Ridgewood NJ, Presidential candidate Donald Trump opposes President Obama’s plan to cede control of the internet .
“Donald J. Trump is committed to preserving Internet freedom for the American people and citizens all over the world. The U.S. should not turn control of the Internet over to the United Nations and the international community. President Obama intends to do so on his own authority – just 10 days from now, on October 1st, unless Congress acts quickly to stop him. The Republicans in Congress are admirably leading a fight to save the Internet this week, and need all the help the American people can give them to be successful. Hillary Clinton’s Democrats are refusing to protect the American people by not protecting the Internet.
The U.S. created, developed and expanded the Internet across the globe. U.S. oversight has kept the Internet free and open without government censorship – a fundamental American value rooted in our Constitution’s Free Speech clause. Internet freedom is now at risk with the President’s intent to cede control to international interests, including countries like China and Russia, which have a long track record of trying to impose online censorship. Congress needs to act, or Internet freedom will be lost for good, since there will be no way to make it great again once it is lost.” – Stephen Miller, National Policy Director
If the U.S. abdicates internet stewardship, the United Nations might take control.
By L. GORDON CROVITZ
Aug. 28, 2016 5:52 p.m. ET
When the Obama administration announced its plan to give up U.S. protection of the internet, it promised the United Nations would never take control. But because of the administration’s naiveté or arrogance, U.N. control is the likely result if the U.S. gives up internet stewardship as planned at midnight on Sept. 30.
On Friday Americans for Limited Government received a response to its Freedom of Information Act request for “all records relating to legal and policy analysis . . . concerning antitrust issues for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers” if the U.S. gives up oversight. The administration replied it had “conducted a thorough search for responsive records within its possession and control and found no records responsive to your request.”
It’s shocking the administration admits it has no plan for how Icann retains its antitrust exemption. The reason Icann can operate the entire World Wide Web root zone is that it has the status of a legal monopolist, stemming from its contract with the Commerce Department that makes Icann an “instrumentality” of government.
Digital media companies are caught in the “crap trap,” mass-producing trashy clickbait so they can claim huge audiences and often higher valuations.
Here is how they fell into this lethal trap: They got into the content game to produce news or info they might be proud of, believing they could lure us to read it and maybe even pay for it. They quickly realized it’s expensive to produce quality content and hard to get a lot of people to click on it, much less pay for it. So they deluded themselves that the better play was to go for the biggest audience possible, using stupid web tricks to draw them in. These include misleading but clicky headlines, feel-good lists, sexy photos and exploding watermelons.
And it appeared to work. Traffic spiked. Costs were contained. But revenue never followed because everyone else was doing the same tricks and getting the same spikes—and the simple law of supply and demand drove down the value of their inventory. This dynamic helps explain why Mashable recently laid off so many journalists, BuzzFeed saw its growth miss the mark and many media companies and investors are freaked out.
Here’s the good news: This era is getting flushed away. Some companies feel self-conscious about the trash they are producing. Many others realize it’s simply not a good business model. But the savviest ones see a very cool reason to change: A content revolution is picking up speed, promising a profitable future for companies that can lock down loyal audiences, especially those built around higher-quality content.
The overseers of the Internet on Monday published a keenly anticipated proposal to step out from under US oversight.
Under the plan, nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) would create a separate legal entity that would be contracted to handle key technical functions of the online address system.
A “Customer Standing Committee” would monitor performance of what would essentially be an ICANN subsidiary, and a review process involving stake-holders would be put in place.
ICANN would remain based in Southern California, and any major structural or operational changes to the foundation of the Internet’s addressing system would require approval of the nonprofit organization’s board of directors.
The 199 page proposal was posted online at icann.org, where a note said that a public comment period would end on September 8.
ICANN president Fadi Chehade said last month that the end of the US role is now set for mid-2016, with the transition pushed back by a year to allow time for input from the Internet community and review by the US government and Congress.
