Is US government regulation of the Internet inevitable?
Back in August when Alex Jones and Infowars was basically banned from every major social media website, every major podcast website, and every major internet financial transaction website for "hate speech" when there was no real evidence he even broke those rules(except for Twitter, but they banned Jones from both Twitter and Periscope a month later when he confronted some worthless turd from CNN over his bans from Facebook, YouTube, and everywhere else on the internet while at a Congressional hearing in Washington, DC), I wrote that the attacks on free speech would get worse before it got better and that the United States government may end up getting involved to protect our free speech rights on the internet. The last few weeks have been the worst for free speech, and I think the US government regulating the internet is becoming more and more inevitable.
The first shoe dropped on Oct. 28th, shortly after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. Because the shooter happened to have an account on Gab.ai(a viable competitor to Twitter, Gab promotes itself as a free speech alternative, though it's been falsely accused being alt-right), which the shooter used to post his anti-Semitic views(and the media tried to falsely blame President Trump even though the shooter HATED Trump for his unwavering support of Israel), Gab was falsely blamed for the shooting and got hit like Infowars was months earlier, proving game developer Mark "Grummz" Kern right when he said months ago that banning Infowars from the major sites was a test to see how far the far left can take their jihad against both free speech and the corporate legacy media industry's independent competitors.
Gab, which was already banned from both Apple's and Google's app stores, was banned from Stripe and PayPal, as well as GoDaddy and Joyent, forcing the site to close temporarily to find new hosting. It has since come out that far left groups on Twitter named Sleeping Giants and Deplatforming Hate have orchestrated these attacks on Gab, going as far as to post records of their private messages to the CEOs of Stripe and PayPal and stupidly opening themselves up to litigation in the process. The Pittsburgh synagogue shooter also had a Facebook account, but these losers didn't have the testicular fortitude to get Facebook deplatformed. This is far worse than when the Parents Television Council attacked the advertisers of WWE Smackdown in 1999-2000 over the content of WWE's Attitude Era programming.
I have said on a few occasions that these far left groups are using the exact same tactics the PTC uses, which L. Brent Bozell III, who initially founded the PTC as an offshoot of his Media Research Center, got from his father, a co-founder of National Review who was a speechwriter for Sen. Joseph McCarthy(after McCarthy was censured by the Senate over the hearings with the US Army), who also used the same tactics. For example, Parkland cult leader David Hogg going after Laura Ingraham's advertisers a month or so after the Parkland school shooting because he got mad over a tweet about TMZ reporting how he didn't get into the colleges he wanted to that she was falsely accused of mocking him for.
As I've pointed out on numerous occasions on various websites(LiveJournal, Minds, GamePolitics, even Twitter), WWE sued the PTC in November 2000 for defamation of character(and asked for either $30 million or $55 million depending on the source) over the PTC falsely blaming WWE for the deaths of children imitating the moves of the wrestlers, specifically the case of then 11-year-old Lionel Tate murdering 6-year-old Tiffany Eunick, who was one-third Tate's size at best, to get advertisers to pull their sponsorship of WWE programming. As Mick Foley pointed out in his 2nd autobiography "Foley is Good: And the Real World is Faker Than Wrestling", the PTC's fundraising video against WWE that included Tate's then-lawyer Jim Lewis falsely blaming WWE for his client's violent behavior showed more stuff from Monday Night Raw and Pay-Per-Views than from Smackdown(which only started in August 1999 after a trial episode earlier in late-April 1999). Foley also noted that the PTC's video showed him being thrown off the roof of the Hell in a Cell by the Undertaker at King of the Ring in June 1998 11 times while every other clip from WWE TV the PTC had in that video was only shown once. In April 2002, after Tate admitted in the appeal of his life sentence(and after he got new representation for the appeal) that he didn't watch wrestling(they were watching The Flintstones and Cow and Chicken) at the time of the murder, the PTC agreed to settle the lawsuit, paying WWE $3.5 million and issuing a public apology. Months before the settlement, a federal judge denied the PTC's motion to dismiss the lawsuit on First Amendment grounds, saying that the First Amendment did not protect defamation, which leads me to believe that Vince McMahon would have won that lawsuit had he not agreed to settle.
