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McCain on Net Neutrality, Copyright, Iraq
An anonymous reader writes "Sen. John McCain kicked off the All Things Digital conference Tuesday night with some interesting comments about net neutrality among other things. His take: there should be as little government regulation of broadband as possible. The market should be allowed to solve the Net-neutrality issue: 'When you control the pipe you should be able to get profit from your investment.'"
From article:
"internet is so simple even a frog could use it."
Why must article discriminate againt the French ? We are good people. Too much now in the US is anti-French feeling, like "freedom fries". Without France, its hards for US defeat Hitler, and France is a leads computer industry, with programming languages like OCAML, which win most programming contest.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Its what he didnt say that should be worrysome ... while few would disagree with "when you control the pipe you should be able to draw profit from it" I noticed he didnt mention "consumers should have a good choice of more than one pipe to attach too" .... yay for pipe-side economics!
Yeah, the market will indeed decide. I can only get one high-speed provider in my house, and I'm sure that provider will make excellent decisions on my behalf.
Never ask for directions from a two-headed tourist! -Big Bird
And they are.
The monthly fees paid by service subscribers. The people paying for unfettered access.
What they're trying to do is double-dip. They charge you to receive content, then charge the sender as well.
It's not our fault if they've priced their subscription service in such a way they cannot turn profit.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
For those who want the government to move in and enforce neutrality, consider whether you really want the government getting involved in such things. Net neutrality may be ok, but when they want a tax on email, site censorship, or other such evils that result from government involvement in the Internet, you will be wishing they had stayed away.
He doesn't have a chance in hell of getting elected. Your next president will be Fred Thompson.
Since the taxpayers of this country have been saddled with tens of millions (billions?) of subsidies to those who we have to go through for our net connection, it only seems fair that either:
A) All those who now control the pipes and who received these subsidies, now give that money back
OR
B) Those who now control the pipes and who received these subsidies have to keep things as they are and not control whose information gets preferential treatment.
Sorry John, you didn't have my vote before and this so-called "free market" idealism isn't helping your cause.
Yes, free markets are a good thing but when business has been receiving, and still receives, tons of money in subsidies, you can't now claim that you want the free market to decide what the outcome will be.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
From my cold dead hands! oh wait, you want to charge me $1 a meg? I can't use skype? I have to use your music service not iTunes? nvm..
Don't forget the cost of DSLAMs, ATM aggregators, Operational support systems, engineering, marketing, fiber deployment, union salaries, advertising and then equipment goes manufacture discontinued (MD) and the whole thing starts all over again. Not much profit and not forever!!!!!
For those who want the big businesses to stay where they are, consider whether you really want big business getting involved in such things. Higher prices may be ok, but when they want a monopoly on email, site censorship, or other such evils that result from big business involvement in the Internet, you will be wishing the government had forcefully taken over.
Why the hell don't these free market aficionados also become interested in efficiency. Various uses of spectrum could free up lots of space for competition. Or, is it competition that is the problem? Particularly, to those donating to these folks...
I thought they were tubes !!!!!
For the last time. It's not pipes, it's a series of tubes! Now all your bad joke will be redundant!
Who needs regulation when market competition is more efficient? Oh, except:
1. no transparency without regulation,
2. no competition without regulation. Hint: a market is temporarily competitive and evolves to a mature market.
3. no accountability without regulation.
Yet another misguided attempt to falsely attribute market-based anything with efficiency or effectiveness.
Got Trader Joe's? friendwich.com RSS feeds work now!
the market is NOT free. If they dissolve ALL of the monopolies (or limit it), then I am all in favor of this. The problem is that many of these companies want a monopoly and no regulations. In my area, I have the choice of qwest, comcast, or some reseller of them. It is a total ripe off. When colorado tried to do the state-wide licensing (get one license at a state level and then compete where you see a market) that past xmas, comcast and qwest fought against it. From where I sit, they need the net-neutrality regulation because they are insisting on monopolies.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Finally a technology conference where there's a presidential candidate present, and it's quite reasonable to grill him about all the pressing topics of interest to the Slashdot crowd, and half the article is about Iraq?
Geez. I know it's important, but McCain has answered the exact same questions hundreds of time. And this article is the first time I've heard a question that involved copyright. Why, oh why, do we have to read the same answers about Iraq in every situation, despite it being wildly off-topic?
As long as the FCC props up access "right of way" monopolies, the free market cannot function. Between DSL distance constraints, spectrum auctions to the highest bidder, everybody overselling bandwidth, [nearly] everybody traffic shaping, unlimited service provider consolidation, and [nearly] every access provider requiring strict "you will be a consumer only" contracts, where is the free market? Net neutrality is just a bastion against unconstrained traffic shaping. The government has already sold off most of our other rights...
For the most part, broadband is comprised of big monopolies, little monopolies and perhaps a little bit of competition scattered here and there. (In case no one noticed, with all the buying and selling of AT&T lately, it seems like the net result is that somehow AT&T controls a lot more than it did before...)
And frankly, even where there's competition, the provider will do pretty much what they please regardless of consumer demand. Look at Dell for example. They switched over to India for their customer support even though the customer demanded otherwise. Customer demand is not the only factor and when you're either the only game in town or one of two in some cases, you set and change the rules any way you like... any way that gives you advantage.
Without regulation, it's not what customers will demand that will shape things... it's whatever they will put up with in terms of abuse.
A standard pro-business comment that ignores reality
The mandatory GOP "OMG IMMIGRANTS" xenophobia. (As if it's such a huge problem that I got my whole house painted for $500. Oh noes! They are *illegal*, they didn't fill out a bunch of forms before they painted my house! The horror!)
He then goes into full-on pro-war mode, advocating a long stay in Iraq, action against Iran and the continued destruction of Habeas Corpus.
Then the oblique nod towards government-funded religious education, because there are a lot of religious voters who want the right to force me to subsidize the indoctrination of their children.
And then he made a comment about how important it is that he have the ability to monitor all the traffic on the internet, to protect against child porn. Yeah, child porn. Of fucking course.
There's nothing interesting here. The guy is a pure stereotype. The slashdot editors who approved the word 'interesting' need to go take an English class, because it doesn't mean what they think it means.
And yet at the same time he states that the White House should take the lead on Copyright reform and give it direction noting that "many in congress don't understand it. Why not let the free market prevail there?
Clearly he wants to be every large media company's favorite Republican.
I listened to Barack Obama's "podcast" about net neutrality (on youtube), it was excellent. He understood that everyone gets broadband through just a handfull of companies, and that not passing the law would allow companies to create barriers to entry, to where everything is as bad as phone or cable companies.
I don't see how McCain is going to be any different than many in the current administration, or even democrats like Hillary. I just don't see how someone could look at the issue and not understand that internet providers are trying to screw consumers.
It might take a year or it might take twenty, but as users become more sophisticated in what they want to use the Internet for, they will become dissatisfied with providers who won't give them the access they demand to the sites they want to use. There's no need for Uncle Sam to saddle us with more rules and regulations. If there's something keeping newcomers out of the market, existing antitrust laws should be applied.
...but is it art?
Since he wants as little government influence as possible, he also needs to force companies to (for the sake of fairness):
1) Pay back ALL government funding they have received to upgrade their networks with.
2) Make it illegal for a company to have a government mandated monopoly. The government would likely need to pay for the infrastructure of new companies in areas where a monopoly exists (to make up for all the help it already gave the old monopoly).
The second one is most interesting and interesting if the laws reflect the monopolistic nature of a company, apparently in NYC Time Warner has to provide service to people because of its government mandated monopoly. If you complain enough they will have to do whatever it takes to give you proper service.
JOHN MCCAIN (R-AZ)
Top Contributors
1 AT&T Inc $39,500
You can't take the sky from me...
When you control the pipe you should be able to get profit from your investment and when you are a consumer, you should have the right to excellent internet and the throttling down connections practice needs to be stopped. When you pay for internet you should get the speed they advertise for all connections on every port. I guess net neutral means different things to different people.
Maybe because, in spite of how important net neutrality is, tens of thousands of people dying might be slightly more important.
John McCain is reported to have said "As your president I promise to wear a dress and talk like a little girl if that is what my campaign supporters want. When you buy the presidency the man you anoint should dance for your amusement. So keep those contributions a coming!", he said in a lilting high pitched voice while sporting a bright blue sundress.
We have the best government that money can buy.
2 cents,
I want a refund.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
You have been trolled, a now so have I:
Do not forget that it was the French that bailed US out of our revolutionary war. Without France, the United States would not exist, and that is a fact.
'When you control the pipe you should be able to get profit from your investment.' Doesn't he mean tubes not pipes?
Fact: Most on the right don't like McCain. Kthx try again. He's a "Maverick" who annoys the right.
I'm from Europe and I've seen that bit on the Colbert Report where McCain was asked what he would make different in Guantanamo.
...I dare say that one plus point for him.
He said: "We don't torture people."
There is no chance in hell that McCain will win the race. In my opinion, he has lost all credibility for being the war monger he is.
Does anyone remember when he paraded down the streets of Iraq, protected by a whole infantry of U.S. soldiers (therefore also endangering them greatly), and then claim that it is a very safe and a lot better than a few years ago? He is on par with Rudy.G; both are utterly clueless of the real cause of 9/11. Every time I hear that "them hating us for our freedom" makes me want to puke. Ironically, Bush's stance on freedom is quite the opposite.
It will be interesting to see what Ron Paul will do to the upcoming republican debates. It will also be interesting to see what Hillary, Obama and perhaps even Gore can do in the presidential elections.
Full Tilt
As if it's such a huge problem that I got my whole house painted for $500.
I guess it's not, if you're a proponent of what is, for all intents and purposes, slave labor. Documented immigrants get paid a fair wage, at least. Illegal immigrants are always paid under the table.
I'm sure you'll find a way to call me a racist and xenophobe because I don't support illegal immigration. But at least you got your house painted on the cheap, right? You certainly are a paragon of humanity.
Damn this technology is getting complicated. Even our leaders disagree on whether its a series of pipes or tubes.
"I am tired of all this sort of thing called science here... We have spent
millions in that sort of thing for the last few years, and it is time it
should be stopped."
- Simon Cameron, U.S. Senator, on the Smithsonian Institute, 1901.
My other SIG is a Sauer.
Someone should pitch this question to them differently, as they clearly aren't quite understanding it right.
INSERT CANDIDATE NAME HERE, let's imagine, for a moment, that you're the President. Now. Let's imagine that the White House gets it's internet from, I don't know, Random DC Internet Company. Hypothetically, let's say that there was a horrible nuclear accident of some sort and the Russians were freaking out. Would you be for or against an email to the Russians explaining that this was not a hostile act not getting through because Random DC Internet decided that it didn't want to deliver email to the Kremlin's servers, run by Random Moscow Internet, that day?
Besides, speaking as a decendent of soldiers in the Revolutionary War, when we've racked up a millennium of military history I'm sure that we'll have a couple of losses there, too. And everyone also seems to forget how many French died in the battles to try to hold back the Germans. It's not like they just rolled over.
Regards, Ian
1) What market is he talking about? Being a broadband provider is a regulated monopoly. There are only two in my area: Comcast cable and Verizon DSL. Nobody else is allowed in now that the telcos don't have to lease their lines.
2) Ironically, net neutrality is what would restore fair competition to the market. Without that, the issue can't solve itself.
And if it weren't for the French, there would be no USA as they bailed us out when we were seeking independence from British rule during our Revolutionary War in the late 1700's. Or maybe you forgot that part of history?
Cheers.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
I suppose the government didn't help with that..
-- lol pwned
I'd point out the French only came in against the British after the Colonial forces took Saratoga, and the tide had turned in favor of the Colonials. The French weren't stupid, and were only going to back the Colonies once a Colonial victory was a near sure thing. We would have almost certainly gained practical independence from the British with or without the French. We're grateful for that aberration of French assistance (after all, a major cause of the American Revolution were taxes levied by Britain to pay for the French and Indian War), but don't overstate your case.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
When the federal government guarantees an automatic franchise to all taker for access to any utility pole, there will be an argument that Net Neutrality can be taken care of by the market. I would still be skeptical due to minimum economic scale requirements limiting the number of entrants.
This is typical Republican faux free market propaganda. McCain wants to rig the market by the government ensuring through the FCC that there is very little actual competition and then claim that the high prices and poor service are the best the free market can provide, all the while raking in campaign contributions from those who benefit from the government enforced limited competition.
The Straight Talk Express has crashed and been replaced with a Campaign Contribution Brothel on wheels.
None of the companies would ever let the lawmakers do it, but I think the regulation that is needed is something to disentangle the ownership of the actual wires, fibres, spectrum, etc. that carries data from the data itself.
Companies who carry the data, and deliver it to all kinds of end users (home users, businesses, etc.) would be required to be completely agnostic as to what the data is they carry. They would be like the post office, who don't own the mail they deliver, they just deliver it. Perhaps even completely transparent non-neutral prioritization of traffic (like the post office, with airmail, first class, media rate, etc.) would be acceptable. Any VOIP provider could agree to pay the tariff for high priority packets, and Verizon (for example) couldn't block their traffic because they compete with Verizon's local phone service.
