We have already seen the Obama administration attempt to take over the healthcare industry with its Obama care program, and we watched it meddle in the alternative energy market by propping up Solyndra and other companies that should have been allowed to fail. Recently, Obama appears to have sold out America again. This time it was jobs-for-politics by denying a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have transported oil from Canada to the U.S. It has been said this decision alone would kill 20,000 jobs. And it threatens our neighbor to the north, Canada. Due to this ill-fated political move, and the volatile indecisiveness on the part of our President, Canadians have said they feel they are being held hostage, and they will take their energy elsewhere, specifically to China and other countries in Asia.
Now the government is trying to grab control of yet another vital industry by tying up the Internet with new rules and regulations. It’s all part of a consistent pattern of interference in private enterprise. Obama and his supporters seem to think the government can run businesses better than the people who currently have control – their owners.
At press time, Congress was debating the so-called Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate. These bills were supposedly intended to protect intellectual property from copyright infringement. For many years, websites based in other countries have been selling unlicensed movies, music, and other artistic property without paying royalties. The problem is that we’re not able to prosecute the real online “pirates” because many of them are based in countries that don’t respect our rule of law. So someone decided to choke off the system that allowed people to access these websites– namely, the Internet.
Proposed regulations would allow the feds to take down an entire website if it contained any connection to a site the government decided was in violation of anti-piracy rules. Tech experts have predicted that these regulations would even apply to search engines like Google, which could be punished if a search result led to an offending website. The information technology magazine eWeek stated, “The language of SOPA is so broad…that this bill could effectively kill e-commerce or even normal Internet use.”
And how would the government enforce these new rules? They’d need armies of bureaucrats snooping through the Web, scanning websites, analyzing content – in short, they’d need a special Internet police force paid for by taxpayers. Foreign websites that sell pirated movies or prescription drugs would be relatively untouched by these measures. If regulators blocked access to one website, they could set up another one in a few hours.
It’s the honest Internet companies that would suffer. Investors would be reluctant to fund Internet-based enterprises, and even thriving companies would be hesitant to expand in the uncertain regulatory climate. The ironic thing about this whole situation is that the Internet is one of the few flourishing market sectors in the U.S. economy. While many brick-and-mortar industries are struggling to survive, the tech sector has been providing desperately needed jobs. The end result of federal interference would be more jobs for bureaucrats and fewer jobs in the private sector.
Regardless of the outcome in Congress of this Internet attack, this out of control President and Congress need to back off of growing our government and our deficits… they need to represent the people, make government simpler, and affect stimulus to assist small businesses to grow and succeed. These small businesses are the ones who can make the difference in growing this nation to prosperity again. I say QUIT THE “BS” POLITICS AS USUAL! Mr. President and Congress. Be somebody and leave a legacy of greatness, not disappointment.
