Seton Motley
BigGovernment.com
8/24/2010
It’s last call at Club Network Neutrality. The crowd supporting this government Internet land grab is rapidly thinning. The latest two to head for the exits each deal a huge blow to the media “reform” cause – for different reasons.
The first is Big Search mogul Google. By its sheer size, power and sphere of influence it is a major player in the Net Neutrality (NN) debate – and they have been pro-NN. But Google’s recent deal with Verizon – which deviates slightly from puritanical NN tenets – was a bridge too far for the pro-NN crowd.
So Google became the latest to receive the sad, tired “You Are Evil” treatment the Left reflexively delivers against their political opponents. Google probably wasn’t all the way out the door on their own – but they may be now, shoved through by the subtle, soft-spoken pro-NN forces.
If so, we say welcome to the Great Outside – let’s do lunch.
The second was the conservative group Gun Owners of America (GoA). Though not the monster entity Google is, their departure is important because it weakens substantially the pro-NN case that the partisan push to over-regulate the Internet isn’t partisan.
Anything championed by the likes of Free Press, MoveOn.org and ACORN is almost certainly non-partisan, is it not?
But this breakdown of Net Neutrality support isn’t (just) a recent phenomenon. This has been a four-year slow-motion train wreck – that began almost at the beginning.
Both Google and Gun Owners of America were members of the original 2006 coalition It’s Our Net – which boasted 148 partners. Just one year later, they’d “reconstituted in a different form” with a broader focus and were rechristened the Open Internet Coalition (OIC). But that entity had just 74 members – a huge loss of support in but one year. This despite the broader focus – which you would think would lead to more participants, not less.
Additionally indicative of the loss of mojo was their shift of concentration away from Congress and to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) – at the very moment the Democrats were taking over both Houses of Congress…
…All the while, anti-NN opposition has grown, and grown, and grown. Included therein are more than 284 members of Congress – from both Parties, more than 150 organizations, state legislators and bloggers, seventeen minority groups, and the Washington, D.C. Circuit Court – led by a Democrat-appointee…
The article continues at BigGovernment.com
