beck completely wrong on net neutrality

Following Kerpen’s Lead Again, Beck Claims That Net Neutrality Is An Attack On Freedom Of Speech

In September, ThinkProgress dissected how Glenn Beck’s successful character assassination campaign against former White House environmental adviser Van Jones was fueled by Americans for Prosperity’s Phil Kerpen, who had taken credit for notifying Beck of some of Jones’ past comments. On his Fox News show yesterday, Beck followed Kerpen’s lead once again, this time in an assault on net neutrality.

In a segment featuring Kerpen last night, Beck warned his audience that the Obama administration “just might be trying to take over the media.” “This is a big week, isn’t it, for freedom of speech?” Beck asked Kerpen, who said that it was because “the FCC on Thursday is going to decide what the future of the Internet looks like”:

KERPEN: It is a very big week because the FCC on Thursday is going to decide what the future of the Internet looks like, if it looks much like the past 10 years where you have private competition and pretty much people can do what they want on the Internet or whether we have a much, much heavier government hand. And they’re going to take the first step on that Thursday.

BECK: OK. I want to start just real quick – Net neutrality, because it happens on Thursday. This is that everybody should have free Internet, right?

KERPEN: Well, essentially. You know, they dress it up the way they dress up a lot of their things. They turn it upside-down by saying that evil corporations, phone and cable corporations are going to block what we can do block or we can say.

Beck then used net neutrality as a jumping off point to outline how he believed the Obama administration was trying to shut down freedom of speech. “You have a freedom of speech or the government. You can’t really have both,” said Beck.
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When he introduced Kerpen, Beck described him as “the chairman of Internet Freedom Coalition,” an alliance of conservative groups that opposes all taxes and regulations related to the internet. Kerpen’s group released a Beck-like conspiracy chart today that attempts to expose the so-called “Obama Information Control Hierarchy.” Hours before Kerpen appeared on Beck’s show, he pushed the idea that net neutrality is a threat to freedom of speech in his daily podcast, warning that regulation would lead to “a government-owned and controlled network” and eventual “content restriction” that would “decide that certain speech is out of bounds.”

Beck also appears to have no idea what net neutrality actually means. Science Progress aptly explained it last year:

At the most basic level, net neutrality is the principle that Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet; all content on the Internet is equally accessible, and once a person pays for access to the Internet, they alone get to choose how they use it. This means that providers should not be allowed to block access to certain sites or applications, or charge different customers different amounts for services.

Kerpen, from whom Beck apparently cribbed his understanding of the concept, claims that there is no reason to be concerned about internet service providers blocking access or charging customers differenty. “Proponents of net neutrality rely on the scare tactic that big bad cable and phone companies will block access to Web sites and cause other mischief unless the benevolent federal government rides to the rescue, and soon,” wrote Kerpen on FoxNews.com earlier this month. “But they’ve been ringing this alarm for the better part of a decade and none of the horrors they warn us about have happened.” In fact, in 2007 it was revealed that Comcast had disrupted peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic on its network, leading to an FCC investigation. There was also an incident where “Verizon Wireless denied Naral Pro-Choice America, an abortion rights group, access when the group asked to the carrier to allow Verizon customers to sign up for text-messaging alerts.”

(Think Progress)