Guess who’s leading the charge to turn the Internet into one big, government utility?
Phil Kerpen
Americans for Prosperity
via FoxNews.com
October 5, 2009
If you thought Washington—which already took over banking and autos, and is fast-tracking attempts to take over health care and energy—would leave the Internet alone, you were dead wrong. The Internet (perhaps our greatest free market success story in recent years) is squarely in the cross-hairs of the administration and it’s not waiting for Congress to act. The charge is being led by an eager, ideologically committed White House staffer named Susan Crawford. Officially, she is the Special Assistant for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy. Wired Magazine calls her, “the most powerful geek close to the president.” In recent weeks, bloggers and online activists have begun calling Crawford the “Internet Czar.” The shoe fits.
As Bill Collier of Freedomist has reported, Crawford has known ties to ACORN, which is one of the participating organizations of her “OneWebDay” project. Crawford self-consciously modeled OneWebDay on Earth Day and the radical environmental agenda that it propelled forward. As Crawford explained her mission to The Wall Street Journal in April: “We should do a better job as a nation of making sure fast, affordable broadband is as ubiquitous as electricity, water, snail mail, or any other public utility.”
In other words, the agenda of her organization is to transform access to the Internet into a government entitlement project, with all the necessary government intrusion and control in order guarantee it to everyone—in the world. Not surprisingly, listed alongside on the OneWebDay participating organizations list is a group called Free Press, which is the biggest advocacy organization pushing the Obama administration to adopt sweeping regulations of the Internet.
Free Press was founded by Robert McChesney, an avowed Marxist who is Washington’s leading advocate of so-called network neutrality regulations who recently argued—on a Web site called SocialistProject.ca—that this type of Internet regulation is a prerequisite for a socialist revolution: “Instead of waiting for the revolution to happen, we learned that unless you make significant changes in the media, it will be vastly more difficult to have a revolution.”
Crawford and McChesney apparently have the full support of the Obama administration and an FCC that is determined to move toward transforming the Internet into a Washington-controlled utility as quickly as possible. The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski, recently announced his pursuit of precisely the regulations they want.
Kerpen’s article continues at FoxNews.com
