Back in late 2014 and early 2015, Glenn Beck issued several dire warnings, predicting that the United States would destroy the internet and drive him out of business if it implemented net neutrality.
America deserved “to be destroyed,” he proclaimed, if we were such “morons” that we couldn’t see that we were ruining the internet, and with it, the last bastion of freedom in the world.
Beck’s opposition to net neutrality, of course, was rooted entirely in his own ignorance about what it actually was. In fact, it has now been in effect for over a year and Beck is still on the air, despite guaranteeing that “voices like ours will be gone” if it were to be enacted.
Given Beck’s willingness to spout off about things he clearly doesn’t understand, it was no surprise to hear him kick off his radio show today by warning that President Obama “is giving away the internet” and handing it over to Russia, China and Iran.
Beck was, predictably, supporting Sen. Ted Cruz’s dishonest crusade against plans to allow oversight of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to transition to an international body at the end of the month.
As PolitiFact noted yesterday, ICANN is simply tasked with ensuring “that the domain names we use for websites and emails are globally consistent” and while “the U.S. government is set to no longer have a contract to oversee certain internet-related duties having to do with all of us finding websites [these] tasks will continue to be handled through a California nonprofit that’s been in place since 1998” that will now be overseen by a multi-national advisory panel.
Beck clearly did not understand anything about this, which is why he spent the entire opening segment of his radio program today warning that this is all part of a plot by George Soros to “grab control of the internet.”
