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Net Neutrality to Win Big on Capitol Hill?
The New York Times has weighed in again on Net Neutrality, this time with a hopeful message of change in the near future due to the shift of power in the House and Senate. The opinion piece takes a look at Ron Wyden in the Senate and Edward Markey in the House who have both promised to lead the charge to pass a net neutrality bill in the coming months. Lessig, on the other hand, has a somewhat more cynical view of the new Congress.
...as less a commercial/military enterprise and more as a public utility that everyone should have a right to access, just like water or electricity.
It is sad but true that most people dont even know what net nuetrality is or they dont care if they do know. There are a ton of people that all they know is that there are gays out there, somewhere, in some city, and they dont like them getting married. This is a topic that will effect MANY people who are mostly oblivious to the topic.
There is a lot of money AGAINT net nuetrality and not enough for it. On an issue that the average person doesn't care about few senator's are going to give up their potential re-election money just for a few informed techies. I am pessemistic about this like Lawrence Lessig, very fews things change in congress.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
This president has used the veto less than any other president in history. I suspect that's about to change, now that Congress isn't his lap dog but the loyal opposition doesn't have veto-proof majorities. Don't get your hopes too high for massive changes. If anything, the biggest changes are likely to be in Congressional hearings - we might actually see some committees try to hold some of the "deciders" accountable for their decisions.
Years ago, when I grew up in Texas, our legislature only met every other year because every time they met, new laws got passed.
It's still that way, it's always been that way, and for the foreseeable future I think I can safely say that we're still not going to trust them enough to let those rascals get together any more often than that.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
From TFA A good reminder that every politician is in someone's pocket, regardless of political affiliation.
That goes with what I've said for years: party doesn't matter when they are all bought and paid for. There isn't one 2 term Democrat that is any cleaner than any 2 term Republican. In the first term a minority of politicians think they can actually change things, by the end of their second term, they know better. The system is so bad that it corrupts everyone sooner or later. Every now and then someone stays straight but is ignored by the media and their peers and dissapears into the corner of irrelevance.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
More signing statements in history than any other president, including gems such as (paraphrased) "I'm signing this bill into law but I don't like it so it won't be enforced"
I'm probably way off on grammar as the statement shouldn't be in quotes as it's not exact. . . but the gist is there.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
I would thoroughly support a Constitutional amendment that did something like this for the Federal legislature; there's no reason those people need to be sitting in the same room together more than once about every five years or so. Maybe ten. At least then, by the time they got around to making laws, they'd have a nice thick stack of citizen complaints to work though and problems to solve. The real problems always seem to occur when you have politicians looking for things to do, to make themselves look useful.
It's ironic that although the Founders of this country realized the dangers that having a standing Army presented, they evidently never realized those posed by a sitting Legislature.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Did it ever occur to you that net neutrality legislation is also a power grab and is being done in the name of fear?
Please explain to me how legislation to protect equal access and prevent multi-tier implementations that favor big business and big government are a un-Constitutional power grab. After all, conceptually, net neutrality goes far back in US history to the mid 1800's to preserve equal access to telegraph lines with the only exception being made for war or emergency purposes. The purpose was to encourage impartial use of the new resource and promote economic development in a democratic manner. I think that perhaps you are confused about the status of the current proposal to break up limits on net neutrality.
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FairTax baby!
Welcome to the kleptocracy. This is of course what many of us have been saying all along. It's impossible to fight the system from within because - gasp - you're PART of the damned thing. You have to fight it from without.
What does that actually mean? It means making yourself as independent from all things government-regulated as possible. Carry out all of the exchange of work you can by barter instead of through cash - that's a great example. Work as little as possible! That way you pay the minimum amount of taxes. Run your vehicle on waste vegetable oil or biodiesel produced from same. Roast your own coffee. Hire mexicans out of the parking lot at home depot whenever you can.
This is the biggest single threat to the system because the system depends on bleeding you dry for the benefit of the rich. The vast majority of U.S. military actions have been to secure financial interests, starting with sending ships down to south america to bombard towns with cannon fire to force them to continue to sell fruit to the United Fruit Company. I won't even go into the whole middle east issue.
