RUSH: All right, folks, here we go. ‘Federal telecommunications regulators, the FCC, approved new rules Tuesday that would for the first time give the federal government formal authority to regulate Internet traffic, although how much or for how long remained unclear. A divided Federal 
Communications Commission approved a proposal by Chairman Julius Genachowski to give the FCC power to prevent broadband providers from selectively blocking web traffic.’ And that’s just a ruse. This net neutrality is not what this is really all about. This is about the Feds wanting to control the Internet just as they control the public airwaves. They want to be able to determine who gets to say what, where, how often. They want to be able to determine what search services are providing what answers to your queries. It’s total government control of the Internet and the regime has just awarded it to itself, after a court said no, after a court denied them this authority, they went ahead and did it anyway.
‘The rules will go into effect early next year, but legal challenges or action by Congress could block the FCC’s action,’ and there will be both. But they were expressly prohibited from doing this by a court of law, just like a court rejected the drilling moratorium in the Gulf, and Ken Salazar says, (paraphrasing) ‘Oh, doesn’t matter, we’ll just ban it again.’ The rule of law doesn’t matter to this bunch.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I want to talk about this net neutrality business. We have dealt with this on this program before. The FCC has just asserted its authority to regulate the Internet, this ‘net neutrality’ is a bogus name just like most legislative titles. Well, most titles of legislation are bogus. ‘Net neutrality’ does no such thing. It does not promote neutrality and lack of bias or any such thing. We noted on this program back in September of 2009: Net neutrality is a solution in search of a problem. It’s just a bunch of liberals wanting to get their hands on something that is massive, that can harm them. They have to control, as much as they can, the free flow of information. They have to be in charge of it, they have to be able to censor it, and that’s what this is all about.
There is no problem on the Internet. None. In fact, in most of life, there wasn’t a problem until the liberals went in search of one so that they could control people’s behavior and try to legislate the outcomes of individuals in life. The only problem here appears to be too much freedom, at least in the minds of the government. There’s too much freedom on the Internet in the minds of Obama and his FCC people. All you really have to know about net neutrality is that its biggest promoters are George Soros and Google and MoveOn.org, which is heavily funded by Mr. Soros and Google. It is also promoted by a number of other radical left Soros fronts, such as the Free Press, the Center for American Progress, and a couple of additional groups improperly named.
The Center for American Progress is about the opposite. They’re not about American progress. And Free Press is not about a free press. So what we’re doing here is neutering the Internet. It’s another private industry. It’s another gleaming aspect of free speech, free market, private industry, that Obama has decided to take over as a Christmas present to himself and the Democrat National Committee and to Mr. Soros. He’s even beaten Hugo Chavez to the punch. Chavez is just talking about taking over the Internet in Venezuela. Obama has got it done. They want you to believe it’s about search engines, making sure that every possible result gets exposure. They want to try to tell you it’s about money, and it’s not. Well, it is about money but not in the way that you would think when that is offered as a reason. It’s about control.
Here is a gleaming artifact of unabridged free market everything — speech, commerce, you name it — and they want to control it. They want to control who gets to say what on it, they want to control who gets found on it, they want to control pretty much everything about it. Monday afternoon, two Democrat commissioners on the FCC, Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn (the daughter of James Clyburn), ‘signaled that the order was not as strong as they would have liked but they wouldn’t oppose it. Their votes along with Mr. Julius Genachowski’s would be enough to approve the order or the takeover. Now, Copps,’ one of the Democrat commissioners, ‘said that he wanted to ensure that the Internet doesn’t travel down the same road of special interest consolidation and gatekeeper control that other media and communications industries like radio, TV, film, and cable have traveled.’
They are worried to death that the Internet is gonna become the next conservative talk radio and Fox News, and that’s what they’re not gonna permit. That’s what so-called net neutrality is all about: To make sure that the voices of minorities and the displaced and the dis-financed and the disabused and the whoevers are equally heard. ‘What a historic tragedy it would be,’ Copps said, ‘to let the fate,’ that fate, meaning what’s happened to talk radio and Fox News, ‘befall the dynamism of the Internet.’ That’s from an earlier app story. Yeah, so we would really hate to see that — and by the way, they don’t have any regulatory authority over cable TV and they haven’t asserted it, and that’s what galls ’em about Fox. They are trying to control Fox on the basis that Fox does news.
But, see, news is specifically — journalism is specifically — mentioned in the First Amendment. That gives them a problem. But we wouldn’t want the Internet to ‘suffer the fate’ of TV, just gone from three networks to literally thousands of choices. We would not want that, would we? You go back. It wasn’t that long ago, 1988, and it was the three networks and CNN. I think ESPN was just breaking out. ESPN first started on radio. But we wouldn’t want that kind of diversity, would we? In 1988, there were 125 radio stations in this country doing talk. Today, what is it, Snerdley? It’s over 2,000. Over 2,000! You have every format under the sun. If you want to listen to a talk show on baking carrot cakes for the holidays, you can find it. It’s there.
Chinese opera. You name it. We certainly wouldn’t want to see the Internet end up like radio where there is even room for views that diverge from the liberal establishment. Oh, we can’t have that. We can’t have views that diverge from liberalism. They see the Internet as something, if they don’t grab control of it, they’re never gonna get control of it — and that is what they want.