Up until now, Google has been able to avoid being hoisted by its own Net Neutrality due to the fact that the firm has not been directly involved as an ISP, but rather has been a partner of ISPs such as T-Mobile. We can point out all we want how they have more money and more market power than any ISP, but until they started providing the services that ISPs provide, we could only get so far.

But now, the day comes that Google gets further into the ISP business. Google is launching its own public DNS server. Ignore the misleading Register header, but read the content. The Google Public DNS is a direct launch of a service that ISPs provide, and that puts Google even further into the role of a gatekeeper. They can already make a site disappear from the Internet from the perspective of their searchers, with no transparency in the process whatsoever. Now they can make a site entirely inaccessible to its users because without a DNS lookup, your webpage, your email, your everything will create error messages instead of connectivity.

So here’s the question: Will Google obey its own Google/Obama/Genachowski Net Neutrality principles, or will Google Public DNS be as non-neutral and non-transparent as every single other service Google provides? Will Google deny DNS forwarding for any domain they deem a ’spammer’ and deny ‘Pagerank’ to?

The world awaits an answer.

This may come as a shock, but I don’t use the Google search service. So it took an anonymous tipster to set me off on a brewing bit of fraud going in in the Google search service: They are ham-handedly altering the suggested search terms in order to promote a coverup of “Climategate.”

Google’s suggested terms feature has been the source of much humor as people have gamed it to produce odd results. Type Why, for example, and you get results like these:

But Google wants us to believe nobody is searching for Climategate despite it being such a big story, but I have evidence that it’s merely a coverup for political purposes.

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I’ve said before that Google was treading dangerously near to hypocrisy in the contrast between its promoted public policy and its own internal policy, but now the large, wealthy firm has gone well over the line.

Google is a widely outspoken proponent of the Obama administration’s Net Neutrality plan. At the core of this plan are two “principles” outlined by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. First is the principle of neutrality that “would prevent Internet access providers from discriminating against particular Internet content or applications, while allowing for reasonable network management,” as Genachowski has said. The second is the principle of transparency that “would ensure that Internet access providers are transparent about the network management practices they implement.”

Conveniently, the same two principles Google wants private ISPs to meet, Google itself flagrantly ignores, even though Google’s market power gives their actions more effect than the actions of any ISP. Take the case of Studio Briefing to see Google ignoring both principles of the Net Neutrality push.

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In another triumph of openness for the Hopenchange™ administration, the secret negotations of the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting and Trade Agreement (ACTA) continue. And according to Wired, they’re not going well for the President. A note from the EU to the US was leaked and published to a European website, and it exposes two facts. First, Hollywood isn’t content to have gotten two expansions of copyright in the 1976 Copyright Act, which extended copyright about thirty years, and the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which extended it about another twenty years on top of that. It wants to gain, through treaty, even more tilting of the scales of copyright, and according to the EU, the Obama adminstration is negotiating purely with Hollywood’s interests in mind.

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I’ve been held underwater by work lately and am just now catching up with this thing called “posting,” so forgive me if this post is light on links and details, but I want to give you all a heads up on what’s coming down the pipe in the Obama/Google administration. The big project after Net Neutrality is supposed to be a National Broadband Plan.

In theory, the idea of a National Broadband Plan is to give faster Internet access to more people. You see, people frequently think America “lags behind” the rest of the world because certain statistics show America to have worse Internet access than other countries. The problem with those statistics is that they don’t account for population density. A country like Japan, South Korea, or the Netherlands has a much denser, more urbanized population, and so it’s easier to run the wires you need to give them all Internet access.

But all a progressive needs is a good crisis, and they’re calling this a crisis. However, one of the proposed fixes is to give third party ISPs access to wires already laid by ISPs to provide service. Do we see how increased access to wires that already exist with service provided, doesn’t give access to people who don’t have access already?

