Much to cover, and less time to cover it in! So many important things I don’t even know what to hit first. So, I’ll be biased and hit what I found out about from RedState. Google and the NLRB teamed up to promote unionization, with Google providing free ad space.

That’s a problem for three reasons. First, the NLRB is supposed to be the impartial arbiter of disputes between unions and employers. For the NLRB to promote unionization is to tip its hand as being a tool of one side: the unions. Second, Google isn’t even unionized. Third, and the undoing of the scheme: The NLRB, like the rest of the government, is prohibited by law from accepting free goods or services. If it weren’t for that, they’d all have continued to get away with it as they have since 2008. What a technicality.

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Good evening, I wrote in my best Alfred Hitchcock impression. Top story as we go into the weekend: our friendly neighborhood House Republicans are pressing on with their oversight of the FCC and Net Neutrality in particular. The resolution disapproving of Net Neutrality is postponed, but instead we’re getting pressure on the FCC to justify its actions economically. Good on Greg Walden, Fred Upton, and Lee Terry!

Meanwhile, up in Vermont, we’ve got a case study going on demonstrating why we don’t want industrial policy in the volatile, constantly innovating telecommunications world. Government grants to favored firms tend to favor those firms and their investors, not the people intended to get the help. Vermont is trying to pump government money into Universal Access, and failing. Let’s not repeat that nationally, please.

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Welcome to the remarkably early Tech at Night tonight. When I have my initial preparation done by 6pm, I’m not going to stay up until midnight to do the actual writing. Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent.

We start with some mild bad news: the resolution disapproving of Net Neutrality has been delayed. Fred Upton is getting recognition for his active work challenging the Obama administration on its overreaches, and Greg Walden’s subcommittee seems to be following suit nicely, but we will have to wait on this one particular vote.

The Democrats are definitely worried, though. Apparently it’s a bad thing that the FCC’s ability to act ahead of the Congress. Haven’t these Democrats ever heard of actually passing legislation to deal with new challenges?

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Hello! There’s no one clear theme of things to discuss tonight. It’s a diverse list of topics, so let’s just muddle on through and see what’s going on.

We’ve got some good news from what the Republicans in Washington are going. On the Senate side, the side we haven’t heard nearly as much about thanks to the Obama-Reid majority there, conservative Republicans are taking key roles. Senators Toomey, Rubio, and Ayotte will join the Senate subcommittee responsible for FCC oversight. Get to it, gentlemen and lady.

Meanwhile, in the House, Speaker Boehner has come out strong against Net Neutrality, calling it a threat, and warning about follow-on regulation like the Fairness Doctrine. Committee members are active too, judging by H. J. Res. 37 by Greg Walden, Fred Upton, and the gang. This simple, readable, eight-line resolution disapproves the Net Neutrality power grab.

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And now I really push the definition of Tech at Night, starting to write this at 2am. I’d originally planned to skip tonight’s edition, and instead just sleep. But I woke up, and sleep isn’t returning anytime soon, so let’s make the rounds of tech and policy.

Some Democrats still haven’t learned the lesson of the PCCC. The far left alternative to the DCCC published a Net Neutrality pledge for Democrats to sign. Every Democrat who signed it lost in November. Yet some Democrats continue to press that extremist agenda. It shows just how of touch Harry Reid’s Senate really is.

Possibly more importantly, the drive for the Internet Tax (which again, they call Universal Service Fund reform) continues from the left. The New York Times came out for it, and a group called Consumer Federation of America is even targeting Netflix specifically for an Internet tax. Watch out.

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Haley Barbour’s been taking some criticism lately, which to me is a sign of how seriously people are taking his rumored Presidential aspirations, with reports indicating that he’s running until he says he’s not. I was able to meet the Governor at CPAC and I’m certainly taking seriously his budding candidacy. I’d like to see him run and I’d like to see him win.

Governor Barbour has the track record that shows him to be up to the job. Here are some key facts I’ve dug up to prove it:

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On Monday I did the first half of my catchup work. Now we’ll do the second half. And one of the big issues coming up is copyright. Over the last thirty years, copyright in America has been radically reformed. While traditionally it worked as patents still do work, as a temporary grant of monopoly enforceable in civil courts, we’ve gradually moved them into the realm of criminal law enforced indefinitely. And I believe we’re gone too far in that direction.

