Technics: Online Privacy: USA consumers may get a 'bill of rights' to protect privacy from Facebook, et cetera

Guardian UK (Mar16,2k11)  When the Obama admin received so much disgust after its Federal Communications Commission floated some Net Neutrality proposals, seeking to forestall future Internet Service Providers and consortia from squeezing time and bandwith from little-guy consumers, it's a wonder really that this new idea is suddenly on the agenda.  Against the naysaying Tea Party, Conservatives, and Republicans, refWrite supported provisionally both Net Neutrality's basic idea and now also the Bill of Rites for bloggers and other denizens 9consumers, citizens) on the Internet.  But refWrite opposes Obama's plan to extend the length of copyrights; we want online news, for instance, to have a much shorter shelflife of special protections. Cut the copyright special protection of news items down to one-half hour!

-- Technowlb and Politicarp

US consumers to get online bill of privacy rights

Obama administration pushes for bill to establish basic levels of privacy amid concern about data being gathered on consumers by likes of Facebook and Google

• • 
    

• Dominic Rushe
• guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 16 March 2011 18.16 GMT

The amount of data being gathered on consumers by sites such as Facebook has raised concern in the US. Photograph: Alamy

The Obama administration is pushing for a "bill of rights" to protect theprivacy of people using the internet. The proposals were outlined by Lawrence Strickling, head of the telecoms arm of the commerce department, at a hearing of the senate commerce committee in Washington DC.

Politicians and privacy groups are increasingly concerned about the mass of information being acquired online by firms including Facebook, Google and Twitter. Strickling told the committee that a privacy bill of rights should outline basic levels of protection and ensure the regulators had the authority to enforce those expectations.

Technics: Net Neutrality: John Fund [WSJ], Open Internet Coalition, and Michelle Malkin

John Fund The Net Neutrality Coup  [Wall Street Journal; Decd21,2k10]

The campaign to regulate the Internet was funded by 

a who's who of left-liberal foundations.

... Thanks to Don McNally

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Ryan Kim [GigaOm; Dec21,2k10]

What the Web Is saying: Net Neutrality Rules

... Thanks to

O

pen 

I

nternet 

C

oalition

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Michelle Malkin [Dec22,2k10]

Internet access is not a “civil right”

... Thanks to 

Michelle Malkin Blog

-- Technowlb

Technics: Net Neutrality: Concept is being played by FCC regulator vs Congressional lackey for Big Net Business

My net problems center around Google (which I love, but which also hurts my interests in several regards that pertain to their desire to gobble up everything into their business power-orbit) and my Bell Internet, my Internet Service Provider (ISP) which has been a pain in the youKnowWhere.

The article being c+ted in this blog-entry comes from another Internet behemoth, CNET which has gobbled up the formerly-independent Version Tracker  service I used for years, but which surprisingly has for the moment improved on the service with its own CNET tech tracker.  See the article CNET carries, "Leaked Net neutrality bill threads needle on mobile."   Whatever country you live in, dear reader, do click-up this CNET article by Larry Downes, a Fellow of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet & Society.

My current ISP, as mentioned, is Bell Internet which gobbled up the Sympatico ISP that I had been using for years.  In the process of gobbling, Bell Internet has hurt me and my internetting considerably.  After reading Downes and the PDF from FreePress.net to which he links us, entitled

IN HIS OWN WORDS:

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI’S VISION OF R E A L NET NEUTRALITY

Free Press September 2010

I've come to realize what the Canadian communications owners and regulators are up to. By the way, Genachowski is chairman of the USA's Federal Communications Commision.

And I see no recourse in appealing to the miscreants (not civil servants, but political appointees at the beck and call of gov, not as bad as the previous Lib appointees but still miscreants) who run Canada's CRTC (Canadian Radio and Television Commission).  They also have charge of the monopoly Bell, a gov-regulated monopoly that uses its monopoly power to harm small customers, like myself.  Also, regarding the Bell Telephone service, I keep getting unwanted calls from the call-centre corporations I subsidize by paying a h+er telephone-usage rate because I'm only a small customer paying individually at the h+er rate per call.  The CRTC does nothing about the abuse of Bell's monopoly and its choking of small users by charging exorbitant rates for a P2P download, thus curtailing our technological freedom, by leveraging Ma Bell's privileged and prioritized bandwith allocation, leveraged against us in favour of their telephone and television corporate entities.

