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Net Neutrality: Lobbyist McCurry Raises Ire
BBCWatcher writes "Mike McCurry, former Clinton Administration Press Secretary turned telecommunications industry lobbyist, reacts to his many new critics in the battle over Net Neutrality: "There are millions and millions of good Democrats who get paid by corporations," he said, "and I think every time we bash corporations, we just turn off people who are in the middle of the political spectrum." Among others, top political blogger Markos Moulitsas Zúniga responded swiftly to McCurry's latest assertions: "What a dishonest piece of sh[..] McCurry has become. This is an anti-corporatist jihad, is it? Is that why we are aligned with Microsoft, Google, and eBay? And when did the Christian Coalition and the Gun Owners of America join the 'left'? What a pathetic attempt to marginalize those of us working for net neutrality....McCurry is now a sad, sad, pathetic man.""
Plenty of democrats are paid by corporations. But the unions continue to contribute a heck of a lot, as well as other groups who aren't great fans of corporate power. There's no reason for democrats to shy away from criticising corporations just because corporations fund some Dems, and some middle-of-the-roaders aren't opposed to corporation-bashing. OTOH, the reflexive bash-the-corporation responses that some Dems exhibit (and Republicans too - espc over oil prices, where "price gouging" - aka charging what the market will bear - gets screamed each time the gas price rises due to exogenous factors) do not make them seem very credible. It's hard to trust people who have routine scapegoats; it suggests they don't think enough.
Exercise your right not to vote. thinkoutside.org
"There are millions and millions of good Democrats who get paid by corporations,"
Yup, by his definition they are "good".. By the rest of us they are paid off hooligans trading personal wealth and power for our freedoms and rights, and our freedoms and rights are a no cost giveaway for these guys.
Good is a relative term and it has been proven for thousands of years that those in power have a very different view of good and evil than the rest of the population.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure that quotes like "What a dishonest piece of sh[..] McCurry has become." do nothing but make you look like your foaming at the mouth. If you read the rest of that bloggers post (another slashdot member posted it above) you'll really see my point. Argument is good, but uncontrolled and uncensored anger will never be taken seriously in politics.
Of course I agree with this blogger, but I don't think he is doing our cause any good by spouting off like this. On Slashdot we always poke fun at corporate bigwigs with anger issues(look at Steve Balmer), why should bloggers be any different. That said, I of course agree with net neutrality like anybody in their right mind would... unless of course they work for said corporations.
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
C'mon, folks: the words "press secretary" are simply code for "weasel." Anyone who thinks otherwie -- and mind you, this is totally regardless of party affiliation -- is being silly. The one and only press secretary for whom I hold any respect is Reagen's, one Jim Brady. During the assassination attempt, he was shot in the head, with substantial brain damange. The work he's done to control the unfettered access to handguns is nothing short of remarkable; he and his wife are to be commended. All other press secreteries are simply PR figureheads, who never -- not ever -- present their own views, if, indeed, they even have any. (A fine and juicy movie that deals with similar people is Thank You for Smoking. See it.)
One of the big mistakes of the Net Neutrality discussion is that is has boiled down to a Legislation v No Legislation battle.
If you take away the legislation part of this discussion I'm not sure that the lefties and free market guys wouldn't swap positions on Net Neutrality.
The push for legislation has steered this discussion more than the issue itself.
As I see it, there is already many ways to purchase better access to your site. You can set up multiple servers throughout the network. You can buy or hire your own pipes, or even lease some bandwidth from an existing pipe, and carry your data on it. (I have read reports that google is doing just that with 'dark fibre'). If a megacorp wants to get better QOS for their customers, they can buy it, and the large telcos can sell it to them.
Surely this obvious fact renders the arguments against NN null and void?
Of course, most here believe, (and I among them) that this is about taking control of our internets, and preventing all the inovative things that are threatening the status quo that is making the existing systems rich.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
Who the hell modded this insightful? Anyone who uses the phrase "liberal left," and then calls Slashdot a "party," is anything but insightful. This doesn't rise above an ideological thumbing of the nose, with all the insights that entails.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
The source of the comment is enough for your outright dismissal, I see. I can understand that: getting all sticky having an actual argument is so gauche.
My book, podcast
Exactly! AT&T and Verizon only have YOUR best interests at heart in opposing network neutrality.
A lot of the network neutrality supporters don't even understand the issue at all. Take this for example, where the NYT and a lot of bloggers think of this as an attack on the web, as though telecoms really want to block off websites instead of regulate bandwidth to things that are going to consume terabytes or more of bandwidth like hi-def video services.
