Campaigns

Sometimes an analysis is so outstanding, all you can say is "Read it!"

Anyone who considers themselves religious should read Red State's illuminating and shocking post, which documents an anti-Christian discriminatory bias by Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig and his extremely close ally -- Google.

• "Obama and Google's mutual advisor: Jesus is gay; wears a diaper and gets run over."

WARNING: Christians will find the one-minute-fifty-second video that Mr. Lessig shows to a laughing Google audience, sacrilegious, offensive, and disturbing.  

I am attending David Isenberg's Freedom to Connect Conference today as a very very small minority of broadband industry folks.

In listening to a panel on politics and the web, my ears perked up when Donna Edwards, who defeated Rep. Al Wynn (MD) in a democratic primary, admitted that only one citizen of the thousands she met going door to door during the campaign -- actually asked her about net neutrality.  Very interesting.

All the bragging by Matt Stoller of Open Left and other net roots suggested that Edwards win was a win for net neutrality at the net roots.

The reality is now shared from the candidate that net neutrality was not at all on the minds of voters in Maryland.

• Once again, the net roots have overstated their power and impact to look more powerful than they really are.  

Professor Tim Wu, who coined the term "net neutrality" is reportedly now advocating "law breaking" to advance the "information commons" agenda, which believes Internet infrastrructure, spectrum and content should be publicly owned and not privately owned.  

Politicizing the Internet

Moveon.org, through its FreePress/SaveTheInternet puppets, loves to extol the virtues of grass roots democracy and claim to the press that there is a spontaneous groundswell for their net neutrality views in the "netroots." BALONEY! Moveon.org is a glorified top-down email list of activists, albeit a huge 3 million activist email list -- just like direct mail political organizers before them.

To support this point, I had to share this juicy dead-on insight shared at the Politics Online conference this week, by Personal Democracy Forum founder Andrew Rasiej -- per Washington Internet Daily:

The uber-communications-advisor of the left, Reed Hundt, gave an eyebrow-raising exclusive interview with Telephony-Online yesterday where he shared his views "on how to change broadband policy."  

The frantic spin-fest by supporters of House Telecom Chairman Ed Markey's new net neutrality bill was truly comical to watch. Let me share some of the more precious "spin" moments from last week.

Gigi Sohn, Founder of Public Knowledge, said in Comm Daily: "The new net neutrality bill has a better chance of passing than previous ones. What's different this year is the momentum leading up to it."

If you want to test the validity, appropriateness or reasonableness of a so-called inviolate "principle" like net neutrality, it can be instructive to apply that principle in a different context to see if it makes sense.

What if we passed a law that all health care had to be neutral?

• That all patient treatment always had to be just the same?  
• That any prioritization of patient treatment would be deemed illegal discrimination?

What would be the nonsensical result of such a broad imposition of a "neutral" medical treatment mandate?

The British paper, The Guardian, reported recently that: "Google Earth used to target Israel."

• "Palestinian militants are using Google Earth to help plan their attacks on the Israeli military and other targets, the Guardian has learned. Members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a group aligned with the Fatah political party, say they use the popular internet mapping tool to help determine their targets for rocket strikes."  

• "It is not the first time that Google has been accused of unwittingly abetting the activities of militant groups or terrorist organisations. In January, British officials claimed that insurgents sympathetic to al-Qaida were using aerial photography in Google Earth to locate potential targets inside British bases around the southern Iraqi city of Basra."