Pay attention when FreePress is quiet about something it was ear-splitting loud about before. Without fanfare, FreePress apparently has mothballed its old SaveTheInternet.com agitprop campaign apparatus by redirecting www.SaveTheInternet.com to a refreshed FreePress.net site that reboots under a variety of "Internet freedom" agitprop sub-campaigns. Mandated net neutrality government regulation has now transmogrified into an "Internet freedom."
And FreePress/Public Knowledge have cloned a SaveTheInternet twin, the comic-book-inspired, "Internet Defense League," which apparently will be the new front group responsible for much of the online community organizing and stunt-staging that FreePress/SaveTheInternet became infamous for. Think of the FreePress 1.0 email list of ~500,000 activists pinging around in a social media 2.0 echo chamber, in order to defend the Internet from capitalism, profit and private property.
FreePress' "Internet freedom" reboot apparently is in the process of getting the people and organizations which signed the original oath of allegiance to SaveTheInternet, to sign the new FreePress 2.0's Declaration of Internet freedom.
True to form, FreePress is taking Orwellian double speak to new heights. First, FreePress branded itself as the personification of a constitutional "free press," when it really advocates for the opposite -- government-dependent media and the destruction of private media. Next it has represented net neutrality government regulation as "freedom of speech." Now we can translate FreePress' calls for "Internet freedom" as really meaning a government-enabled information commons where ultimately there is no cost to access or use the Internet and no cost to consume Internet content.
While FreePress/Public Knowledge apparently have concluded begrudgingly that net neutrality is a loser issue through the front door (in Congress and in the Courts), they have not given up on the prospect of slipping it through the back door disguised as something else.
Now we understand why FreePress/Public Knowledge have been so relatively quiet on promoting wireless net neutrality of late and why FreePress really dropped its appeal of the Verizon challenge to the FCC's Open Internet order. Apparently it is because they knew something the public did not. They must have been tipped off to the thrust of the recent Presidential advisory committee's spectrum "sharing" recommendation released last Friday.
That advisory committee recommends the Administration effectively bypass the Congress and the Courts on net neutrality and create by Executive Order, a de facto government-owned, wireless information commons via the Government "sharing" 1,000 MHZ of U.S. Government spectrum with the public, rather than providing more cleared spectrum for auction to the private sector, per U.S. law.
Remember in FreePress-land nothing is as it seems. Their concept of "Internet freedom" is freedom from Congress, the Courts and the U.S. Constitution; and freedom from having to pay for anything related to the Internet: access, bandwidth, apps, content, etc. They see "Internet freedom" as the ultimate digital free lunch.