ICANN will become an independent entity without US government oversight for the Internet’s domain and address system, Chehade said, noting that the transition is likely to take place between July and September 2016.
Tedesco unveils a very expensive initiative to bring Internet to low-income high schoolers in Bergen County
JULY 15, 2015, 7:29 PM LAST UPDATED: WEDNESDAY, JULY 15, 2015, 9:18 PM
BY JOHN C. ENSSLIN
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD
Bergen County Executive James Tedesco on Wednesday unveiled an initiative aimed at providing basic broadband Internet service to low-income families with children who are starting high school this fall.
Tedesco announced he will provide a $50,000 grant from a discretionary fund in his budget to Jersey On, a non-profit that aims to connect more low-income families to the Internet.
A wireless router is the hub of your home or business network, delivering a single Internet connection to other devices on the network, through either wired Ethernet or a wireless connection. Some routers, targeted at novice users, are easy to set up, while others take a little more know-how. Routers also vary in the throughput they can manage, depending on the antenna configuration and the hardware inside.https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2398080,00.asp
The organization is headed by Josh Gottheimer, a Microsoft executive who is a Democratic candidate for the 5th Congressional District seat now held by Republican Scott Garrett.
The $50,000 will provide a pocket-sized Wi-Fi hotspot device good for up to five wireless devices at no cost to 531 freshmen within the county whose families are eligible for the free or reduced-cost lunch program, starting this fall.
Those families also will receive free wi-fi for the four years that their student is in high school.
Ridgewood Superintendent’s Column: On digital citizenship
MARCH 27, 2015 LAST UPDATED: FRIDAY, MARCH 27, 2015, 12:31 AM
BY DANIEL FISHBEIN
THE RIDGEWOOD NEWS
Years ago I ran in a local road race that had a very strange outcome.
…………..
Now you are probably wondering why is this guy telling this story? Well, it’s because I innocently signed up for this race as did a few hundred others and found that the organizers of the race gave away or sold that list. We do this same thing all the time when we hit the “Agree” button to get information off the Internet.
We hardly give it a thought when we electronically sign up, email, tweet, use Facebook, post on Instagram and blog as part of our everyday existence. Our lives have improved in many ways with the fast, easy, convenient and mostly free access to information at our online fingertips, whether we are researching directions, restaurant reviews or places to stay, ordering our clothing and books, or keeping track of our bank accounts, our photo albums, our documents.
Such convenience makes it easy to forget that when we log on, we also agree, yes, agree, to hand over access to all types of personal information about ourselves in exchange for that instant line of communication. Our privacy and personally identifiable information is easily shared, as we know from the personalized ads that appear on the sites we search. And yet, we get upset and outraged when the obvious happens, when a breach occurs and our files are hacked, or a company is called out as a spy on an individual.
Just this month, a student in another New Jersey district tweeted out some PARCC testing information. Pearson, the company that developed the assessment, followed its protocol to contact state officials, who then called to inform those school district administrators of a testing breach.
Many people were upset at this chain of events … and so was I … at first. Then I thought about Daniella. Sixteen years ago I had essentially “tweeted” out my personal information when I agreed to run that race, never thinking of the consequences. I did what we have all done dozens, maybe hundreds, of times when we readily fill out an electronic form, order over the phone, search for our next vacation and the like.
We know now that when we order from our favorite online vendor, they remember us. They know how our waist sizes have expanded or shrunk from the last time we ordered, our color preferences, the types of movies we like to watch.
As we move forward, others will know more and more about us because we have either given them this information directly, or granted them permission to access our files. We must hope that they use our personal information ethically, at least that is my expectation, but we must also make every effort to scrutinize to whom we give out our data so that it does not come back to haunt us. We must teach our children the same and pray every night that they’ve listened.
Taking responsibility for technology-based information, and having this conversation with our children, too, is called good digital citizenship. The Ridgewood Public Schools guards our data and only shares with state and federal officials the information that is required by law. We make every effort to teach our students about good digital citizenship and with the beginning next school year, we will teach it more formally through a Digital Citizenship Curriculum, from kindergarten through Grade 12.