Separating the data carrier and the content provider is just my thought for preventing vertical monopolies. Time Warner owns your cable line, and forces their traffic on you, and only lets in their and their "partners" VOIP or video on demand traffic, for example (they don't do this now, but I'm sure they'd love to if given the opportunity).
Simply, you can own the wires or the data, but not both.
Perhaps someone should tell St. McCain that the US government paid to develop and build out the internet... with our tax money. Then maybe he can tell us why, in his NeoCon dream world, megacorporations should be allowed to throttle the internet and mandate what traffic their customers can or cannot access.
Not that St. McCain could answer... or even disagree. That's one great thing about John McCain: no matter what your opinion may be, he has very strongly agreed with it at least once.
'When you control the pipe you should be able to get profit from your investment.'
When you control the phone lines, you should...er no. Regulated industry and for good historical reasons (antitrust).
When you control the electrical lines...er, no again. Hmmm
When you control the oil...NOW WE'RE TALKING!
Anything is possible given time and money.
Iraq is important, but there are other issues that we never hear about. For example...the Federal Reserve. It is costing us dearly (the interest on government debt), and quite frankly, I can't see any reason for its continued monopoly on this country's money supply. Also, what does the candidate plan to do (specifically) to repair the havoc wrought by Dubya's end-runs around the other two branches of government (not to mention the Constitution)?
The Telecom 'Market' was never Free. The government helped subsidize it, gave it public land to use, etc. It is *NOT* private property that the Telcos have a right to profit from. Don't give them the ability to do whatever they want and pretend it is Capitalism when the government propped them up and helped them get started.
While we are on this subject, "Intellectual Property" and Capitalism are mutually exclusive. Copyrights and Patents are merely state imposed monopolies meant to provide incentive to invent and create, and are in no way similar to actual, physical Property. With property, there is exactly one instance of any given item in existence, and in order to acquire said property, the original owner would no longer own the item in question.
"Intellectual Property" refers to abstract concepts which are limitless in number and availability; therefore, it is absurd to claim that someone stole an idea, or "stole music from the Internet". Unless you have been deprived of that idea (which is impossible to do), nothing has been stolen.
Actually, I'm a Political Science and History Degree holder, working on my masters, and I'm a Libertarian. Maybe that just speaks to the sad state of the U.S. education system. I won't disagree with you on that, but....
The "problem" is that the government recognizes a corporation as an individual. Please show me where Libertarians list a core tenant being "large, conglomerated corporations should be fully protected under the law as an individual." I know that the word libertarian is so vague as to be nearly meaningless, but you're certainly not helping the matter.
Look if the law changed to not allow corporations protection as individuals that would do next to nothing to Libertarian ideals. Libertarians believe in the individual freedoms, to (in my opinion) the extreme in some cases, but nothing in the party doctrine states that corporations MUST be allowed the status and rights of an individual.
Don't forget the cost of DSLAMs/ATM aggregators - Legitimate cost but as with all switching and aggregation technology is falling in price rapidly and DSLAMs are being required at fewer points within an area because of the maturation of DSL technology. Operational support systems - india engineering - israel marketing - not necessary due to monopoly fiber deployment - subsidized union salaries - what unions? advertising - see marketing manufacture discontinued equipment(MD) - still works, when it breaks replace with cheaper alternative and only if you can't squeeze or shape more traffic onto remaining equipment. The only time this is even worried about is in regards to the 911 system which they are about to wash their hands of because of VOIP.
The problem we face is that the market is actually closed. There is no free market in the telecom or cable industries. Almost all towns, counties, and even states have laws in place restricting the number of cable providers and forcing a monopoly in the state, county, etc., etc.
In an open market, things would work out for the consumer, as they would have the choice to go to a different company if they were not getting the service they want or even expect from their current providers. Yet, where I live, I can not even start a rival cable company if I wanted let alone have a choice between different ones because the law forbids me from being able to use anything other then Comcast, as they have an exclusive deal with the county to be the only licensed cable tv provider, and the county will not license any other competition. So, since I have a choice of them or nothing, it isn't like I can do a whole lot when I am upset about a change in service or experience poor service, etc., etc. In a free and open market, I would go to someone else who didn't do X or Y to me, and isn't speed throttling different network connections, etc., etc., and that is the idea of the free market, and in that case, the free market would make sure that the consumer got what he or she wants, not what is forced on them.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
How is he a "maverick" that annoys the right when he's lock-step with them? That may have been true ten years ago, but somewhere along the way he started sounding and acting just like them.
Salaries and marketing notwithstanding, the rest of those costs are all pretty much up front costs that the infrastructure provider pays once. You act as though they have to replace this stuff on an ongoing basis just for fun. The only time that stuff has to be replaced is when it is necessary to roll out a new technology (e.g. DSL), and even then, it can mostly be rolled out on an as-needed basis, upgrading a single rack of new hardware that will handle a few thousand customers, then waiting until it is mostly full of customers on the new service before upgrading another rack.
For the ongoing maintenance, don't forget that when you own as much gear as the telcos own, if something breaks and is discontinued, you just do a working pull from a unused card slot in a nearby cage and go on with your business. At such point as the hardware fails to the point that there aren't enough working boards, then you replace the equipment with new gear as it dies, but that's likely many, many years after the hardware is discontinued. Oh, and every time they do end up upgrading a rack of gear, all that old gear is now surplus parts that they can and will substitute in as parts go bad, so the effective cost of maintaining old gear actually drops as it gets decommissioned.
The reality is that the bulk of the wire infrastructure in most areas was put in decades ago and has more than paid for itself many times over. Thus, with the exception of having to wire new neighborhoods as cities expand, the cost of operating a telco is almost entirely profit, personnel and marketing costs notwithstanding. Adding DSL to an existing voice line also adds very little incremental cost. A DSLAM port costs on the order of $70-110 per port in the quantities purchased by telcos (source: isp-planet.com). At an average price of $30 per month, for a DSL connection, the hardware costs are covered within the first couple of months, and the cost of sending someone out to hook it up is covered shortly thereafter. Your customer equipment is paid for with the few months after that, and by the time you're at the one year mark, you've likely paid for all of the infrastructure and personnel costs associated with your account, customer service and marketing costs notwithstanding. From there on, beyond pennies per month for power to the DSLAM, the entire cost of your network connection is profit for the telcos---maybe not your local telco, since they have to pay money to an upstream provider for their bandwidth---but profit for telcos, nonetheless.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I've seen this claim before, but where is the proof? Can anyone actually quantify the amount of money and how big a percentage of the whole it represents? I'm sure there's more, but here's one I found in 30 seconds on TheGoogle:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2006/agric
I don't know what sort of percentage this represents, but I'm sure you'd agree that it's a significant amount of taxpayer money involved, regardless.
Honestly, the perfect market argument is just as good as any "in a perfect world" arguments.
The Raven
A comparison of telecom contributions to presidential candidates shows the same picture.
Love the Google "I feel lucky" joke. Just a note, I like France. I'm not a "Fan" per say, but I like the people... or I might be in trouble with my Fiancee.
So how smart does that make his fellow Republican, Ted Stevens?
On a more serious note, it looks like we have another naive libertarian type here. Let the market take care of the government-created monopolies! I mean, *obviously* the market would duplicate all the existing infrastructure, without the benefit of billions of dollars in government money*, if there were a profit in it! And a monopoly would *never* be rent-seeking, so we should just let it sit there with no government regulation, because we sure as hell won't help out any potential competitors dig up the roads to install fiber and such!
Oh, and wireless? First, we sold all the good wireless spectrum to companies that aren't even using it, but that's okay, because we auctioned it to ensure that those with the most money got it, rather than the startups who might make good on it. And community driven wireless ISPs? Tools of the devil! A community has NO place in using THEIR tax dollars to make it a better place! That's evil, because they have no incentive to exploit their customers for greater profits!
How can libertarians NOT see this? "Regulation isn't the answer," so what the hell DO you do? You can't just undo billions of dollars in infrastructure at the public expense. Duplicating the infrastructure is incredibly wasteful, not to mention just plain stupid. The free market is supposedly good because it's *efficient* after all. Oh, and they don't want to open access to the infrastructure because the pipes are "theirs" even though WE paid for them!
It's to the point where, whenever someone even says "libertarian" I read it as "corporate whore" because they apparently have no common sense to see what is happening when it's not what "should" happen in a Perfectly Free Market[TM]. To be fair, there ARE libertarians who are more sensible than that, but they're apparently a lot quieter than the nutjobs I see trumpeting it. Personally, I still wish that a few of them would take game theory. Cooperation trumps selfishness in absolute terms, but you have to punish selfishness or be taken over by it. It seems like they want to convince people to stop punishing selfishness, but they don't seem to realize how that harms cooperation or that the benefits of cooperation outweigh the benefits of selfishness. The world doesn't need self-proclaimed John Galts.
So I don't care if McCain is from my state. I don't care if I'm still technically registered as a Republican because I never bothered to change that to "none of the above." He's NOT getting my vote. Asshole.
* Telecoms always talk about "their" pipes, but WE paid BILLIONS (that's on the order of 10e9 dollars for you Brits) on infrastructure and we still don't have the fiber we should, like almost every OTHER first world country. Honestly, I don't really consider the US first world any more; it's like watching the Titanic sink the past several years. I've gone from flying the biggest damn flag I could get my hands on right after 9-11 to wanting to wipe my ass with it because I'm so ashamed of our country's actions. Torture especially was inexcusably criminal.
looks like the big pipe providers figured out step #2
1) Donate to candidate
2) Get them to adopt your position on NN
3) Profit!
McCain's message varies with his audience, like other politicians. But to a greater degree than most, IMO -- often he sounds just like a Democrat. He's like a Democrat who opposes civil rights, or a Republican for higher taxes and more government regulation.
doesn't include allowing soldiers to post their blogs about how they hate being in Iraq.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
If that "free market" rationale had been applied to ordinary superhighways rather than information superhighways?
Historical reference to the railroad monopolies of old might also be relevant.
For some reason, the government has decided historically that some "interference" in the free market might be in everyone's interest (antitrust laws). I wonder why?
Maybe because most people don't get chances every day to ask presidential candidates about issues they care about? And that the people at the conference may not be unidimensional geeks who think that the war in Iraq is just a video game that shows up on their TV occasionally? And that, therefore, they might like to ask a question about it because, as people are dying, it might be a bit more important to know why this candidate supports it rather than asking about whether or not some geek has to pay a bit more for the bandwidth to wank off to porn? Sheesh.
That is all.
He sounds exactly like the man he wants to replace. Why he thinks anyone would want to vote for him I don't know.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
OMG indeed.
... they're in a lot of trouble. oh, they're doing just fine: http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/comcast-prof it-almost-triples-fueled/story.aspx?guid=%7BF768A0 CE-B1E3-40B7-BB1A-9AC17427B7F7%7D
If anything, the youtubes and googles of the world _should be charging the ISPs to carry their content, not the other way around_. Its the comcasts that are getting a free ride, charging me $40 to access content they didn't make.
...quite right. Why worry that our own working class can't get work because you've help depress labor conditions in this country? You've managed to fullfill your short term self-interests.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
How is he a "maverick" that annoys the right when he's lock-step with them? That may have been true ten years ago, but somewhere along the way he started sounding and acting just like them.
You are completely ignorant.
He annoys the right when he refuses to support tax cuts, fights for the new immigration bill, and censors political speech in the McCain-Feingold bill.
The "problem" is that the government recognizes a corporation as an individual. Please show me where Libertarians list a core tenant being "large, conglomerated corporations should be fully protected under the law as an individual."
Please see my reply to the OP to understand why I think you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
(As if it's such a huge problem that I got my whole house painted for $500. Oh noes! They are *illegal*, they didn't fill out a bunch of forms before they painted my house! The horror!)
So I guess it's only evil when a corporation exploits poor people?
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
his is an open letter, which you are welcome to use as you wish. I want as many people as possible to know that John McCain should judge not, lest he be judged. Let's get down to business: McCain loves getting up in front of people and telling them that he can change his unbalanced ways. He then boasts about how he'll precipitate riots before long. It's all part of the media spectacle that is John McCain. Of course, he soaks it up and wallows in it like a pig in mud. Speaking of pigs and mud, the public is like a giant that McCain has blindfolded, drugged, and gagged. This giant has plugs in his ears and McCain leads him around by the nose. Clearly, such a giant needs to act honorably. That's why I feel obligated to notify the giant (i.e., the public) that McCain's ideological colors may have changed over the years. Nevertheless, his core principle has remained the same: to elevate his hastily mounted campaigns to prominence as epistemological principles. If you don't believe me, then note that I want to live my life as I see fit. I can't do that while McCain still has the ability to delegitimize our belief systems and replace them with a counter-hegemony that seeks to cause diabolic subversion to gather momentum on college campuses. We can never return to the past. And if we are ever to move forward to the future, we indubitably have to take advantage of a rare opportunity to expose some of McCain's pestilential deeds. Like I said, McCain's magic-bullet explanations do not represent progress. They represent insanity masquerading as progress. It's really amazing, isn't it? We can put people on the Moon and send robot explorers to Mars, but we must upbraid McCain for being so intemperate. If we don't, future generations will not know freedom. Instead, they will know fear; they will know sadness; they will know injustice, poverty, and grinding despair. Most of all, they will realize, albeit far too late, that McCain claims that the best way to serve one's country is to rip off everyone and his brother. I assert that the absurdities within that claim speak for themselves, although I should add that if Fate desired that McCain make a correct application of what he had read about masochism, it would have to indicate title and page number, since the cold-blooded, mudslinging social outcast would otherwise never in all his life find the correct place. But since Fate does not do this, McCain's habitués believe that children should belong to the state. It should not be surprising that they believe this, however. As we all know, minds that have been so maimed that they believe that newspapers should report only on items McCain agrees with can believe anything, especially if it's false.
