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Not that "tech company" is a separate category anymore what with almost every part of industry transforming itself onto a technological base. But every industry from pharma and insuranceto automobilesto appliances is pouring money into politicians with very predictable results. For decades. For centuries. Now I'm supposed to believe the government is actually reigning in capitalism under a Republican president and a heavily Republican-constrained congress? Pull the other one, it squeakes.

"Some people say that it is not for government to regulate when it comes to technology and the internet... We disagree."

Sounds like something, fans of "Net Neutrality" would say...

At least, UK may create a new "government controlled Internet" (or so the write-up says). America's Progressives wish to take over the existing network, impose "Title II" on the ISPs, ban the sites they don't like and otherwise sensor "haters".

Mickey Mouse was invented in 1928, after that there is no public domain.

Unless Congress extends the copyright law for another 20 years, the Mickey Mouse copyright is scheduled to expire in 2023. Unless the Disney CORPORATION lobbies Congress again and/or files a trademark application, Mickey Mouse will enter the public domain.

That link you posted was about Netflix saving people money by offering free caching servers, which are much cheaper than the bandwidth. Here's a free car, you just need to provide gas.. ZOMG, they're making me pay for the gas!

Oh, that's nice. They provide the servers (on *their* terms), which- as you say- are the cheap part, and want the ISP to bear all the bandwidth costs. One of the links in the Slashdot story is dead, but here's a currently working version.

Netflix- who have a position that is (at best) dominant and plenty of exclusive deals- were *choosing* to not provide access to customers whose ISPs hadn't signed up to conditions that suited *them*. Netflix say:-

Super HD requires that your Internet Provider is part of the Netflix Open Connect network. Please contact your Internet Provider to request that they join the Netflix Open Connect network so you can get Super HD.

But as the article points out

Neither my ISP nor the open Internet is preventing Netflix from allowing me to access its HD content. Netflix is choosing to block me from accessing its HD content because my ISP hasn’t agreed to host Netflix equipment for free and Netflix doesn’t want to pay another CDN to deliver HD content to my ISP.

In short, they were trying to leverage their dominant market position to make ISPs look bad and force them- and ultimately *all* that ISP's customers- to pay for the costs involved in supporting their *oh-so-generous* free caching servers under the terms of the agreement.

That is exactly where you are incorrect. Here are some references for you
Article 1
Article 2 Check the section about sexting
Article 3 Here is a good article about how most people on sex offender lists are not dangerous pedo rapists.

Literally took me 5 minutes on google to find these.

How about the ACLU opposing the CAN-SPAM act on the grounds that this incredibly weak law was actually too restrictive? And the statements by an ACLU representative that people who are spammed should just press delete?

Also see http://techliberation.com/2008/08/07/anti-spam-laws-and-the-first-amendment/ . Do a google search for "aclu" and "anti-spam".

Some of this I gather since I have a friend who is a "sex offender" for frivolous reasons, amounting to talking to a girl online that he met at a party who lied about her age. The parents checked her computer and filed charges against him. They never actually had sex, to which both him and the girl testified. But because it was "suspicious" the State came down hard on him. Talking to my friend he has had to do counceling and psychiatric evaluations and all sorts of crazy stuff. He says at the group meetings most of the people we convicted just like him when they were young for stupid situations with a girl a couple years younger, or for doing something stupid (and harmless) while drunk, taking a leak and someone taking offense, and all sorts of nonsense.

Rethinking registries

I'd hate ot be this guy

Don't take a leak

This is why we need Libertarians to control Congress and the White House so they will get rid of government (especially Federal government) supporting this kind of theft, and promote a fully Free Enterprise system where anyone can invent whatever they want and not worry about the government stealing it.

Big-L Libertarians -- as in the Libertarian Party -- want to shrink or eliminate entirely the regulatory functions of government, not the wealth-concentrating ones. Their 2008 VP candidate was a patent troll. These right-wing propertarians have little interest in patent reform: patents are just another form of property, and in their view the state exists to create and enforce the "property rights" of the owning classes. (Still, I'll take the Libertarians over the GOP any day, at least they're not trying to bring the state into my bedroom.)

Actual libertarians -- libertarian socialists, a.k.a. anarchists, from whom the right-wingers stole the appellation "libertarian" -- want to eliminate the wealth-concentrating functions of government.

(As for Ron Paul, specifically, he's a grade A loon who is disconnected from consensual reality on abortion, evolution, and the separation of church and state, and is a liar who is either a racist or is incompetent to run a 'zine. Please, folks, get over the crush on him.)

