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Republicans Defeat Net Neutrality Proposal
LiquidEdge writes "A Republican controlled committee has defeated a bill that would have guaranteed fair access and stopped companies like AT&T and Verizon from charging high-bandwidth sites for allowing their customers to have priority access to them."
Because the free market economy has done so much for improving the free flow of information. Does it seem redundant to make both the sender and the recipient pay for the same bandwidth? What if other countries ban this type of thing, how could you regulate speed in one area, and not in another?
Reduce cost? You're new to this, aren't you? ;)
I wonder if Joseph Stalin took time away from killing 20 million Soviets to blame all his troubles on the free press. Oh, wait a sec, he didn't have a free press.
Talk about an ungrateful nation. Don't complain about the fact that your press is doing its job by being a watchdog. It's one of the few things left that's keep the States from slipping into a dictatorship.
I think the issue here is that ISPs and telco's are going to make your access to google slower if google doesn't pay them. They're confused about who their customers are, and seem to think google should pay them for access to me, while I'm already paying them for access to google.
It's a bit like commercial TV, where advertisers are the customers and viewers are the product.
Yeah, I hate it when they said "EVIL" and "RUIN".
Oh, wait. That's not in the article, its solely your invention.
The actual article makes no comment on whether its good or bad, and gives space to both pro- and anti- viewpoints.
It's a factual article with little evidence of bias.
And you're an idiot.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon spent $230.9 million on politicians from 1998 until the present, while Amazon, eBay, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo spent only a combined $71.2 million. (Those figures include lobbying expenditures, individual contributions, political action committees and soft money.)
When will people learn that laws will only get passed in this 'K Street Project' Congress if you simply spend enough money to bribe them?
Oh well, I guess people will be happy when I finish my life's work of designing and implementing a totally neutral "Internet 3"
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
No Internet Packet Left Behind?
What the Republicans are doing here is exactly what Republicans ought to be doing, by their charter. They are blocking the Federal government from enacting regulation that would seriously impede the actions of private companies. They are saying, in effect, if AT&T or whomever wants to make available special broadband services at higher data rates or lower cost to certain selected partners, then it is not the government's job to step in and legislate that deal. The limitation sought to force these broadband providers to offer equal or better service to non-partners and affiliates, which would stifle the ability of the providers to generate their own services.
In effect, the law would have put a strict limit on what services the broadband providers could do business-wise. The idea was to keep broadband providers from forming monopolies by keeping other non-partner providers out with high costs or degraded services. However, the Republicans are doing the right thing by their constituents by allowing the maximum freedom to these broadband providers and only seeking legal recourse if there is proof of anti-competitive actions.
Pretty much.
EVERYTHING is starting to have extra charges towards it and even extra charges on those extra charges. You need to pay for absolutely every possible tiny thing. And thanks to all the modern companies bribing officials left and right, unless the mass "sheeple" actually get off their couches and do something about it there is little we can do to stop it. Eventually only the extremely rich will be getting the same level of "service" that normal people are getting now in just about everything. Welcome to the modern dark-ages: kings, nobles, and pheasants all over again.
A train station is where a train stops. A bus station is where a bus stops. On my desk I have a workstation...
From TFA:
A Republican-controlled House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Wednesday defeated a proposal that would have levied extensive regulations on broadband providers and forcibly prevented them from offering higher-speed video services to partners or affiliates.
By an 8-to-23 margin, the committee members rejected a Democratic-backed "Net neutrality" amendment to a current piece of telecommunications legislation. The amendment had attracted support from companies including Amazon.com, eBay, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, and their chief executives wrote a last-minute letter to the committee on Wednesday saying such a change to the legislation was "critical."
Any time you start throwing regulations at something, you make it harder for everyone to compete. You also make it much easier for the government to start sliding in taxes here and there.
And I'm sorry but anything that those patent-happy companies want for the internet is probably NOT a good thing to begin with. Microsoft and Amazon would patent the keyboard if they could. Just because Cnet and
"Thoughts are more powerful than any weapon, and I don't even let my people own guns." --Joseph Stalin
Here in the United States, we have the best government that money can buy!
