They have no intention of regulating the bloggers. They will use the power of regulation to destroy any perceived enemy. The White House signaled this the other day when they declared Fox and enemy and announced the intention to treat them as an enemy.

If Mr Isely made no claims and simply sold them, I would say that he is just foolish and certainly does not deserve this treatment. However many such supplements are sold as cures for serious conditions, and every year people die because of such false claims.

Mr Isely might well be blameless, but in focussing on the legality of the product I think you should mention some comment on the damage such products do, and the reprehensible nature of Mr Otto’s advertising campaign.

Otherwise an interesting and worrying tale.

Note to George P. Burdell:

To Hell With Georgia!

What’s to stop them connecting to a friendly ISP/user in another country? They’d have to ban modems and telephone service too…

In the US most areas’ ISPs have locally granted monopolies. Under such conditions it is not at all difficult to get an “enemy of the people” banned from access for good and at that point darknets can’t help them. Encryption doesn’t help as ISPs simply drop encrypted traffic and ban/arrest its sender. That’s another point, under the current system it’s always very easy for a Government/ISP to figure out exactly who sent which packets to whom. True anonymity on the internet is currently impossible.

The most viable technological solution is a DTN-like system where encrypted packets hop from system to system on the wireless mesh attempting to find where it’s supposed to be. Sadly such technologies are basically nonexistent in the marketplace (wonder why) and it is inefficient for long-distance communication.

The only thing that government regulation and control can do is subdivide the Internet into the “government approved, out in the open” Internet and a series of underground networks, so called “darknets.”

Internet regulation in places like China only succeed, to a point, today because there is a large portion of the population (those born prior to circa 1980) that may not be computer literate, and thus do not know how to get around the regulations and filters.

They (bureaucrats, politicians) have plenty of time to think of “what to do” – every country in the world has this problem.

Regulation and the welfare state are THE biggest problem that we face – what’s the prime cause (since it’s everywhere?) &how to solve it… Hope Mises.org and real economists solve it. And CITIZENS – DON’T LET it happen – write to the FTC &whoever needed / make Tel CALLS.

So true! How good central regulation is can and could be seen in the many failed communist states…

And so as soon as something is perceived as getting “out of control”, their anxiety levels increase, they think “crap, we have to do something about this!” and set about destroying anything that might eventually lead to spontaneous progress, because they are afraid of it.