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What the NRO is really saying: net neutrality is evil

I am no all encompassing Obama supporter, but I hate the extreme views taken by the left and right, to the exclusion of sane sensible moderate thought.

So let me dismantle the NRO idea that Obama “dislikes” the free movement of information if he can’t control it (thereby hating technology) and get to the heart of this NRO article: net neutrality.

NRO: “President Obama’s disdain for new media has become so consistent that it is hard to dismiss as mere posturing.”

COUNTER: Dis-proven by the writer himself who says in the next sentence “This is all the more ironic because Obama’s political movement supposedly mastered the new art of communication.” Obama used a number of new technologies in the campaign as did and do the right as well. But perhaps he means that he has been consistent only since taking office, okay, lets go on then.

NRO: “Obama has sounded downright nostalgic about the old newspaper era, all the while warning that the new communication revolution is producing more information than people can digest.” The writer calls this a criticism, and shows an Obama quote saying “information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.”

COUNTER: Yes, Obama is right about the amount of data and the amount of distraction. Do you disagree, NRO, that the sheer amount of data available on the Internet cannot be digested by a single person? Do you honestly think that things such as facebook are not distractions?

NOTE: I disagree with Obama on his last point, that the Internet and technology is a source of “empowerment”. It is a source of whatever we want to make it a source of. Hence gaming, hence the distractions. So I will give a POINT to NRO.

NRO:  Obama continued to share is opinion of free flow of information with this quote, which the writer obviously disagrees with: “part of what’s different today is the 24-hour news cycle and cable TV and blogs and all this. They focus on the most extreme elements in both sides. They can’t get enough of conflict. It’s catnip to the media right now. And so the easiest way to get 15 minutes of fame is to be rude to somebody. In that environment, I think it makes it more difficult to solve the problems the American people sent us here to solve.”

COUNTER: Who in their right mind would disagree with this? Have you WATCHED the news channels lately? Have you read the BLOGS? I mean seriously, the “news” media is an exercise in yellow journalism these days, either tilted left or right. There is hardly any center any more. But then, the NRO comes from a SLANT itself, so it can hardly be objective, can it?

NRO: “when Obama nominated his solicitor general, Elena Kagan, to the Supreme Court, Kagan did not speak to the media, new or old — though the White House released an “interview” with her on its official website.”

COUNTER: Tell me the last time, dear NRO, when any administration made a Supreme Court nominee available for interview prior to Senate hearing. This from CBS news: “it’s worth noting that it seems to be unprecedented for the nominee to be heard from at all before the confirmation hearings, other than in the initial introduction and in brief photo ops with senators.”

NRO: says that Obama missed the “old days” when “three liberals — say Cronkite, Reasoner, and Brinkley — had a monopoly over deciding what the news was every day, and synthesized it every night on TV. Then they let the New York Times echo those views the next morning. Those were the days.”

COUNTER: This assumes, I guess, that no Conservatives had any voice in the old days. This perplexes me, as Ronald Reagan was elected in the “good old” days. How in the world could this happen if all minds in America were controlled by only liberal news media? What about Nixon? Republicans and conservative thought existed prior to new media.

NRO: “it’s beginning to dawn on this White House that the Internet is not its friend and, in fact, that the web stands for the opposite of what has emerged as the Obama administration’s animating spirit. The Internet is centrifugal, dispersing power outward; the Obama administration is centripetal, concentrating power at the center. “

COUNTER: A couple of things bother me here. The central point, that ANY political administration would like to control the message I do not disagree with. However, the idea that the web “stands” for anything is, essentially, silly. It doesn’t stand for anything, not now, not ever. It is what it is. Also I don’t think the White House thought the “web” in it’s entirety was its “friend”. After all, during the campaign the birther movement was founded on the web. How could that be anything remotely friendly?

NRO: “The Obama administration, conversely, prides itself on offering top-down governance by the best and the brightest — not realizing that, as most Americans see it, that type of thinking creates a self-selected elite prone to hubris and atrocious error.”

COUNTER: This assumes that NO other administration was ruled “top down”. What, did the Bush administration rule by consensus? Also, I was wondering how long it would take for the writer to throw the “elite” word around. Oh, nothing stings more than being elite. After all, we should rely on commoners to run things right? No one should be an expert in anything. Instead we should take someone who knows nothing about the job and throw him in it! In fact, lets burn down the schools too!!!

NRO: “The FCC recently announced that it will ignore its own previous determination — and a court ruling — and proceed to regulate broadband communications”

COUNTER: Now we get to the heart of it. The writer is AGAINST the “net neutrality” rules that the FCC wishes to adopt. In the NRO’s mind eye, this is an attempt by “Obama” to “control” the Internet. But, ironically, the net neutrality proposals are all towards maintaining the open internet. It wants to prevent a provider such as comcast from, say, blocking a particular part of the web that comcast finds offensive from you. It wants to ensure that providers serve up internet that is unfiltered to users. You know, that whole free internetty thing that the NRO writer seems to be singing so loudly about.

Imagine what would happen if NRO was content filtered? I think they would suddenly have a change of heart about net neutrality then.