So when I hear about the COICA, a new copyright and counterfeiting law promoted by the Obama administration, I’m concerned. At a fundamental level, the COICA would give too much power to government to solve a problem that doesn’t actually exist. No, copyright is not at serious risk in America today. It is simply certain business models that are failing, and it is not the place of government to try to prop them up.

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I’m back. CPAC week came and went. Then another week came and went after the horrible cold I got at CPAC. But now I’m healthy again and it’s time to start catching up. Though there’s no way I’m going to post on every tidbit I’ve run across in the last two weeks, I can try to hit the highlights.

And let’s start with the fact that the Internet Kill Switch is back under a new name. Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman have reintroduced the bill under a new name. They think if they put freedom in the name that we’ll ignore the problems inherent in giving the President emergency powers to wage economic war on America. The Internet Kill Switch is a broken idea. We don’t let the President close supermarkets nationwide if one butcher in one city has an e. coli outbreak. We can’t apply the same overreaction online.

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Every decade of conservatives has its hero. In fact, I think Ronald Reagan became the hero of the conservatives who came up in the 1970s and 1980s. He won the Cold War, he cut and then simplified taxes, he fought the unions, and he was an outspoken champion of the pro-life cause. He energized a movement, a party, and a country. It’s why many of us flew in for CPAC to an airport named for him.

In the 1990s, for those of us who were too young to appreciate President Reagan, we had Speaker Gingrich. “Newt is the man!” is what one CPAC blogger said to me, when I admitted I still enjoyed seeing him here as much as I did. I am a fan, not just an activist, when it comes to Gingrich. He broke a 40 year old hold the Democrats had on the House, he introduced Americans to the 10th amendment, he smashed up the old, destructive welfare system, and he cut spending to the point that the national debt went down.

Looking around at CPAC now though, seeing the students here and watching the excitement, it’s clear to me that the youth coming up today have their own hero, and his name is Ron Paul.

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Known and Unknown.

Open Thread.

Remember when the Communication Workers of America backed Net Neutrality in the mildest way possible, despite the fact that it risked killing CWA jobs? Well here’s their payoff: CWA is all-in for the Internet Tax.

Of course, the left isn’t calling it the Internet Tax. Instead it’s “Universal Service Fund reform,” by which they mean finding a way to get more money into the so-called Universal Service Fund for rural phone access, then spend that money on state-run Internet access. How will they get that money? With “contributions” of course, by which FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski actually means USF taxes.

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Muzzammil was a Muslim.

Muzzammil thought Muslims were being portrayed unfairly as violent after 9/11.

Muzzammil created a TV network called Bridges TV to counteract that.

Muzzammil had a wife named Aasiya.

Aasiya declared she was going to divorce Muzzammil.

Muzzammil plotted his wife’s beheading at his TV network, then did it.

Muzzammil was convicted of second degree murder.

Forgive me if I’m not as engaging as usual tonight. Firefox robbed me of a good 20 minutes of time tonight. Firefox 3, what was supposed to be faster and better than ever, had taken up so much memory it was slowing my whole system, and then it took forever to restart. Of course, now they’re saying Firefox 4 will be better this time. Really. Forgive me if I’m not optimistic. As soon as NoScript or equivalent comes to Safari, I’m away from Mozilla forever.

Moving on, I wrote on RedState today about the FCC plotting something that could be a sign that the left wants to start manipulating statistics to push their agenda. We need to watch and make sure they don’t try anything funny.

The IPv4 Panic Button has been hit again. People are saying we’re out of addresses! But we’re actually not. We’ve just handed out many large blocks of addresses to regional authorities who then assign them to those who need them. Of course, if we actually did run out (and couldn’t fix the issue of a few large companies having obscene numbers of addresses, from the old days), I say we just strip pubic IP addresses from countries that firewall the Internet, including China, Saudi Arabia, and Australia. If you’re not on the public Internet, you don’t need public IP addresses.

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So the FCC is having another open meeting on Tuesday, February 8. A tentative agenda for that meeting has been published, and part of it looks dangerous. It’s written in conservative-friendly language, talking about streamlining processes and minimizing the burdens on the private sector, but there could be much more to it than that.

The agenda says the FCC is issuing “A Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, initiated as part of the Commission’s Data Innovation Initiative, to streamline and modernize the collection of data via Form 477, in order to ensure that the data the Commission collects enables informed policymaking while minimizing burdens on voice and broadband service providers.” Note: this means the FCC isn’t just gathering data, but is already about to propose new rules. So what happens might happen quickly, so we’d best be sure we know just what the FCC is up to here.

