Conservative Media Must Die (or Big Tech Loses Money)

 

It's all about power and money.

So why is Big Tech targeting new political censorship free social media that competes with the Big Tech approved Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram coalition??? Dennis Prager pointed out in a recent interview that leftists are children. Freedom frightens them. They want to be taken care of instead.

So Big Tech, prefers the more easily manipulated, more vulnerable to advertising, more lucrative demographic made up of the leftist snowflake generation. It therefore feels it must squash social media for adults. "Why?" you ask.

You see the trouble is that the snowflakes are quicker to change brands or political direction in response to clever advertising, but they don't have any money. If older, more conservative consumers move to more freedom friendly, free market social media they would lose the eyes that actually have money to buy things. If those eyes are moved onto conservative friendly social media in large numbers, then the Big Tech supported social media giants lose a vital income stream.They are already seeing massive loss of revenue as conservatives bail on Twitter and Facebook and the rest in favor of new more friendly social media like Parler, MeWe, Minds, and others. Parler in particular with its easy to use interface was pulling millions from Twitter and Facebook and had to be shot down in a hurry, costing Twitter billions in falling stock value.

Leftist social media like Twitter and Facebook need conservatives to give them money because most young leftists don't have any. More than 75% of the liquid cash assets in the United States are in the hands of older decision-makers - a group that becomes notoriously more conservative with every year they age. Young leftist snowflakes, a group less well off financially, therefore less able to contribute to the ad-based economy, are motivated by promises of free stuff from politicians. In exchange they obligingly vote for "progressives" and they obligingly get angry at conservatives who seem to stand in the way of their getting free stuff. Thus the temper tantrum rioting and looting we've seen this past year.

At the heart of it, Big Tech is trying to force conservatives to depend on liberal media. They must shut down any particularly successful conservative and so-called unmoderated (i.e. leftist) social media like Parler, Minds.com, Blabberbuzz and others. If they don't crush the competition, it costs them dearly as Twitter and Facebook have seen with the massive migration of conservatives to these other media.

Sadly, new conservative media must rely on Big Tech controlled resources to operate on the Internet as it currently exists. The servers they exist on and the technology they use is infested with Google, Microsoft and other Big Tech code that will make their platforms fail if access is blocked as Parler found out to its chagrin.

There is a possible solution to the problem on the horizon. Tim Berners-Lee 30 years ago, he wrote the codes that made the world wide web possible. Berners-Lee believes that "Too much power and too much personal data reside with the tech giants like Google and Facebook. Big Tech's darlings are basically silos for amassing enormous stores of data. Tim envisioned the web as a tool for an interconnected world. Instead, Tim says they have become surveillance platforms and gatekeepers of innovation.

Tim wants to restore his original vision for the Internet. The project is called "Solid". The key to his new connectivity vision are PODS (Personal Online Data Stores). PODS store the records of what websites you visit, what you buy, what you view or listen to online. The information stored in PODS would be under the control of the user. Anyone who wants access to your information would have to have your permission through a secure link and would not be allowed to store it. This allows you to control your own data and decide who gets to use it and how.

Big Tech and other corporate bullies would, under the Solid version of the Internet, find it difficult to categorically remove a rival website as they did with Parler and are trying to do with Minds.com. And your data would remain your own throughout.  Members' data would not be salable to just anyone. This would screw up the financial model for some of the more predatory social media sites, but it would certainly keep your data under our own control.

I, for one, plan to sign up as soon as its ready. I am heartily sick of the way the Internet is being tied up to be safer for leftists to continue their overthrow of the American way of life.

© 2021 by Tom King

Net Neutrality Is Dead and Munchkins Are Dancing In the Street

We are the FCC, sir. WE are omneepeetent!

 

Hooray! Net Neutrality is repealed. The Democrats are wailing that the Internet is doomed because businesses that provide goods and services on the Web will not be heavily regulated by the federal government for "the good of the people."

Oh, frabjous day!  The truth is Net Neutrality had nothing to do with neutrality. It had everything to do with power. It's a battle over who controls the Internet - the users and innovators who made it a powerful economic engine or the government which has been trying to figure out how to control and tax the Internet since it got out of hand thirty years ago. People argue that without NN and FCC control, the Internet will be controlled by big corporations like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Centurylink, Comcast, Xfinity and such. Trouble is, every one of those "evil" big corporations SUPPORTED Net Neutrality and spent lots of money trying to get it passed. 