As always, please feel free to contact me with your questions or concerns.
Daniel Fishbein, Ed.D., is Superintendent of the Ridgewood Public Schools. Dr. Fishbein can be reached at 201-670-2700, ext. 10530, or via e-mail at [email protected]. For more information on the Ridgewood Public Schools visit the district website at www.ridgewood.k12.nj.us or visit the Facebook page at www.facebook.com/RidgewoodPublicSchools.
Verizon said in a statement , originally released in Morse code the FCC’s move imposes 1930s rules on the Internet.
FCC Votes In Favor Of Rules Aimed At Enforcing ‘Net Neutrality’
February 26, 2015 2:30 PM
WASHINGTON (CBSDC/AP) — Internet service providers like Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile now must act in the “public interest” when providing a mobile connection to your home or phone, under rules approved Thursday by a divided Federal Communications Commission.
The plan, which puts the Internet in the same regulatory camp as the telephone and bans business practices that are “unjust or unreasonable,” represents the biggest regulatory shakeup to the industry in almost two decades. The goal is to prevent providers from slowing or blocking web traffic, or creating paid fast lanes on the Internet, said FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler.
The 3-2 vote was expected to trigger industry lawsuits that could take several years to resolve. Still, consumer advocates cheered the regulations as a victory for smaller Internet-based companies which feared they would have to pay “tolls” to move their content.
Verizon said in a statement — which was originally released in Morse code — that the FCC’s move imposes 1930s rules on the Internet.
“The FCC’s move is especially regrettable because it is wholly unnecessary. The FCC had targeted tools available to preserve an open Internet, but instead chose to use this order as an excuse to adopt 300-plus pages of broad and open-ended regulatory arcana that will have unintended negative consequences for consumers and various parts of the Internet ecosystem for years to come,” Verizon said.
Net neutrality is the idea that websites or videos load at about the same speed. That means you won’t be more inclined to watch a particular show on Amazon Prime instead of on Netflix because Amazon has struck a deal with your service provider to load its data faster.
Opponents, including many congressional Republicans, said the FCC plan constitutes dangerous government overreach that would eventually drive up consumer costs and discourage industry investment.
House Speaker John Boehner denounced the vote in a statement.
“Overzealous government bureaucrats should keep their hands off the Internet. Today, three appointed by President Obama approved a secret plan to put the federal government in control of the Internet,” Boehner said in a statement. “The text of the proposal is being kept hidden from the American people and their elected representatives in Congress, and the FCC’s chairman has so far refused to testify about it. This total lack of transparency and accountability does not bode well for the future of a free and open Internet, not to mention the millions of Americans who use it every day.”
Republican FCC Commissioners Mike O’Rielly and Ajit Pai, who voted against the plan, alleged that President Barack Obama unfairly used his influence to push through the regulations, calling the plan a “half-baked, illogical, internally inconsistent and indefensible document.”
Michael Powell, a former Republican FCC chairman who now runs the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, warned that consumers would almost immediately “bear the burden of new taxes and increased costs, and they will likely wait longer for faster and more innovative networks since investment will slow in the face of bureaucratic oversight.”
Republican FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai declared that President Obama’s plan to regulate the Internet, coupled with potential FEC regulations would be “pretty dangerous” on Monday’s “Sean Hannity Show.”
When asked how a website like the Drudge Report would be impacted, Pai stated “there’s not much within the four corners of the document that hint at anything regarding content. What I can tell you is one my friends over at the Federal Election Commission, Lee Goodman has been outspoken about the fact that some of the commissioners there are very interested in looking at content online that, in their view, shapes the political discourse. And so if you pair what the FCC is doing in terms of the Internet’s infrastructure, and what the FEC might do in terms of the Internet’s content, you see a pretty dangerous combination in terms of government control over not just what we say, but how we say it.”