The real motive of Julius Genachowski, Barack Obama, Google, and the rest of the adminstration’s Internet crusaders is to help freeloaders, which is why the Songwriters Guild of America is against Net Neutrality. Anyone who creates things of value on the Internet has something to lose from the Obama plans. Everyone can see this. The terrible problems with the Genachowski/Obama/Google plans are not theoretical.

Chuck DeVore has hit a major milestone in his campaign fundraising. In the year since he announced his bid for Senate, he has raised (dramatic music) one million dollars. Do we think he’s a viable candidate yet?

Meanwhile Carly Fiorina, who’s only recently announced her candidacy, announced early that she would not fund her campaign out of her own deep pockets. However she’s already gone back on that and is loaning her campaign some money. She has to do this because her NRSC-backed announcement, rushed out the door as a reaction to the Jim DeMint endorsement of DeVore, has clearly gone far below her budgetary expectations. Do we finally see that she’s not the candidate we’ve been promised?

California statewide races are tough for Republicans. We need somebody who can fight hard, raise money, and keep the Democrats honest. Carly Fiorina can’t do it. Chuck DeVore is already proving that he can. Chuck DeVore is not just the better candidate on the issues. He’s also the better candidate on practical and technical grounds.

Experience counts, and experience running a corporation’s share price into the ground isn’t what we need for the Republican party in a state where we already have problems. Experience winning elections is what we need, and Chuck DeVore is the candidate in this race who has the best chance to win this one. And I have one million reasons to back that up.

The last time we checked in on Nate Silver, the top-flight baseball analyst turned bottom-feeding partisan shill (appropriate for a guy who started out in politics as a Daily Kos diarist) was launching a crusade against Strategic Vision so lacking in integrity or even basic mathematical sense that it left many of us wondering whose payroll he’s on.

The sad part is, though, that his analysis is so bad, it would honestly surprise me if anyone were actually paying for this. Take this attempted broadside from Sunday. It’s full of so much bad math and so little critical thinking that I lack the time tonight to address it all. Here are the highlights, though.

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The Democrat coalition may be fracturing more visibly along abortion lines in the Obamacare debate, but that’s not the only popcorn-friendly battle going on right now. ‘Minority’ groups are going after Net Neutrality now, and nobody is sparing the ‘race card.’

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Listen to Carly Fiorina yourself, if you don’t believe my repeated posts describing how wrong a candidate she is for this party at this moment of conservative mobilization. Is this the time to nominate a candidate who wants to sign a globowarmo treaty with China? Who wants to withhold water from California farmers? Who can say, without gagging, the words “Regulation can play a very important role in bringing about change?” Who blames under regulation for the financial crisis?

Don’t take me at my word. Listen to her. Does she sound like someone who will take this country somewhere different from where Barbara Boxer wants to take us?

They haven’t passed the Net Neutrality regulations, phase one of the push for Single Payer Internet, but the FCC is already plotting phase two: a National Broadband Plan. Call it what you will: a socialist Five Year Plan, fascist-inspired industrial policy, what have you. It’s a frightening step by this administration.

It’s so frightening, in fact, that Senate Democrats think the FCC needs to be more plain spoken about their plans, currently being hidden in overly-fancy language. It’s not impossible to speak about Internet policy in plain language. It’s just not possible to plan fascist takeovers of industries in plain language without scaring voters, is all. Which is why they don’t do it.

Meanwhile, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel refutes Net Neutrality proponents who claim that the practices NN is meant to oppose, are not theoretical:

Net-neutrality advocates raise the specter of providers censoring websites by slowing or cutting off access to them in the absence of new rules. Yet they cite only three isolated instances of this in the past five years. Each was quickly resolved.

Once again, we get more evidence that Net Neutrality is really just the crisis that progressives are using to grow government. We have to stop them.

You may remember when Carly Fiorina insinuated that anyone who opposes extensive government regulation of the Internet, is covering for child rapists. I was confident that DeVore would get back to me with a record contradicting that slimy attack, but also offered the Fiorina people an opportunity to get an airing of their candidate’s record on pro-life issues.