We have R and NC-17 movies that as a society we have agreed that minors should not be allowed to see. Why is it different with interactive media.

It's not different, I suggest you do a bit of research.

The ESRB rates all games, and video game stores epically outperform other stores when carding people.

It is twice as easy for a 16 year old to buy an R-rated DVD than a M rated video games. It's almost twice as easy for them to get into an R-rated movie.

Here's a great link to look at http://techliberation.com/2007/03/20/is-downloading-illegal-wanna-bet/

Looking at the quote you used, what was found illegal was the distribution. The P2P systems that were used allowed sharing and distribution. The argument that downloading in and of itself is not illegal goes like this:

I read every bit of information I could find, including case law. I studied the DMCA. Since then I have studied the NET Act. I have studied everything I could find. Guess what? I could not find a single line in any act that said that downloading anything was illegal, or even anything that could be construed to mean it. I submit that there’s a legitimate reason there is no law covering the downloads. I believe it’s because you cannot know for certain that a file is pirated until it is in your possession. File names mean nothing. Fake music files planted on Kazaa prove it. Fake video files planted on torrent sites prove it. Even non-pirated files get named with titles that could be misconstrued as being pirated. I also believe that intent is insufficient to come to the conclusion that a person is attempting to download a pirated file.

Furthermore, in reference to the Napster decision:

The district court further determined that plaintiffs’ exclusive rights under 106 were violated: “here the evidence establishes that a majority of Napster users use the service to download and upload copyrighted music. And by doing that, it constitutes-the uses constitute direct infringement of plaintiffs’ musical compositions, recordings.” The district court also noted that “it is pretty much acknowledged by Napster that this is infringement.” We agree that plaintiffs have shown that Napster users infringe at least two of the copyright holders’ exclusive rights: the rights of reproduction, 106(1); and distribution, 106(3). Napster users who upload file names to the search index for others to copy violate plaintiffs’ distribution rights. Napster users who download files containing copyrighted music violate plaintiffs’ reproduction rights.

And explaining it...

The Supreme Court essentially adopted this application of the law in its Grokster decision (545 U.S. 913, 936-39). The Court looked to the defendants’ own advertisements that users could download copyrighted files “to prove by a defendant’s own statements that his unlawful purpose disqualifies him from claiming protection.” (id. at 938). In other words, defendants’ promotion of an unlawful activity (downloading) was proof of their unlawful purpose.

A shrewd attorney could argue that this aspect of the opinion is dicta–that is, inessential to the outcome of the case–because file distribution by uploaders (which is certainly infringement) was also present.

Now, if you can quote an actual law or case where the it was explicitly stated that downloading in and of itself (there was no uploading occurring at all) is counted as infringement, then I will retract my statement and admit you are correct. Until then, it is pretty clear that there is no law nor precedent that states that downloading by itself is infringement and thus it depends on what judge/jury you end up with. There are other places where this is the situation, such as Canada. But logically consider that fact that since when is being in receipt of an unauthorised copy a copyright infringement on the part of the recipient? Since there is no law against "receiving infringing material" only distributing it logically makes sense that if you were downloading a new copy or something you legally owned it is no different than if you made that copy yourself. There is no distinguishable way to tell the difference and thus there is no way to enforce a downloading infringement. Or else don't you think

I though it would be useful to have a post or two here that mostly ignores exhibit Apple and talks about the book.

A guy by the name of Adam Thierer has put quite a bit of work into Thoughts on Tim Wu's Master Switch. What makes it interesting is the Tim Wu dropped into the discussion thread to rebut several points, and then Adam writes a response to that rebuttal.

Unfortunately, Adam makes a mistake that Russ Roberts sometimes makes on EconTalk (which I generally enjoy). The story goes like this: something big is happening, some enlightened souls speak out "we should worry about this", someone loosely affiliated with the furrowed forehead sect spouts a rabid depiction of this which the MSM circulates aggressively, the bad outcome does not materialize, and in the aftermath, some careless bloghards conclude we were wrong to worry so much in the first place.

This has been said about Y2K. It's still being said about the CDC and the imminent (or not-so-imminent) global influenza pandemic. Big flu blew over. Should the CDC stand down?

Larry Brilliant [still] wants to stop pandemics.

