XM MLB Chat: The left falls out of love with the internet, free speech not such a great idea after all

The FCC and FTC now see the internet as too much competition, or at least that's long been the far left's whiny agenda (Cass Sunstein, 2001). Free speech used to be their mantra. After the internet became popular, they dropped the idea like a hot potato. Now the right has taken up the banner. The left looks back at the halcyon days of major newspapers, and aims to get government and taxpayers to put them back in the decider's chair (Castro and Chavez like it that way too).

Legacy media at one time protected the people, now they protect the government:

5/29/10, Jeff Jarvis: "The Federal Trade Commission has been nosing around how to save journalism and in its just-posted “staff discussion draft” on “potential policy recommendations

to support the reinvention of journalism,” it makes its bias clear: The FTC defines journalism

as what newspapers do

and aligns itself with protecting the old power structure of media."...

Among ideas FTC discusses to prop up existing newspapers: "* “Additional intellectual property rights to support claims against news aggregators.”... ...the FTC frets about “difficult line-drawing being (between) proprietary facts and those in the public domain.” Proprietary facts?... * Antitrust exemptions. The FTC looks at allowing news organizations

to collude to set prices to consumers and with aggregators....

* Government subsidies. After saluting the history of government subsidies for the press — namely, postal discounts, legal notice publication, assorted tax breaks, and funds for public broadcasting — the agency looks at other ideas: a journalism AmeriCorps paying journalists; increased funding for public broadcasting; a national fund for local news suggested in Columbia’s report on journalism; a tax credit for employing journalists; citizen news vouchers (a la campaign checkoff); grants to universities for reporting. It also looks at increasing the present postal subsidy (which would only further bankrupt the dying postal service in the service of dying publications); using Voice of America and Radio Free Europe content (aka propaganda) in the U.S.; and enabling the SBA to help nonprofits.

* Taxes. At least the FTC acknowledges that somebody’d have to pay for all this. In one section, the FTC looks at licensing the news: having ISPs levy a fee on us that the government then dolls out to its selected news purveyors — call that the internet tax.

It’s nothing but a tax and it would support incumbents surely.

In another section, it examines the aforementioned iPad tax; a tax on the broadcast spectrum; a spectrum auction tax; a tax on ISPs and cell phones; and a tax on advertising (brilliant: taking a cut of the last support of news in America).

* New tax status. The document spends much space looking at ways to

make journalism a tax-exempt activity and suggests the IRS should change its regulations to enable that. ...

The real problem I see here, again, is the alignment of the legacy institutions of media and government. Here, the internet is not the salvation of news, journalism, and democracy. It’s the other side."...

from "FTC protects journalism's past," buzzmachine by Jeff Jarvis, via Washington Examiner, via RedState.com

"Cass Sunstein's republic.com, the epitome of liberal chic, chronicles the unhappy decline of the Internet as an object of liberal ardor.

In the beginning, the Internet was dominated by .edu, .org, and .gov domains. This provided a convenient meeting place for the diverse and multicultural. Gradually, however, the

dot-coms took over, producing "consumer treadmills"...Sunstein concludes that the Internet is in need of regulation because free choice does not always produce genuine freedom. Nothing characterizes Sunstein's concept of freedom more than Rousseau's injunction that men must be forced to be free. In fact, Sunstein seems to believe (with apologies to Socrates) that

the unregulated life is not worth living."...8/30/2001