What's more, the moronic Bell has forced me into an increasingly MicroSoft tech environment, which is infamous for its virus-prone Hotmail and several other wretched "services", while refusing me an account for the used Hewlett Packard laptop I bawt in a tech crisis. Another reason for my purchase of this old and battered machine was simply that it had a (hated) MicroSoft XP operating system that allowed me to look at how my blogs appear to readers who come to my pages via their own MicroSoft operating systems (there are several of these, of course). It's a dishonest product and I have no sympathy for the charitable Mr Gates who built this hit house on dubious moral parameters. MS gave no reason for the refusal to let me download Outlook Express into my XP OS; perhaps because they have no reason but, again perhaps, have a previous registration on their records.  But that's mere speculation, since they acted arbitrarily and didn't supply info so I coud guage what the situation is. It certainly devalues the Hewlett Packard product, old as it is. When my iMac went into Riverdale Mac for repair (backup programs and devices were backing-up each other in a potentially infinite regress, a recursion resulting in extreme redundacy, a fawlt apparently of Apple's iDisk backup which I've disabled as useless), thus I had only the HP on hand and spent my t+m reading which led to wr+ting a book-review essay.  The only reason I want an MS app for email (Outlook Express) is so that, in any similar circumstances, I woud be able to put any essay I may wr+t on the HP into the MS email format and send it to my Apple Mail app on my iMac.  

MicroSoft sinks lower in my estimation, along with Bell Internet which forced me to abandon my Internet email address that had become over the years a virtual brand (ie, I conclude that Bell stole my brand), because some ill-trained tech novice or idiotic Bell program treated me like a MicroSoft user and not a Mac user.  They want to push me into the smarmy suffocating tentacles of MS. I know they've received lots of complaints from fellow consumers, because Bell Internet recently added a "Mac Desk"for users they've messed up with their abominable small-customers-last policies.  And more recently they raised the Mac Desk service to 24/7 status. Which means the volume of complaints by irate Mac users is larger than they had cared to acknowlege. Bell Telephone, Bell Internet, and Bell Television keep the small customer waiting ad infinitum, that's because their bloated system tries to cut on services expenses.

In the USA, the whole issue is being fawt out around the term "Net Neutrality," and the Machiavells in Congress -- like Henry Waxman (D, Hollywood, California), well-known lackey of Big Movies and Big Music purveyors, this overly-waxed ears-clogged sycophant who wants to make an end-run around the Federal Communications Commission by introducing in the waning hours of his sycophancy an item of lame-duck legislation regarding the Internet, now on the docket to be taken up when the House of Representatives reconvenes after the Nov 2 election.  I hope he's turfed-out by the voters in his congressional district, but he has so much money for his campaign from the conniving Big movies, music, and internet interests he represents, that his prompt removal is unl+kly.

In the opposite direction comes advice and agitation from FreePress.net which exposes the motives of Waxman's sneaky law, draft legislation that again gives ordinary end-users the stinky sticky end of his schtick. (This isn't the first time the Wax fiend has attempted to whack small communication endeavours, such as the small radio broadcasters upon whom he wanted to impose fees and taxes for the music they played, thus closing them down; he didn't treasure this most free section of America's broadcasters, knowing they operate on shoe-string budgets and respond most actively to their listeners' changing tastes in music and freely expressed opinion -- left, center, and r+t.) 

FreePress.net exposes the plans of many ISPs to choke out the "little guy" -- while the FCC under its present chairman Mr Genachowski has seen its Internet responsiblity hived off by the Wax who is blocking the President's campaign promise and delivering our Internet freedom into the hands of an utterly unreliable Congress which refuses to wr+t laws that can be read by non-lawyers, which enforces short deadlines between a final draft and forced adoption -- when the Senators and Representatives haven't even read the law.