One possible version of the true story is that we might need to maintain a permanent vigilance on the rise of corporate gorillas. Sure AOL/Warner face-planted. Some gorillas are clumsy. And there was a time when Google was vulnerable and might not have become a counter-balancing force. These are contingent outcomes.

I have to say I think it's a bit of a dim bulb argument to argue from a catastrophe averted that there wasn't much risk in the first place, unless the belief is that the warning system was operating in complete isolation on an entirely separate plain of reality.

I loved Google from the outset, but my loyalty hung by a thread if Google had taken certain corporate directions. I've been around long enough to recall IBM as the 800 pound gorilla. I didn't much enjoy living through the Microsoft replacement.

Seth Godin said in a lecture at Google (four years ago) that Google has promoted their brand to such a degree that to backtrack on their declared values would cause them immeasurable brand injury. I tend to agree. They aren't going to poop the bed for small potatoes.

Microsoft did succeed in stifling innovation for a few years. It might have been a lot worse if they hadn't misjudged the internet, and been forced to take a tripping penalty on Netscape, and then spend two minutes in the FTC penalty box around the time of Google's nascence.

There are 17,000 federal lobbyists in Washington, DC. They exist to promote regulatory capture for vested interests. What will Apple do a year after losing Steve when their share price has contracted 40 percent? Will they reinvent, or run for cover?

I'm inclined to ascribe more of our good fortune (so far) to a small group of determined people tirelessly trying to do the right thing as described in RFC 2468.

Should we worry, or not?

Right, and because of this, it's a zero-sum game, and the rest of your analysis falls apart.

How do you figure?

You are claiming that someone selling the stock is then taking that money and using it to stimulate the economy. But, they had to buy the stock in the first place. In the long term, only their profit can really be called "stimulus".

You want to count each sale of the stock as "stimulus", but that's the fallacy of the broken window, and the same poor logic that leads the BSA to say that software piracy costs the economy hundreds of billions per year.

Ummm, then again, it may be that I got things backwards...
Which is why I couldn't find any citations to support my claim.

The change was that the FCC started counting form letters as individual complaints instead of glomming them together as one.
http://techliberation.com/2009/09/09/more-inflated-fcc-indecency-complaints/

• On July 1, 2003, the agency began tallying each computer-generated complaint sent to the FCC by any advocacy group as an individual complaint, rather than as one complaint as had been done previously. The advocacy group benefiting from that change had challenged the FCC to make the change by June 30th and boasted later that it was responsible for the FCC's redirection, citing reassurances of FCC commissioners.

I wonder if the FCC takes into account supportive e-mails and letters it receives in its complaint box.
If so, maybe an anti-PTC action alert system to flood the FCC with messages supporting 'indeceny' would be a good idea.

And remember that any attempt to circumvent locking out third-party memory is a heinous violation of the DMCA and will leave *you* the crimino-consumer liable for a big fine or jail.

Meanwhile the Feds looked at Microsoft's Monopoly and decided it all soft, fluffy and harmless.

Where's my Hope and Change?

> Biden was one of only four Senators invited to a champagne reception with Jack Valenti for his work on the DMCA
http://techliberation.com/2008/08/25/biden-on-tech-policy/

No, they don't report back to Nielson, they use their own ratings.

And if your cable box isn't reporting back your viewing habits now, it soon will.

Last year I wrote that Intellectual Ventures is a kind of reductio ad absurdum of our flawed patent system. Itâ(TM)s a firm that literally does nothing useful, its only business is the acquisition and licensing of patents. Not only does it have no intention of commercializing the technologies it âoeinvents,â its business model is based on minimizing the amount of research performed per patent obtained. In Malcolm Gladwellâ(TM)s brilliant (if inadvertent) exposé of IV, he describes how IV hires smart people to participate in brainstorming sessions and then has patent lawyers immediately file patent applications for every idea that comes up during the discussion, without bothering to actually implement any of them, or even devoting much effort to verifying that they actually work. IV then approaches firms that are doing the hard work of implementing âoetheirâ ideas and demands a cut of their profits.

Myhrvoldâ(TM)s firm illustrates in a way that no law review article could the extent to which the patent system punishes firms that actually produce useful products. Firms whose business models involve actual innovation have to show restraint in exploiting their patent portfolios. If they donâ(TM)t, thereâ(TM)s a high probability that some of their adversaries will countersue and both firms will be dragged into a legal quagmire. But if litigation is your only business, then youâ(TM)re not vulnerable to retaliatory infringement lawsuits, so you can exploit your patent portfolio much more aggressively. Many small âoepatent trollâ firms have exploited this flaw in the past, but Myhrvold is the first person to recognize that it can be exploited in a systematic, large-scale fashion.

