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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 government's job is to assure that the market actually functions correctly. In a situation where you have a small number of large carriers who basically hold both consumers and content producers in their grips, you do not have a functioning market. Since no one is really advocating cutting the big pipe holders down, the only other reasonable alternative is the big R; Regulation. In a perfect marketplace, the government would have little or no role at all, but come on, living just a few years after a century which saw huge monopolies and markets that simply were nonfunctional in the laissez-faire notion of a well-functioning marketplace.
If there were a thousand independent large pipe providers in the US, then net neutrality wouldn't even be an issue. But because the large bulk of it is concentrated, they can get away with what can only be seen as extortion; give us money or we'll strangle your bits. That's clearly predatory and monopolistic behavior, and a properly observant government would lay it on the line "Fuck with a market that you already have too much power over, and we will make sure your powers are greatly reduced". All it would require is Congress to even mutter this, and I think you would see the market corrected in a fashion that is to the consumer's benefit. After all, the whole point of the market is consumers, and they should be the prime concern of both the government and the players big and small.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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...
Eh, I just saw that as depressing pandering to the religious nutjobs that make up a huge portion of the Republican base.
I gave up on him after his little trip to Baghdad in which he endangered American soldiers by making them act as his personal armed guard so he could safely go to a market to show us how safe(!) it is. Anybody who has lost friends to war and can still bring himself to unnecessarily endanger soldiers for the sole purpose of tricking Americans into keeping them at war will never, ever have my respect as a human being, much less my vote.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"