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Net Neutrality Act On the Agenda Again
blue234 writes "On January 9th, Republican Senator Olympia Snowe and Democrat Byron Dorgan reintroduced the bill popularly known as the Net Neutrality Act, and officially called the Internet Freedom Preservation Act. The bill was killed in the Senate last year in a vote split along party lines (Democrats yea, Republicans no), with the exception of Senator Snowe, who voted with the Democrats. Now that the Democrats have a slight majority in the Senate, the bill certainly has a better chance, but it still needs 60 votes to prevent a Republican filibuster.
Obviously YouTube has a lot to lose if Net Neutrality is not preserved and if teclos start treating consumer's bandwidth in a fashion unfavorable towards the site. You can see videos of Senator Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) and Senator Dorgan (D-North Dakota) appealing to the YouTube community for support regarding Net Neutrality here:
Kennedy's video (3 min, 22 sec)
Dorgan's video (1 min, 48 sec)
You want band width, you pay for band width. But don't come telling me my use of the bandwidth I pay for is somehow less important than yours and therefore I can't watch baseball or view youtube so you and your suits can crack wise across the continent.
principally i cant see how anyone could support enforcing a lowest common denominator upon everyone.
How is it that a level playing field is some how cast as the "lowest common denominator" in your twisted world?
You get what you pay for and I expect to get what I pay for. Why should you get a megabyte of bandwidth at a cheaper rate than I do? Why should your megabyte perform better than mine, just because I happen to be using Skype which competes with the carrier's voip product?
There is not a bandwidth shortage in this country. This isn't an argument about rationing a scarce resource. Its an argument about allowing carriers to degrade (prioritize to death) protocols that compete with their own services.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Ok, so you agree with the premise of the GP. Thanks.
:)
Now, what are you planning on doing about it? Government regulation is one group of people saying - "This is what I think we should do about this issue." You forget that generally most of the government tries to do what most people want most of the time.
Do you object to the government stopping corporate tyrannies? I really don't see a point, unless you are trying to say that since we got ourselves into this mess we deserve what we get.
But that's hardly constructive. If "the consumers" ruined the market it's only because they were part of the feedback cycle created by the military industrial complex post wwII. Manufacturing capabilities had grown so much that consumption had to be promoted. Not that people had much problem with that given the austerities of the War.
Charging into the sublime 50's producers seemed to have gained access to the psych work done by allied and axis scientists during the propaganda wars and and the real start of the War on Consciousness advertising began to have much more bite beyond the crude pokings of a pre-freudian mindset, it began to more closely target increased probabilities of "conversion". Having no natural defenses against this kind of attack, large portions of the population fell sway, and still are, of this feedback cycle and meme complex.
However, this type of underhanded maneuver is certainly not limited to advertising. Political issues are quite tasty treats for this species of behaviour. Speech writers choose their diction quite carefully nowadays and certainly use the latest NLP and related exploits.
Hrm that could be what this is analogous to - exploits to human consciousness - 0 day ones, as i don't think we've quite caught up. Pretty weird.
*at least some of the above is true*
at least i had fun writing it.
Sorry, but I think you are confusing lies with abstractions. The 'free market' is a theorerical abstraction for economists like a black body is a theoretical abstraction for physicists. Calling economists liars because the free market doesn't match your day-to-day economic experiences is like calling a paint manufacturer a liar because his black paint does not emit perfect black body radiation.
In the real world, the free market is gummed up by many things, such as collusion, friction, well-meaning government interference, and bribery-motivated government interference. What is truly remarkable is how well it works in spite of such problems.