Until recently, one of the few points Myhrvold could make in his own favor is that he hadnâ(TM)t started suing firms that declined to license his patent portfolio. I say âoeuntil recentlyâ because weâ(TM)re now learning that the lawsuits have started. IV has begun selling off chunks of its patent portfolio to people like Raymond Niro with well-deserved reputations for being âoepatent trolls.â Threatening to sell patents to a third party who will sue you is more subtle than threatening to sue you directly, but the threat is just as potent. Myhrvoldâ(TM)s âoesales pitchâ to prospective licensees just got a lot more convincing.

The fundamental question we should be asking about this business strategy is how it benefits anyone other than Myhrvold and the patent bar. Remember that the standard policy argument for patents is that they incentivize beneficial research and development. Yet IVâ(TM)s business model is based on the opposite premise: produce no innovative products, spend minimal amounts on research and development, and make a profit by compelling firms that are producing products and investing in R&D to pay up. Not only does this enrich Myhrvold at everyone elseâ(TM)s expense, but it also reduces the incentive to innovate, because anyone who produces an innovative product is forced to share his profits with Intellectual Ventures. Patents are supposed to make innovation more profitable. Myhrvold is using the patent system in a way that does just the opposite. In thinking about how to reform the patent system, a good yardstick would be to look for policy changes that would tend to put Myhrvold and his firm out of business.

Nielsen is NOT about how many people watch a show. It's about how many people watch the COMMERCIALS. DVR folks generally skip past those. People who watch broadcast TV cannot. Although they can get up and make a sandwich, or whatever.

True.

But just because they do not focus on who is using a DVR does not mean that the big cable companies have no data to sell.

The cable boxes can be polled remotely to determine what channel it is tuned to.

A comcast or a quest can and does make a tidy profit by simply adding a little software to their head end and selling the anonymous aggregate data.

Further, they can poll before a commercial, poll after a commercial and tell you how many people switched away during the commercial, which speaks to the quality of both the commercial and the show.

http://techliberation.com/2009/01/12/cable-companies-to-log-viewing-habits-is-privacy-at-risk/

I'm looking for a well written and researched piece that can tell me why TPB and other such sites are good for society, not some crap "I just want stuff for free" argument.

The simple utilitarian answer is that the pain you feel in not being compensated for your software is less than the aggregate marginal benefit to the users who didn't pay you but still use it. The simple rights-based answer is that you have no right to restrict the behavior of a 3rd party with whom you have no contract -- which is what govt-enforce intellectual property is.

For deep reading...
http://techliberation.com/2006/11/22/a-practical-argument-against-copyright-protection/

and...
http://libertariannation.org/a/f31l1.html

Broadband penetration in rural counties is likely to plateau around 50% in the foreseeable future not for lack of supply but for lack of strong demand, especially when technical challenges will push the price considerably above dialup.

I know that /. is the wrong place to say this, but many people (myself absolutely not included) can get by with minimal internet usage. Insisting that they must secretly want to be like us is flattering, perhaps, but it's delusional and paternalistic.

Followup:

http://techliberation.com/2008/03/07/debunking-rural-broadband-myths/
http://voipservices.tmcnet.com/feature/articles/20381-rural-broadband-demand-not-supply-problem.htm

So, their spec for OOXML calls for displaying things like office does.

Who's to say that their interface docs don't have a line somewhere that says it "connects with a share like xp does" in order to protect the code within the "blue bubble".

I know interfaces should be relatively free of things like this, but when they take thousands of pages to lay out a document format that still isn't specific enough, I can only wonder how much they will continue to leave out of the info they give to everyone else to protect their intellectual property.

Tech Liberation Front is also reporting that the raid was carried out with the help of a SWAT team. Cripes, what exactly did the lawyers tell the police was happening in there?

Only those with deep enough pockets should be able to threaten system stability. It's about access to resources. You wouldn't want the end user to get the notion that s/he could write and distribute software (shudder).

That news article was from two days ago. Check out what happened since then: http://www.techliberation.com/archives/041383.php

I avoid FM radio like the plague most of the time, but it's not quite as bad as you're painting it.

... all the FM radio stations in the country, except for those playing NPR (National Public Radio--like an extremely watered-down BBC), are owned by a single company: ClearChannel.>

ClearChannel is the biggest player in the radio market, and now that there are no FCC impediments, they usually own multiple channels in a given market. They arguably wield monopoly power in some markets, but they don't even control half the market.

