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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.'"
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
Honestly, the perfect market argument is just as good as any "in a perfect world" arguments.
The Raven
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
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.
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.
(You might think I'm joking, but this is exactly what big business does.)
Free Hans!
Well us formerly French hating Americans are now pleased to say we no longer hate France. You can thank Sarky for that.
On a side note, I laugh that all these groups who advocate democracy and peacful resolution riot when the wrong person gets elected.
"The quickest way to end a war is to lose it" -Orwell
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....
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?
I really can't understand it. Perhaps it's something about the foundation myth of ragtag civilians freezing in the woods winning a nation against a mighty empire. The fact the French made this possible and it wasn't just a small band of heroes must really annoy some jingoistic "patriots".
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.