I received nothing from Fiorina. However DeVore’s campaign sent me DeVore’s 2006 fight for “Jessica’s Law”, a large expansion of legal protections of society against the sexual predators and killers of children. DeVore stood up against Democrats looking to be lenient, or to use a phrase Democrats use against us all the time, “putting dollars ahead of childrens’ lives.”

DeVore also fought to expand California’s predation laws, making it a crime for an adult to lure a 13 or 14 year old youth away from home, and expanding forfeiture of the tools (presumably computers and other telecommunications devices) used by criminals to accomplish that. This provides protection when a minor is lured away but not (yet) attacked.

Carly Fiorina truly is panicked. The NRSC has been spooked by the Scozzafava/Hoffman/Owens race, and is more or less going to leave Fiorina out to dry. And while she got the support of conservative favorite Tom Coburn to match Chuck DeVore’s Jim DeMint, the rest of her supporters paint a different picture. Lindsey Graham, John McCain, Olympia Snowe, Lisa Murkowski: to many of us, these are what is wrong with the Republican Senate caucus.

So now she’s launched prematurely, shot the wad of endorsements she has in the middle of a week, rushed to pander to the right by appearing in the OC Register, but even that’s not enough. Now she’s making outrageous attacks on Chuck DeVore and the rest of us who favor an Internet free of burdensome government regulation.

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The last time a Democrat was in the White House we got the Communications Decency Act (since thrown out by the Supreme Court) and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (still a weight on the neck of American innovators). This time we’re not only seeing “Net Neutrality” being used as cover for sweeping proposed regulation of the Internet like never before seen in this country, but we’re also due to expand copyright further.

The best thing about the DMCA is that its long arm can’t extend offshore, so Americans have been able to bypass it when needed by working with non-Americans who retain their rights to such technically-critical activities as reverse engineering.

But now the Obama administration is looking to promote an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a trojan horse for a Global DMCA. Or worse actually, because the DMCA only requires ISPs to act on specific copyrightholder requests to shut down accused infringers. Says Cory Doctorow, the ACTA would require ISPs to be active nannies policing copyright, and would outright kill Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, and probably Twitter. Further, your complete access to the Internet could be shut down, without warning, just because you are accused of being a copyright infringer.

Elections have consequences. How’s teaching the Republicans a lesson working out, libertarians?

We won the big statewide races yesterday, and now it’s back to work trying to win some more. The California Senate primary may not be until June, but when we’re faced with an entrenched incumbent like Barbara Boxer, we need all the lead time we can get.

Up until now, the DC types have all been supporting Carly Fiorina in our primary, even though she had not yet declared her candidacy, and had yet shown either an inability or an unwillingness to campaign to the Republican voters of this state. Thus, that early support had failed to move any dials as Assemblyman Chuck DeVore has raised money well, gained loyal grass roots support, and ran ahead of Fiorina against Boxer in polls. But now, with the fallout of Dede Scozzafava’s blowup spreading nationwide, events are moving more quickly.

The NRSC is conceding its positions in primaries, pulling a crutch out from under Fiorina’s already-limping campaign. Conservative DC types are taking advantage of the new neutrality, too, starting with Senator Jim DeMint endorsing DeVore, while Fiorina has the backing of South Carolina’s other Senator, Lindsey Graham.

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What do you get when you combine an ISP active in Internet filtering with a left-wing group that is essentially the online ACLU? You get the broad, bipartisan opposition to the FCC’s plans for Internet regulation that are being sold as Net Neutrality.

It was remarkable enough when Governors left and right all wrote to the FCC against Net Neutrality. But now when Comcast is on the same side of a dispute as the Electronic Froniter Foundation, that’s a sign that nobody who is aware of the technical issues wants any part of what Barack Obama and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski are planning.