Personally I think the FCC screwed the pooch when it decided to do away with limitations on media ownership. That ship has long since sailed, though. Clear Channel wouldn't have achieved its dominance under the old FCC rules. At the same time I wouldn't be surprised if they started losing marketshare once competitors start to figure out how to provide listeners something better (which really shouldn't be difficult, given the crap Clear Channel churns out). Dominance doesn't equal monopoly.

I never followed HDTV, but I too remember that it was old news in the mid-90s. I figured it was just another technology that was never going to get ut the door.

The only thing I would add your post would be the Great Spectrum Giveaway, where the broadcasters wanted to get now valuable hdtv frequencies, but not pay for a license like they had to with analog tv frequencies. Instead they got hdtv frequencies for free with the understanding that once the marketshare of hdtv reached some threshold, they would turn in their now worthless analog tv frequencies. And of course once hdtv did reach that threshold, analog tv broadcast would then become illegal, thus forcing everone in the country to go out and buy a new television whether they wanted to or not.

Consumerism enforced by law. Brilliant!

I like movies. I like widescreen, because it better perserves the content of movies. But other than aspect ratio, I've never seen any reason to upgrade to hdtv. It's just not that impressive. And given the fact that most people have bought hdtvs watch standard tv on them, and thing they're watching hdtv, I think it's all hype.

Ads are a terrible way to learn about Net Neutrality.

I keep tabs on the debate at The Technology Liberation Front, which is libertarian, IP Democracy, which provides Net Neutrality news and a wider slice of commentary, and Common Cause, which is inherently suspicious of corporate power.

The TLF and Common Cause each come at Net Neutrality from their own philosophical start points, and IP Democracy is about exploring the debate. Net Neutrality is not the central issue for any of these three sites, so they are much more useful sources of factual information and intellectually honest debate than any of the corporate-sponsored coalition sites on either side of the debate.

When Google or Comcast talks about Net Neutrality, I simply can't believe that they are not acting out of financial self-interest, so I find it impossible to give credence to anything they say. They're locked in a struggle for control of the Internet. I want fast Internet access, lots of provider choices, and true competitive pricing. So I'm not going to do my research by reading what the goliaths in this struggle are telling me.

Ads are a terrible way to learn about Net Neutrality.

I keep tabs on the debate at The Technology Liberation Front, which is libertarian, IP Democracy, which provides Net Neutrality news and a wider slice of commentary, and Common Cause, which is inherently suspicious of corporate power.

The TLF and Common Cause each come at Net Neutrality from their own philosophical start points, and IP Democracy is about exploring the debate. Net Neutrality is not the central issue for any of these three sites, so they are much more useful sources of factual information and intellectually honest debate than any of the corporate-sponsored coalition sites on either side of the debate.

When Google or Comcast talks about Net Neutrality, I simply can't believe that they are not acting out of financial self-interest, so I find it impossible to give credence to anything they say. They're locked in a struggle for control of the Internet. I want fast Internet access, lots of provider choices, and true competitive pricing. So I'm not going to do my research by reading what the goliaths in this struggle are telling me.

If I remember correctly, the bnetd guys asked Blizzard about checking legitimacy, and were told no way. They then asked about including the CD-Key checks, and were again told no way. I think the arguments were:

1. Wouldn't check across all the bnetd servers people could possibly be running.
2. Since people had the source, they could just comment out the check code, and go on with life.

#2 is the flimsiest one, I think. The people that would take the time to download, edit, and recompile the source are the ones that are running keygens and cd-cracks anyway.

Ummm, no. Tim Lee is a big proponent of school choice. About ID he says (and I quote) "for the record, I think the theory of intelligent design is nonsense". Funnily enough, I have exactly the same reaction as you: after reading Stoller's attempt at a hatchet job of a technology commentator I have appreciated for quite some time, I thought "I knew I was on the correct side on this issue!"

If you don't like blogs, don't read 'em.

I understand why you wouldn't want to read the "Why I like the color pink" blog, or the "I just took a dump" blog.

But you're bashing on an entire medium. Hell, even television has a lot of good content hidden among the chaff. When you discount blogging out of hand, you're lumping sites like Daring Fireball, The Technology Liberation Front and IP Democracy in with the navel-gazers.