I think you can smell the gumbo I'm cooking here. I firmly believe that if Gab founder Andrew Torba filed a defamation lawsuit against Sleeping Giants, Deplatforming Hate, PayPal, Stripe, and GoDaddy, he would win. He would make Sleeping Giants wish they had stayed asleep like Rip Van Winkle. I have also said that Alex Jones could win a defamation lawsuit against YouTube for sure and Facebook as well as these same sites if he wanted to.
The second shoe dropped Wednesday when PayPal without warning disabled BitChute's ability to use it, basically banning them for no real reason. BitChute is a direct competitor to YouTube that uses BlockChain technology and is more torrent based, from my understanding from videos by Styxhexenhammer and Dave Cullen(Computing Forever).
I said on Twitter in response to Styx that the Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates the banks and Wall Street, should investigate PayPal and Stripe for their behavior against Gab, Infowars, and now BitChute, because I believe they are outright violating US banking laws. And I think PayPal and Stripe know they may be violating US banking laws, but chose to be gutless, spineless cowards kowtowing to "progressive" and corporate bullies/economic terrorists, just like how Coca-Cola, Worldcom, and other companies chickened out of sponsoring WWE programming when the Parents Television Council threatened them. Interestingly, because Styx retweeted me, somebody responded to me saying that several e-commerce websites were dropping PayPal as a payment option as they seem to think an investigation is inveitable or it's in protest of their behavior against Infowars and Gab.
I have also posted on Twitter and as a comment on one of Tim Pool's videos that SIlicon Valley has forgotten how the Federal Communications Commission was formed in the first place. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The FCC was established in 1934 because the Radio Act of 1912 failed to establish a system of property rights for radio stations with broadcasts being regularly jammed either accidentally or on purpose by a rival network. The Communications Act of 1934 basically gave the federal government ownership of all broadcasting rights on radio and later on television and giving it regulatory power through the FCC. The whole idea that "the public owns the airwaves" is nothing more than a myth. And several US Supreme Court decisions have upheld the FCC's regulatory power over AM/FM radio and broadcast TV(but not so much satellite radio or cable TV since they are pay services).
As I said in August, there are huge double standards in how these websites enforce their terms of service based on race, gender, sexual orientation, financial status, celebrity status, religious beliefs, and especially political beliefs. Terms of service that are intentionally vague when the people running the websites have very broad terms in constitutes a violation of those terms and it's just like how the United States Supreme Court defines pornography, which is "I know it when I see it". The main reason why I think that the US government will end up regulating the internet is because the Silicon Valley oligarchs that run Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, PayPal, Stripe, etc. can no longer be trusted to regulate themselves in a manner that is fair to every user on their websites.
Problem is, we can't really trust the government to do regulate the internet either. Remember Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" during the Super Bowl halftime show in 2004? The FCC's double standards in how it enforced its rules ultimately led Howard Stern to go to satellite radio when his contract with Infinity Broadcasting ran out. Specifically, he got fined for shows he did in 2001 that led Clear Channel to drop his show on radio stations they owned in Florida(which Jack Thompson claimed responsibility for that move, goiing as far as to use a Stern quote about him on the cover of his failed book) in the immediate aftermath. Later, he got fined for another show in 2001 where he described various sex acts, yet Oprah Winfrey does the exact same thing on her TV talk show that same week the fine against Stern was issued with just as many viewers as Stern had listenersa and at various timeslots in which children were likely to be home from school just like Stern's radio show, and the FCC(which was led at the time by Michael Powell, the son of Colin Powell) didn't fine her and made lame excuses for why they didn't. The double standard was first pointed out by Jimmy Kimmel on his late night talk show, but Stern wasn't even allowed by his radio station to play the clip of Oprah and her guest describing a "rainbow party".
