Everyone Loathes the Latest Obama Power Grab – Except Google, and ….

Source: RedState | May 2, 2016 | Seton Motley

Everyone Loathes the Latest Obama Power Grab – Except Google, and That’s All That Matters

A key Barack Obama Administration legacy item is its wanton abuse of the Constitution’s separation and balance of powers. No Executive Branch in history has spent more time pretending to be the Legislative Branch – writing regulations where the requisite preceding law doesn’t exist.

As this Administration’s time runs down – its minions ramp up these unilateral power grabs. As the grabs get larger and more obnoxious – more and more people oppose them. President Obama’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has with its latest proposed heist created just this sort of nigh total opposition – their looming set-top-box mandate.

Does the FCC have the legal authority to do this? It’s pretty clear the answer is No. The law under which the FCC just about always operates is the 1996 Telecommunications Act – until very recently a law recognized by just about everyone to be a deregulatory document. Meaning its intent was to get and keep government out of the way of things like television and the Internet.

But this Administration has turned this mandate on its head – and bizarrely warps the law into bizarrely “justifying” power grab after power grab. So too it is with this set-top-box seizure.

So who exactly is opposed? Of course the usual, rational actors in these sorts of things. The people and organizations who understand the rule of law, economics and freedom generally. We at Less Government certainly are. So too are joints like Tech Freedom, the Center for Individual Freedom, the Free State Foundation and many, many more.

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And to whom is the FCC giving the favorable thumb treatment? Yet again giving the favorable thumb treatment? Endlessly, ceaselessly giving the favorable thumb treatment? Why it’s Google, of course. Shocker:

“Set-top-boxes collect data. So of course Google wanted in – in 2014. But the marketplace is already passing them by: ‘The future (and increasingly the present) of television isn’t boxes, it’s apps (and alternate hardware like Apple TV and Amazon Firestick). Netflix, Amazon Prime, Roku, Hulu and a host of other companies deliver you (via their apps) unlimited streaming TV and movie content using only an Internet connection. No cable TV subscription (or box) required.’

“Google loathes apps – because they can’t get at the data collected by them. So they want to muck up the apps (r)evolution – and prop-up the dying set-top-box. The Obama Administration is more than happy to oblige.”

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