More Mutterings about Silencing the Internet
by Jeff Davis
I know, no one believes me when I say that one day we’re going to lose the Internet, but people in authority keep floating these little trial balloons to introduce restrictions. They keep running things up the flagpole to see if anyone salutes. Make no mistake: the political will to take the Internet away from us definitely exists.
A Business and Media news article reports “There’s a huge concern among conservative talk radio hosts that reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine would all but destroy the industry, due to equal time constraints. But speech limits might not stop at radio. They could even be extended to include the Internet and government dictating content policy. FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell raised that as a possibility after talking with bloggers at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. McDowell spoke about a recent FCC vote to bar Comcast from engaging in certain Internet practices – expanding the federal agency’s oversight of Internet networks.”
Liberals are upset that right wing talk radio gets more listeners than they do. Their solution is to shoehorn a liberal into every single right wing radio show so you have to listen to some whiny liberal whether you want to or not. One big problem with the “Fairness Doctrine” is that it assumes that all of free speech can be boiled down to neocons and liberals. Apparently, anyone who is pro-White, doesn’t deserve any “fairness” or free speech.
The article notes “The commissioner, a 2006 President Bush appointee, told the Business & Media Institute that the Fairness Doctrine could be intertwined with the net neutrality battle. The result might end with the government regulating content on the Web, he warned. McDowell, who was against reprimanding Comcast, said the net neutrality effort could win the support of ‘a few isolated conservatives’ who may not fully realize the long-term effects of government regulation. ‘I think the fear is that somehow large corporations will censor their content, their points of view, right,’ McDowell said. ‘I think the bigger concern for them should be if you have government dictating content policy, which by the way would have a big First Amendment problem. Then, whoever is in charge of government is going to determine what is fair, under a so-called Fairness Doctrine, which won’t be called that – it’ll be called something else,’ McDowell said. ‘So, will Web sites, will bloggers have to give equal time or equal space on their Web site to opposing views rather than letting the marketplace of ideas determine that?’ ”
This idea has come up in several earlier incarnations down through the years, the idea being that the federal government will require “at least three links to web sites with opposing views” so that people surfing the Internet “will hear something other than the echoes of their own voices.”
Somehow, I doubt if any Jewish Holocaust websites will have to link to the Institute of Historical Review or that any pro-Israeli websites will have to link to Stormfront. Any politically incorrect website however will no doubt have to put up links for enemy websites if not pop up ads and maybe even let liberals post articles on their sites –all for the sake of “fairness.”