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Net Neutrality is taking a real pounding this week. The Heritage Foundation has come out shooting, calling for a major rollback in the FCC’s authority, including repealing Net Neutrality legislatively. Also, The US Chamber of Commerce is calling upon the FCC to be held to the President’s standards for regulatory review, which would certainly put Net Neutrality at risk.

But its supporters press on. Even as GoGo Inflight Internet offers non-neutral Free Facebook access (just wait until the radicals start telling us that free stuff is bad!), Andrew McLaughlin says the Egypt situation proves the need for state control of the Internet through Net Neutrality. Try to figure that one out. I sure hope Vint Cerf didn’t feed him that line. He has a reputation.

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On this date in the year 1848, in the conquered and occupied Federal District of Mexico, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed by representatives of US President James Polk and interim Mexican President Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, ending the war between the two countries.

By every possible measure, the war ended as a decisive victory for the United States and a humiliating defeat for Mexico. As a result of the treaty, Mexico ceded all rights to territory north of the Rio Grande and the Gila River, including all of California, Nevada, Utah, and Texas, parts of Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, and Oklahoma, as well as the parts of Arizona and New Mexico not later bought in the Gadsden Purchase. From Mexico’s perspective, a perspective that recognized neither the revolutions in Texas and California nor the Annexation of Texas, the country lost over half of its prewar territory.

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Wow, my Tech at Night graphic is now out of date. I was already late to the iPhone 4 party because of the iPad and because I had waited for the legendary White iPhone 4. But now that I have an iPhone 4, having the 3GS in the graphic seems wrong somehow. Time for a new one if I get a good idea. Comments welcome.

Anyway, I want to be very clear about the Internet Kill Switch plan. The plan by Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman has now passed the Democrat-controlled Senate Committee claims to be a grand venture for “Cybersecurity,” but the plain fact is the plan as written is unworkable as a security venture, but only works as a tool to let the government control or even destroy the internet.

Yes, just like in Egypt.

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I don’t want to go the full Jim Anchower on you all, but the end of the week has been a bit rough on my end. My Internet connection is going full on Neutral on me, by which I mean it’s been going offline as much as it’s online, including a big 8 hours of full downtime at one point. If it weren’t for my new iPhone 4 I’d be even worse off.

Maybe I should be like Netflix, who continues to ride the Net Neutrality fad to get its own subsidies. Yes, Netflix now wants all of us, everyone who pays for Internet access at home, to subsidize Netflix users. Hey, that’s good for me, since I’m a subscriber and even dropped to Internet-only as soon as it was available, but I wouldn’t feel right supporting it.

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Sorry but Monday night I plain forgot to post. So I just have twice as much stuff to discuss tonight is all.

Arguably the big story right now is what to do with the D Block. The D block is one of five pieces of the old television spectrum that is now freed up for new uses since we’ve gotten television broadcasts moved into a new, narrower range. However back in 2008 we tried to auction it off, but got no takers. I agree with the plan to give it to public safety groups, learning from the lessons of 9/11.

One interesting aspect of the issue is how it all relates the the FCC. If we move forward with the D Block resolution through legislation, then we take it away from the regulators. We can likely get broad bipartisan support for that even, because who wants to argue against first responders and post-9/11 recommendations? The FCC recognizes this threat, too, which is why the FCC on the 25th strained its arm patting itself on the back in some press releases.

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Here at RedState I always hesitate before I praise a proposal by a Democrat. This is a site committed to achieving conservative aims through the Republican party, and I agree with that commitment. But once in a while, on issues less politically charged, a Democrat will come up with something reasonable. This is one of those times.

I’ve looked at the issue, thought about the consequences, and I can’t find any reason to oppose the efforts by Senator Jay Rockefeller, Democrat that he is, to set aside for public safety use the so-called D block of wireless frequencies, efforts he also made last year. We learned on 9/11 that in a crisis we need different public safety groups to be able to talk to each other. It’s not enough to let them go on their own. We see similar issues every time there’s a major wildfire in the west, when expert teams congregate from throughout the region.

It’s important for emergency response teams to be able to coordinate. Some say we’d have gotten more firefighters out of the World Trade Center before collapse, had we built a better public safety communications network by 2001. So as much as I think auctions are a tremendously efficient way to allocate wireless broadcast resources in general, this is a specific case where I think we need to bypass that and simply allocate the D block to a new national safety grid.

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