From FOX News, South Dakota Senator John Thune has introduced a measure to ensure that Google and other e-mail providers aren’t being selective when they decide which political e-mails you receive, and which you don’t:
The bill from Thune, R-S.D., is a reaction to a study from North Carolina State University that found Gmail sends a much higher percentage of Republican candidates’ emails to spam than Democrats. It has the support of the entire GOP leadership team, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and 19 other Republican senators.
Called the Political BIAS Emails Act, the bill would ban email services from applying filtering algorithms to messages from federal political campaigns.
and..
“We asked people come in and defend it, and they said, well, you know, that doesn’t comport with our data or whatever. But they didn’t really offer an alternative,” the Senate minority whip said.
“What happened was our members got more and more agitated as they talked about this,” Thune continued, “because they didn’t have a good explanation for why a consumer shouldn’t have the option of making a decision about whether or not, you know, a company sends information based on a filtering algorithm to spam.”
Big brother might be subtle in how they select what information you receive, but unless they’re going to treat everyone equally, it may very well require intervention to make sure that one group isn’t favored over another.
AKA so they can get more campaign funds. Next they should ban sharing of email addresses–and maybe things won’t go to spam? It’s endless and my junk mail folder has no less than 20 per day leading up to a primary in any state.
Maybe our good freedom-loving legislators shouldn’t be restricting private businesses’ activities. Let the market work. If Google restricts emails I want, I’ll find another provider. This is government overreach, pure and simple.
That kind of libertarian thinking is so anachronistic it’s not even funny. Google is not a “private company” like a local hardware store is. It resembles a utility in some regards, has monopolistic power deriving from the network effect, lock-in, and other things, and is a pillar of the modern public square. It uses these powers to censor the right. That matters. Especially because people are ill-informed about the situation and don’t know to go find alternative provides. Or — they are locked in to Google and can’t switch easily. This business of there’s no problem because people “can just take their business elsewhere” seems rooted in pie-in-the-sky idealized libertarian thinking rather than reality.
Freedom is in important ways an achievement that must be nurtured, not some kind of state of nature that magically springs up when “government” just stays out of “private business” (though it should also do that to the extent possible).
Libertarians seem to have great goals but then shoot themselves in the foot by substituting axiom-based deductions for reality in the pursuit of those goals. It just not compelling to say “Thune’s measure is not needed in reality because it’s not needed in my theory.”
“Freedom is in important ways an achievement that must be nurtured …”
Seriously? You’re going straight to the “freedom is a privilege” argument? You may as well substitute the word “American” for “libertarian”, because the right to not be ruled is the cornerstone of our country.
Sure it’s idealistic. The idea that you can live your own life and build what you please is what has made America great — not our GDP, not our military might, not our superpower status. Hopefully you will ponder that during your upcoming Fourth of July barbeque.
Have Libertarians ever won an election for legislature? Or higher office?
In South Dakota, no. We’ve had several city council members, but no legislators yet. The closest Libertarian legislator is Marshall Burt who serves in the Wyoming House. Nationally, there are more than 300 elected Libertarians, including Jeff Hewitt, who is a county supervisor (similar in function to a county commissioner) in Riverside County, California, which has a population of almost 2.5 million. Justin Amash was our first sitting Libertarian member of Congress, though he was elected as a Republican before changing parties.
And Outlook and Yahoo send more Democratic emails to spam. You know what I do? I check my spam folder and mark things “not spam” that I want to read. But most of the time it is spam from some elected person that I contacted once about something and they put me on their list.
And what about the people who really want to read the p3nis enlargement emails…should we force Microsoft to send those to your inbox too?
I saw some strange statical behavior out of our search engine results heading into the primary .. does Thune’s provision hire South Dakotan’s to audit their technology? Cause we need some good paying jobs here.
PS: Thank GOD! We’re SAVED! 😀