That would be a sensible theory wouldn't it, one suspects however that it'll create a tiered system that costs the end user more.
/. would pay more to provide a better service or those that use are the type of people who'd pay for a faster connection. Would you then really want a fast site with lots of links to slower sites?
Think about this; would something like slashdot be able to work? Obstensibly
Would you then host all your images and shared web services with a "fast" provider and embed them into your sites hosted on "slow" providers. You'd then have a market for providing lots of "fast" images for embeding into your "slow" personal page. Lot's of technical implications to think about there, smells like someones "wealth creation" plan to me.
Regards, Phil
"Me fail English? That's unpossible." - Ralph
If republicans support a bill backed by the largest of corporations, they're evil.
If republicans defeat a bill backed by the largest of corporations, they're evil...
Just making sure I have it right..
If you think about it, you might come to the conclusion that this already happens in other domains.
Compare to cable television, for instance. If you subscribe to CATV, you are paying for the bandwidth (all those channels) to access the content, while at the same time, the CATV company is paying (slightly less) to carry those channels, and the network (CNN, Fox, TLC, SF, etc.) are charging advertisers for sending that content to you.
If you don't have subscription television service, the advertiser alone is bearing the cost of assaulting your eyes with their commercials.
This is analagous, I think, to a Tier {1,2} ISP charging for priority access. If you want the CATV equivalent (millions of channels, digital content, high speed), you're going to pay for it. So is the content provider on the other end of the session (after all, they need a connection to the Internet as well). If you are happy with over-the-air quality (quality, quantity and speed of delivery...not so much), you don't pay.
Essentially, the chains would look like:
CATV subscriber (-$) -> CATV provider (-$) -> Network ($$$) <- Advertiser (-$)
-or-
Local ISP customer (-$) -> Local ISP (-$) -> Backbone provider ($$$) <- Content provider (-$)
--
Just because you can do a thing, doesn't mean you should do a thing.
THe chairman of AT&T has openly lamented during hearings that he gives websites like Google a "free ride". To his mind, Google is a service that should be paid for. That Google needs to apportion a percentage of its revenue into a general fund, because AT&T doesn't sell bandwidth to Google, but carries a lot of Google traffic. He specifically used Google in his example.
That's called revenue sharing, and you know who does stuff like that? Sports team owners. They divide up the revenue from tv rights equally, despite teams representing unequal market share. You know what the big ISPs want? They want that. They want to see Microsoft and Google, and anyone else THEY deem to provide some essential function to the net to pay into a revenue sharing pool.
You know the only time a free market can allow something like that to happen? When you have a oligarchy. And that's what the big backbones providers want. They want to consolidate the market, and start putting tarriffs in at peering sites. They want to exert influence outside the carrier market, and they see QoS as the first step to getting down the slippery slope. Pretty soon, some carriers decide to de-prioritize packets to Google. Maybe Google works, maybe it's really really slow. The internet routes around failure, but it DOESN'T route around a transit carrier who decides to fuck with the traffic en route.
The Republican mindset has only one edict: Corporate self governance. Regulation, in nearly any form, is bad. THey see liability law and tort reform as key, so airlines can crash and not have to pay the passengers settlements. And they certainly want to reign in the FAA to stop "burdening" the airlines with all those expensive safety checks. Same with ISPs. You watch and see, nobody is stopping the oligarchy and now the carriers like Level 3, AT&T and others are going to collude and force a revenue sharing scheme. Next up: national firewalls. The reason Cisco and Google and others only got a slap on the wrist when censoring the Chinese nets, is that the US republicans want to see how well it works first and then start putting it in here under the guide of the Patriot Act.
Well, this bill was to support the idea that "no external entity should suffer discrimination when trying to get their packets to me".
What's going on is that packets from/to Vonage, and other voice over IP companies are being marked by Comcast, and Verison as 3rd class mail: if they are even permitted. This law was to prevent this pratice.