The only way to fight the system is to make it irrelevant.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
All that is required for Net Neutrality to remain is for Congress to do nothing.
They are remarkably good at that, especially with the divided government we have now: remember, it takes 60 senators to pass legislation, and the dems only have 51.
Net Neutrality is a solution to a hypothetical problem that could exist. Not one that does exist. And it's not even the right solution to it. The right solution is to increase competition. On the other hand, any legislation will risk unintended consequences.
I am never going to approve of stopping people from doing what we want them to do just to stop them from doing what they're not going to do.
That's who I thought of when I read your last sentence. The only Senator who stood up and said "Hey guys, maybe we should, you know, read this so-called USAPATRIOT Act before voting on it?" Of course he was ignored. He has gotten involved with various committees and bills, like McCain's campaign finance reform bill, but yeah, a single Senator can't really change much.
The enemies of Democracy are
If I were you, I'd quit making sense. You don't want to know what happens to people who make sense and actually get people to listen to them.
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There is another way. Starting at the local level only elect people to office that have done real work. Doctors, nurses, teachers, contractors, anyone who has actually had to pay bills with what they earn. No more Ted Kennedys who have never had a real job in their life. No professional politicians of any kind at any level. The intent of the Consitution was to have a CITIZEN legislature that went to Washington, got the job done and returned home to the jobs that allowed them to survive. We were not supposed to have a permanent ruling class. Start at the state level, get the legislature to pass a Constitutional ammendment that makes the pay for members of the House & Senate the median wage of the country. It only takes 37 states to make the change no matter what the clowns in DC say about it.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
The idea of losing net neutrality is nothing compared to the threat we face from Howard Berman's rise to power as chair of the IP subcommittee. He is fully in the pocket of the content cabal, and I suspect that that subcommittee will see a whirlwind tour of every draconian fair-use-revoking freedom-hating DRM-infested idea ever put to paper.
And to think we were so close to having Berman promote himself to where he wouldn't be able to do any damage by chairing whatever foreign relations committee it was he was looking at. We would have had Rick Boucher chairing this committee, which would have been a serious victory for fair use advocates worldwide.
I wonder how much the content cabal paid Berman not to take the better job.
Pelosi says it'll be a 100 hours of legislation to get the country back on track. What every one forgets is that a) the President can still veto 2) even if the veto is overriden, who will enforce it?
Meanwhile, the FCC has already declared that they'll fine any company that abuses their tiering abilities.
Oh good, because the FCC is not completely owned by corporate interests...
How would they even know?
Finkployd
I think the problem with idiots such as yourself is that you never seem to realize that both sides are screwing you equally. The GP makes a general statement about politics and you turn around like the retard you are and make it an us vs. them partisan debate.
The best part is that idiots such as yourself always seem to point at the other side as to why things don't get done, regardless of who controls the government at any given time.
And to make matters even worse you wasted a mod point on your real account modding up an AC comment. A real winner you are sir!
Stay out of politics, you don't have the head for it. Stick to things you have the brain for, like Jenga or American Idol.
Okay, so what will prevent companies from abusing tiered service? The free market? There isn't one in telecom and there simply can't be one. Great example of a natural monopoly, no state required.
The FCC? Ah, isn't that part of the government? Who do you want making the regs, some unelected bureaucratic body, or your elected and (slightly more) accountable representatives? Without any special instructions from congress, what do you think the FCC will do, what is best for we, the people, or what is best for telecom fatcats?
The companies themselves? Why? You just know it's going to be, "Hey Google, those are some mighty nice lookin' packets ya got there. Be a shame if anything happened to them, capisce?" Wouldn't they be sued by their shareholders if they didn't screw people over this way? That's what capitalism is all about right, dog eat dog, devil take the hindmost, screw the poor and powerless neo-social-darwinism sort of thing?
In the free market, it's one dollar one vote. Theoretically in a democracy, rich and poor alike both have one vote. Sure, in practice it doesn't work like that, but who's fault is that? Show me the system of checks and balances inherent in the free market that will ensure justice and equitability? Or are those just outdated, antiquated notions now that we all worship on the altar of the almighty dollar.
