Techdirt: Federal Consumer Protection Is Dead. The Fate Of Net Neutrality Warned You It Was Coming.

[ancianita]

3. Thanks for this. I read it, and they clearly adhere to democratic principles for the net, as early

builders and users of the Internet did, like the Chaos Computer Club that's been around since 1981, six years before my youngest son (now an IT guy) was born.

More from your link:

Or take what’s happening at the FCC right now. The traditional media keeps repeating the claims that Brendan Carr is a “free speech warrior,” because that’s what Donald Trump called him. But if you’ve been covering tech policy for a while, you know full well that Carr isn’t actually a believer in free speech. Quite the opposite.

Carr made it clear he wants to be America’s top censor, but cleverly wrapped it in misleading language about free speech. Inexperienced political reporters just repeated those misleading claims. Then he started doing exactly what he promised: going after companies whose speech he seemed to feel was too supportive of Democrats. And now some of those same media companies who failed to cover Carr accurately are falling in line, caving to threats from the administration.

This is the kind of thing tech and law reporters spot immediately, because we’ve seen this all play out before. When someone talks about “free speech” while actively working to control speech, that’s not a contradiction or a mistake — it’s the point. It’s about consolidating power while wrapping it in the language of freedom as a shield to fool the gullible and the lazy.

This is why it’s been the tech and legal press that have been putting in the work, getting the scoops, and highlighting what’s actually going on, rather than just regurgitation administration propaganda without context or analysis (which hasn’t stopped the administration from punishing them).

Connecting these dots is basically what we do here at Techdirt.