This law had nothing to do with providers charging more for a T3 over a T1 for a web-service company. That would be brain dead to argue against. This was about network neutrality: that *infrastructure* companies can pick-and-choose what content you can get to and what content you cant (and what content is so damn slow you won't ever use it).
Just a little FYI, "our press" isn't really interested in being a watchdog. They're interested in making money.
It just so happens that their preferred way of making that money is by providing the news.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. People just need realize what they're watching, reading, and hearing to make informed opinions.
But don't kid yourself into thinking that freedom of the press means we're always getting the complete truth.
But that's not the problem either. If I were requesting a service from Apple and knew that they would be getting my provider to prioritize that traffic over the rest it would still be sort of fair. The point is that my internet connection is going to be slower because OTHER PEOPLE are using video services provided by a company who pays the extortion fee (or more likely, is another branch of the telco giving me access): the free sites which I try to access will be slower because of that.
It's not about MY 1.5MBps on the cable that runs to my home, it's about the unknown amount of bandwidth I am sharing with an unknown number of other subscribers, on a bigger cable somewhere downstream.
Actually, you've probably got that slightly wrong. It's not so much "who their customers are" as "who their customers *were*". All Amazon, Google, Yahoo! et al need to do is agree not to cave in to the telcos demands for more money (they *are* presumably paying for their own connectivity, yes?) and sit it out - Google has pretty much stated they are going to do this anyway. After a while, once the word gets out and customers start to leave for alterative "single tier Internet" providers, the telcos will either have to quietly drop their demands and rate limits or suffer the inevitable stockholder backlash when their profits start to slide.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Except, when literally dozens (if not hundreds) of ISPs try to make side deals with Apple so the content from iTunes doesn't get way-layed en-route to you, Apple will be forced to pass the cost on to you. And, since Apple will charge more, the record companies will try to sneak in extra costs for the tracks so they get a bigger cut of the pie too.
Look at a traceroute some time
The way packets are routed on the internet, this will be a free-for-all of people trying to gouge a little extra money. The whole concept of peering -- since our packets travel over your network, and your packets travel over ours -- will all go to shit. As packets get rerouted around individual places that aren't playing nice because they haven't been paid, all of your traffic will be sent through congested chokepoints.
The sum total will be an overall reduction in service and relibility for everyone.
Your downloads of Mozilla, or Linux, or iTunes, or things from sourceforge, Microsoft updates, or whatever -- all of them will be subjected to intermediate 'road tolls' by people who feel they should get a cut for reliably delivering your data. Every single one of them will be approached little-by-little to cough up or experience packet loss/delays.
Then, your Earthlink service you're so happy to allow charge Apple extra money to deliver packets at a good bandwidth will eventually turn to crap as every site you're visiting hasn't paid someone intermediary their cut. Anyone large enough to show up on radar will be subject to huge numbers of companies trying to gouge them.
Have you really thought this through? To me, this sounds like the end of good internet access, and the beginning of separated, specialized networks. This is like travelling through some third world country where armed groups stop you and charge a fee to be allowed to continue.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Reducing costs is right. They will reduce costs, I am sure. Just don't expect any reductions in price.
If you'd RTFA, you'd see that the headline and writeup are actually taken more or less directly from the article - if there's spin there, it's not from Slashdot.
Which is precisely why the Republicans are wrong here. The first Republican President warned of corporate power, corporate influence in government, and monopolies. Anti-trust law used to be something Republicans accepted as pro-capitalism, and pro-democracy. Current Republican politicians have been bought, it would seem.
Damn.
disclaimer: this post is in no way an endorsement of any other political party, if you assumed it was, then you're an idiot, and part of the problem.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Luckily "being a watchdog" and "making money" practially go hand in hand now days. What's one kind of story that sells very well? Now, of course, they're going to cover a bunch of other bs too just because its sensational, but you know they're going to come down on anyone or any group that's been doing something "scandalous".