It's a well-known fact that there are prurient popinjays in our midst. It's an equally well-known fact that I have avoided engaging in open debate with disingenuous idiots -- or even acknowledging their existence -- for fear of lending them any form of legitimacy. When logic puts these two facts together, the necessary result is an understanding that I overheard one of McCain's intimates say, "'The norm' shouldn't have to worry about how the exceptions feel." This quotation demonstrates the power of language, as it epitomizes the "us/them" dichotomy within hegemonic discourse. As for me, I prefer to use language to give peace a chance. Although McCain's overt pauperism has declined, a covert form still survives and may be an important factor in fueling a tendency and/or desire to dilute the nation's sense of common purpose and shared sacrifice.
McCain somehow manages to get away with spreading lies (things have never been better), distortions (he is a martyr for freedom and a victim of Fabianism), and misplaced idealism (he can achieve his goals by friendly and moral conduct). However, when I try to respond in kind, I get censored faster than you can say "anthropomorphologically". We must also assert with all the sincerity of informed experience and the desperate desire to see our beloved country survive that teenagers who want to
In that case, the customer should be able to sue the ISP for degrading their choices in the free market. The VOIP service provider should also be able to sue. The main issue is that this is a matter of using control over the lines in order to preclude competition of other services which is already something of a no-no.
The problem with assuming people can just go to competition in this case is that we seem to be heading towards duopolies in terms of broadband options (not so in my county, thanks to our PUD). If the duopolies offer similar service packages, they both have the same interests in precluding other third parties to the competition.
For example, suppose you use Verizon and DSL. You should be able to buy the DSL line without getting land line service, and you should be able to get Vonage. That should be prioritized in terms of routing at the standard priority. Anything less should be vulnerable to antitrust suits. If Verizon also wants to offer priority routing for your Vonage connection at an additional rate, that should be their right however.
In short, your examples specifically point to the areas I would like to allow the consumer to sue over. They are not problem cases with my proposal.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Because if someone on the right gets called on their bullshit, all right-wing talk show types must label said person "actually a liberal".
or a Republican for higher taxes and more government regulation.
Yeah, we have a word for those - we call them "Republicans".
We've secretly replaced Slashdot with new Folgers Crystals - let's see if it notices.
So his wanting the 'market to sort it out' ( among a bunch of virtual monopolies ) must mean he has stock in one or more of the largest players.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Bob Dole: What the hell is this, some kind of tube?
'When you control the pipe you should be able to get profit from your investment.'
Who thought John McCain would be in favor of legalizing crack cocaine?!
I'll grant you that most people would consider life and death more important than amorphous concepts like liberty -- especially when those concepts are not under some frontal assault. And I'll admit that I'm mostly just debating the point because I don't think it's as clear as you feel it is.
My real point is that I read about the Iraq war constantly. The lines of debate and politician's stands are constantly on display and dissected. In no way will the world be less informed if we just asked a couple fewer questions about Iraq when it happens to be wildly off-topic.
As Republicans go, McCain was the best of the bunch, until he started sucking up to Shrub and the far right.
;)
But in this case, I actually liked what he had to say.
I'm still voting Democrat tho.
Scott
©20014 angrykeyboarder & Elmer Fudd. All Wights Wesewved
It wasn't WWII that broke the French, it was World War I. Their casualties were literally in the millions; they fielded the majority of the allied land forces, and most of the war took place on their territory. They held back, literally, the best army in the world. Fought them to a standstill for years in the face of obscene casualties.
After the war was over they hunkered down into a defensive posture, and then when the next war broke out, the French government dithered for months while the German's prepared (the so-called "Phony War" period), basically annihilating the morale of the troops.
So no, the French as a whole didn't make a great showing in WWII. It would have been more surprising if they had. It was very easy for us to talk; our WWI casualties were a joke compared to what had happened in Europe.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
You know that paperwork has little to do with opposition to illegals. Its not that people will paint your house for $500 dollars, its that either they or their employers do not pay taxes and do not follow state and federal regulations for safety and other things. They are also not held to professional standards in their work.
At the same time, illegals take advantage of medical care, schooling, policing and other taxpayer funded services. They also may have helped build your house and did a shitty job of it, something that will become apparent within a few short years of your residence there. Maybe an illegal alien, unlicensed and uninsured of course, plowed his vehicle into your car and now your insurance company has to pay for it.
Because insurance companies and municipalities have no choice but to provide services and/or deal with illegals in some way, but at the same time, need to actually cover costs, they end up charging you more. Even if you denied illegals every service and human right, you'd still have to pay to deal with policing them and protecting the general population from the criminal elements that come with the relatively honest, hardworking illegals. You'd also still have to deal with the fact that you have a permanent, unassimilated underclass living within your borders.
Another issue with illegal immigration is farther from home... it props up crappy regimes in their home countries. If Mexicans actually had to try and find jobs in Mexico, perhaps they might be less inclined to tolerate the completely corrupt governments that run Mexico. While I grant that a civil war in Mexico is an unappealing prospect for the U.S., the fact is that nothing will get better there until their own population stops running from their problems.
Lets be clear, illegal immigration is a problem under the current system... a real one. Its not because they are illegal, or they don't speak English, or they look different, its that they are leaving a place that couldn't give a shit about them (i.e. Mexico) and overloading the infrastructure and job market in places that are too humane to deny them basic services. They also take the money that they earn and ship a lot of it off to the black holes that they call their homes, to support their dependents and family in those other countries, thus removing a good chunk of money from local economies.
Let's see, the drug trafficking, the weapon smuggling and the flood of humans coming over the border isn't enough for you? The problem isn't that they didn't fill out a bunch of forms, it's that they can't get workers comp if they get injured and that their employers take advantage of them and will often not pay them for their work and threaten to turn the into the authorities. It's that they're often paid under the table so they get no taxes taken out, or they can't file for a refund so they get too much taxes taken out.
Your "oblique nod to religious education" is actually vouchers for private school, where half the money that would usually go towards public education for your child can go towards a private education instead. It's not a way to get someones child "indoctrinated," it's so middle class parents like mine can afford to send my little brother with a genius IQ to a school that will accelerate his education so he doesn't get bored in class while the public education system gets to keep half; it benefits everyone. If some parents prefer a religious school, is it that big of a deal? You can send your child to a school that teaches your children to ridicule the children getting "indoctrinated".
That might lead you to believe he is pro-freedom or even pro-market. Neither is true. It is just a convenient way to dismiss these efforts and sound like he is appealing to his constituents. I suspect in any other technological area, he is pro very BIG government: DRM, copyright extensions (further criminalizing "infringement"), software patents, anything involving: indescency or children (combined or separate), anti-encryption exports (giving overseas a competitive advantage), pro-snooping, pro-eavesdropping, pro-corporate rootkit, outlawing reverse engineering, etc.
Not to mention the biggest: FREE POLITICAL SPEECH. He was an architect of so-called campaign-finance reform that has been one of the biggest government takeovers of the political process since direct election of Senators (keep in mind states already had representatives so removing those accountable to state government simply reduced a separation of power).
rather than asking about whether or not some geek has to pay a bit more for the bandwidth to wank off to porn? How about, "Do you think campers should be required to clear rights before singing songs around the campfire?" or "What are your opinions about the RIAA suing thousands of people, and tens of millions of kids evidently committing felonies every day?" or "Do you think it's fair that Fox will not allow citizens to use video from presidential debates?" or "Is DRM a good thing? Even though it restricts competition?"
The thing is, while the Iraq war has killed off roughly 3,000 Americans, each year there are over 2 million American deaths. Hundreds of thousands of non-Americans are dying in wars around the world that we don't care about. Millions are dying from AIDS in Africa. Millions of abortions happen each year. Stem-cell research has the potential to save millions of lives.
Do I want to talk about any of those things? No. Are they important? Sure. What do they all have in common? A complete lack of anything to do with digital stuff.
And, as I pointed out earlier in this comment, there are plenty of serious, non-porn-related questions to ask a major presidential candidate, and it's likely that he's never answered them before.
Iraq? Again, just google parts of the questions, and you'll likely find other examples of him answering the same question.
To repeat a sig that I love, "I'm a fiscal conservative, too bad there's no party for us..."
or quit making outrageous claims about how "free markets" behave.
'When you control the pipe you should be able to get profit from your investment.'"
That should read "When you pay for the pipe you should be able to profit from it." Because government has given cablecos, telcos, and others money to build up the internet infrastructure then they should be mandated to have an open pipeline.
FalconShould there be a Law?
"When you control the pipe you should be able to get profit from your investment.'"
If you substitute pipe with oil, trains, telecom infrastructure, drug patents, wood pulp, it makes a lot of sense because we have never needed government intervention on those fronts.
You seem to think that a free market means you, the consumer, having a choice between multiple services. It doesn't.
The market is free as soon as you have _any_ choice available, and you have two:
1. You find adequate value in the service offering, and take them up on it.
2. You don't, and you don't take them up on it.
Since you have no FSM-given right to service, these are your choices. Do your choices suck? Certainly. But they are your choices (along with where you chose to live, for example, which also has obvious trickle-down effects in terms of your broadband choices.)
Don't like it? Don't pay for it. Free market.
This is your Senator John McCain
This is your Senator John McCain on drugs.
... and then they built the supercollider.
If I knew that the invading force was going to haul my people off to places like Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Birkenau, Dachau, and Flossenburg, we'd have fought until the either pushed us into the Atlantic Ocean or killed all of us.
Many French did fight the Germans in the underground or resistance.
FalconShould there be a Law?
On a more serious note, it looks like we have another naive libertarian type here. Let the market take care of the government-created monopolies!
McCaine is not a libertarian. If anything he's more authoritarian.
At first as a Libertarian I was against any net neutrality law myself, however once I found out the government has given businesses taxpayer money to buildup the net infrastructure I started to support such a law. Either these companies can open up thier pipes or they can pay back the money they were given. And if they have a natural monopoly such as cablecos and telcos then they should be mandated to have open access as well.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I call Slippery Slope on your "argument."
Regulation is not all bad despite what the PR says. The market is largely defined by the government which creates a formal system in which to operate (aka civilization.)
ISPs screw with the net already and some censorship has occurred. Take away any common carrier like regulation and you would not be able to sue the ISP for censorship.
Government also does some enforcement of regulation since we can't have you sue for enforcement; although, its getting to the point where lawsuits are the only real enforcement.
Corporations are a government defined entity.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
McCain is ignoring a key caveat. Namely that the communication industry does not, and has not, participated in the "free market" in quite a while now. They were given a federally protected monopoly a number of decades ago.
Start preaching about taking a wrecking ball to the communication industry's legal monopoly, and then I'll talk "free market" with him. The industry is quite devoid of competition, so the "market" will likely NOT favor the consumer. Competition drives price down, a monopoly drives prices up. No competition = high prices.
I do give points to McCain though. He's picked a stance that will please his corporate overlords and fool the majority of people into thinking he's pro-consumer. But then again, seeing the government's current record on "fixing" things, it's quite possibly a better solution than allowing a politician to mess with it and ruin it utterly.
A free market is not free if a cartel controls it and creates sufficient barriers-to-entry to prevent new businesses from competing with them.
In such a circumstance, if you do not have government regulation preventing them from abusing their market-dominance, they will abuse it, the consumers will all suffer, and there will be no competitors for them to switch to.
That is why we need net neutrality.
Let the market decide? How about this. We have laws against how monopolies work. There are a few companies legitimately providing broadband and define what you are purchasing (companies such as Verizon and Cox Communications for instance). My issue with his logic is companies such as Comcast don't define what acceptable use is, you get a call then you are disconnected from the internet for a year. If you don't have alternatives then you are screwed.
I'm sending letters out to these guys. Companies such as Comcast can't be trusted to be the "guardians" of the Internet. If so then it becomes privatized and we put up and shutup or forget joining the 21st century.
It's sad these guys are in office and yet don't see the problem.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
"Don't forget the cost of DSLAMs, ATM aggregators, Operational support systems, engineering, marketing, fiber deployment, union salaries, advertising and then equipment goes manufacture discontinued (MD) and the whole thing starts all over again. Not much profit and not forever!!!!!"
You forgot the C officer's compensation & the Board's compensation.
Can we forget they set their own pay.
Thanks for your time.