 

Why do you suppose that is? Okay, I'll tell you, young Padawan. It's because the Democrat sponsored bill made the Net into a public utility and gave the FCC regulatory increased powers over who does what on the World Wide Web. Now there would be fewer folk that Big Digital needs to bribe in order to get their way. Without NN, customers decide whether or not they use these digital behemoths' products. If the product sucks, they can go elsewhere to obtain service. With NN, you just grease the right government officials with lobbying dollars and voila! You get whatever "regulation" you want.

Why not make the Internet a public utility? Won't that upset Big Digital? Not so much! AT&T was much happier when the phone system was a "public utility" regulated by the FCC. You see government regulators LOVE big corporations. The more big corporations, the less work the FCC has to do. All those independent little entrepreneurs clog the system with essential paperwork. Big corporations love government regulation because it protects their monopoly. This way the FCC can control the amount of paperwork so as to exert the maximum power with the minimum effort.

And without efficient government paperwork, government bureaucrats either don't have any work to do or they have too much. The trouble with the Internet is that the government has historically little power to censor, control and tax those who do business there. It wound up being the digital Wild West. So, of course Democrats on the FCC board wanted Net Neutrality so badly. 

 

Three reasons:

1. It gave them power to tax Internet users and to control what people say about the government.
2. It gave them an excuse to hire more people and there's nothing bureaucrats love more than more minions. It gives them the illusion of greatness to have lots of hired servants.
3. It furthers the goal of centralization of power in the hands of government.

Don't forget what condition the phone company was in before deregulation. Remember "Ernestine the telephone operator" - the old Lily Tomlin comedy routine? Lily got laughs from Ernestine's bullying of customers. I remember one line where the customer said "You can't do that!" She snorted derisively and said, "We are the phone company. We are omneepeetent!"

It was funny, but not far from truth. Within a year of deregulation, we went from $1 plus per minute long distance to Sprint's ground-breaking ten cents a minute long distance. Mobile phones went from a car trunk full of equipment, $200 a month service charges and a year's waiting list to buying cell phones in Walmart for a hundred bucks and paying $20 a month for service within the space of a couple of years.

The phone system still hasn't shed all the taxes leftover from when it was a "public utility". Do we really want to make the Internet into "Ma Bell"? Apparently at least some of us do not. Thank goodness for them.

Ding dong, Net Neutrality's dead, and this Munchkin is hap, hap, happy about it!

© 2017 by Tom King

The FCC Takes Another Run At Net Neutering

Since telephone deregulation, Lily Tomlin's Ernestine
from the phone company sketch isn't funny anymore. The.
phone company now has competition and can no longer
bully customers like Ernestine did in the comedy sketches.

The FCC is at it again after they lost a lawsuit that threw out an attempts to create so-called Net Neutrality regulations. They're back with a 1930s style regulatory scheme that makes the Internet a public utility regulated heavily by the government - coming in February. Net Neutrality they're calling it. I call it Net Neutering.

In essence it gives us locked in rates, locked in connection speeds and ties the hands of Internet providers to regulate the delivery of Internet service as they see fit. If you grew up before the de-regulation of the telephone industry, you'll know what that means.

Prior to deregulation it cost you hundreds of dollars a month and a six to 12 month wait to get a car phone. After deregulation, within a few short years we were carrying cell phones in our pockets for a fraction of the cost. If you'd like an idea what pre-deregulation phone service was like (back when the government "regulated" phone service), get hold of one of Lily Tomlin's old skits about the phone company and you'll get an idea of where the Internet will be headed.  It's rather like communism - everyone equally misereable as government regulation suppresses the quality of Internet access for everyone. It's the old shared misery of communism/socialism all over again.

Think slowing down your streaming video on Hulu and Netflix to where it jerks and jumps so that Joe Blow can publish cat videos that jerk and jump in high def on his blog, just like the big guys. I can guarantee a major degradation across the board since competition between carriers will be virtually eliminated. So where will the motivation be to provide faster service? 

It's the old idea that if everyone is forced to be the same, suddenly, out of the goodness of our collective hearts, we all will strive to make everything better. It's kind of like thinking that if the boat sinks, the way to save lives is to have all the drowning people and all the swimming people clump together into one big mass and hope everyone decides to swim equally hard, only better because they have drowning people clinging to them and trying to climb on their heads.

One thing though: Internet customer service will probably be better - you'll be told they can't do anything about your probably because of government regulation in half the time it takes them to fix your problem now.