That is why we need an internet bill of rights(and a declaration of internet independence) that expands the rights of free speech and privacy to make sure that Silicon Valley, the governments of the various nations around the world(especially China and the European Union), and the corporate legacy media conglomerates(especially the news media and the entertainment industry) play fair.
The first shoe dropped on Oct. 28th, shortly after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. Because the shooter happened to have an account on Gab.ai(a viable competitor to Twitter, Gab promotes itself as a free speech alternative, though it's been falsely accused being alt-right), which the shooter used to post his anti-Semitic views(and the media tried to falsely blame President Trump even though the shooter HATED Trump for his unwavering support of Israel), Gab was falsely blamed for the shooting and got hit like Infowars was months earlier, proving game developer Mark "Grummz" Kern right when he said months ago that banning Infowars from the major sites was a test to see how far the far left can take their jihad against both free speech and the corporate legacy media industry's independent competitors.
Gab, which was already banned from both Apple's and Google's app stores, was banned from Stripe and PayPal, as well as GoDaddy and Joyent, forcing the site to close temporarily to find new hosting. It has since come out that far left groups on Twitter named Sleeping Giants and Deplatforming Hate have orchestrated these attacks on Gab, going as far as to post records of their private messages to the CEOs of Stripe and PayPal and stupidly opening themselves up to litigation in the process. The Pittsburgh synagogue shooter also had a Facebook account, but these losers didn't have the testicular fortitude to get Facebook deplatformed. This is far worse than when the Parents Television Council attacked the advertisers of WWE Smackdown in 1999-2000 over the content of WWE's Attitude Era programming.
I have said on a few occasions that these far left groups are using the exact same tactics the PTC uses, which L. Brent Bozell III, who initially founded the PTC as an offshoot of his Media Research Center, got from his father, a co-founder of National Review who was a speechwriter for Sen. Joseph McCarthy(after McCarthy was censured by the Senate over the hearings with the US Army), who also used the same tactics. For example, Parkland cult leader David Hogg going after Laura Ingraham's advertisers a month or so after the Parkland school shooting because he got mad over a tweet about TMZ reporting how he didn't get into the colleges he wanted to that she was falsely accused of mocking him for.
As I've pointed out on numerous occasions on various websites(LiveJournal, Minds, GamePolitics, even Twitter), WWE sued the PTC in November 2000 for defamation of character(and asked for either $30 million or $55 million depending on the source) over the PTC falsely blaming WWE for the deaths of children imitating the moves of the wrestlers, specifically the case of then 11-year-old Lionel Tate murdering 6-year-old Tiffany Eunick, who was one-third Tate's size at best, to get advertisers to pull their sponsorship of WWE programming. As Mick Foley pointed out in his 2nd autobiography "Foley is Good: And the Real World is Faker Than Wrestling", the PTC's fundraising video against WWE that included Tate's then-lawyer Jim Lewis falsely blaming WWE for his client's violent behavior showed more stuff from Monday Night Raw and Pay-Per-Views than from Smackdown(which only started in August 1999 after a trial episode earlier in late-April 1999). Foley also noted that the PTC's video showed him being thrown off the roof of the Hell in a Cell by the Undertaker at King of the Ring in June 1998 11 times while every other clip from WWE TV the PTC had in that video was only shown once. In April 2002, after Tate admitted in the appeal of his life sentence(and after he got new representation for the appeal) that he didn't watch wrestling(they were watching The Flintstones and Cow and Chicken) at the time of the murder, the PTC agreed to settle the lawsuit, paying WWE $3.5 million and issuing a public apology. Months before the settlement, a federal judge denied the PTC's motion to dismiss the lawsuit on First Amendment grounds, saying that the First Amendment did not protect defamation, which leads me to believe that Vince McMahon would have won that lawsuit had he not agreed to settle.