A sample paragraph, emphasis mine:
The rest of it is essentially laying out an emotionally evocative argument for the "free market" and against government regulation. I'm suprised they even bothered to throw in the halfassed "They're breaking teh internets!!!!~1" quotes from the Democrats that they DID manage to find space for.
I don't know which ISPs CNET intends to "partner" with, but they're sure as hell a video content provider, and they obviously have a dog in this fight. I don't think I've ever seen an ostensibly straight news story from an ostensibly objective tech news site where the corporate bias was so blatant.
Shit, they closed with a quote from Grover Fucking Norquist. That's just lame.
hang brain.
Let me get this straight:
I paid once for taxes that created the internet and supported most of the phone system infrastructure.
I paid again for phone service and use of the lines.
I paid again for all the people who can't afford access to the lines.
I paid again for dsl.
I paid again for the USF (which gets paid to Verizon so that they can pay themselves for using there own lines, which I already paid to use twice.)
Yet the oposition to this bill wants me to think that someone needs to pay for al this service they're providing.
I'm generaly against government regulation, but something isn't right here. It makes me glad we also paid all that money to brake up AT&T in the first place.
don't believe it
"regulate the market"
If there was perfect competition in the ISP market, then fine, let market forces rule! However, the 1st tier ISP market today is far more oligopolistic than free market. You can bet that if there was perfect competition, this idea would not even have the slightest chance of gaining traction. Free market capitalism only works in competitive markets, that's why price fixing is illegal in the US. Sadly, the ISP market is beginning to resemble the telephone market, highly concentrated ownership, limited competition.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
I have seen on many occasions the wonderful folks here at Slashdot completely butcher the facts and place into an article's title or summary certain statements that just don't mesh with reality. In some cases, they don't even mesh with the actual article that's been linked. This is a case where the article's authors suffer from a guilty conscience about trying to paint with a very broad political brush. Of course, no one here who would be responsible for submitting a summary of the story seemed to care that it was not "Republicans" who defeated the proposal.
Some of the more logical among us, who do not as often subscribe to political stereotypes, might have asked themselves whether or not the "House Energy and Commerce subcommittee," which is actually called the Telecommunications and Internet Subcommittee (but why do research?), would be distributed along 23-8 partisan lines. After all, that's the vote count for the proposal, and both the article title, the post title, and the article summary are quite confident in their claims that Republicans defeated the net neutrality proposal. So it was 23 Republicans versus 8 Democrats, right?
Not really, If you bothered to read on (I know, I know--I'm asking too much), you'd see that one Republican voted for the amendment. Three Democrats voted against it. But just the Republicans defeated the proposal, according to the folks here. Sure, if those three Democrats voted for it, you would have had a 20-11 vote, and then Republicans would have defeated the proposal. But that didn't happen.
And those Democrats, who apparently feel so strongly about this proposal and are so deserving of the support of the Internet community, had no problem going along for the ride and voting 27-4 in favor of the final bill without the Markey net neutrality amendment. Wow! So principled!
Markey, who is clearly an expert on such topics, declared, "We're about to break with the entire history of the Internet. Everyone should understand that." Indeed, because the entire history of the Internet has been based around the ability of broadband providers to offer high-speed video services. What?
Let's go even more abstract: the entire history of the Internet has been one that prohibited the prioritization of network traffic. What what?
It also would have been nice if the people at CNet News would have gotten an interview with Fred Upton, the chairman of the actual subcommittee that did all of this, instead of going to the full committee chairman Joe Barton. In many cases, the full committee chair doesn't have nearly the same kind of expertise on the issue as the subcommittee chairman does. Though with the way CNet News framed this whole thing, maybe they did interview Upton, but he made too good of a point, so they just trashed it and went instead with "Republicans Defeat Net Neutrality Proposal." Alright, got my mini conspiracy theory of the day out.
I think the jury's still out on that. Those who are making the case that this is (or would be) a bad thing are doing so based only on historical precedent.
