We Are Venezuala

Nothing Changed This Week-The FCC Still Has No Authority to Regulate the Internet

What was true before FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s Tuesday midnight run to grab power over the Web remains true today – the FCC does not have the authority to do what they have just announced they will do on December 21st.

Unless and until the Congress enacts law making it so, the FCC doesn’t have the authority to do anything. December’s vote to commandeer control of the Internet is no more legitimate than – and just as capricious as – if they were to vote themselves masters of all the nation’s pizza joints.

The FCC – no government agency – can just decide they want to regulate an industry – and then vote themselves power over it. That’s not constitutional, representative, limited government – that’s Hugo Chavez-style expropriative despotism.

And it’s not as if The Chairman has been suffering from a dearth of people pointing out his lack of authority. We have repeatedly pointed it out. And it hasn’t just been us.

In April, the D.C. Circuit Court said so, unanimously ruling the obvious – that the Commission does not have the authority to do anything to the Internet.

More after the jump

Another One That Has To Go

Chavez comes to the FCC
FCC diversity officer sides with the dictator

If for a moment you thought the Obama administration was going to sit there placidly while some on talk radio were so bold as to criticize its actions, think again, because here comes Mark Lloyd, the new diversity officer of the Federal Communications Commission and a man with a mission.

It's not a pretty mission, not if you value free speech, but it is a mission made clear by Mr. Lloyd's own words.

There he was in 2008, participating in a conference on "media reform," telling us what a wonderful leader Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was and wincing at an unpleasantness the dictator had to deal with, the uppity owners of media, people who had some objections in mind.

He spoke of Mr. Chavez's "incredible revolution, a democratic revolution," and of the "property owners and the folks who then controlled the media in Venezuela" who "rebelled" and who "worked to oust him." Still, said Mr. Lloyd, Mr. Chavez "came back with another revolution, and then ... began to take very seriously the media in his country."

Dang those property owners. Aren't they a pain? Mr. Lloyd seems to think they are a pain in this country, too, at least those who own radio stations. As much becomes clear when you read a report he and some others produced for a left-wing think tank that said conservatives dominate talk radio, not because they are more popular than liberals, as the evidence clearly shows, but because most station owners are white men who apparently heed their monolithic ideology more than the marketplace and their pocketbooks.

DC Protest Warrior: From Rush...To Good Not To Share

From Rush...To Good Not To Share

“Perhaps you and I have lived with this miracle too long to be properly appreciative. Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance, it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom and then lost it, have never known it again.”
Ronald Reagan