Regarding the impact of the plan on Internet users, he declared “bills for broadband are going to go up, this order opens the door to a vast array of federal and state fees because it’s going to be treating the Internet, for the first time, essentially as telephone service…Secondly, it’s going to mean that the speeds that your listeners use—the speeds your listeners get when they’re accessing the Internet are going to slow down because obviously these networks don’t build themselves. The private sector has to take the risk and invest the capital to build those networks and if they know the FCC’s going to micromanage them every step of the way, they’re going to be less likely to build some of those high-speed connections,” and that the regulations would lead to “much less competition” over the long term.
Democrats on FEC open to new regulation on donors, Internet
BY PAUL BEDARD | FEBRUARY 11, 2015 | 12:01 PM
Claiming that thousands of public comments condemning “dark money” in politics can’t be ignored, the Democrat-chaired Federal Election Commission on Wednesday appeared ready to open the door to new regulations on donors, bloggers and others who use the Internet to influence policy and campaigns.
During a broad FEC hearing to discuss a recent Supreme Court decision that eliminated some donor limits, proponents encouraged the agency to draw up new funding disclosure rules and require even third-party internet-based groups to reveal donors, a move that would extinguish a 2006 decision to keep the agency’s hands off the Internet.
The Obama Administration’s Net Neutrality Proposal Could Change the Internet Forever—but the FCC is Keeping it Secret
The FCC wants to regulate the Internet as a utility, but won’t release its full plan.
Peter Suderman|Feb. 6, 2015 1:15 pm
On Wednesday, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Tom Wheeler announced a major new proposal to regulate the Internet as utility, and, in doing so, institute restrictive net neutrality rules on every major component of the Internet. Given the Obama administration’s unusual and aggressive effort to push the FCC chief into putting forth the proposal, it’s better thought of as the White House’s net neutrality proposal.
The proposal is extraordinary in many ways: According to an op-ed by Wheeler and other accounts, it would not only reclassify wired broadband service as a Title II utility, like the phone system, it would also apply to wireless data. In addition, it would give the FCC new authority over the Internet’s backend—the middleman services that transfer data between Internet service providers (ISPs). It would pave the way for new taxes to be applied to Internet service.
It would, in other words, be a fundamental break from the sort of relatively light federal regulation that has defined the Internet since its inception, and it represents a blatantly political reversal on the part of Chairman Wheeler, a technically independent agency head who plainly caved to White House pressure.
But perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the proposal, which is 332 pages long, is that it is being kept secret from the public—and it will remain secret until after a vote later this month in which it is likely to pass on a 3-2 basis, with Wheeler and the FCC’s two Democratically appointed commissioners outvoting the two Republican-appointed commissioners.
The head of the Federal Communications Commissionis urging his fellow commissioners to block state laws that would prevent cities and towns from building out their own government-run Internet services.
Chairman Tom Wheeler this week will circulate a draft decision to nullify laws in Tennessee and North Carolina, after receiving a request from towns in each of those states.
Cities across the country “should be able to make their own decisions about building the networks they need to thrive,” Wheeler said in a statement on Monday.
“After looking carefully at petitions by two community broadband providers asking the FCC to preempt provisions of state laws preventing expansion of their very successful networks, I recommend approval by the commission so that these two forward-thinking cities can serve the many citizens clamoring for a better broadband future.”
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt: “The Internet Will Disappear”s
by Georg Szalai
1/22/2015 11:10am PST
Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt on Thursday predicted the end of the Internet as we know it.
At the end of a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland where his comments were webcast, he was asked for his prediction on the future of the Web. “I will answer very simply that the Internet will disappear,” Schmidt said.
“There will be so many IP addresses…so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with that you won’t even sense it,” he explained. “It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic. And with your permission and all of that, you are interacting with the things going on in the room.”
Pew: 75% ‘better informed’ because of Internet news sites, don’t feel ‘overloaded’
By Paul Bedard | December 8, 2014 | 12:19 pm
The Internet is revolutionizing news consumption, with more than seven in 10 telling Pew Research Center that they are better informed than they were five years ago because of the news websites they visit daily.