© Daily Tech

Won't it be a brave new world once the government controls the last free market on the planet? 

Yeah, right.

© 2015 by Tom King

An Open Letter to the Federal Election Commission

Dear FEC Commissioners,

The right of free speech, especially that of free "political" speech is enshrined in the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States. I am, therefore concerned that the FEC is considering ways to further increase the FEC's power to regulate political speech online. The federal government has already over-stepped its bounds in regulating the messages I am able to see and hear on television, radio and other public forums. The FEC already regulates the paid placement of political advertisements on the Internet. We do NOT need to give the government power to further regulate free speech by individual Americans.

Existing regulations already suppress a robust debate over our nation's futureis. Increasing government meddling with the sacred American right to voice his opinions in the public square is a very very BAD idea, I don't care whether you are on the political left or the hard right. Regulating what can appear on blogs, social media, video platforms and other places online is a clear violation of the First Amendment. The Internet IS the modern public square. We have the right to assemble there, to speak there and to worship there if we wish and no politician has the right to take those sacred rights from us in order to protect his or her cushy government job.

We know who to turn our backs on without our nannies in government having to tell us what is worthy to see and hear and what is not. Handing to a government agency the power to control what we see and hear opens the door to abuse by those who disagree with what is being said by American citizens. The problem with bureaucracies with too much power is that eventually they seek, not to protect the rights of the citizens they serve, but instead to protect their own jobs in government "service". If you wish to "serve" do so by protecting the citizens you represent. We can decide for ourselves what we believe. We are not a stupid people. We realize that there are liars in the public square. You do not need to point them out to us. There are frauds and phonies out there raising their voices and demanding our attention. We know that already. Leave us be to deal with them ourselves.

As a citizen I should be able to say what I wish in the open forum of the Internet so long as I do not harm others or suppress the speech of others. Remember this. Just because a majority of opinions being expressed in the public square disagree with your own, does not mean that those opionions are wrong or that they need to be suppressed. Sometimes, you simply lose the debate. Sometimes even, if the citizens dislike what you're doing, you may lose your job if you do not act in good faith to represent those citizens. That is one of the great checks and balances we citizens reserve as a way to limit the power of government to oppress us.

Placing increased power to regulate speech on the Internet in the hands of any government agency is not only dangerous, but also hands the Commission the kind of power to suppress that almost inevitably expands to suppress economic activity and screw up whole economies. The Internet is the last bastion of free market capitalism we have left. We tamper with that at our peril. Like the market for goods and services, the market of ideas and beliefs has made America strong for almost a quarter of a millenium. We do well to continue to protect what has made us strong.

The Internet is the the most democratized marketplace we have in this rapidly changing world. It is given to you to protect that marketplace for the free exchange of goods, services and ideas. You are not called to shape that marketplace to your own ideas of what is fair and just and right, only to keep it open and free. Let us decide what we want to listen to and who we want to ignore. We are grownups. Please do not arrogantly treat us like dim-witted children. In doing so you insult all Americans.

Thank you for your consideration.

Respectfully,

Tom King

The Tragic Hacking of North Korea's Internet Connection

Apparently some American hackers have re-discovered their patriotic gene. North Korea is being hacked!  :-o

Despite our collective wish that the president might have discovered his own inner tough guy, it's unlikely that the US government is taking North Korea offline (at least not with the president's blessing anyway).  Some members of the press are expressing fear that such a retaliation might set a dangerous precedent. This confuses me. Are they advocating that we set the no less dangerous precedent of allowing attacks on our infrastructure to go unanswered?

Might as well paint a target on ourselves and invite the world to take out its frustrations on us. That would be a very Obama-like position to take, though, in the wake of the president's World Apology Tour.

Let us therefore extend to Kim Jong Un the Handkerchief of Pity and to the North Korean government and military (the only ones allowed to actually use the Internet in North Korea) our deepest heartfelt sympathy for their loss. It must be a wrench for the generals and Communist Party operatives to lose access to the Asian porn and free pirated Western movies that make the great burden of leadership bearable.~


© 2014 by Tom King

Cut-Rate Community Organizing Disrupts Traditional Political Advocacy

Even the Anarchists are whining. The traditional methods of grass roots organizing are being challenged by the low cost community organizaing tools being offered by the Internet and the new technology.  Here's the problem as they see it. 