Sure, there are a lot of useless blogs. There are also a lot of useless magazines and books. Personally I prefer a world where there are more mediums of expression, not fewer. Slashdot is an excellent example of this. It could easily be considered a group blog, filled with useless opinions, but it is obviously more than that. Get all your information and all of your opininions from Big Media if you want. I like having more options.

It's troubling when someone with no apparent business background and understanding of technology to the depth necessary to grasp what DRM has done and will do gets a bully pulpit this high and this visible. I don't know one of the referenced articles is accurate in describing how Ms. Tate love for DRM really is a result of:

Apparently, her love of country music has brought her to this studied position

but, "love of country music" seems anemic justification and mostly a non sequitur in justifying something of magnitude DRM.

To be fair, the quote is based on an article about this on the Technology Liberation Front web site:

Last night a FCC commissioner came out in favor of...DRM? Yes, at a reception sponsored by the DC Bar Association in her honor, Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate, the newest addition to the FCC, spoke eloquently on a number of issues but perhaps most remarkable was her advocacy for strong copyright protections. Hailing from The Music City, Nashville, this former Tennessee Regulatory Commissioner proclaimed her love for country music and the artists that wish to use DRM to protect their content.

Of course, this is just her personal opinion. However her position on the FCC lends it credibility it wouldn't ordinarily have. I don't know her tech credentials, but I doubt she's on top of the whole subject and is just espousing a knee-jerk reaction based on the usual political babble. She's probably a frustrated country artist at heart. Anyway, she's so obsucre as government people go, I doubt her promotion of DRM is going to create a groundswell of public support anytime soon.

BoingBoing linked to the sorrowful tale of a guy who's a big pro-lockdown guy on the web who got screwed when his portless DVR ate all the carefully recorded Spanish lessons he had saved for his children. He would've been within his rights to do an external backup, but those rights got trampeled by the fear of casual piracy. Whoops, too bad! I mean.... !no es bueno senor!

Don't get me wrong--I'm not defending RIM; I'm sure there's some shenanigans going on, such as bribery, but that doesn't mean NTP's patents are anything less than bogus. Not a spec of novelty to them. Wireless email? That's just sticking together two popular technologies, and I'm sure the idea is as old as email itself. But now it can be implemented. This site pretty well reflects my opinion on the subject. Granted, patenting a gene is even less novel (since the sequence itself has generations-worth of "prior art"), but only by a hair. I do think that novel genetic sequences (i.e., not pre-existing in nature) ought to have some IP protection, but it should be copyright, not patent. A process for expressing the gene should be patentable, but not the sequence itself.

They are crushing the small guy, pure and simple.

If the small guy doesn't have a non-obvious invention, I don't have much sympathy. Seems like both sides are bad guys.

Okay, maybe you read the summary before you posted but it sure doesn't look like you RTFA'd:
"by the end of the year some 16 million U.S. households will have HDTV sets"[1] (emphasis added). Last time I checked, US still meant the United States. Like others have mentioned before, /. is US-centric, so the summaries will reflect this.

Check out Tim Lee's lengthy response. He argues (and I suspect most Slashdotters will agree) that, "The Internet is a massive, chaotic, fiercely competitive ecosystem. No one carrier owns more than a tiny fraction of its capacity. No one company controls more than a tiny fraction of its content. In short, no one company is ever going to control the Internet." The complete rebuttal is available at http://www.techliberation.com/archives/027010.php

Cities, due to their density have much lower tranportation costs. It is much cheaper, per person, to get water and gas services to a single apartment building than 100 rural farms, or even 100 suburban homes. Virtually anything done in a city is cheaper per person than it is in rural areas.

Urban taxes pay for the network of roads and highways that make suburbs possible. Urban taxes pay the farm subsidizes. Urban taxes pay for public transit outside of cities. Urban taxes pay for rural schools and hospitals.

http://www.ewg.org/reports/gastaxlosers/analysis.p hp
http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/Infrastructure/ov erview.htm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/07/05/AR2005070500594.html
http://www.techliberation.com/archives/015244.php
http://www.blueoregon.com/2005/03/joined_at_the_h. html

Why should anyone regulate VoIP?

Because you need some regulation in order to keep others' hands off of VoIP so that it does not get strangled.

Primarily that means the California PUC, which wants to license and charge VoIP providers as telephone operators.

It is also important that Democrat FCC Commissioner Michael Copps not become Chairman, because he is the biggest proponent for wire-tapping VoIP, censoring the media, and over-regulating broadband.