 11:40 to talk about this.*
Ignoring Congress and a federal appeals court ruling, the FCC has followed the whims of Barack Obama to impose the so-called “net neutrality” policy on the country.

John Fund, with the Wall Street Journal provides some interesting insight into the basis for this unnecessary policy. [Update by VT:] For openers the groundswell of “support” for this caper was a put up job. Here’s the money ‘graf:

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.

Article HERE

Of note from Fund’s article,

“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’.”


“A year earlier, Mr. McChesney wrote in the Marxist journal Monthly Review that ‘any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself.’ Mr. McChesney told me in an interview that some of his comments have been “taken out of context.” He acknowledged that he is a socialist and said he was ‘hesitant to say I’m not a Marxist’.”

Tell ’em where you saw it. Http://www.victoriataft.com