Mike Adams
Natural News
Regardless of what you think about the Wikileaks release of state secrets, there’s no debating the astonishing fact that the internet made these leaks possible. Without the internet, no single organization such as Wikileaks would have been able to so widely propagate secret government information and make it public. In the old model of information distribution — centralized mainstream media newspapers and news broadcasts — such information would have been tightly controlled thanks to government pressure.
But the internet allows individual information publishers to bypass the censorship of government. In the case of Wikileaks, it allowed an Australian citizen to embarrass the U.S. government while sitting at a laptop computer in the United Kingdom.
Governments don’t like to be embarrassed. They don’t like their secrets aired on the internet. Sure, it’s okay for governments to tap all of your secrets by monitoring your phone calls, emails and web browsing habits, but every government seeks to protect its own secrets at practically any cost. That’s why the upshot of this Wikileaks release may be that governments will now start to look for new ways to censor and control the internet in order to prevent such information leaks from happening in the future.
What governments around the world are suddenly beginning to realize is that a free internet is ultimately incompatible with government secrets, and secrets are essential to any government that wants to remain in power. That’s because, as even Noam Chomsky stated in this DemocracyNow video interview (http://www.democracynow.org/2010/11…), most government secrets are based on information governments wouldn’t want their people to discover — secrets that might threaten the legitimacy of government if the people found out the truth.
How the FCC plans to seize authority over the internet
As part of a long-term plan to control content on the internet, the FCC is now attempting to assert authority over the internet in the same way it has long exercised content censorship authority over broadcast television and radio.
The reason you can’t say those seven dirty words on broadcast television, in other words, is because the FCC controls broadcast television content and can simply revoke the broadcast licenses of any television station that refuses to comply. This is the same tactic, in the internet world, of yanking a web site’s domain name, which the Department of Homeland Security has already begun doing over the last several weeks (http://www.naturalnews.com/030542_c…).
The FCC also controls content on the radio and can yank the broadcast licenses of any radio stations that refuse to comply with its content censorship. This is why operators of “pirate radio stations” are dealt with so harshly: For the government to allow any radio station to operate outside its censorship and control is to invite dissent.
The internet, of course, has been operating freely and without any real government censorship for roughly two decades. In that time, it has grown to be what is arguably the most influential medium in the world for information distribution. Most importantly, the internet is the medium of information freedom that is not controlled by any government.
The U.S. government wants to change all that, and they’ve dispatched the FCC to reign in the “freedoms” of the internet.
How to crush internet Free Speech
The first step to the FCC’s crushing of internet freedom is to assert authority over the internet by claiming to run the show. The FCC, of course, has no legal authority over the internet. It was only granted authority in 1934 over broadcast communications in the electromagnetic spectrum — you know, radio waves and antennas, that kind of thing.
There is nothing in the Communications Act of 1934 that grants the FCC any authority over the internet because obviously the internet didn’t exist then, and it would have been impossible for lawmakers in the 1930′s to imagine the internet as it operates today.
So instead of following the law, the FCC is trying to “fake” its way into false authority over the internet by claiming authority in the current “net neutrality” debate. By asserting its authority with net neutrality, the FCC will establish a beachhead of implied authority from which it can begin to control and censor the internet.
This is why “net neutrality” is a threat to internet freedom. It’s not because of anything to do with net neutrality itself, but rather with the FCC’s big power grab in its assertion that it has authority over websites just like it has authority over broadcast radio.
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