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It’s the little things that illustrate the big problems with the common evidence that the Earth is heating up rapidly. Take this picture I took yesterday afternoon, as I hiked on out to Wal-Mart to check on after-Halloween cheap candy*:

I always get a kick out of seeing these little guys running around. You see, when I first set foot in Moreno Valley almost a quarter century ago**, I didn’t see this kind of wildlife running around. We’re at the edge of the desert, and as the town was first being developed, the only things I saw were the big old tumbleweeds rolling down the street on every windy day. Brown, dry, and prickly, they weren’t very friendly to little guys like in that picture above.

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…plotting to pass Net Neutrality.

I’ve written in this space for a while about who the real Astroturfers are in the Net Neutrality fight. Google – and its puppets like Free Press – are promoting this idea that it’s a struggle between big telecommunications firms, and the little guys. Except the little guys are actually bigger Internet firms. The corporations pressing for Net Neutrality are Fortune 500 and even Dow Jones Industrial Average firms, with billions in cash ready to be spent on Net Neutrality, trying to defeat Proposition 8, or even promoting Barack Obama.

That last one makes the FCC’s rush to regulate look bad, given all the placements of Google people within the Obama administration as well as the nearly one million dollars that Google employees gave to the Obama-Biden campaign. How do we know that the secretive Obama White House isn’t directing the FCC to pay off Google?

After all, we know he’s giving donors special treatment. In fact, it has come out that FCC Chairman Genachowski himself was a major fundraiser for Obama, pulling in over a half million for the campaign. Why shouldn’t we believe that this is all a big circle of back scratching in the Obama adminstration, when he refuses to release the kinds of information we need to determine otherwise?

The President has played political games with information all along. He dangles his birth certificate on a string in order to distract the right. He’s keeping as little of the Obamacare agenda in writing as possible, because he knows if we read it and expose his plans, we can win the fight, so we end up with ridiculous spectacles like a Senate committee voting on a bill that hasn’t been written yet. And now he’s playing footsie with donors in secret.

We must encourage and join Senator McCain and Representative Blackburn in their fresh legislative efforts to stop the Google/Obama Net Neutrality scheme. We cannot allow this kind of quid pro quo to go unchallenged.

As most of us watch the special election in New York, we still have a Senate primary in California to deal with. It’s the same old story, though. There are two kinds of Republicans.

One kind celebrates big government and progressive control over America. Carly Fiorina, like Dede Scozzafava, is one of those:

While some of us are fighting hard against the Obama push to nationalize the Internet, Fiorina goes behind our backs and joins them, just as Scozzafava will work with ACORN and Planned Parenthood. Meanwhile, Chuck DeVore knows the score and endorses Doug Hoffman.

There are two kinds of Republicans. Some are on our side. Some are more interested in the left. I know which I prefer to represent our party.

As we have covered before in this space, the far left does anything possible to avoid having a straight-up, honest debate over ideas. Much like the old Communists and Fascists on the streets of Weimar-era Berlin, they’d rather use muscle than ideas to get a victory.

As we’re all aware, one of the current targets is Glenn Beck. In particular, Free Press wants to make him out as a paranoid McCarthyite.

Supposedly he’s seeing socialists, Marxists, and communists everywhere. Even though Senator McCarthy was right, and Communists had infiltrated our government all the way up to Alger Hiss, we’re supposed to think badly of Red hunting. But let’s look at the people themselves at Free Press, leading special interest promoter of the Fairness Doctrine, ownership diversity rules, and of course Net Neturality. Are they as socialist as Beck thinks?

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The time is coming that the left is going to begin its drive for Single Payer Internet, and so the time has come for us to fight back. Finland is gradually nationalizing the Internet and declaring use of other people’s Internet hardware a “right,” and the left is cheering. Obama’s “Internet Czar” does not hide the left’s hopes for an end to freedom and markets for Internet service.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, President Barack Obama, and the rest of the radical left want to use the Net Neutrality movement as the crisis that gives cover to sweeping big government action, allowing the FCC to pick winners and losers and dictate to private individuals and firms how their private property must be run, putting government bureaucrats in charge of the Internet.

The dangers of the administration’s Net Neutrality plans are not theoretical:

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