The big telcos have ALREADY got a good "return on their investments" to the tune of billions and failed to deliver what we the people have already paid for, high speed broadband to the premises, ie, fiber optics everywhere. Now they want more money to do what again? Screw 'em! And to hell with the new world order goon selected candidates, just say NO to the media darlings picked out for you by your "betters".
McTraitor is a goon, he wants full amnesty for illegal scab invaders, maximum profits for transnational disloyal corporations who ship still useful jobs overseas so the Cxx class can have bigger yachts, and a furtherance of the aristocratic society in the US with the elite on top and everyone else shuffling along to do their bidding. Screw 'em! This idea that our government exists solely to maximize the profits of the wealthiest people is *absurd*.
No, the pipes AREN'T the big telcos, not by rights anyway, although they have gamed the system and hijacked them, we the customers and taxpayers paid for them, every single penny. That's like saying the contractors who built the interstate highways should get to own them forever and keep charging tolls, hell no! And the radio spectrum is OURS, "we the people" ours, not THEIRS. They've monopolized the airwaves for generations now, they can broadcast and suck up huge amounts of spectrum, shovel out crap, yet joe blow can't run a cheap low power FM, that's "illegal" and some sort of "threat".
Screw the hijacking of government and the people's property by those goon corporations and triple screw their "investors", let them go get JOBS to "make money". We've got WAY more than enough capitalist pigs with their snouts in the trough now, we need LESS, not more of that middleman skimming crap and we need ZERO on critical national infrastructure. We need to nationalize the pipes back so that we the people own them, because we PAID for them. If those "investors" aren't content with the tens or hundreds of billions they have already made, screw 'em, they can go to hell.
All of those GOP candidates toe the same line on net neutrality: "let the free market [heavily modified by subsidies and regulations to favor my donors] take care of it." All the candidates except Ron Paul, of course: "I trust the Internet a lot more [than the mainstream media]. And I trust freedom of expression, and that's why we should NEVER interfere with the Internet. That's why I have never voted to regulate the Internet, even when there's the temptation to put bad things on the Internet." -Ron Paul "I believe strongly in protecting the Internet. My colleagues aren't quite as interested in the subject. That, to me, is disappointing." -Ron Paul Personal note - I'm registering Republican so I can vote for RP in the primaries. I know /.ers are generally big supporters of his... you all should be doing the same.
**** You never REALLY learn to swear until you own a computer. ****
Given that this is the same guy who doesn't seem to realize that condoms reduce the risk of contracting AIDS why would we expect him to understand the first thing about net neutrality? As lots of people point out, it's incredibly difficult to get someone to understand something when he's being paid by AT&T to not understand it?
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
If I knew that the invading force was going to haul my people off to places like Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Birkenau, Dachau, and Flossenburg, we'd have fought until the either pushed us into the Atlantic Ocean or killed all of us. It makes me cry just thinking about it. I cannot understand how anyone who considers themselves to be a human being can surrender your populace to such a horrific regime knowing - KNOWING - what they're going to do to them and that their only goal is to eventually exterminate all of you.
Finally! An explanation for the Iraq insurgency.
And voiced by an American, no less.
Maybe there's hope for this shithole yet....
You're entirely right. What happened to French people like Napoléon?
"The quickest way to end a war is to lose it" -Orwell
Funny, here on the west coast, where the oil companies purposely charge more because of the higher incomes on the drivers, I still wait for gasoline prices to go down to parity with the rest of the country
And yet LA has more than 1000 oil wells in the area.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Just saw your xanga page - please die, thx.
Actually a lot of the ideas that went into the American revolution stemmed from the brewing French revolution going on at the same time.
"The quickest way to end a war is to lose it" -Orwell
Oh that's a bunch of crap. I don't have a right-wing talk show, first of all.
Nor am I what would be considered right-wing; I'm more liberal on abortion than McCain is (in that I support it and don't kiss-ass for evangelicals over it -- but then, I'm not a politician), I'm more liberal on gay marriage than McCain is (in that I support it, same as the last), I'm more liberal on the "war" on drugs than McCain is (in that I think it's a stupid waste of resources). I was just pointing out that the right-wing doesn't like him. You cite talk shows: Limbaugh, Boortz, and Hannity have always hated McCain, not just when he gets called on bullshit.
He's also not going to be the nominee of the Republican party; it will be someone who isn't "actually a liberal." Watch and see.
If a private school is going to push an agenda then it doesn't deserve any tax money at all. Parents shouldn't have the right to deny their children education any more than they have the right to deny them decent medical attention. So having competition for the parents' vouchers might actually lower the standards of education in this country. (Imagine the piles of money spent on marketing instead of actual education.) What we really need is quality. If we can use "choice and competition" (McCain's words) to increase the quality of education then I'm all for it. However, what you've described will not have that effect, and I fear that the OP is correct in suspecting that McCain's motives are not pure.
I heard the same thing from my gf as she was telling me the various gifts I would be getting her for her birthday.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
'When you control the pipe you should be able to get profit from your investment.'
Except those tubes wouldn't be there without government intervention in the form of eminent domain. If you want to be able to use government force to require me to allow you to run your lines across my yard, my government should get a say in how you use it. Don't like it? Don't use eminent domain and pay whatever the landowners feel like charging you at that moment.
Try If I knew that the invading force was going to invest billions of dollars into creating a democracy, freeing the populace, giving women rights, destroying tyranny, getting rid of biological weapons, possibly nuclear, we'd have fought until they either pushed us into the Ocean or killed The terrorists.
You call yourself an American? Go to hell.
I think you need to lay off the Fox News, friend.
There is no democracy in Iraq, nor was there any intention of creating it--the Glorious Leaders (currently Bushites) don't want democracy HERE, dittohead! These days, the word "democracy" is little more than a crypto-fascist keyword meaning "corporate exploitation", which the US has practiced quite well since it dropped the bomb on Japan--its clearest statement that it was the new bully on the block, and things were going to be done the "Washington consensus" way from then on. This isn't new, you know--even the crotchety Council on Foriegn Relations stated the US was having a "crisis of democracy"--too much of it, in other words--in the 70s. Democracy is SO twentieth century; you need to get with the program.
The post you responded to may have been acerbic, but the sad reality is that your jingoism doesn't match up with the sad reality of Iraq (your argument about the benighted Crusaders was used forty years ago in Vietnam with all the "burning the village to save it" justifications that came out of THAT imperial invasion; again, your "views" are about as dated and as real as a tea party with Alice and the Mad Hatter.)
Don't worry, though. I promise not to vote in the next election. Can't have people like ME running around here, voicing things that don't toe the flag-waving line. I mean, I should be greatful that I can even say things like this, right?
who thinks the Internet is a series of tubes.
The internet is not tubes, or pipes.
It is a set of commonly agreed up conventions that allow people to communicate digitally.
This isn't about allowing the market to do its thing. It's about wealthy interests buying up pieces of the commons, freeloading on the commons as a whole while restricting their customers when it is in their financial or ideological interest.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
1) They didn't know that. As far as they knew surrender might result in the kind of thing that happened to Germany 22 years earlier: decommissioning of the armed forces, very heavy war payments, maybe some loss of territory. Remember the final solution didn't really gather steam until years later.
2) They didn't exactly surrender at the first sign of fighting. Some villages changed hands dozens of times, large parts of the French military where destroyed or captured before the surrender came and it's only ally, the UK, had already given up the fight on the continent (wisely probably, but still devastating for morale. Also by then a significant part of France industry and Farmland had already been conquered.
3) As others have noted you can't understand the situation in 1940 unless you look at what happened between 1914 and 1918. They lost literally millions of people. And not as casualties (e.g. death and wounded) but in deaths. For four years hundreds of thousands of men died without much effect on the opponent.
In 1940 the French simply lost to a better trained opponent. If there had been a land bridge at Calais I doubt the UK would have lasted much longer. The only thing you can accuse the French government of the time of is that they didn't flee and continue the fight. To call them cowardly or weak ignores the reality of the time.
Besides, the way around that would be for all schools that receive government funding to have the same standardized tests as the public schools and to require a certain proportion of students to pass (making exceptions for special needs schools). Religion is not synonymous with ignorance despite what many atheists may think.
Only if the market is truly free. If it is concentrated into a few very large interests, I'm afraid you don't get an ideal marketplace.
Big monopolies are what happen in a "truly free" market. Government regulation of large companies, when needed, is what gives us the ideal marketplace, or at least that's the idea.
It's the government that creates those big companies and monopolies. Government only allow one company to use the right of way to lay or string cable, power, or phone lines. That is not a free market!!! And those regulations you want, they are created by those being regulated to keep out competition. I saw something about a landscaper, government wanted him to spend a few thousand dollars to get a license to use an herbicide any individual can walk into a garden or home improvement store and buy off the shelf. Want to start a drycleaning business? Try and check into all of the licenses needed to start one.
And cars? States and cities are lining up to give auto manufacturers tax breaks to build plants. And in almost all of these cases the pay of jobs created, and any increase in property values, are not enough to cover the tax breaks. And any rise in property values makes it harder for people to buy a home.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Unfortunately all too often in our modern "free market" society, people just squat on critical or indispensable items/technology everyone needs, and so they are in a position to extort people of their money. (i.e. ISP's overselling bandwidth) and sit on their old technology ("investments") as long as possible to extort every single cent possible.
I think that's called contract work. Businesses pay people under the table, but individuals just pay with cash. However, just because you pay a licensed painter to do a job, doesn't mean that he won't hire someone who is not documented.
The reason why people are risking their lives coming to the US is because they are working as slave labor making products to ship to richer countries. America can slow immigration by enforcing labor laws for the companies that produces the goods that it imports, even if it is in another country. Many unions are behind this, but it's a radical argument to make in this political climate.
Well, no.
You see, the French Revolution didn't actually occur until around 1789. That was 17 years after America's Declaration of Independence(1776). So in reality, a lot of the French Revolution actually was sparked by the American Revolution.
You should study the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma sometime.
The really short version of it is that cooperation trumps selfishness, but that it will be "invaded" by the selfish unless it acts to punish them. Thus, the nicest playable strategy is "tit for tat" or something like do onto others as you would have them do unto you. What that means is that people will continue to act like greedy assholes until punished for it, therefore it's in both your own and everyone else's 'enlightened self interest' to do exactly that.
In this case, we gave the telecoms billions for infrastructure and we, the public, have a right to see a proper return on our investments. It's not "two wrongs" unless you assume that no regulations are good regulations, an oft-quoted maxim of Libertarianism, but not one that's supported by anything other than cynicism* and flat-out ridiculous when you realize that it's supposed to promote market efficiency. Yes, now how would it be more "efficient" to unnecessarily duplicate basic infrastructure, or to avoid regulations requiring them to open that infrastructure to competition?
And we can't "end the subsidy" just that easily. They're already billions ahead, a natural monopoly, and there's no way the market can correct that. Well, unless you regulate them, forcing them to open their lines to competitors, but apparently that's a "wrong" merely because it's government regulation (of what should rightfully be government property). The fact that it works for essentially every other country (i.e. most of Europe and especially Japan make us look like we're in the Stone Age) and that it fosters actual fair competition are too often ignored.
But then again, look at that other thread on here with the links. McCain gets more than double the money any of the other serious presidential candidates get from telecoms. So I'm not very surprised, but to be honest, I really don't want the best government money can buy.
* Incidentally, does anyone but me know that "cynical" comes from Greek words meaning "dog like"?
I think that services should be bandwidth neutral but I think the government should keep their hands out of it.
Ask your local Bell representative what they think of opening up the public servitude to any and all who would lay fiber. He'll choke. Until then, they don't own the network, you do. The person getting their monopoly investment back is supposed to be you. Funny how monopolies never bring the returns they should.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
while few would disagree with "when you control the pipe you should be able to draw profit from it"
I can dissagree with that two ways. First, a "controlled" network is inefficient and only profitable in a non free economy. Second, rigging laws so to give that kind of control and profit to select companies is FUCKING UNAMERICAN. This kind of talk is pure bullshit because the telco market is not free. Anyone realistically proposing a free telco market will be doing exactly the opposite of proping up the incumbents.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Perfect Markets are as realistic as perpetual motion machines.
... imperfect information, especially as applied to systems of such staggering complexity as those we use whenever we buy a loaf of bread. This leads to the consideration of the efficiency of markets, which in turn demands we generate ever more sophisticated models.
/.
There is no such thing as an externality in real life; there are limited models of economic theory that attempt to describe the side effects of our limited ability to comprehend the consequences of our actions and so treat lots of stuff as "externalities". This is a necessary simplification considering we're still learning.
What's interesting is the slow but inevitable tendency of Economics to incorporate the lessons of Physics. The problem is one of
Science, who'd a thought!
P.S. I love
science in government
If the market was actually free.
But as long as the market is concentrated in the hands of a few players who use their muscle and money to lock out competitors (municipal broadband, co-ops that want to run broadband etc) it needs to be regulated to prevent abuse of that market power.
That's good old John "Pander Bear" McCain for ya. Most politicians have two faces, he has a whole set. One for every audience he's speaking in front of.
Business leaders? He's happy to tell 'em that doesn't cotton to all that fundy nonsense!
Conservative religious university? Give him that old time religion!
