I was taken aback that a group that promotes itself as defenders of the second amendment right to own firearms would align itself with a group that espouses greater government regulation of our free markets. Gun Owners of America should not be faulted for leaving the Open Internet Coalition. They were probably confused by OIC’s misuse of the words freedom and openness.

I doubt that the mid-term elections had any direct bearing on GOA’s decision to bow out of the group. Conservative groups and commentators are taking inventory of conservatives in name only.

GOA should have imagined a world where buying a shotgun from Walmart took two weeks and a gun owner would have to disclose where she kept her shotgun and how often she cleaned it to any citizen who demanded to know.

So much for freedom.

At times I want to join blogger Damion White in laughing at the position that Color of Change, Free Press, Public Knowledge, and the Open Internet Coalition take in regards to net neutrality. The leaders of these groups must be big fans of Tom Cruise’s Minority Report. In that movie, they arrested you on the probability that you were going to commit a crime in the future. The net neutrality bunch forget that at the end of the movie, the project was shut down because of the damage precognition brought about.

Mr. White raises the same point and to great effect. Why introduce burdensome regulations to stifle private ownership and investment on the hunch that a broadband provider might do something bad in the future? It makes no sense.

The argument by the Open Internet Coalition, that Internet service providers do not provide information services, is bogus. According to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, an information service is defined as offering the capability for generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information via telecommunications.

Last time I checked my information service provider was doing all this via digital subscriber line service. They do more than just connect me to some amorphous cloud. Granted, connectivity is an important part of the service, but it is the availability to get and exchange information that provides access services their value.

In other words, so what if they provide fast connectivity. If I wanted a fast bridge to no where, I would have bought a bridge in Alaska.