Call me old fashioned, but I kind of like our Republic, with it's Houses and Executives and, you know, the Constitution? Maybe congress isn't the problem. Maybe we are. It's our government, after all.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Prioritizing traffic can be a good thing when properly applied. For example, VoIP services work much better when there is a guarantee that the packet will make it to its destination in a specified period of time. (A bit like how RTOSes guarantee a time slice to a program.) The only reason why we have a problem is because some telco exec got the bright idea of selling this prioritization service in a general-purpose fashion. (Thus negating the purpose of such a service. Genius, pure genius.) They then tried to ram it through as part of Senator Steven's Internet Consumer Right Bill thingymatube
Net neutrality legislation isn't fighting against prioritization of service types (e.g. VoIP versus HTTP). here is not and should not be any legislation preventing giving VoIP traffic priority over bulk traffic. Similarly, net neutrality is not fighting against the notion of tiered service classes (e.g. someone paying more for 3Mbps than for 1.5Mbps).
No, the reason we have a problem is that the telco execs got the bright idea to try to extort money out of content-providers (who are not their customers) under threat of degraded performance when their content is downloaded by the telco's customers. The goal of net neutrality legislation is to prevent prioritization of services in an unequal way depending on which non-customer entity is sending/receiving it.
For example, Skype might pays protection money to Comcast, so their VoIP traffic gets priority, while Vonage doesn't pay them protection money, so their traffic gets prioritized somewhere just below bittorrent downloads. Since neither Skype nor Vonage are customers of Comcast, that sort of behavior would be highly inappropriate, and the people who would inevitably lose in this example would be Comcast's customers. Worse, since most parts of the country are only served by one or two high speed internet providers (and satellite internet is not particularly viable due to extreme latency), many of those customers could not reasonably avoid such harm. That is the scenario that net neutrality legislation is trying to prevent.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Wrong.
The United States of America: We do what we must because we can.
> The free market? There isn't one in telecom and there simply can't be one.
Agree with the part about a lack of a Free Market. I'm amazed anyone can call two government granted monopolies pretending to fight 'competition.' But you are wrong in that there COULD be competition.
A bold statement, right? Almost every tech savvy type has admitted that telco competition just isn't possible so we are going to have to take it in the pooper from the government, the telcos, big media or somebody. Wrong.
The AT&T breakup was bungled because everyone missed the real monopoly and broke them up into the wrong pieces. AT&T's 'monopoly' on long distance didn't matter. The Baby Bell's monopoly on local calling was an annoyance at best and only because of the limits in the numbering plan. The monopoly was and is on the physical plant, the most importantly, the WIRES.
Imagine a new breakup order that took that reality into account. And we are going to have the opportunity because look out, Ma Bell is back and she is large and in charge again. Break them up into two parts, one part regulated as a utility that would own the wires, poles, right of ways and the central offices. This part would be a boring dividend paying entity, just owning and maintaining the wires and selling access at mandated rates to any and all who wished access. The second half would own the switches, dslams and the current customers and pay the first entity for the wires to get at them and rent for the facilities to house their switches.
Then impose a similar breakup on the other monopoly, the cable companies where once part keeps the monopoly right of way grant but looses the right to put a signal down the wire.
In the world I just described net neutrality would arise as a consequence of the Market because customers would have a choice.
Democrat delenda est
Actually I don't like to agree with anyone. How else are we going to keep these discussions going on /.? It would be pretty damned boring without someone making arguable comments.
Please let me keep my license. I don't want to end up on Ars Technica!!!
I don't know where this comes from, I have never heard a Libertarian say all roads should privatized. Can you provide a link, or is this smoke?
Right from the Party Platform [lp.org]:
...
Ah, neither on the snippet you provided nor on the actual page of the link you provided appears either "highway" or "road". I went ahead and searched the LP website using "road" and "privitize" and all I found was a post in a forum wherein a poster writes:
But, many of our critics like to accuse us of not living in the real world. They say, "You crazy Libertarians! You guys probably want to privatize the roads!"
Indeed, we do. Or at least I do. Privatizing the roads is one very important and under-appreciated step we can take toward liberty.
That's one person's belief, one I disagree with, but it is not the party platform. On another page another writer says: privatizing the roads along with other things is only going to make Libertarians look like loons.
FalconShould there be a Law?