His stance on immigration shifts likewise, as does most every other position. Remember all those "maverick" statements that would appear one day, then vanish like smoke the next? Yeah.
...Study your history. The revolution had been brewing for many years. Many of the ideas about democracy come the French. Not to mention Rousseau.
"The quickest way to end a war is to lose it" -Orwell
How about being in the middle of Phoenix, 5th largest city in the USA?
* Cable: Great speed, 20 GB/month cap. You didn't want to, you know, download much on a high speed connection, did you?
* Wireless: Run by morons. WazTempe's "transparent" proxy isn't and if you have a bad connection (you will unless you're right next to an AP) you'll spend more time seeing the page telling you it logged you in for the 50th time this hour than actually browsing anything. Downloads? It loves to break those. Frequently. The wireless bands are horribly polluted by 20-30 random Linksys routers that the cable company gives out, which doesn't exactly help connectivity. You probably will get a better connection to those than to WazTempe, though. Sadly, that's one of the better options if the APs are open. I used this for a while, I really tried. But when you have to make a program to wget Google every 30 seconds just to keep your computer logged in over a flaky connection, you can't possibly recommend their service.
* DSL: From the map I saw, most of the population has to be outside of DSL range. There are only a handful of COs that I could see on Broadband Report's map. I'm at the VERY edge of their range, so I have a really slow and expensive IDSL link. No bandwith cap, but you're lucky to get 30 GB/month maxing out the line.
* Satellite: I didn't investigate these because the latency is so horrible, but maybe it'd have been better. I know my physics, though, and the ping times a link like that gives you are just bad. Also, your upstream is limited to dial-up speed. No good.
To even give him a second thought is ludicrous and a complete waste of time, and really quite a shame. It's more than obvious it will be business as usual. And his non-answer on copyright was exactly that. Nice cop out! As if I should expect any different from him. My translation on that and immigration, We must reform the institution of slavery, at the same time respecting the owners' property rights. I'm for allowing slaves to become citizens, but not the runaways. They must follow procedure. We can't just let them cut in front of the line of those who have. Note that we have moved the plantations outside the borders. That's the only difference between then and now. Slavery is alive and well. On the republican side, Ron Paul is all there is, but he doesn't get my vote either for the same reason.
What?
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
No need to wait -- Korea, Vietnam, Iraq.
Try googling for "Broadband Scandal" The first on my list when I did is here. If I recall correctly, the telecoms have received $200 billion in tax breaks &/or subsidies. We were promised 45Mbps fiber service for [most] everyone by last year. HaHa. You get yours? Me neither. The book Broadband Scandal was available as a free pdf for a week or so last year.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
> His take: there should be as little government regulation of broadband as possible. The market should be allowed to solve the Net-neutrality issue: 'When you control the pipe you should be able to get profit from your investment.'"
Sound like a reasonable concept until you realize that there'll be no disclosure. We the people won't know that their connection to BannerAdSearch.com is way way slower than their connection to MyBetterSearch.com because their ISP is getting paid money (on top of the money we pay them) to prioritize our traffic toward BannerAdSearch.com
"Let the market sort it out" doesn't work as well when secrecy is applied- then it becomes "race to the bottom".
-- Nil
((How long do you think it is before slavery is legal again? The new improved non-racist kind.))
My house gets cleaned weekly by Mexicans of unknown immigration status. They get $120 for about 3 hours work.
My lawn gets cut by Mexicans of unknown immigration status. They get $500/month, and I only have 1/3 of an acre.
And yes, I once had a house painted for $500 (not including the paint itself.) It took one guy two days, giving him $250 for two days work. Adjusted for inflation it's probably more like $700 today.
The idea that this is slave labor is asinine. The idea that the jobs should be paid more than that is asinine. The idea that I'm hurting the labor market by "only" paying $35-$50/hour for unskilled labor is asinine. The market is charging unreasonable amounts, and I'm responding appropriately.
Do you have any citations?
All of the studies I have seen about the net economic of undocumented workers is that it is either slightly positive, or slightly negative. The economists seem to agree that whichever way it goes, the figure is small.
As such, any significant expenditures to deal with the "problem" hurt me far more than the initial problem.
--
That said, we live in a time where there are so many problems that are vastly more important, the expanding authoritarianism of the government, the mess in Iraq, issues with foreign policy, the plummeting dollar the whole question of what one should do with American military might.
These are important questions that should be debated. But instead they bring up illegal immigration, because it's a tiny, unimportant issue that idiots like you can buy into. Or argue against.
Either way, only a fucking retard would bother arguing that illegal immigration is a problem worthy of first place in our current national discussion. Congratulations sir, you are that retard.
According to McCain, "We need to finish the War on Terror in Iraq by sending our troops against the insurgents until they're all dead." When asked to clarify whether he meant troops or insurgents, McCain shrugged, saying, "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran."
Wrong. The roads are publicly funded, and everybody has the option of using them. Schools are publicly funded, and every citizen is allowed (nay required) to attend.
While not everyone is required to go to public schools everyone is required to pay for them. If and when I ever have children I want to homeschool then as much as I can. What I can't teach I want to hire tutors to teach. That or have a private school teach. That's what my sister is doing with her daughter. Though she's 3 year old now, my sister is sending her to a school where she's learning ASL, American Sign Language, and French. I took ASL and French in college, half year of ASL and 1 1/2 years of French, and she knows both better than I did when I was taking them.
FalconShould there be a Law?
actually, stuff like portions of spectrum have been given away to existing big players for free on occasion, no auction. i wish i still had the link... anyway, yes, the internet in the us has all the negatives of lasseiz-faire and all the negatives of government control.
the privacy of one's mind is important.
you do have something to hide.
If some parents prefer a religious school, is it that big of a deal?
Yes, and if you don't understand why, you should give up your citizenship.
the drug trafficking, the weapon smuggling and the flood of humans coming over the border
Wow, that's some sensationalist verbiage you spewed there. You should work in news, and I mean that in the worst possible way.
Drug trafficking is unrelated to illegal immigration. People sometimes conflate them to try to create an emotional issue, or to try to create a false dilemma. The guy walking through the desert to try to build a life that can sustain his family is not carrying drugs or guns. He's carrying a bottle of water. Even ignoring the debate about the efficacy or intelligence of the "War on Drugs", you made a pointless argument because they are two separate groups of people.
Weapon smuggling: see above. Additionally, there is no significant problem with weapons being smuggled from foreign countries. There's no domestic shortage of weapons. There are problems with straw buyers, stolen guns, and all sorts of under the table nonsense. But none of that has anything to do with immigration.
Flood of humans: They're here because there are jobs for them. If anybody was serious about it, they'd just crack down on employers and it'd be problem solved in a year flat. No fences, no debates, no sanctimonious speeches. Just put some big fines on the existing laws and enforce them. Done.
As such, I am thoroughly convinced that illegal immigration as a topic of debate exists solely so that jackasses like you will try to pretend it's worth discussion, when the reality is that there are dozens of problems far more pressing, that will affect our children far more deeply, and that will affect our lives in more significant ways.
But we wouldn't want a candidate talk about America's *real* problems, now would we. Easier to just rile up retards like you about illegal immigration.
Well, what about the 'natural monopoly' of the owners of the last mile of copper wire/fiber optic cable to the homes? Unless we want 15 different cables and wires coming into each home for 15 different competing providers, how will we provide competition in the marketplace?
A local government or non profit can own the infrastructure. They then allow whoever to lease bandwidth and offer whatever service they want whther it be cable tv, net access, or phone service. A groups of communities in northeast Utah is doing this, they have A Broadband Utopia there.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The biggest problem with removing "net neutrality" is that Internet service is for the most part a natural monopoly. You pretty much either have to pay the one phone company or the one cable company. It's unrealistic for competitors to join the market, because laying a second set of wires to your house isn't going to happen. Alternative companies offering DSL service are still at the mercy of the phone company.
Internet customers don't really have a choice who to go to for Internet service. When service to popular sites gets slow, or when sites charge customers on certain ISPs more money, people can't get fed up and leave to a different provider. There are no market forces.
As much as everyone hates it, the only way to keep natural monopolies in check is to regulate them. Regulation is the difference between the current AT&T and the AT&T of the 1970's, and hardly anyone will argue that things are worse now. We don't have to rent phones anymore. Regulation sucks, but abusive monopolies suck worse.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Ron Paul!
This is just a flamewar and flamebait. It's only recently that Republicans have become the war party (among other things...), and prior to this administration they had on parity or less waring than the Democrats.
But McCain seems to have decided from his 2000 primary defeat that selling out to the farther right is in his best interest this time around. I'm just curious if his previous maverick persona was just an act.
Some market regulation is good and some market regulation is bad. I agree with regulating hygiene standards in restaurants because I don't want to get food poisoning. Yes, it makes work harder and costs more for restaurant owners, but it's something the vast majority want regulated. I also agree with building standard regulations including things like a requirement for hardwired smoke alarms in multiple occupancy buildings (A UK thang, not sure what kind of regs the US has for that) because it forces a situation where, for the example given, if there was a fire, people have an in-built warning system. Yes, architects and building owners will have to make considerations and concessions on the design of a structure and fork out more to install said fire alarms (plus extinguishers, thick doors with intumescent seals, etc), but so be it.
Regulation of the Internet when it comes to Net Neutrality is something I also agree with. Yes, it makes things harder and costs more for the businesses that provide backbone services, etc, but if big businesses are given control of what goes through their tubes, then, well, there will be consequences such as limitations on free speech online, as hey, it's their system and they can simply take it home with them if they get upset.
Over regulation is bad as well as it leads to authoritarianism, but a minimal amount to make the world a better place is better than none at all.
MilkMiruku
The government would not "move in and enforce neutrality", the government has BEEN enforcing neutrality since the dawn of the Internet under the common carrier laws as set forth in the 1996 Telecomm Act. Recent court decisions have reduced that capability for oversight--which is why the fight is happening now.
Do not for one second believe that the Internet has been free of regulation. It was created by the U.S. government and in the U.S., it has operated under government oversight its entire life. "Regulated" is the default state. What the big ISPs want is to CHANGE that to unregulated. They're halfway there thanks to the courts.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
And when the public gives you a monopoly, the public deserves some consideration.
With the development of almost every national infrastructure, this same argument has occurred. And every time, the concept of common carrier has needed to be applied by the government to ensure fair service. It's true on telephone lines, on railroads, on roads, in shipping services, etc.
The technical details of network traffic management will be worked out over time--yes. But the fair treatment of all must be enforced through government oversight. That has literally always been true when it comes to national networks.
Without such protection, the ISPs would have the power to block your Web site or e-mails simply because you complain about their service, or maybe they don't like your shirt. They wouldn't even have to give a reason--after all it's "their pipes."
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Well put. Very well put. I'm not a historian, but I'd like to add, that there is a large difference between a government surrendering and its people surrendering. As a government, surrender makes sense. The German war machine was on your border and could burn you to the ground in an instant. The country, as you said, had lost millions already, and did not wish to do so again. Add to this the historic and cultural value of the country, and it makes little sense to fight a hopeless battle that will only end in ruination of many areas. At least in surrender, people, especially the non-soldiers, may have better chances of surviving than if artillery was bombarding their homes. Courage and bravery isn't always to throw everything away to die a meaningless death.
On the other hand, the French Resistance, from what I have read of them, were not particularly the type of people you wanted to be on the wrong side of a rifle with.
And this is AFTER the brutal initial assaults before the surrender.
As an American, I have noticed we don't tend to talk about our more embarrassing military times (1812, Korea, Vietnam) but maaaaaan, did we ever kick that Hitler's ass with one hand tied behind our backs whole the girly French fell down and cried, amirite? This notion is sadly prevalent, but it's just not true. (Let's face it. America didn't "win the war." The Russians did much of the grunt work, and we came in late. Did we help? Most certainly. But it wasn't exactly "America shows up and the Nazis flee in terror")
France and America are tied in many ways. We are a people of a shared history, and should respect each other for that.
But we can't/won't ridicule and mock Germany, China, or Russia, all for various reasons (money in the first 2 cases, and Russia is a bit touchy), and we can't thumb our noses openly at the whole world while we're building an ostensible "coalition" and gabbing about the will of the free world. So France gets to be the proxy for everyone else who opposed us.
It amazes me that many Americans actually believe the crap the bush government push on the people.
Do you know in Iraq before the war women where free to choose if they where the head scarves now they do not really have a choice, hell even NON muslim women wear it to 'fit in' so they dont end up being kidnapped, raped, insulted, beaten by people on the street.
Where's the freedom and the womens rights?
I urge you all vote in the elections - although this will NEVER stop what America has become. A war machine bent on dominating the foreign markets for its own purpose. I think the only ones who can solve this problem is the rest of the world.
The world for too long has sat back and allowed America to dominate the markets via military means. When the world gets feed up and does something about it the average American will complain 'it wasn't our fault we had no control' but it will be too late.
Nope. Lack of bandwidth causes problems for VOIP. Net Neutrality stops ISPs from preying on a market in which they are neither producer nor consumer, and in which they have no incentive to be fair or to consider the market's long term viability. It'd be nice not to needlessly conflate the two.
