Akkam’s Razor

The partisan political blogosphere has been humming along nicely for the last several years.  But where the  progressive and conservative ideologies intersect, at technology, they can possibly be best categorized as libertarian, particularly if limited to the development, growth, corporatization, regulation, and taxation of the internet.  As such, there's much news worthy of our attention.

Politicians would be well served by listening to the war drums being beaten by their constituencies over the various proposals on the Hill, and the mostly skeptical if not antagonistic buzz that they are generating online.

The "Communications, Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act of 2006," authored by two senators, both max porkers, Ted Stevens and Daniel Inyoue seeks to reinstate the audio and video broadcast flag, require VOIP traffic to be identifiable, and effectively eliminate analog televisions in a year's time.  You can read more here, and you can track the bills progress, sponsorship, and legislative histories of the representatives, and their campaign finances at GovTrack.us.

The FCC is similarly considering enforcement of a ruling mandating that colleges and universities will have to comply with the provision of backdoors into their networks to US Spy Agencies in compliance with the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) wiretapping law, with an impact to be passed on to students of $400-500, as reported in Network Pipeline by Preston Gralla.  This will in essence be a wiretap tax, which will end up making the consumer pay for the mechanisms that may result in violations of their own privacy.

Compound this with the certain-defeat of the Network Neutrality Act of 2006 by elected representatives in the pockets of industry, signals of Congressional intent to legislate mandatory internet data retention (you know, to protect the kids) as well as the government stonewall on the scope and reach of the AT&T-NSA domestic spying scandal, one finds plenty of reasons for internet activists to read up, stand up, and take action.