A Fairness Doctrine for Internet?

RUSH: To Bucks County, Pennsylvania, we start with John. Great to have you on the program, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Rush, it’s an honor, sir.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: USA Today, the 16th, front page, small story, it seems insignificant. The FCC wants more fast lanes to Internet. They basically hit you with a bunch of numbers, blah, blah, blah, by the time you get through it. But when you read through it and you see what the plan — actually what they want to do, today they’re voting on Congress, is to have a sweeping plan, the federal regulators have unveiled an ambitious plan to bring high speed Internet service to millions of people. Here’s their promises, promises, and they go on to say about a nationalized system. Jump way to the bottom of the story, the FCC, the White House or Congress would have to implement the plan, some of which would be controversial, or another way of saying unconstitutional. If you jump around in this story, Rush, it’s a takeover of another industry by ‘helping us.’ And what industry is it? The cable, communications. The FCC, which is the government, wants to take over another industry.

RUSH: Well, it’s actually much more hideous than this. This story that you’re quoting is just talking about the spectrum, the frequency spectrum, and they want more broadband spectrum for higher speed access for everybody that uses the Internet. In getting this, one of the areas they’re looking at is asking over-the-air television stations to stop broadcasting over the air since it’s all cable or satellite now and they want to take that spectrum and apply it to Internet. Now, you can say that they want to take over the Internet, but they already have. I mean they regulate all broadcasting. They don’t regulate cable or satellite but they regular over the air broadcasting, like radio. You have to go through, every five or ten years, whatever it is now, for license renewal, community ascertain, you have to run out and talk to librarians, a bunch of people, ask them what their big issues in the community are, okay, document that, send it in with your license renewal, they say you’re paying attention to local issues, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

What’s coming way beyond this, what’s coming in the fall is the deceptively named net neutrality. The easiest way to understand this is to think of a Fairness Doctrine for the Internet. Now, how would this work? Let’s say that you want to go Google or Bing, you want to search the mating habits of the Australian rabbit bat. Net neutrality would require that every search engine produce an equal number of results that satisfy every disagreement about the issue. Yep. And that’s going to happen. That pretty much is going to happen. And the White House is in bed with Google. The White House and Google are bedmates, Google, largest search engine. Already, if you do a search of me on Google and you look at the crap that comes up, it’s by design and on purpose. It’s literal crap, I mean the most obscure places you never knew existed with comments about what happened on this program every day. It took a long time, but we had to really work hard at getting our website to pop up in a search of Google, our own website.

So in the era of net neutrality — and this is where the Google-White House partnership comes into play — the results of any search, let’s say you want to search abortion, or you want to search the health care bill, they want to control what you see. They want to control what your options are. They can’t really control the content, it’s too massive and it’s too big. What they want to try to do is limit your access to it and have that access flavored toward whatever particular point of view the administration wants supported. Now, that is coming. That’s why they want all this new broadband. That’s why they want all this new speed. That’s why they want all this new access. It’s not to own it; it’s to control the content as best they can. Just think of it as Fairness Doctrine for the Internet. I’m not making this up. I guarantee you that’s what’s coming. I think this is a fait accompli. I think it practically has been voted on, done deal.

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RUSH: George in Philadelphia. I have about a minute and a half here, but I wanted to get to you. Hello, sir.

CALLER: Good afternoon, Rush. The real issue with these net neutrality is that Google is looking for the bandwidth, not so much for searches for information but what they want to do is go into the Voice Over IP telephone business. That’s why they need the bandwidth and without net neutrality there would be preference given to like packets being sent by Comcast or by the AT&T networks or something like that. So they have to flatten that out in order to make their VOIP phones work properly.

RUSH: Yeah, that’s true. The Voice Over IP, like Vonage.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: Google wants to do that with their phones. There’s also a cost component to net neutrality, too. And it’s kind of complicated to explain, but if a website wants to start charging for its content, it’s all gotta be equal, and they have to make content to other websites available as well. It’s so convoluted. It’s all rooted in this corrupted notion of ‘fairness’ that liberal Democrats have. But the VOIP stuff is probably relevant, too. One thing you can probably rest assured of: Google and this administration, they’re very, very tight. Very tight.