In Pew’s latest survey of Internet use, 75 percent said they are “better informed” about national news, and a near equal 74 percent on international news.
Just as importantly, 72 percent said that having so much information at their fingertips was a good thing and didn’t make them feel overloaded.
The survey bolsters a previous Pew report that found many Americans shifting from print and TV to Internet based news outlets. The new survey shows that Americans are benefiting from the shift.
Overall, a whopping 87 percent said that the Internet and cell phones “have improved their ability to learn new things, including 53 percent who say it has improved this ‘a lot,’ ” said Pew.
“Americans like lots of information choices and don’t feel particularly oppressed by the growing flows of material into their lives,” said Lee Rainie, director of Pew’s Internet, Science and Technology Research. “Even through all the tech change in the past generation, people said they are coping fine and relish new options they have to get and share the information that matters to them.”
Obama calls on FCC to keep Internet ‘free and open’
The president says that all Internet service providers should “protect Net neutrality” and agree to not block or throttle Internet traffic.
by Don Reisinger
@donreisinger
November 10, 2014 6:56 AM PST
President Barack Obama has issued his strongest message yet that the Internet should be kept “free and open.”
In a statement released Monday, Obama called on the Federal Communications Commission to maintain Net neutrality and ensure that Internet service providers (ISPs) are not allowed “to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas.”
“That is why today, I am asking the Federal Communications Commission to answer the call of almost 4 million public comments, and implement the strongest possible rules to protect net neutrality,” President Obama said in the statement.
The FCC is working on a new set of rules for Internet oversight in the US. Those rules were expected to be made available later this year, though reports now claim they may be delayed until early 2015.
The agency earlier this year saw a vigorous response from the public to its call for comments on its Open Internet proposals, with the FCC’s servers sometimes stumbling and crashing under the overwhelming input. The comment window closed in September.
Net neutrality, which is the principle that ISPs and governments treat all Web traffic the same, has long been a debate around the US with no clear victory for either side. Consumers and many Internet companies argue that the Internet should remain open and that all traffic should be treated equally. Opponents have argued for a toll road of sorts that would provide better service to companies that pay to support their high traffic volumes. That has created widespread concern that ISPs could throttle service in some instance, intentionally slowing down some content streams and speeding up others.
Net Neutrality: Don’t Let the FCC Control the Internet!
Nick Gillespie | May 26, 2014
By the time you read this, the Internet—that glorious system of tubes that brings us everything from cat videos to free amateur porn to (trigger warning! NSFW!)free amateur cat porn—might already be dead.
That’s the consensus from proponents of so-called net neutrality, who are alarmed and dismayed by a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposal that might eventually allow Internet service providers (ISPs) to charge users different rates to transmit data across their networks.
The result could be that big companies with a lot of cash could use “fast lanes” to deliver content, while smaller, poorer outfits might be stuck in “slow lanes” that would turn off potential users and customers (who wants to wait for a site to load or a video to buffer?). Such “paid prioritization” would, we’re warned, violate cyberspace’s bedrock principle of digital non-discrimination, lead to the “death of the democratic Internet”, and even kill “the dreams of young entrepreneurs.”
Yeah, not so much. Reports of the imminent death of the Internet’s freewheeling ways and utopian possibilities are more wildly exaggerated and full of spam than those emails from Mrs. Mobotu Sese-Seko.
In fact, the real problem isn’t that the FCC hasn’t shown the cyber-cojones to regulate ISPs like an old-school telephone company or “common carrier,” but that it’s trying to increase its regulatory control of the Internet in the first place.
Under the proposal currently in play, the FCC assumes an increased ability to review ISP offerings on a “case-by-case basis” and kill any plan it doesn’t believe is “commercially reasonable.” Goodbye fast-moving innovation and adjustment to changing technology on the part of companies, hello regulatory morass and long, drawn-out bureaucratic hassles.