What? Skype won't install on your machine with out a contract with your ISP? Do behave, there's a good fellow.
Not so much "don't care", more "don't think it's important enough to warrant breaking the rest of the internet".
I don't want your phone service going down through network congestion, either. But if the delays are due to a lot of non-VOIP traffic in between you and the person you want to call, then that's just your hard luck. If you want to guarantee that sort of access, get a land line; that's their selling point, after all.
Why oh why are so many people determined to mis-represent this issue as a clash between P2P and VOIP? What you're saying wouldn't just hurt bittorrent users; it would stifle every non-mainstream use of the internet. There'd be no more disruptive technologies emerging from the internet - they'd be de-prioritised to make way for "legitimate traffic" and die before there was ever enough of a userbase to contemplate a class action lawsuit.
And that's really my problem with your proposal: it's broken by default, and you have to go to court against a cartel of wealthy corporations to enable any new usage.
I'm sorry, but it just won't work.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Do you think people discovered places like Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and so on, in 1940 ? Come on, open an history book. It was discovered when Americans went there, and clearly, nobody had ideas of what was in place at that time. Even at the trial of Nuremberg, the issue was about war crimes, and not about crimes against humanity... But you come here, 60 years later, and explain what people should have done. You're the worst kind of people. When judging people from the past, try at least to know what they knew at that time. By the way, at that time, they were two governments for France. The "official" as you say, was official for the Germans, but for UK and USA, the official was the one in London. The leaders of the "official" were all sentenced to death.
> It wasn't WWII that broke the French, it was World War I. Their casualties were literally in
> the millions; they fielded the majority of the allied land forces, and most of the war took
> place on their territory. They held back, literally, the best army in the world. Fought them to
> a standstill for years in the face of obscene casualties.
With a little BIG help from their little Belgian friends... It was the Belgian king Albert I who, by not allowing his relative the Kaiser to enter Belgium to take the French by surprise, put his country as a buffer against the powerful german army. Then it was the decision to flood Belgium and the courage of its little army that stopped and held the ruthless Prussians (in Visé, Dinant and many more places they simply executed all Walloon civilians and destroyed their houses). And this involvment of Belgium in this war was crucial for that war to become the first "World War" and not yet another french-german war.
I guess it is yet another case of famous "french" stuff like the "frites" ("french" fries), the Smurfs, Lucky Luke, Tintin, Hercules Poirot, etc.
--
El Guerrero del Interfaz
Oh come on, everyone knows we were bailing out the FRENCH in Vietnam. Besides, if you ask virtually any vietnamese living in the US what THEY think of the war, the answer might surprise you. In part, the North Vietnamese were looking to throw out the foreigners, which was a good idea. Trouble is they installed a repressive totalitarian regieme. Elections? Forget it. Free speech? Are these things worth fighting for?
I do have to concede that in virtually all areas the US bungled so badly that I have come to believe that the only real way to get an open society is for the people of a country to fight for it themselves.
Some final questions - was it worth it to drop the A-bombs on japan to stop the brutal military dictatorship from raping and pillaging china, korea, the phillipines, etc.? Should we have invaded japan instead, continuing the conventional war at the cost of perhaps millions of more lives lost? Would it have been better to just let the japanese military do what they wanted?
I already knew that the USA had a strong 'corporatism' going instead of something more democratic, but I always figgered the 'lobbying' was much the same as in my country, exept for the cap on the amount.
But following your link, am I to understand that senators get the money *personally*? I mean, is it for the individual itself? Because in my country, the money given is legally transferred to the party of said politician. I even don't like that system, because it's in effect still bribery with a proxy. But am I to understand that in the US, you can actually pay an individual senator? How is this different from actually..well, just bribing him?
I always thought the 'legal bribery' part of USA politics was slightly ironic...but it isn't?
What does the USA law say about giving money to politicians, and where/why does it make a difference between paying money to one and bribing him? Is the difference that a senator explicitly says he will change his politics if he is given money - thus, if he just do it without explicitly saying so it remains legal?
Can anyone link me to a site where the legality of bribing/lobbying is explained?
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Which all tell me what I can do with my property.
life isn't fair baby!
But seriously, how is anyone supposed to support illegal immigration? Since when does anyone support something illegal in the context of government. What we do is support things that are currently illegal in the hope that in the future they will be legal. So when it comes to immigration, the parent poster supports a cheap workforce no matter who its made up of. Some of the people who reply to you are the xenophobes, because they only want the workforce to be people like them. You aren't racist or xenophobe, you just have a different perspective on whats fair. You can throw around words like "slave" but these people are in a situation where being taken advantage of is still to their advantage. I do advocate making it better, lets make immigration easier so that sadistic human smugglers can't leach off the hopes and dreams of poor people.
"how can they call it a MINE if everything here is THEIRS?!?!" -Straight Jacket
The French did shit except decimate the British fleet after we had already won so they couldn't run away back to England, nothing more nothing less.
And for the record the US did jackshit when it came to winning WW2 in Europe, the Russians were already on the offensive and would have steamrolled Hitler's troops all the way to Spain in a matter of months/years with or without D-Day or a second front being opened.
when do you find out what you're missing?
Much like the ToS you often see: reams of what THEIR RIGHTS are and one section there about your rights: "your statutory rights are not affected". Well, duh. They can't be. Now what ARE your statutory rights?
What seems missing from most discussions on net-neutrality, is the companies need to be able to hide under the blanket of common carrier status.
If they start to control the data that flows through their pipes, in any way what so ever, they can no longer claim to be a common carrier.
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
Politics on Slashdot. Serious business.
Waiting for Warhammer Online.
Too bad your opinion on anything is weightless. You have no knowledge of history whatsoever, you dumb kid.
Actually, it was well known at the time exactly what was going on the concentration camps. Ask the Jews - they knew well before the camps were discovered. They even tried to tell people but most folks put it down to hysteria. The governments in question knew all too well thanks to their own intelligence.
I have no quarrel with the French resistance. They stood up on their hind legs and fought. I have a serious quarrel with the vichy French government filled with Nazi collaborators many of whom are now powerful old men still running the French government. Somethings are worth fighting for. Better to die a quick clean death on the field of battle than to be slowly tortured and starved in a concentration camp.
I stand by my judgment of them.
2 more cents,
QueenB.
PS: You can mod me as a troll and flame bait all you like. Truth most always SUCKS. It just isn't "politically correct" to come out and say what the truth is because "it might offend someone". Well, now isn't that double plus good.
HDGary secures my bank
As an American, I have noticed we don't tend to talk about our more embarrassing military times (1812, Korea, Vietnam)...
You probably should have left that last war off your list. How often do you bring up your own embarassments in public conversation?
Granted that WWII is more the subject of books, games and TV these days, partly because the generation that fought in it is leaving us and this is our last chance to recognize their deeds and sacrifice.
But the Vietnam War did get it's fair share of coverage, especially in the mid to late 1980's. One major difference is that the folks who wanted to end that war gave up school, their jobs and more than that to bring the troops home. Nowadays we can't even pull people away from their keyboards.
...not even on a weekend when the weather's nice. ...no wonder Cindy Sheehan went home.
BTW, the TFA was about Senator McCain's take on Net Neutrality. He's a vet, right?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Hey! Stop insulting the mentally retarded!!
I share those concerns. VOIP is a fun toy, and a useful tool in certain specialised circumstances. I don't think the infrastructure currently exists for it to be a viable primary telephony system.
Where we differ is that you seem quite content to break the Internet in the general case, just so long as you can safeguard one particular application area. I can't accept that as a wise move.
And I do wonder if you're not letting your own personal involvement lead you to have an exaggerated idea of the importance of VOIP. I mean, you seem like a decent chap, and all that. But for all your talk about minimal intervention, it seems all you really want is to intervene in the way we use the 'net for your own personal benefit.
I wouldn't mind so much, but the end you see as being so important is simply to turn the internet into a telephone system. And, respectfully, we already have one of those. Worse, by the time the dust settles from the lawsuits your proposals will generate, it'll be a telephone system controlled by the same vested interests that control the current system. No disruptive technology, no consumer choice, no real benefit to VOIP over a land line.
Sorry, no sale.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
You can't take the sky from me...
I am not speaking against the non-Free market aspects here, just pointing them out. Many seem to have a hard time admitting that goods protected by copyrights and patents are not traded legally in a Free Market. To me, it is a separate question as to whether we think the copyright and patent solution is better than letting the Free Market try and find a solution, but at least people might try to come to grips with it not being a Free Market in those goods.
Niether copyrights nor patents exist in freetrade capitalism. Adam Smith the father of capitalism opposed copyrights and patents. I used to support both copyrights and patents, except business methods and software patents which I oppose, myself however recently I got into a debate on them and now I'm not no sure they are needed anymore.
I have only just started to wonder about corporations and Free Markets. These are early musings on that subject for me.
I've thought about both for a long tyme, and believe in freetrade capitialism as well as holding corporations to the standard of benefitting the common good and holding them responsible. Since I was a teenager I wanted to be an investor and start my own business. Now because of a disability I probably never will have my own business but with the help of my sister I may become an investor, maybe even a trader.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Hi there, Mr Mosch!
I believe we worked together a few years ago, if you're the original Mosch and not some newbie who bought his 3 digit ID. Send me an email, will ya? I tried your old email address, and it bounced.
We probably wouldn't agree about the role of regulation in the telecom industry - you're right that this particular subsidy isn't exactly propping up every phone company, but most utilities depended on government intervention for their creation: you simply can't lay a wire, pipe, or road from point A to point Z without stepping on a lot of property rights at points B through Y.
:-) I sometimes have to fight (and often succumb to) the urge to be stubborn and combative in an argument, and it's encouraging to see that urge defeated so thoroughly.
I do think that in general most governments (in particular the US federal government) aren't nearly as concerned with property rights as they should be. So if you're going to fight that problem, would you please try to do so in the tone of your last message, rather than the tone of the previous few? Responding to perceived deception and injustice rudely is natural, but if you make the effort to be polite you're more likely to convince others to come around to your way of thinking. That doesn't mean ceasing your opposition; you'd be doing just the opposite by making that opposition more effective.
Thank you for the apology, by the way. I doubt Deagol is coming back to this aging thread to read it, but you've at least convinced me that pseudonymous message boards don't have to be corrosive of civility.
In the end, I suspect we agree on more than we disagree. Personally, I doubt that VOIP will ever supplant the PSTN and my view is that the future lies in convergance technologies such as ATM which allow circuit and packet switching over the same physical lines.
However, I think that a lot of people defend net neutrality as a way of protecting services like Vonage from the bad telco/ISP's and hence I take issue with that issue.
Let me just leave one final thought for you, however. Where I live, the county owns a large fiber optic network that they lease space on to ISP's as a last mile solution. I have a fiber/ATM segment to my front door and much more choice in ISP's than most (I can probably choose between seven or eight broadband ISP's here). I even know a few owners of some of the smaller ISP's.
One of the problems that some of the smaller ISP's have experienced has been the fact that a smallish number of users can run Kazaa and other P2P software and interfere with everyone else's bandwidth simply because the ISP does not have enough upstream bandwidth for all users to be using their connections to capacity all the time. The solution many of these businesses have turned to is traffic shaping, essentially putting all P2P traffic in a separate routing queue.
Does this break the internet? I don't think so. The internet is designed to be latency-insensitive, so adding additional latency for certain types of high-bandwidth traffic which doesnt compete with an ISP-offered service does not seem to be a bad thing. In fact, the TCP spec requires that software using connectons slow down when the ACK's start getting delayed to avoid network congestion. So I fail to see what is wrong with this.
Nor do I see what is wrong with ISP's offering the option of putting VOIP protocols in a higher-priority queue. Again, TCP/IP is designed to be tolerant of this sort of thing, and it hardly seems to me to be breaking anything. (Aside from certain niche markets, however, I don't see such a service catching on.)
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
mmm... Vonage is rather the poster child for Net Neutrality; it's a popular company, widely popular and under siege from various vested interests. And in a great many ways, Vonage's plight exemplifies a lot of the abuses waiting in the wings if we abandon NN. But that doesn't mean that Vonage or VOIP are what the debate is about, and I don't think you're doing anyone any favours by representing it as such.
Here's a thought in return: I don't care if your ISP traffic shapes your traffic. That can be covered by the terms and conditions of your service agreement. It may be problem for people in areas where there's only really one or two service providers, but in the general case, if your ISP is too restrictive, you just change ISPs. Market forces apply and all that.
What I do care about is if a telecoms company other than your ISP wants to start degrading your traffic for their commercial advantage. You can't do anything about that: it's not like you can say "oh, I'll just use another Internet". And that's what the Net Neutrality debate is about. It's not about ISPs rate throttling bittorrent traffic from their customers, it's about third party carriers shouting "Stand And Deliver" on the information superhighway.