Ever since the development of Strowger's automated (as opposed to operator-driven) call switching, an underlying principle of telecommunications (long since codified into law) was the ideal that the switching system should not make routing decisions based on the content of the call. (It's considered fair-play for a carrier to, for example, route a over a satellite circuit vs. an undersea cable based on whether it is a FAX/DATA call, but not based on wether it's a business vs. personal call.) This is the fundamental basis behind the concept of network neutrality.
One could argue that without some concept of network neutrality, we can't really say we even have a telecommunication system. I'm not sure there's a good example of a system akin to what the Republicans are proposing here, which is a system where public rights-of-way are privatized into a handful of companies with monopoly control. The closest I can come-up with off-hand would be what was done in the era of the railroad tycoons. Not a perfect match, since in that age the railroads did not lead into every home, nor was the economy as dependent on them as ours is today in the Internet.
My opinion only, but yes, you're wrong. ;-)
The fear is that these companies will be driven by the interests of their shareholders, rather than the interests of the society. The two points of contention seem to be:
History (both railroad and telecommunications) tells us that when a single entity is in control of the network, evolution of that network proceeds slowly, and only in a way as to increase control and profitibility. Let us not forget; between automatic switching (circa 1890's) and the 1984 breakup of AT&T, the two big telephone company innovations were DTMF dialing and the lighted dial Princess Phone(TM)
The railroads fell only when an alternate infrastructure (the Interstate highway system and, to a lesser extent, commercial aviation) was built along side the existing network infrastructure. The Internet, as we commonly know it today, took-off as a result of the break-up of the Bell System monopoly and legislated network-neutrality. Prior to the 1997 Telecommunication Reform act, the Carriers were prohibited from offering data services (like AOL or CompuServe did) specifically to prevent them from favoring one provider over another. AOL, CompuServe, Earthlink, and the like, using modems and the fact that the telephone companies were required to carry these calls even though it prectically bankrupted many of them, were the impetus behind the
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
Except there's already proof of anti-competitive practices when they blackball vonage. Apparently you missed the part where they're hurting far more private companies than they're helping. DO a quick count on how many sites there are on the internet today, then do a quick count of how many ISP's you have providing your area, do you want to reconsider whether they're helping or hurting private business. You also missed the part where they're supposed to be looking out for consituents... how many small business owners have websites? How many small businesses are affected by this?
This is yet another transfer of wealth from the little guys to the big corporations. The republicans haven't been looking out for their constituents for years, please stop trying to kid yourself.
In London, we now pay for access to the roads. If I want to drive into Central London I have to pay for 'bandwidth' in the congested area [if I use low bandwidth access, like a motorcycle, I don't pay]. This is directly analogous to the fact that I pay for my broadband access at home. [some commentators might discuss other road charges, such as road tax and petrol tax too] The idea of service providers paying the ISP's for preferential access to customers is a bit like charging shops for my car usage. It would be like having a toll booth at the entry points to the City, asking me where I'll be shopping, then charging the shops for my access [potentially allowing me to go on faster roads if I'm visiting high paying shops]. At the very periphery of the real world this might just work [a shop are so keen for your custom that they will send a limo to collect you] but if this policy were applied wholesale, it'd lead to the death of the City's commercial centre. The logistics are simpler in the case of the internet, but the principle applies. Economic dynamism is achieved by having plenty of vendors vying for business. Economies which restrict this stagnate. The internet will stagnate if middlemen [ISP's] try to choose which sites we can visit [they may profit, but the consumer will not]. As ISP's enjoy a degree of natural monopoly, it behoves governments to prevent this potential abuse.
I think you've nailed it on the head -- only I don't think you realize what it means.
Congress shall pass no laws which protect the consumer, because the Republicans are all about letting big business do whatever they want. Unless it's ensuring the companies are doing what THEY want.
In my opinion, any company who wishes to be able to charge certain sites for reliable bandwidth should immediately lose any and all common carrier status afforded to them. They are now liable for every single packet which travels over their networks; since they clearly need to identify the source of every packet for specific billing purposes.
If kiddie porn goes over their wires, they get fined -- if they can track it close enough to know Google's traffic, they are now obligated to identify and block all child porn, left-wing political content, and, um, vegan recipes so we can support the beef industry. All references to b00bies, Islam, and all things not sanctioned by the Republicans will be supressed -- the only place where Republicans DO pass laws that restrict the behaviour of businesses -- forcing their own moral standards on others.
Oh wait, the Republicans already want to make it the job of having ISPs be fully responsible for monitoring the content. So maybe they'd be perfectly happy to see all of that happen. Then, they can be sure that only content approved by the MiniTruth and MiniPac will be allowed to be transmitted. This just lets the companies start asking for it first, and when they realize the implications, it's too late for all of us.
Nope, you've convinced me -- bring on the thought police, and let's continue unbridled, so-called unregulated capitalism. I, for one, welcome our new Big Brother overlords.
The Party is Mother, and Father.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Is there any way we can have articles with more spin please? Maybe: "Republicans kill bill that saves cute ponies from slaughter"!
Thanks!
~nate
I agree... but this philosophy only works when there is competition. The reason this thing is so bad, isn't because AT&T is going to go off and do something dumb... its because AT&T is going to go off and do something dumb, and the market can't punish them by allowing their customers to switch. For 99% of broadband customers, they only have one high-speed choice.
This is something, sadly, today's Republicans forget. They believe the solution to every problem is "the free market" when they forget that includes "competition".
Next, Google puts up a page that Verizon DSL customers see if they try to access any Google resources at all which says something like "Verizon is deliberatly degrading your connection to our pages. We cannot assure reasonable response to any requests you may have. Please contact Verizon DSL customer service at XXX-XXX-XXXX if you find you cannot access Google, or alternatively switch to provider Y ".
Now imagine that Google teams up with Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and a few other biggies to do the same. (I assume MS would pay, seeing it as a chance to overtake Google) How long do you think Verizon could stand up to this? Nobody gives a damn who carries the packets, but take away their eBay access and people will scream bloody murder
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
From what I have read, they seem to think that the solution is for companies to buy bigger data pipes. That's not what this net neutrality is about! As I understand it, it's preventing what amounts to "data access surcharges" from being applied in lieu of not having your service downgraded.
Simply buying a bigger pipe isn't going to do anything as far as I can tell when some other party is artificially decreasing the performance of the service you provide because you don't pay the troll! They can do nothing to improve your potential service based on what you currently have... they can only degrade your service and allow you to pay to have the roadblocks removed.
I think a lot of people live such miserable uninteristing lives (no offense intended) that they are looking for anything which seems new to continually distract themselves from their own life. News corporations are able to make much more money targeting this HUGE audience, than actually producing useful information. That is not to say that the market for useful information does not exist, in fact it is probably presently undervalued. As useful information becomes more and more valuable, I think we will see more and more individuals/institutions becoming interested in producing it.
Yes, this is bad news for regular users, but its also bad for the big telcos. That's because if they start trying to sell traffic prioritization to people, they'll end up with egg on their face due to the very nature of the Internet, and everyone will lose. Regular customers will just lose first, but I think telcos will lose later.
The reason is that telcos think only in terms of their own networks, not in terms of the internet as a whole. For example, suppose I want to go to google video and so does Joe in Iowa. If Joe and I are both are customers AT&T, for example, and we both purchase some kind of fast streaming (steaming ?) video service from AT&T, and Google has direct uplink to AT&T, then we both will get faster video downloads. However, if Joe's traffic ever traverses another network like UUNet, then the fast steaming video service Joe paid for won't be so fast. Unless, that is, AT&T and Verizon/MCI (UUNet) have an agreement to honor each other's traffic prioritization.