The approach that would work best for assuaging free speech concerns is to beef up common carrier laws. Extend common carrier status laws to the point that any ISP or telecom that blocks legal speech in the United States loses all common carrier protection through every service it provides. Yes, make it a legal corporate death penalty statute so that the MPAA and RIAA can literally sue Verizon into irrecoverable bankrupcy through the DMCA if they start playing speech king-maker.
And here's the funny thing about the "democracy" angle. When domain names were "democratically" controlled, they were much more expensive than they are today. Democracy sucks ass at allocating resources compared to a competitive free market. I'll take my chances with the market over protections for either side, thank you.
Really? Did we need more proof of how corrupt our government is, do our politicians actually have to stand up and flat out say they are corrupt now and act proud of the fact that they are all in the pay of various corporate interests and not doing squat in the interests of the People?
Who was it that laid all the fiber?
I'm not being facetious; I'm trying to figure out the argument that Verizon (for example) spends billions to lay fiber to everyone's house, and then they should sell access to that bandwidth on par with what they would use it for.
Shouldn't they be able to recoup the cost somehow? Why should they be required to subsidize competitors?
Having said that, I think that once they sell internet service at a given bandwidth (15 Mbps on my FIOS plan), they should not be allowed to degrade service for Vonage or other IP service providers.
This is the base who's wondering why Bush slept at the switch for six years and then suddenly discovered this highly-divisive issue when his poll numbers were tanking. They're here. They are part of the economy. They are here SOLELY because they have discovered that employers will hire them -- and it is to the exploitative employers that the "base" directs our ire. These employers have lived in an atmosphere of wink-and-nod enforcement of immigration. We've had a global amnesty before -- it's a way to reset the system and make it honest. If you think you can jerk 11 or 12 million people out of our country without a noticable economic impact and also without initiating a concentration-camp style deathmarch you're dreaming. But what's going on has nothing to do with any kind of "gathering threat" and everything to do with pushing people's panic buttons to get them to the polls. See last year's gay marriage threat.
2. This is the base that wants immedi
This is the base that wants their public leaders to speak in complete, intelligible sentences.
3. This is the base that wants abortion on demand for underage girls without parental or legal notification
This is the base that wonders why the same people who insist we ban abortion won't stand up for readily-available birth control. This is the same base that views with something approaching complete revulsion the recent statements by scions of the religious community that vaccines for STD's are tantamount to a greenlight for sex. This is the base that can pretty easily see that the issue has nothing to do with "pro-life" and everything to do with people of one religion inserting their moral views into the legal code in violation of just about everything this country stands for.
This is the base that deplores legalized abortion but despises even more the inevitibility of illegal abortion that a full ban would bring, and would like to see some evidence-based strategy to reduce unwanted pregancy, rather than "abstience-only" programs based on religious flummery and wishful thinking.
4. This is the base that wants to raise taxes to promote economic growth
Clinton raised taxes. It certainly didn't kill economic growth. Don't tell me the 90's boom had anything to do with Reagan because that's been repeatedly debunked.
Bush cut taxes. We're stuck in stagflation now, and the dollar is crashing, and the national debt will be paid off by my children and their children. And in real terms, wages have been dropping. Don't tell me what a great economy this is. Go out into your community and ask your neighbors if they're better off now than they were six years ago. A clear majority of them will not agree.
5. This is the base that applauds when dick durbin and jack murtha compare american troops to nazis
Give me a source of both the quotes you imply and an opinion poll of the "base" agreeing with said quotes. Then we can talk about that statement.
You should be thankfull you have the DLC to mask your base from the rest of the country.
Currently the opinions of "my" base are in tune with the opinions of 71% of the rest of the country. The DLC is out of touch, and so are you.
My book, podcast
My take is this, Net Neutrality sounds great on the surface, but here's why I don't like it; if you are a content producer you should pay for the bandwidth that is allocated for your content
Excuse me, but as a content producer myself, I ALREADY pay for the bandwidth of my content. At the moment, it costs about $10/month, but in the event that my weblog becomes much more popular than it is now, I'm going to have to start shelling out much more money.
Google already pays millions of dollars a month for its bandwidth. Kos himself pays thousands a month to maintain dailkos.com. The bandwidth is already paid for. The telcos shouldn't be charging "protection money" from web site producers who are already paying big money for their bandwidth.