If it's your ISP shaping your traffic in ways covered by your service agreement, then neither do I. But that's not the issue. The issue is when carriers start de-prioritising everything that doesn't directly earn them money. That is what will break the Internet. That's what the debate is about.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Please note while I agree with all that you said, I meant we don't speak of these embarrassing moments TODAY. The only time I seem to notice Vietnam come up in public is "we can't treat our troops like that again" (though minor browsing shows that these claims of "spitting on the troops" and such are at best, exaggerated). I can't speak for everyone, but growing up, "we" were the good guys, and anyone we thought was bad. Fortunately, it didn't take long to realize what a load of crap this was. (It's war. There is no good guys or bad guys) And the Vietnam war was explained to me as "Well, we could have won, we just didn't want to stay that long" or such.
Anyway, anecdotal evidence is always a pure indicator, right? Right??
Oh, and yes, McCain is a vet. In fact, he's getting a lot of cold shoulders from Republican groups because he opposes torture. He opposes it because he was CAUGHT by the Vietnamese and tortured. So he knows QUITE a bit on the subject.
Read a book, learn a fact or two, THEN comment. But I guess this is /. so that is unpossible.
The THREAT of the second front tied up entire German Armies on the Western Coast of Europe to help defend Hitler's "Fortress Europe" you ignorant troll. THAT is what allowed the Soviet Union to push toward Germany.
As a matter of fact, the Soviet Union had been screaming for the Allies to open the second front since 1942. That it was not opened until June 6, 1944, was due to the need of the US to retool factories, and get war production to a point where it would support a 2 front war (against Japan in the Pacific and against Germany/Italy in Europe). Remember, the US supplied most of the war fighting capabilities for the Allies in WW2. Lend/Lease ring a bell? No expectation of repayment was actually written into the program to prevent the rest of the Allies from owing us a shitload of $$ at the conclusion of the war. Take your trollishness and shove it someplace special, ok?
On to something relevant:
McCain is as bad as the rest. He is a politician. And until we get the politicians and the corporations, and the special interest lobbies out of Washington, things will continue to go downhill.
What an ass:
I suppose things can get worse.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
My own view is that the issues with Vonage do not support a net neutrality position. I.e. if you want to support "net neutrality," VOIP is the wrong technology to argue about because it is fundamentally hurt by Net Neutrality (i.e. can never be a viable replacement for the PSTN if net neutrality is the name of the game).mmm... Vonage is rather the poster child for Net Neutrality; it's a popular
company, widely popular and under siege from various vested interests. And
in a great many ways, Vonage's plight exemplifies a lot of the abuses waiting
in the wings if we abandon NN. But that doesn't mean that Vonage or VOIP are
what the debate is about, and I don't think you're doing anyone any favours
by representing it as such.
Would that not be prevented in most Net Neutrality proposals?Here's a thought in return: I don't care if your ISP traffic shapes
your traffic. That can be covered by the terms and conditions of your
service agreement. It may be problem for people in areas where there's
only really one or two service providers, but in the general case,
if your ISP is too restrictive, you just change ISPs. Market forces apply
and all that.
What I do care about is if a telecoms company other than your ISP wants to
start degrading your traffic for their commercial advantage.
You can't do anything about that: it's not like you can say
"oh, I'll just use another Internet". And that's what the Net Neutrality debate is about.
It's not about ISPs rate throttling bittorrent traffic from their customers, it's about
third party carriers shouting "Stand And Deliver" on the information superhighway.
I think we share the viewpoints on these concerns. The difference is in the solution, not the question of whether the problem exists.If it's your ISP shaping your traffic in ways covered by your
service agreement, then neither do I. But that's not the issue. The issue
is when carriers start de-prioritising everything that doesn't directly earn
them money. That is what will break the Internet. That's what the
debate is about.
I would also add that the FCC has unfortunately been moving regulations to a point where most of the country will be served by at best a duopoly of high-speed ISP's (the baby bell, and the cable company). This does not allow for enough competition and I think we need to work on reversing this trend (fostering real competition in the high-speed ISP space). I am luckier than most-- my county owns a number of hydro dams witha high-speed control network that is woefully undercommitted. So they used this to start a county-wide public internet infrastructure. So while I have a choice of maybe a dozen high-speed internet service providers, most people in the country are lucky if they have a choice between two.
We need to make sure that people *do* have such a choice.
We also need to make sure that two specific scenarios are prevented while avoiding too much regulation in other areas:
1) We need to make sure that any traffic shaping is not done in an anti-competitive way. I suggest that tightening antitrust laws would be a good place to start here.
2) We need to make sure that any traffic shaping is not done on the basis of extorting money from web sites. A limited net neutrality proposal simply targetting the other endpoint (saying that you cannot discriminate on the basis of destination) would be acceptable to me. A blanket proposal banning all traffic shaping would not.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
It's not the taxpayers money, it's the ISP's money, given to it no strings attached from the gov'mint, which in turn robbed it at the point of a gun (in broad daylight) from it's unsuspecting, uninformed and non-objecting 'free' citizens. Any complaint about what is done with 'your' money should keep in mind it's not your money any more. Once you've been taxed (read - mugged), any control you think you might have/could have/should have over it's use is null and void. Remember - money freely given to a government is money lost for people.
[/rant]
Just to make it clear - I'm a citizen of a democracy (well, they call it a democracy), and I do pay taxes. I just have no illusion that I'm somehow 'buying' something with that cash. Once it's out of my bank account, it's out of my hands. Nobody is forced to give me anything in return, and nobody asks me what to do with it. And if you think that my use of the word 'rob' is hyperbolic, look it up.
Possibly. I must admit I've not been following the proposed legislation. But if so, it's the proposals that are broken and not the principle of Net Neutrality.
I think we agree a problem exists. I'm not sure we see the same problem, however. I did a bit of reading up on this, since this discussion. The whole Network Neutrality issue seems to have kicked off with an interview SBC CEO Edward Whitacre gave to business week. This is the offending section:
As you see, he's not talking about traffic shaping, and he's not talking about victimising specific sites. He's talking about making people pay to use his pipes. "People" probably doesn't mean you and me directly, but it's only a matter of time once the practice is accepted before it means the ISPs. And if they have to pay a surcharge to use Ed's pipes then they have to pass it on to us. So he may be talking about Google and Vonage, but what he means (reading between the lines) is that he wants to tax everyone using the Internet.
And... I'm not an expert on US law, but I'm not sure that anti-competitive law would apply if they victimise everyone equally. They'd just be charging all the market would bear, surely. And they we could look forward to cross licencing deals between the big boys which would allow them to offer service at a lower price than the mom and pop ISPs that had to pay a surcharge to every penny ante cableco on the face of the globe, and that would just be "economies of scale" when it came to court. Eventually, there would be a handful of multinational service providers, and the content companies would finally achieve their dream of turning the Internet into Just Another TV Channel.
So, really, I'm not adverse to tightening anti-trust law, but I don't think it's going to offer any sort of protection here. And I don't think that protecting specific sites is going to help, because I don't think that's the plan. I think that's a bit of misdirection; what they want is to charge everyone.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
We can agree that victimizing specific sites should be illegal.
Neutrality to endpoint is worth considering. Neutrality to protocol is not something I can support.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
True. Although Google and Vonage are the least of my concerns. Google in particular have the money and lawyers to make sure they get a slice of any eventual carve up.
mmm... I don't think I understand what you mean by that. Do you mean that third party carriers shouldn't be allowed to charge some users or final ISPs more than others? Because I don't think that's what they want to do. I think the they want to charge everyone, everywhere. If you stop them being predatory, they'll just use that as the excuse to roll out charges across the board.
Which kills the next emergent network technology stone dead. The carriers will drop anything they don't understand, and only the big boys will be able to cut the deals needed for new protocols to be accepted. Although, in practice, I suspect we'll just see a lot more use of ssh tunnels, possible even the scenario from Cryptonomicon where endpoints stream encrypted full bandwidth white noise at one another, just so no one can do traffic analysis on them. It wouldn't exactly be an improvement, but it would get round protocol based traffic shaping. Unless of course you'd sanction shaping SSL session traffic. Mind, that might ruffle a few more feathers than you would just blocking kazar and e-donkey.
Look .. I get the feeling I'm trying your patience here, and I don't mean to do that. You seem like a decent fellow, and it's been an interesting discussion. Maybe this would be a good time to shake metaphorical hands and agree to differ?
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
True. Although Google and Vonage are the least of my concerns. Google in particular have the money and
lawyers to make sure they get a slice of any eventual carve up.
mmm... I don't think I understand what you mean by that. Do you mean that third party carriers shouldn't be allowed to charge some users or final ISPs more than others? Because I don't think that's what they want to do.
No. I mean that you can't interfere with traffic, charge more for priority access, etc. merely depending on where the non-local end-point is.
In short, you can't sell enhanced http access to Google and threaten to degrade or block access to MSN.
I.e. all traffic for a given user on a given protocol must be treated equally.
I think the they want to charge everyone, everywhere. If you stop them being predatory, they'll just use that as the excuse to roll out charges across the board.
Yeah, but this only works if they are allowed to charge content providers for their protection racket. If you outlaw the ability to treat any content provider differently on a network level, the problem goes away.
THis is what you seem to be after in net neutrality. If so, I agree.
Which kills the next emergent network technology stone dead. The carriers will drop anything they don't understand, and only the big boys will be able to cut the deals needed for new protocols to be accepted. Although, in practice, I suspect we'll just see a lot more use of ssh tunnels, possible even the scenario from Cryptonomicon where endpoints stream encrypted full bandwidth white noise at one another, just so no one can do traffic analysis on them. It wouldn't exactly be an improvement, but it would get round protocol based traffic shaping. Unless of course you'd sanction shaping SSL session traffic. Mind, that might ruffle a few more feathers than you would just blocking kazar and e-donkey.
Look .. I get the feeling I'm trying your patience here, and I don't mean to do that. You seem like a decent fellow, and it's been an interesting discussion. Maybe this would be a good time to shake metaphorical hands and agree to differ?
I am not sure I understand. You suggest that traffic shaping of P2P traffic within an ISP is OK. Many ISP's do block some ports (my ISP only blocks port 22 and unblocks that upon request-- they do this because of the number of SSH break-in attempts they see on their network). I don't see any major complaint about that either.
The thing is-- the network neutrality debate seems to have two components:
The fear that content providers will be charged by ISP's for access to their customer bases. This is a valid fear and regulation may be needed to deal with it. Network neutrality specific to this concern would be something I could support.
There is also the fear that ISP's will degrade traffic for protocols relating to services (particularly VOIP) which they compete with. This is a valid fear and we need to deal with it. However, I do not think that this means that we can't allow ISP's to do traffic shaping for specific customers and specific protocols as long as they are not attempting to harm their competition in so doing. You seem to have no objection to this point either.
So our problem may actually be one of definitions more than anything else. It seems to me that I see network neutrality defined more broadly than you. Perhaps I am wrong on this, however.
Let me rephrase my two requirements agai
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Fair 'nuff. Just thought it worth mentioning.
Tell you what. Let's suppose we have five people, Alice, Bob, Charlie, Dave and Emma. We'll say they live strung out along a long desert road. Each of them sees their nearest neighbours reularly, but it's too far to keep in direct contact with the rest.
So they decide a simple system for message passing. If one has a message for someone down the line they tell the neighbour living closest to that person, who passes it on. So if Alice wants to say something to Dave, she tells Bob, and Bob tells Charlie when he sees him, and Charlie tells Dave. Once a year Bob, Charlie and Dave's neighbours buy them each a bottle of beer bu way of saying "thanks" for the message service. Well, no one buys beer for Alice and Emma since they never have to carry messages. But that's ok: they're just glad to be able to keep in touch with the rest of the community.
That's the way the Internet is supposed to work. Bob, Charlie and Dave are "common carriers" in that they pass on everything they are given, and they get their recompense from their nearest neighbours. That's Network Neutrality as I understand it.
The problem starts when one day Charlie has an epiphany: "Alice and Emma are using my pipes for free!" he exclaims. "We'll soon put a stop to that!" And so now Alice and Emma have to buy Charlie a been every year as well as one for their neighbour. Charlie is no longer a common carrier, and he's no longer network neutral, but he has just doubled his beer income, which some people might see as justification enough. Certainly the argument looks persuasive to Dave who can see the extra beer Charlie is getting. So he says "in that case, Bob and Alice are using my pipes for free!" So no Alice has to buy yet another beer. So does Bob, but he can at least retaliate, and does so by charging Dave and Emma for using his "pipes".
So all of a sudden, Emma and Alice find the cost of sending messages has gone up three fold with no compensating rise in the value of the service. Meanwhile Bob, Charlie and Dave realize that the the beer they're getting from each other is the same as the beer they're getting from each other, and it would make sense to just waive one another's charges, or maybe take a bottle and pass it around between them once a year in token satisfaction of contractual agreements. Now the lads are getting same amount of beer bought for them as before, but they no longer have to buy beer for anyone. While the girls on the and are have seen their beer bill treble overnight. Obviously, Bob, Charlie and Dave consider this to be "good business".
OK. let's try that. Alice goes to the judge and says, "Judge, Charlie is discriminating against me by refusing to carry my packets. That's discriminating against my mail based on endpoint. Please make him stop",
"With respect, your honour" say Charlie, "that just isn't so. I treat everyone the same way. It's just that I provide a service for which I demand compensation. Anyone who fails to provide compensation is not entitled to the service".
