Emperor

Today, Barack Obama will take unilateral action to change the status of illegal aliens. It's not so much the content of what he's doing, but the way that he's doing it that causes great concern. A while back Obama said: "I’m the President of the United States, I’m not the emperor of the United States. My job is to execute laws that are passed." It looks like he's changed his job title.

The fallout from his questionably constitution action will be bad relations with the new GOP congress that the citizens of the United States overwhelming voted in. I honestly think that is what he wants. The new "emperor" is unquestionably the most hyperpartisan president in modern history. He wants to destroy the GOP—his enemy.

Instead, he is destroying the Democratic Party. In every category, dragged down by their Leftist leadership, Democrats now have fewer senators, fewer congressman, fewer governors, and fewer state legislative majorities than at any time in modern history. You'd think that the Dems, who are now in a deep hole, would stop digging. But no ... instead of focusing on bipartisan efforts to improve the economy, reform taxes , and create a viable energy policy, they hyperventilate about "climate change" the "war on women" and "income inequality"—leftist memes all. Keep digging, guys, keep digging.

On another front, there is reason to worry that the new "emperor" may make a move on the Internet. The more I delve into the implications of Barack Obama's latest effort to impose big government intrusion on the Internet—a very bad idea packaged as "net neutrality"—the less I like it.

Gordon Crowitz provides a detailed critique:

Al Gore didn’t invent the Internet, but Bill Clinton deserves credit for the most important Internet policy: a bipartisan consensus reached during his administration in the mid-1990s to keep the Internet free of regulation. The Web would be permissionless, so that innovators could start sites and other digital offerings without waiting for regulatory approval.

In a surprise speech last week, President Obama demanded the end of the unregulated Internet, ratcheting up his campaign to subject the Internet to century-old regulations written to micromanage public utilities. Mr. Obama pressured the Federal Communications Commission to reclassify the Internet under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934, which was based on railroad regulations from the 1880s and used to oversee AT&T when it was a telephone monopoly. Regulators set prices, terms and conditions and must approve new products.

Mr. Obama says Internet service providers will “limit your access to a website” without Title II oversight. Pro-regulation lobbyists have made this argument from the beginning of the Web—and every year are proven more wrong. The Internet boomed precisely because it wasn’t regulated. In 1999 the FCC published a paper titled “The FCC and the Unregulation of the Internet.” The study contrasted the dramatic growth of the open Internet with that of the sluggish industries subject to Title II’s more than 1,000 regulations. Sen. Ted Cruz got it right last week when he tweeted that Title II would be ObamaCare for the Internet.

Amazing as it seems, under these regulations federal bureaucrats in the 1970s decided whether AT&T could move beyond standard black telephones to offer Princess phones in pink, blue and white. A Title II Internet would give regulators similar authority to approve, prioritize and set “just and reasonable” prices for broadband, the lifeblood of the Internet.

When Apple first offered Internet access on the iPhone, Steve Jobs didn’t have to ask regulators for permission. Instead of network operators prioritizing traffic based on technical optimization, as they do today, under Title II regulators would prioritize streaming video from Netflix , pornographers or church services. Title II would invalidate “nonneutral” practices such as T-Mobile offering mobile phones with free music. Surgeons operating remotely via robotic systems may no longer have access to a latency-free (no lag time) connection to the Internet.

Title II regulation would also be a hidden tax increase: Broadband consumers would pay the 16.1% tax on interstate revenues under the Universal Service Fund. State utility commissioners would also get oversight of the Internet.

None of these implications comes as any surprise to those of us who object to the injection of the B.I.G. (big intrusive government) policies in areas that have been regulation free. But Barack Obama and his BIG Democratic supporters have a different view. It's bad enough when they attempt (almost always unsuccessfully) to fix an existing problem. Obamacare is a frightening example of BIG applied to a health insurance problem.The unintended consequences (well, maybe they're intended by this president) of his latest immigration dictate, will become still another example.

But its far worse when they try to fix something that's clearly not broken. Hopefully, the coming GOP majority in Congress will stop the net neutrality idea in its tracks. It better, or the wonder of the Internet will be ruined with new taxes, new restrictions, new controls, and old thinking forced on it by our new "emperor."