Here's where it gets interesting. What if Verizon sells the same traffic prioritation to its customers? Are we to believe that Verizon will treat AT&T's 'prioritized' traffic with the same expediency as their own high-priority steaming video traffic? I think not. The interesting thing is that it doesn't matter if Joe is an AT&T customer or not - the chances of his traffic traversing non-AT&T link somewhere on the internet are pretty good, since there are steaming video providers all over the place, not just on AT&T's network.
The end result is that telcos may sell something to customers that they can't deliver, due to the nature of the Internet. What will happen in time, without 'net neutrality', is that telcos will try to re-engineer their networks to reduce the chances that their customers' traffic will ever traverse other provider's networks out on the internet.
Who will scream first will be business customers. They'll insist on SLAs when paying extra for 'prioritized' traffic, and SLAs nearly always include rebate clauses when things go wrong, and things will go wrong until the internet gets all partitioned up (and functionaly broken). My place of work hosts many hundreds of large commercial web sites, and I'll for sure enforce rebate clauses when the content we pay to have 'prioritized' doesn't move with the specified urgency. And, yes there are ways to determine how to measure whether or not traffic like steaming video is getting the performance promised in SLAs. I think what will happen is that big telcos will be at each other's throats for failure to honor each other's traffic prioritizations.
The Internet is an ocean, not a bunch of lakes. The telcos want to sell good weather and calm seas.
The only thing a 'tiered' internet will result in is poorer service to people who don't pay for 'prioritized' traffic - that you can bet on. Once that becomes apparent, of course people will start coughing up extra dough, and telcos will get a temporary boost to their bottom line. Of course, that is, until the internet starts to break down as telcos start to partition up the ocean into nice, managable lakes.
Well, it was interesting while it lasted.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Another Lincoln quote seems appropriate here as well: "These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert to fleece the people, and now that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people's money to settle the quarrel."
"Party of Lincoln" my ass.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
In short they're shooting the messenger rather than phoning up their Congressman and saying "Hey, you goddamn whore!"
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I really love the spin this story has... "EVIL Republicans RUIN the Internets!"
Well if it was a Democrat controlled committee the story would be "EVIL Democrats RUIN the Internets!"
Seriously, I'm not a democrat and used to be a republican, but the point of the matter is that it was THEIR committee so it is THEIR fault. Maybe some Democrats were involved, but I don't know... If they voted against or for the measure on the committee is irrelevant because they were not a deciding factor.
Get over this partisan supporting crap, I am literally ashamed I voted for Bush in 2000. People are following the political party blindly and fight the other people without even realizing how wrong everyone is.
Realize the other party aren't the only ones out to screw you over, but also the party you yourself belong to... Democrats and Republicans!
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
The liberal media myth is tired, old, and ridiculous. There are 5 corporations that own the media, and those corporations and their CEOs contribute waaay more money to republicans than they do to democrats. Combine this with Republicans=Neocons and Democrats=Moderates, with no real left, and NO ONE in the media is actually liberal. If you want to read or watch something that is actually liberal, you need to look at common dreams or alter news. Those are liberal news sources...which in no way means they aren't accurate. So do a bit or research, and please, stop repeating talking points that are patently false and easily debunked.
Or have you only comfort...that stealthy thing that enters the house and guest then becomes host, then master - KG
Coming from an outsider (Canadian). Whenever I watch American news it appears to me to have more of a right wing bais than anything.
As compelling as the evidence in your link of anecdotes and quips is (which is to say, not very) it sure would be great if someone actually took the time to poll the men and women of the mass-media about their views. Well The Association of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) (a group obviously with no vested interest in making their own look bad or disreputable) did just that:
The most recent ASNE study of 1997 (surveying 1,037 newspaper reporters) found 61 percent identified themselves as/leaning "liberal/Democratic" compared to only 15 percent who identified themselves as/leaning "conservative/Republican."
Is that clear enough for you? More than 60% of those surveyed self-identified as liberal/Democrat vs 15% who identified themselves as conservative/Republican.
And now, at the risk of seeming impertinent, I leave you with some wise words I picked up a long time ago in some god-forsaken corner of the internet