"That sounds fair to me" says hizzonner, "Charlie is not discriminating on endpoint, he's discriminating based on failure to pay. O
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Ok. I think I see where the argument is. And it is a matter of definitions rather than substance.
When I say discriminate on endpoint on a network level, what I mean is that the routers may not consider any valid (from an RFC perspective) endpoint differently than any other regardless of any business decisions. Obviously ISP's are not required to forward addresses upstream that are invalid for various reasons (private IP address space, for example).
In other words, what you are describing would be within my definition of descrimination on the network level because one person should not be able to look at where the packets are going except to be sure that they *can* be routed there.
Furthermore, I would ban traffic shaping only where it either degrades a competing service, or where it selectively degrades traffic based on remote end-point. I.e. you can sell better access to protocols to your subscribers, but you cannot sell better access to your customer base to content providers. I hope this makes more sense.
I.e. selling QoS for VOIP is OK. Degrading VOIP traffic is not OK only if you sell competing services or if it is in collusion with someone who does. Charging Google for faster access to your customer base is not OK.
Again, this brings me back to two proposals:
1) On a network/router level, routers should not be allowed to consider any remote endpoint in routing priority, nor should they filter out based on that endpoint except under a whitelisted set of reasons (security bypass attempts coming from that endpoint, for example). An ISP *can* look at endpoints originating from their network, but may only look at remote ones under certain enumerated circumstances under this proposal (probably mostly security-related).
2) Businesses should not be allowed to use traffic shaping or similar technologies to block competition. Even if an ISP can look at local endpoints, they cannot use this information to damage their competition. Thus if they want to offer telephony services, they cannot degrade VOIP. Nor can an ISP block ports relating to or competing with services they offer. Yes, this would cause some pain for ISP's since they could no longer block port 25 in/out. And port 80 could not be blocked inbound if they also offer web hosting services.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
OK, I can cope with that.
I think so. Let's find out - we'll design a new protocol. Let's call it BSL for Business Session Layer. It's essentially identical to SSL except that in addition to the encryption data already present in the SSL protocol, there's facility for an arbitrary number of cryptographic tickets. The idea here is that carriers can sell an encryption key to an ISP who then uses it to generate tickets for each packet then send out. At each hop, the router checks to see if the packet has a ticket authorizing if for that particular subnet. If the ticket is absent, out of date, or invalid, the packet gets dropped.
Now suppose I'm AT&T and I offer to prioritize this protocol. It's not discriminating against anyone. We'll accept the traffic regardless of source, and give equal priority to all packets using this protocol. But unless the endpoint has paid AT&T for a key, it's useless to them. And since the protocol supports any number of tickets, all the major carriers can get in on the act.
So now we can privatize the entire Internet, save only one thing. We still have to support other forms of TCP/IP traffic and we're not allowed to de-prioritize that. What do we do? We stream junk traffic between all the nodes our subnet. Basically, the carriers all DOS themselves. Of course, the prioritized packets get through without a problem, but for all other purposes, the network is dead.
Tricky one, isn't it?
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
I think so. Let's find out - we'll design a new protocol. Let's call it BSL for Business Session Layer. It's essentially identical to SSL except that in addition to the encryption data already present in the SSL protocol, there's facility for an arbitrary number of cryptographic tickets. The idea here is that carriers can sell an encryption key to an ISP who then uses it to generate tickets for each packet then send out. At each hop, the router checks to see if the packet has a ticket authorizing
if for that particular subnet. If the ticket is absent, out of date, or invalid, the packet gets dropped.
Now suppose I'm AT&T and I offer to prioritize this protocol. It's not discriminating against anyone. We'll accept the traffic regardless of source, and give equal priority to all packets using this protocol. But unless the endpoint has paid AT&T for a key, it's useless to them. And since the protocol supports any number of tickets, all the major carriers can get in on the act.
So now we can privatize the entire Internet, save only one thing. We still have to support other forms of TCP/IP traffic and we're not allowed to de-prioritize that. What do we do? We stream junk traffic between all the nodes our subnet. Basically, the carriers all DOS themselves. Of course, the prioritized packets get through without a problem, but for all other purposes, the network is dead.
Maybe.Tricky one, isn't it?
However, I would make a couple of notes here. This seems very hypothetical. I think we differ in our approach here in along the lines of whether it is better to try to ban all possible harms or whether we should just act when there is clear and present danger.
Even so, I have a very hard time imagining such a system taking off. However, just to be clear, I would probably phrase the proposal (regarding deprioritizing traffic) as:
An Internet Service Provider may not attempt to actively degrade the performance any protocols that compete with any services they offer. Banned activity includes without exclusion deprioritizing traffic below the median routing priority or blocking ports.
Under such a proposal, the activities in your hypothetical scenario would be banned due to the wording "without exclusion."
However, that aside, the internet is already privatized, or at least most of the lines and routers are. The way this currently works involves agreements between networks to route traffice between them (peering agreements). In these cases, money changes hands based in part on the symmetry of the data exchanged. Over the last few years, we have seen issues relating to what happens when these agreements are revoked. So, in essence, traffic is already charged per hop-- you just don't see it on your bill. Note that the provision against looking at remote end-point for routing priority would not necessarily tell people who they have to peer with.
This obviously does not stop the issue of one side challenging a peering agreement and deciding not to allow traffic to be routed directly to or from a specific bordering subnet, but the internet is designed to work around such problems. I don't see a way to legislate around such problem without causing more damage anyway.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I think I maybe didn't make this bit very clear. See, if I was a unprincipled, greed obsessed CEO of a major telecoms company, I wouldn't do it like that. What I'd do is set up bittorrent clients on each of my nodes and torrent files filled with random noise between the nodes in the subnet. It set the traffic so the BT used 99% of the available bandwidth, meaning that only traffic that had been prioritised upwards could get past.Nothing is be prioritised downwards - I'm just artificially increasing the load on my network.
And if anyone asks why they can't use my pipes without accessing a for-pay protocol, I just say "99% of the traffic on our network is filesharing, your honour". And the chances are no one will look any closer.
Nothing is being excluded though. There's an excellent chance any one of your packets will get through, eventually. It's just that other traffic (much of it using file sharing protocols) is putting such a load on out network that non-prioritised traffic can't get through. That's why need to be able to offer prioritised protocols, which we do for a very reasonable fee, by the way.
Nothing has to be de-prioritised. Nothing has to be blocked. And if enough of the big players got together on this, they could make it fly.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
If this does become a problem, then we can legislate against it specifically. I personally see more harm than good in legislating against hypotheticals. The desire to charge content providers is no longer hypothetical. The desire to block competition is not hypothetical. We can reasonably talk about solutions to these problems because the way the problem is manifesting is clear. However, when we talk about hypotheticals, we cannot be sure that we are not just putting together legislation which will be easily abused. Hence we need to be clear about intent (i.e. no stifling competition and no charging content providers for access or enhanced access to your network) and be less worried about the deatils.
If people want to try to price gouge by forcing one to pay for QoS packages, we can address that when the problem comes up. I am not convinced economically that such a plan would work or that it would even make sense economically to an ISP to try.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Well, currently the whole situation is hypothetical. We don't know for sure who Whitaker and his friends are going to charge, and we don't how they intend to implement the scheme. But now they have the idea, it seems silly to leave loopholes to be exploited.
So let's turn the problem around: why are you so determined to retain protocol based traffic shaping? Do you really believe that bittorrent will destroy the Internet? Do you think that we need VOIP badly enough to leave a loophole open? Or do you just want a weapon to attack file sharing?
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
It seems like we are back around to the beginning of the discussion.
I think that ISPs should be able to provide traffic shaping in pro-competitive ways, while you do not. This seems to be the only area of our disagreement.
Secondly, I am not sure that what you have described would even be allowed. Intentional interference with the traffic would seem to be banned under my proposal no matter how it might be done.
Control over Quality of Service is an area which, for better or worse, has become very much a part of TCP/IP. For example, there are already accepted RFC's concerning traffic engineering extensions to OSPF. There are also sets of RFC's relating to centralized management of policy routing, and the like.
It seems to me that legislating which RFC's can be supported by ISP's would "break the internet" as you put it. Instead, it would be better to have a law which establishes a clear intent against abusing those RFC's. Perhaps we should give the FCC a mandate to ensure this sort of thing?
This last part of my post is likely to be controversial and probably everyone will hate to read it (IANAL). I do assume that the reader is in the US for this to make sense. This next paragraph is not about a political position but rather contrasting frameworks.
When you look at Roe v. Wade, the only support people can give it is for the "central holding." The actual framework in the ruling, designed to settle for all time the question of the extent to which abortion was protected was a miserable failure. The court sought to draw arbitrary lines over what was permissible and what was not and created a system which was both brittle and subject to abuse (particularly by those who didn't like the ruling). Justice O'Connor later championed a more conservative framework which supplanted that from Roe in Casey v. Planned Parenthood. This framework removed the bright lines drawn in Roe (the trimester framework) and replaced it with a more flexible approach (no undue burden) which actually extended the protection given to abortion. O'Conner's more conservative approach has been much more successful.
My point is that if you try to overly define what is problematic and what is not, you will likely end up causing problems for many ISP's who are not abusing the standards, while encouraging those who are likely to do so to look for ways around the legislation. Therefore I would draw the line at "intentionally interfering" with competing protocols and leave it at that. Sure there may be abuses, but they are banned, and we should create a framework for enforcement.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Sorry for the late reply: I've been away for a couple of days. Anyway...
I don't object to traffic shaping at all. I just don't value it so highly that I'm willing to enable predatory pricing schemes just to preserve the practice.
In what way? All I'm proposing is a new protocol, and that ISPs be allowed to send private data between their own nodes on their own sub-nets. Best of luck drafting a law to outlaw that. Doubly so when it comes to prosecuting it in court.
Whoops! Not so fast, if you please. I'm not suggesting we enact legislation as to which RFCs ISPs may support. What I'm proposing is legislation that would would make it illegal to comply with those RFCs in certain circumstances. We already have plenty of those. For instance, suppose I had a web server containing lots of copyrighted materials that I was not licensed to distribute. In this case, the law makes it illegal for me to comply with RFC1954, at least regard to the unlicenced files. I don't see that breaking the Internet, however.
Hmmm... not being a US citizen, I don't have a well defined impression of the FCC. I know there's a lot of debate as to their role, but I've never taken the time to sift through the propaganda and the faith-based-reasoning, so I don't think I can usefully comment here. What I will say is that in the UK, having an independant regulator seems to have worked quite well. British Telecom still own a tremendous amount of the infrastructure, but there are still lots of independent ISPs. The ISPs moan about BT, but overall, everyone seems able to do business,
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
s/RFC1954/RFC1945/
After going to the trouble of looking it up, you'd think I'd check I had it spelt correctly....
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Just a few points.
First, I guess the question is what sort of predatory pricing scheme you are worried about. If it is about charging content providers, than my proposal covers this. I think that traffic shaping should be on the basis of customer end point and protocol only.
Secondly, let us go back to your hypothetical situation of hop-by-hop verification and routing. The easy (and inexpensive) way for an ISP to handle this is to simply block other IP-level protocols. Not signed? Dropped. Nothing in any net neutrality proposals (other than mine) would prevent that practice. This is one of the problems with targetting traffic shaping-- the alternatives are a whole lot easier.
Another legitimate service offered by a few ISP's involve parental controls (essentially attempting to block porn sites at the customer's request). Provided that the customer is the one in charge of the blocking, I don't have a problem with that. I suppose my proposal should provide for customer-controlled site blocking but at the moment it does not.
I suppose I would add:
"Nothing in the rest of the proposal is intended to prevent blocking of content by subject matter provided that the customer has complete control over this sort of blocking. ISP's who do such blocking would, however, be liable for damages in the event of blocking content inappropriately."
The problem with targetting the technology rather than the intent is that the technology always changes. Hence such proposals saying "no traffic shaping" will not solve the problem for any length of time.
Finally about the FCC. This federal organization is designed to regulate communications infrastructures. This includes air waves and telephone networks (including anything that goes over telephone lines, such as DSL). The form of regulation has generally differed based on media, but a lot of effort goes into making sure that devices don't interfere with eachother. For example, while there is some level of regulation regarding indecency over the air waves, up until the AT&T breakup, they were heavily involved in fostering competition in the long-distance telephone service market.
They also regulate the actual lines that are used in most internet connections. Unfortunately, their latest approach seems to be to push towards a duopoly of cable and dsl providers. I have argued repeatedly that this needs to be reversed and the only way to reverse it is to get Congress involved. I actually think that a duopoly of internet access providers would be more threatening to the openness of the internet than any threat by a few large ISP's to charge content providers. Simply put-- larger numbers of viable competitors would solve the net neutrality issue far better than any legislation.
This is not to say that state and local governments cannot play a role. As I said, in my county, I have a number of choices for local telephone and high-speed internet access (all multiplexed over an ATM/Fiber network owned and operated by the county PUD). This is in addition to the cable and copper/dsl options. I personally think that counties should build and operate such networks, and then rent out the lines for services to other providers, fostering competition.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP