Major Government Policy on the Internet Passed

Welcome to Crossroads, folks. Net neutrality is back. We thought it was gone, but it was now brought back. Now, you might remember during the Obama administration, there was a controversial policy put in place. And what it did, basically, was established federal government control over the internet over broadband because it classified broadband as a utility, like the phone companies and so on. Now, that was called net neutrality. And the policy was dropped when Trump was president. But just recently, in fact, just last week, it was quietly restored. They did it while, again, all these other cases are ongoing. And what was, at the time, one of the most controversial issues in the United States was just slipped under the rug. Now, the Federal Communications Commission, the FCC, brought it back in a three to two vote. And what it does is restores policies of so-called equity over internet online traffic. Now, you could have easily missed it. In fact, I think a lot of people did because you might remember this took place on Thursday. This happened when Trump was standing trial in Manhattan. This is gonna be for the next month or so. It happened while the Supreme Court was deliberating on presidential immunity and other big things like this. And also while people watched pro-Palestinian students taking over American colleges and getting dragged off campus and then retaking them. All of this happened amidst this noise. And one of the most controversial issues in the United States from just a few years ago has now been restored. It is currently back in place. The Hill said this. They said the Federal Communications Commission, the FCC, voted Thursday to restore Obama-era net neutrality rules. And I'll explain what this means. It notes that net neutrality refers to the principle that internet service providers should treat all information that travels through their networks equally. I think they mean equitably. It notes that under the FCC's proposed rules, providers would be barred from blocking or throttling internet traffic to some websites and speeding up access to others that pay extra fees. Now, it notes as well that net neutrality rules, which were first approved by the FCC under the former and former President Barack Obama in 2015, were repealed by the commission during the Trump administration in 2017. It wasn't in place that long. They note that last October, the FCC voted to move forward with the process of restoring net neutrality rules after securing a Democratic majority following a two-year holdup over a previous nominee. Now, it notes the three-to-two vote was along partisan lines, as you might expect, and advocates for net neutrality, like Democratic Chair Jessica Rosenworkel, have argued it is necessary for ensuring a fair and open internet. And they say the FCC chair has also argued that net neutrality rules would give the agency greater oversight of broadband companies, allowing it to address outages and national security concerns, i.e. surveillance, probably, and increase consumer protections. Now, let me get into this. It's likely that it's gonna face legal challenges. In fact, a lot of people are saying it's probably not gonna hold up in the long term because there are already lawsuits planned and announced, and these are almost definitely gonna go to the Supreme Court. It's likely these challenges are gonna end up there in the very end, and based on, again, unless the Supreme Court changes, they're probably gonna overturn it. But that could take a few years. For now, net neutrality is back. And you might remember, Trump previously got rid of these. Now, this was one of the big controversies when Trump was still president, right, during the, again, 2017 to 2019, because we were technically repealed in 2017, but there were lawsuits that pushed it back. And proponents of net neutrality, people who want it, what their argument is is that government control would make the internet service more equitable. Basically, it means all traffic is treated the same. Everybody gets the same internet speed regardless of how much you use, and internet companies cannot censor websites or censor content, right? It makes it so that, again, broadband, your internet connection, is treated as a utility. Therefore, it is under government constitutional protections which might be a good thing, I'll get into that. But it also gets into the issue that, again, companies have to provide the same basic service. If you download crazy amounts of data, your traffic is gonna be treated just as much as the person who maybe uses the internet to check their emails every now and then. And normally, people either have their internet speed throttled because of the large amount of data they might use, or some companies, like there's a handful of major corporations that use a really huge majority of internet traffic, especially the ones working on AI in particular, artificial intelligence, because they need to suck up all that data. And also, for example, companies that run maybe server houses or other things, or social media that kind of have to check everything, or, for example, streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime and these types of services. Services that need to provide high-speed streaming video. And of course, they often have to pay more money to access that amount of bandwidth. Now, under these rules, it's all the same. And opponents of this argue that it would basically stifle innovation. They're saying it would damage the incentive for companies to build out internet infrastructure because the profit's not really there anymore. They say that basically, if you put that in place, it's going to strangle the internet business, and it's gonna lead to slower internet connections for everybody, maybe faster for the big streaming platforms or internet pirates and things like that. But for most people, it's gonna mean higher costs and slower internet. That's the big argument with that. I mean, we'll see if it happens. Now, Trump, and you might remember the former FCC chair, Ajit Pai, they were saying that this is gonna basically ruin the market for the internet, ruin the free market. This was Trump in October of 2019 after they won a key case on the issue. Donald Trump said on Twitter at the time, we just won the big court case on net neutrality rules, a great win for the future and speed of the internet will lead to many big things, including 5G, which we now have. Congratulations to the FCC and its chairman, Ajit Pai. Now, of course, at the time, they were still rolling out 5G internet connections. Again, one of the things that's very common now. And because of that, you also have incredibly faster internet and also the ability to create subsections of kind of internet traffic domains and things like this. Part of the FCC debates this time around are also around that subset of web hosting services and other things like that. It's all under the government now, basically. Now, most of the debate around net neutrality happened in 2017. And stick with me, because I want to get into why this matters, it's actually pretty important. But here's how the corporate media were framing it at the time. Vox said this. They said, under the leadership of chairman Ajit Pai, and with only the backing of the agency's Republican members, could still say it's the same thing, only now it's only with the backing of the Democrat members when they passed it. They say the repeal newly-freezed telecom companies from federal regulations unravels a signature accomplishment of the Obama administration and shifts the responsibility of overseeing the web to another federal agency that some critics see as too weak to be effective. In practice, it means the US government no longer will have rules on its books that require internet providers to treat all web traffic equally. The likes of, this is again when they repealed it, right? They say the likes of AT&T and Verizon will be limited in some ways. They could face penalties if they try to undermine their rivals. For example, they won't be subject to preemptive bright line restrictions on how they manage their networks. And meanwhile, the FCC's repeal will open the door for broadband providers to charge third parties like tech giants for faster delivery of their web content, like again, Amazon or Netflix or streaming services that eat up ridiculous amounts of internet traffic, right? Everything is treated equally. You can't charge anybody more or less. We're all the same now. They say that even though the FCC would require the time telecom companies to be transparent about these arrangements, critics contend these so-called fast lanes will limit consumers' choices in services like video streaming and harm startups that simply can't afford to pay such tolls to ISPs, internet service providers. Now, as ironic as it is, and hear me out on this, I'd say that bringing net neutrality back, ironically, could actually help Republicans more than hurt them this time. Things are a lot different now. The current environment of the internet is significantly different. The nature of businesses and these big corporations are significantly different. And what applied at the time no longer applies now. Ironically, I think that the corporations are more tyrannical than even, again, federal regulations could be, because at least they have constitutional protections. I'll be talking about this more after a quick word from our sponsor. Experts agree, one of the best ways to protect against financial uncertainty is to diversify your portfolio. Learn how physical gold and silver can secure your retirement funds from today's economic challenges with a gold IRA from American Hartford Gold. You can safeguard your wealth with no penalties or taxes when you transfer your current qualifying retirement accounts. Call now and our precious metals specialists will send you a free information kit, no cost or obligation. 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And remember, the battle over the net neutrality was taking place 2016, 2017, when a lot of the debates were happening. The vote was in 2017. Lawsuits took place. Those were settled around 2019. And you might remember, again, 2016, when a lot of this started, it was an Obama-era policy, and at that time, the internet was a much different place. Political censorship was still relatively rare. That, again, started heavily, really around, first, again, under the Trump administration, right? And at the time, you might remember that many platforms were talking about ideas on freedom of speech, and the concept among netizens. I'm sorry, it was 2015 under Obama. And you might remember, again, real quick on that, 2015, before the Trump elections and so on, and Trump came to office, 2015, what was the state of the United States? Well, relatively speaking, you had a lot of the big influencers on YouTube who were conservatives or alt-right, you could call a lot of them. Independent voices were getting more traffic and more views than most of the established media. There was an idea at the time on the internet among netizens that information wants to be free. We still had a very strong open-source movement. People were building free software and so on, things that could challenge Google Docs and other things like that. There was a concept at the time of creating products that could compete with the mainstream ones, the big ones from Microsoft and Apple and Google and so on, but that were free from the corporate controls and free from these systems that would charge people and tax people and everything else. The vision for the internet at the time was significantly different. And that, again, was 2015 when Barack Hussein Obama did this. The concern at the time was that by establishing government control over the internet, it would change that emerging culture. Now, again, there were threats of internet restrictions on the internet. A lot of that was coming from the government, not from businesses. Businesses were not seen as the threat to freedom at the time. The federal government control over the internet was seen as a threat to freedom. The internet, you might remember, was framed as the new Wild West. It was the new frontier, right? The global narrative was that law needs to come to the web. It was compared to the open seas and the maritime age. It was a place where free speech and the free markets had extended to as businesses were starting up within that sphere, but where government regulation had not really come in yet. That was the vision of the internet roughly between roughly 2008 to about 2015 when this took place. And in that context, that was when Obama designating internet traffic as a kind of utility under the government marked the end of that openness. The government moving to the internet, that this was how it was viewed at the time. It was the introduction of state control, the law coming to the West, the end of the golden age of pirates, so to speak, when you think about maritime trade. But things have changed a lot since then. Significantly, because the big tyrants now are not so much the government when it comes to the internet, it's the big businesses. Now, since 2019 under Trump, when these things actually, again, were overturned, because, sorry, I misstated the dates earlier. 2015, Barack Obama passed this. 2016 to 2017, Trump was trying to overturn it. They voted to overturn it in 2017. 2019, after the lawsuits cleared, it was done. But 2015, things were very different. Now, when Trump came into office, what took place? Censorship programs were rolled out. You might remember, especially after January 6th, do you all remember Parler, the conservative equivalent to Twitter? Parler was, of course, one of the fastest growing social media websites. It was seen as a real contender to Twitter. After January 6th, what happened? The establishment accused Parler of having chat groups and so on that allowed radicals to plan and plot January 6th and to try to attack democracy. And Parler got canceled by not just the businesses and so on, but even by things like Amazon Web Services, even from the app stores. It was destroyed as a company. Those attacks came from the businesses, the internet businesses, the hosting sites, the things that allow you to, again, even operate on the internet. The system, the business around the internet is what killed Parler. Now, the Biden administration has rolled out new forms of censorship as well. Things like public-private partnerships where authorities are communicating with platforms like Facebook, Google, even Amazon Books we've been finding out. And they're carrying out government censorship using that form of communication. Because normally under the Constitution, the government cannot do that. The government can't go and censor your free speech. It can't go and cancel you on Twitter or YouTube. But they found that they can recommend to YouTube that you are maybe a danger. They can recommend to Twitter that maybe you're spreading false information. And these third parties, private businesses, not held by the Constitution, because they're not government, they can then censor based on the suggestion by the government. That's very debatably legal. And so the gray area they've found is public-private partnership to do their dirty work. Now, we've also seen this with online businesses. Remember the Facebook of 2010 is not the Facebook of 2024. People are getting censored, shadow banned on social media sites. I would note how many of you before January 6th, or frankly before 2016 and the Trump elections, how many of you watched people on YouTube who are no longer on YouTube because they were canceled? How many of you had Facebook groups at the time that got banned, that maybe you're communicating with friends? How many of you have received alerts that you've shared false information and things like this? The internet at that time, again, 2015, even when Barack Hussein Obama passes them, is absolutely different from what it has become. Website holders are worried that hosting services are gonna drop them, again, like what happened to Parler after January 6th. And generally speaking, a lot of big tech companies, in my opinion, have become bigger threats to online freedom than federal government controllers, because at least the government is held by the Constitution, whereas private businesses are not. And of course, it's not just about censorship, it's also about basic free market principles. Now, while net neutrality is being paraded around as something that will guarantee faster internet for everybody, on the other side, it probably works out like most socialist, one size fits all programs. The other side of it, and this is gonna be an issue in my opinion, the probably cost of it, is we will watch the cost of services go up, and we'll probably watch the quality of services go down. But hey, you know, at least we're all gonna be equal on it. Here's what the chair of Citizens Against Government Waste had to say about this in a statement. They said, the repeal of net neutrality led, as we've already seen, to increased investment and innovation, along with faster speeds and lower costs, again, when they repealed it. They say there is no factual justification for undoing this progress, which will harm consumers and providers through the same strict and ineffective regulations that were in effect the last time Title II, again, this policy, was imposed by the FCC. They say there is nothing to fix or change regarding regulation of internet service providers, and they note that the regulatory uncertainty and increased government control over the internet that will result from the FCC's decision is further evidence that Congress must step in and resolve these issues permanently by statute. Instead, the taxpayers' money will be wasted as this regulation moves through the FCC and the courts, where it will likely be overturned. Again, as I mentioned, it's probably gonna go to the Supreme Court, and it looks like the Supreme Court would probably overturn net neutrality in the end. But on this note, again, I'm generally a big supporter of free market principles, as you all know, and generally, I don't like state interventionism in the free market. I think it causes more problems than it fixes, and I think oftentimes you're gonna see innovation get stifled, and you're gonna see prices go up on things they shouldn't be going up on. But the reality on the other side with FCC changes that go with net neutrality is that a lot of big corporations, they no longer act on free market principles. Behind the scenes, they're getting pressure from DEI agencies, right, diversity, equity, and inclusion. State interventionism has changed the culture of big corporate America. They have foreign government pressure to censor, like what Elon Musk is facing right now from India and from Brazil and from Australia. And again, these companies also have partisan hacks breathing down their necks to go after people they don't like, like the government is doing right now in their communications for censorship. These platforms have largely lost their independence, and the system whereby, again, this public-private partnership of going around the Constitution by having private businesses do their dirty work is one of the reasons why, ironically, bringing the internet under government control may actually create more freedom than it will stifle, right? As far as I'm concerned, independence and internet freedom has largely gone down the drain, and again, because of these public-private partnerships. And remember also, Barack Hussein Obama dropped US government control over ICANN and IANA. This is something that most people don't even know he did, by the way. ICANN, a lot of people would say, oh, it just handles internet name services. If you wanna register, for example, a website, you have to go through ICANN name services. And they said that Obama relinquishing government control over that because the internet was invented by the United States. It used to be controlled by the military, as a matter of fact. And of course, it was controlled still by the US government until Barack Obama got rid of it. And when Obama got rid of it, when he dropped government control over it, people said it's not gonna cause any problems. The argument at the time was that if you get rid of it, it's going to expose the internet to foreign government interference, to NGOs and other groups, to the United Nations. And you might remember, the United Nations actually had meetings where they were planning rules for the internet and they were trying to force the world to adopt them, things we now see in place, by the way. But what's often missed from the conversation of ICANN is that underneath ICANN is another group called IANA, I-A-N-A. And they run some of the core rules that govern the internet. When Barack Obama, again, relinquished US control over ICANN and IANA by extension, it opened up the internet to foreign government influence, from the influence of businesses and organizations, from the United Nations, from all these different groups, and it removed constitutional protection over what takes place online. It opened up businesses to foreign censorship. It opened the doors to all these problems we're seeing now. And as ironic as it is, again, I'm normally against this stuff, but bringing, again, broadband under federal control might ironically restore some of the constitutional protections over it. In my opinion, it's the lesser of two evils. I do not like net neutrality. I think it's gonna destroy innovation. I think it's gonna mess up prices. I think it's gonna make it harder to expand the internet and so on. I think it's gonna result in poorer services. But I also think that the threats we're facing to our basic freedoms could actually use some backing by the Constitution. And if this is the price of having constitutional rights applied to some forms of the internet, and where we can challenge these things legally by going to the government again, going to the court system, if our constitutional rights are infringed upon, maybe this is better. Again, lesser of two evils, it shouldn't be this way, but it's better than what they've been doing. Now, on another note, a week ago, President Joe Biden signed the bill extending Section 702 of FISA. And this is another big thing that just happened. FISA is the Foreign Surveillance Act. It was extended in another two years, just recently. And what this did was extended the system of government spying that was used by the Obama administration when they were spying on Donald Trump and his team during the 2016 elections. You might remember, Donald Trump was shouting, they're spying on me, they wiretapped, they wiretapped Trump Tower. Do you remember when Trump was saying that? And the media was saying, oh, he's lying, they're not wiretapping Trump Tower. It turns out they were spying on him. But you could argue that FISA in Section 702 is not technically wiretapping. It just means that they're monitoring all the communications without technically putting a big copper clamp on those wires, right? Different from wiretapping, but the same thing in principle. They were spying on him. And now those powers of federal surveillance, because they could have gotten thrown out, actually, they just got even broader. The House of Representatives just passed a bill that adds additional powers to FISA. It is more powerful now than ever before. In particular, it's gonna give them the ability, the government, to get its hands on data from online data brokers. That includes just about anything that is tracked on you on the internet. Anything that any website collects on you. That's your location, that's your text messages, that's your emails, that's every ad you look at, that's every YouTube video you watch, that's every news article you read. That's the profiles on you. Your likes, your dislikes, your interests, your political affiliations, geolocation, your friends and family, every single thing that you have granted social networks access to, every single thing that you've granted your phone access to, everything you've granted your laptop access to, meaning basically everything, will now be able to be obtained by the government. The Federalists said this. They said a group of liberty-minded Republicans were fighting to add two major things to FISA, a requirement for a warrant, meaning, again, constitutional protections, you can't just do warrantless spying, and a ban on federal intelligence agencies from buying American information from online data brokers. In close votes, those attempts fail, which means federal agencies can continue their illegal practice of snooping on fellow Americans. Now, they note that data brokers collect an obscene amount of data on everyone who uses the internet. The types of places we're searching on Google Maps, collected and sold. The types of content we read on most often, collected and sold. The ads we don't skip over, collected and sold. Even keywords we say in conversations that our phone mics pick up. You notably give them access to your camera. If you use any website, any app that is able to access those, that is recorded. You give them access to your microphone. In fact, Google was even collecting this, you have to manually shut it off if you wanna shut it off. Everything you say near a device, once connected to those, and once you grant them access to it, can be recorded and your words are actually retained as data which can be sold. Now, they note that worse, we willingly give this information away every time we hit accept all, on terms and service conditions. And these terms and service conditions, we must accept to use pretty much any part of the internet. I think most of us have agreed to this step, including myself, even though I know this. They note that this data is conveniently packaged into profiles that let advertisers more accurately target us, and ostensibly, so we have better advertisement experiences, and so advertisers can be more efficient in their use of funds. But this information also gives our intelligence agencies, the governments of all the different countries on earth, an unprecedented glimpse into our lives, habits, likes, the people we interact with, and so much more. And they note that worse yet, a warrant may not be needed to obtain this information, since it's freely given to the data brokers and freely sold by them to our intelligence agencies. I have warned about this before. Remember, we showed you videos recently, where the FBI was investigating people for videos they viewed on YouTube. You might remember they obtained warrants of anybody who, to get the IDs, or the ISP, the IPs, basically your online signature that shows where you are and who you are. They were asking Google, which runs YouTube, for data on every single person who had viewed several YouTube videos within a certain timeframe. These companies are not the same as the government spying on you or I, right? If the government wanted to spy on us, well, they'd have to get a warrant, unless they use FISA, by the way, which is warrantless spying. Under the Constitution, though, the government can't just investigate whoever they want. They can't just kick your door down and go and rummage through your stuff. They need to get a warrant. And warrantless spying was one of the problems that came about with the rise of terrorism and George Bush and the Patriot Act and so on, right? They were able to bypass some of those constitutional protections to make sure the terrorists don't get us. And when, again, Bush passed these things, he opened the door that then expanded more and more broadly to where we're at right now, where we have the federal government able to do warrantless spying, including on American citizens. They would argue that FISA only applies to foreign surveillance, but there were loopholes in that, which allowed them to spy on Trump and his entire team, by the way. If you communicate with somebody who's a foreigner, how many of you have maybe Twitter followers or you're friends with people on Facebook who happen to live in foreign countries or who are not American born? Well, what happens if you communicate with them? It means that they can spy on them, but because you're communicating with them, they can spy on you. Then they can spy on not just you, but every person who's communicated with you as well. And before you know it, maybe your friend is talking to someone from another country and by extension, they're able to go through them, then to you, then to your friends, and then to other people. This is the way that FISA is being abused and the way we saw it get abused when they were going after Donald Trump. Normally the names are sealed, but we found that they were abusing FISA to unseal the names of American citizens in order to roll out forms of surveillance that looked like they were made to basically rig the 2016 election, which again, they were using to launch investigations under the fake Trump-Russia narrative. Now on this note, remember last week, we looked into the organizations and the money behind the pro-Palestinian protests. On another note, folks, we looked into the organizations behind the pro-Palestinian protests happening on American college campuses. Well, one of the individuals that we exposed on last week's show was tied to money that's now gotten attention from Congress, but I'll be talking more about this only on EpicTV.com. That's our uncensored streaming platform that frankly covers many stories that corporate media would not dare to touch. 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