You and I laid that fiber with our tax dollars and still Verizon and the other big telcos get sweetheart treatment from congress and FCC no matter what they do. In a perfect world, when you pay someone to do something for you that is mutually beneficial and then they try to abuse that in a way that fucks you over, you put the smack down on them. In this case Verizon, et. al. have decided that our efforts in helping them do something mutually beneficial to both of us were not enough for them and now they are trying to fuck us over. Plus there is that whole "common carrier" concept that is apparently like a law or something, it would be totally cool if the government would enforce the motherfucking law, but for some totally weird and unknown reason they doN't Seem to reAlly give a shit...
No new oil refineries have been built in the US since 1976. We are at an 8 year high in supply for oil, we just don't refine it!
Perhaps you could let the oil companies know of a location where they could set up a new refinery. It would need to be near existing oil distribution systems and the neighbors and local community ordinances will need to not oppose the development. Shouldn't be too hard, right?
If you look at these oil companies investor reports, you will see it is price gouging. Take Exxon/Mobil. Last year as a share of capital investment, Exxon Mobil made a 46% rate of return on it's US oil operations, a 59% profit margin on it's US oil refining, totalling $36 billion.
These prices and profits can also be explained by limited supply (in gasoline and other refined products) and high demand. Limiting supply in many markets is only possible with a cartel, but there are exceptions. It all depends on the cost of entry. In refined oil products, there is no new entry. It is currently impossible to build a new refinery in the US for any amount of money. So you have an upper cap on supply with no upper cap on demand. High prices are the result as the demand curve shifts against the supply curve. Econ 101.
The problem is the "build absolutely nothing anywhere at any time" attitude that residents and communities currently have. Which they (and you and I) will start paying for with higher fuel prices. Which I don't mind. Personally, I think the government ought to phase in an additional 50% tax on gasoline to push the price still higher (and all of the interest in alternate fuel and power that will engender).
Regards,
Ross
Hate to break it to you, but it wasn't Verizon. It was outfits like Global Crossing and Metromedia Fiber and so on, most of whom built out much too fast and then went belly up. Their investors and creditors paid for that fiber. Now a lot of it has been bought up by Verizon (and, apparently, Google) at pennies on the dollar. Verizon's gotten it almost free, most all of it is laid through public right-of-way. So you're saying because they've had this windfall in fiber capacity (most of which they've held off the market so far) they deserve a further windfall in being able to monopolize their sectors of the Internet?
Note when it was built the business plan was to make model under the old, network neutral, model. It was never an investment towards a proprietary net.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I see what you're after, but that's not going to solve the problem.
What if I really, really want Joe Smith to be elected, and I want that so badly that I'm willing to buy a TV commercial for him? I should be free to do so.
And as long as that freedom exists, money will continue to pervert the process. I'm not convinced that less liberty is worth less perversion of the system.
Of course, now we've got both.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
My take is this, Net Neutrality sounds great on the surface, but here's why I don't like it; if you are a content producer you should pay for the bandwidth that is allocated for your content, period and end of story.
They already do. The issue now is that the telcos want to charge a 3rd time. One charge for the customers bandwidth, one for the bandwidth of the content provider, and then a new 3rd latency surcharge which the telcos want to be able to apply arbitrarily to content providers they think can bear the burden. Oh and by the way, they want to be able to waive this surcharge for their friends and whomever they please. Oh and they also want to provide their own content if they think they can make a buck or two.
Then again, who is John Galt?
Please don't invoke the ideals of libertarianism or objectivism to provide cover for this so called business practice. Libertarianism understands the need for societal rules enforced by the threat and use of force. Murder, stealing, fraud (theft through deception) are all things that are rightly in the power of government to regulate. A free market will no longer exist if corporations, which have been given power and life by the government, are allowed to corrupt the Internet.
I know who John Galt is. And if you want to deregulate the Internet on objectivist grounds, then lets go ahead and deregulate corporations out of existance first. After all, without the government creation of the limited liability for shareholders which goes along with the corporation, individuals would not be able to own and control nearly as much capital as they can now. And they wouldn't be able to manipulate the free market nearly as much without incurring large amounts of personal liability. So, in a true free market you would not see the accumulation of capital into such large corporations as you see now. Simply because no one would want to share so much risk with so many unknown people and without knowing what people were doing with your capital in your name.
You either regulate corporate business practices or you eliminate the corporation. You cannot pretend to deregulate something created by regulation without even more seriously distorting the free market.