I think you can smell the gumbo I'm cooking here. I firmly believe that if Gab founder Andrew Torba filed a defamation lawsuit against Sleeping Giants, Deplatforming Hate, PayPal, Stripe, and GoDaddy, he would win. He would make Sleeping Giants wish they had stayed asleep like Rip Van Winkle. I have also said that Alex Jones could win a defamation lawsuit against YouTube for sure and Facebook as well as these same sites if he wanted to.
The second shoe dropped Wednesday when PayPal without warning disabled BitChute's ability to use it, basically banning them for no real reason. BitChute is a direct competitor to YouTube that uses BlockChain technology and is more torrent based, from my understanding from videos by Styxhexenhammer and Dave Cullen(Computing Forever).
I said on Twitter in response to Styx that the Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates the banks and Wall Street, should investigate PayPal and Stripe for their behavior against Gab, Infowars, and now BitChute, because I believe they are outright violating US banking laws. And I think PayPal and Stripe know they may be violating US banking laws, but chose to be gutless, spineless cowards kowtowing to "progressive" and corporate bullies/economic terrorists, just like how Coca-Cola, Worldcom, and other companies chickened out of sponsoring WWE programming when the Parents Television Council threatened them. Interestingly, because Styx retweeted me, somebody responded to me saying that several e-commerce websites were dropping PayPal as a payment option as they seem to think an investigation is inveitable or it's in protest of their behavior against Infowars and Gab.
I have also posted on Twitter and as a comment on one of Tim Pool's videos that SIlicon Valley has forgotten how the Federal Communications Commission was formed in the first place. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The FCC was established in 1934 because the Radio Act of 1912 failed to establish a system of property rights for radio stations with broadcasts being regularly jammed either accidentally or on purpose by a rival network. The Communications Act of 1934 basically gave the federal government ownership of all broadcasting rights on radio and later on television and giving it regulatory power through the FCC. The whole idea that "the public owns the airwaves" is nothing more than a myth. And several US Supreme Court decisions have upheld the FCC's regulatory power over AM/FM radio and broadcast TV(but not so much satellite radio or cable TV since they are pay services).
As I said in August, there are huge double standards in how these websites enforce their terms of service based on race, gender, sexual orientation, financial status, celebrity status, religious beliefs, and especially political beliefs. Terms of service that are intentionally vague when the people running the websites have very broad terms in constitutes a violation of those terms and it's just like how the United States Supreme Court defines pornography, which is "I know it when I see it". The main reason why I think that the US government will end up regulating the internet is because the Silicon Valley oligarchs that run Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, PayPal, Stripe, etc. can no longer be trusted to regulate themselves in a manner that is fair to every user on their websites.
Problem is, we can't really trust the government to do regulate the internet either. Remember Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" during the Super Bowl halftime show in 2004? The FCC's double standards in how it enforced its rules ultimately led Howard Stern to go to satellite radio when his contract with Infinity Broadcasting ran out. Specifically, he got fined for shows he did in 2001 that led Clear Channel to drop his show on radio stations they owned in Florida(which Jack Thompson claimed responsibility for that move, goiing as far as to use a Stern quote about him on the cover of his failed book) in the immediate aftermath. Later, he got fined for another show in 2001 where he described various sex acts, yet Oprah Winfrey does the exact same thing on her TV talk show that same week the fine against Stern was issued with just as many viewers as Stern had listenersa and at various timeslots in which children were likely to be home from school just like Stern's radio show, and the FCC(which was led at the time by Michael Powell, the son of Colin Powell) didn't fine her and made lame excuses for why they didn't. The double standard was first pointed out by Jimmy Kimmel on his late night talk show, but Stern wasn't even allowed by his radio station to play the clip of Oprah and her guest describing a "rainbow party".
That is why we need an internet bill of rights(and a declaration of internet independence) that expands the rights of free speech and privacy to make sure that Silicon Valley, the governments of the various nations around the world(especially China and the European Union), and the corporate legacy media conglomerates(especially the news media and the entertainment industry) play fair.