Advocacy groups with absurdly small budgets can have a surprisingly large impact on public opinion, on the vote and on the actions of politicians.  Where once large budget political groups could virtually buy themselves a grassroots movement, the new amazingly cheap communications technology has muddied the water with second opinions.

There is an old adage that "What is "sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander."  When the Internet first appeared, pundits feared that the web would intrude into our lives in a downright Orwellian fashion.  To their surprise, the Wild West country of the World Wide Web, rather than supressing opinion and free expression, actually encouraged an incredible outburst of creativity, free speech and political debate. It seems few people care whether or not Big Brother is watching all this (and he probably is) Talented individuals have proved capable of influencing public opionion profoundly, creating high quality films, essays and promotional pieces that regularly get millions of viewers from being passed around on Youtube, Facebook and talked about on Twitter.  These rogue public opinion shapers are able to bypass all the traditional filters like network news media, editorial boards and publishers and speak directly to the public.  It's little wonder that the leaders of last century's great political movements are 'disturbed'.  All the tools they have worked so hard to establish control over are suddenly becoming obsolete. 

Technology has had a powerfully disruptive effect on good old boy networks everywhere, whether they be corrupt county judges and their cronies, unions, corporations, anarchists, Marxist progressives or the local garden club. I've been involved for some years with a small npo that teaches other small nonprofits how to do what I call "fund-raising without permission". This group helps train and organize collaborative projects that skirt the traditional "permission of the local elders" track that for decades has limited the numbers and types of charitable activities that are conducted locally. If you didn't have the blessing of the local equivalent of the Skull & Bones Society, you just couldn't raise money for your cause.
After almost 15 years of teaching grant-writing and community organizing, things have changed dramatically in the area. One bank complained that local groups were creating "too much affordable housing". Others complained that there were too many nonprofits in town for them to control. City officials, on finding out a group had applied for funds to develop affordable senior housing in a town that advertised itself as Texas' first 'certified retirement city' was quite upset. "We don't want to attract THOSE kinds of retirees!"

One group I worked with was actually able to co-opt a member of the ruling elite who called in a favor and got us federal funding for a transit project that helped people with disabilities get home from second shift jobs. Many such things were done that would have been impossible without the Internet and the technological tools that have burst upon our culture in the past couple of decades.

But as I said what is sauce for the goose......

As we've gained access to new more sophisticated communication resources, talented organizers have risen who care about doing what's good for the community. We work across political lines without stopping to ask who among us are Republicans or Democrats. The question, in an organization with an absurdly small budget tends to be, not what is good for my union, my party or my company, but what is good for my children, my community, the poor, people with disabilities or our seniors.

The troublesome Tea Party rose so quickly because of the Internet and social media. Social media provided a perfect organizing tool. Whatever you might think about the values and beliefs of the Tea Party, it is as thoroughly grass roots an organization as you'll find. If you don't believe me, check Craigslist under "nonprofit jobs" and see how many "re-elect Obama" paid jobs are being offered by organizations like SEIU and ACORN (or whatever it's calling itself now) versus how many paid "Elect Romney" jobs are being offered by the Tea Party. Hint: I have yet to find a single paid Tea Party job and I've looked.

I do agree that the new low-cost advocacy is going to be a disruptive development, especially for those with powerful ideologies. The ability of poorly funded groups to slug it out with massively funded political action committiees dilutes the power of the pursestrings to some extent. It's not entirely gone, but as an ever-larger segment of the population becomes tech-savvy, it's only goint to make political cow-herding more difficult. Demographics that certain political groups have always found "reliable" are no longer reliable as the Republicans found out in the last election when they pushed a moderate onto their conservative base and expected them to show up at the polls and vote as instructed. The Obama administration is discovering to its dismay this go-round that it's base is beginning to think for itself and may not just pull the lever because they've been told to.

As in every new cultural upheaval, there is potential for great good and great evil. If the wise amongst us don't keep their heads and learn to use these new tools for the greater good; if they keep using the old kiss some babies and vote the graveyard tactics, things will blow up in their faces.

And perhaps it's a good thing if they do. And perhaps with access to a better understanding of history, we footsoldiers in the infowars won't wind up in a political version of the first World War where the generals, using the tactics of the 18th century, marched blindly obedient soldirs into the guns of the 20th century.

Hopefully, we're smarter than that these days.We certainly have access to better quality information and organizational tools than we ever have in the history of the world. . One wonders whether the next war will be fought to preserve the freedom we've come to enjoy on the World Wide Web.

Tom King