03 June 2010

Obama to Save MSM by Taxing Your Laptop and Broadband!

Naked Authors

Obviously, the last thing a statist control-freak like Barack Obama needs is an all-out, open competition on the web for the many readers now leaving the MSM in droves... then have them wind-up reading some reactionary, anti-progressive rag like Brietbart or the Reaganite Republican.  Seriously bloggers, your First Amendment rights are coming under pressure from the Bolshevik Boy Wonder yet again... this in today's New York Post: 
In a just-released "staff discussion draft" of "potential policy recommendations to support the reinvention of journalism," the agency (FTC) only circles its wagons around old newspapers and their fading business models.

If the FTC wants to reinvent journalism, perhaps it should align with news' disruptors. But there's none of that in this report. The word blog is used but once in 35 pages of text--and then only in a parenthetical mention of soccer blogs. Discussion of investing in technology comes on the last page in a suggestion about tools for "improved electronic note-taking."
And while Dear Leader's first attempt to control the internet with new "emergency powers" went nowhere in congress, he's now got the FTC taking the opposite tack: pretend the New Media don't even exist... while scheming to prop-up obsequious hacks of the old-guard MSM and state propaganda organ PBS by -among other things- taxing consumer electronics.  Makes you wonder if much of this deal wasn't made in 2008, how else to explain their resolute refusal to properly vet the dubious, shadowy background of Obama...



* Granting antitrust exemptions to allow publishers to collude on pricing to consumers and to business partners.

* Giving news organizations tax exemptions.

* Subsidizing news organizations by increasing government funding to public broadcasting; establishing an AmeriCorps to pay reporters; giving news companies tax credits for employing journalists; creating a national fund for local news, and giving the press an increased postal subsidy.

To its credit, the FTC does ask how to pay for all this. So the staffers speculated about what I'll dub the iPad tax -- a 5 percent surcharge on consumer electronics to raise $4 billion for news. They also consider a tax on broadcast spectrum and even on advertising.

And that's not all they've got up their sleeve: The FTC is also discussing the possibility of awarding the MSM strict, new copyright protections primarily meant to restrict the unruly rabble of the New Media... including something called proprietory facts- meaning they actually own distribution rights on the truth...? And that squares with the First Amendment how exactly, Mr Holder?

FTC staff declares defeat in the search for business models so it may explore many government interventions, including:

* Expanding copyright law and restricting the doctrine of fair comment to benefit legacy publishers.


Most dangerous of all, the FTC considers a doctrine of "proprietary facts," as if anyone should gain the right to restrict the flow of information just as the information is opening it up. Copyright law protects the presentation of news but no one owns facts -- and if anyone did, you could be forbidden from sharing them. How does that serve free speech?