Green Party Wants To Mandate a Regulated, Politically Neutral Internet

Yesterday, I asked how one could assert that the Green Party is nutsy. Allow me to answer my own question with a piece of the Green Party’s tentative policy platform for 2008:

All viable candidates at the state and federal levels should have free and equal access to a regulated and neutral internet, to radio and television time, and to print press coverage.

You read that right: the Green Party wants to regulate the Internet so that it is politically neutral and provides free and equal access to all “viable” candidates, whatever “viable” may mean.

I find it hard to decide where to even begin. I mean, okay, how about this one: the internet is a forum for freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Someone wrote about those freedoms somewhere once:

Amendment I. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Oh, right, the Constitution! Hey, I know that the Constitution is getting less respect these days and it seems to be more of a suggestion lately, but gee, I thought the Green Party might still subscribe to the radical far-left wacko position that the U.S. Constitution is the law of the land and junk.

Then there’s the question of exactly how you would go about regulating the Internet to make it politically neutral. What? I mean really, what would you do? Make it the law that every time Yellow Swordfish posts a critique of George W. Bush, it must also say something nasty about Al Gore? Can John McCain make Progressive Patriots post pro-McCain campaign materials on its website? That’s equal access, you know. Or do you not let TalkLeft post another expose of George W. Bush’s shenanigans until some half-cocked Bush supporters write a piece of their own to balance it out? How do you have equal access for all the candidates during a week when a la Aaron Burr, one candidate shoots another in a duel?

The committee of people within the Green Party that wrote this silly, nutsy, bureaucratic piece of the 2008 Platform doesn’t seem to understand how the Internet actually works. See, every political candidate pretty much does have access to the Internet, or at least every candidate who can afford a $20 domain registration fee at $10 a month for a website. Someone tell the Greens how it all works: see, you write something, then others link to it if they like it, and bingo, you’ve got an audience. That’s, like, freedom in a self-organizing collective or some kind of anarchist decentralized Power to the People sorta thing. Why on Earth the Green Party would want to sweep aside the Constitution and use the Government to mandate some kind of bureaucratic bean-counted neutrality is beyond me.