Senators Call For Hearing On Carrier Content Blocking

HangingChad writes "Two Senators on Friday called for a congressional hearing to investigate reports that phone and cable companies are unfairly stifling communications over the Internet and on cell phones. Now that the Senate is getting into the act, Comcast will probably want to come up with some new talking points as their old ones were leaked."

Comments

Re:unfair vs. illiegal

[Silverlancer]

Comcast doesn't filter Bittorrent--they FALSIFY RST packets in order to terminate connections, which is wire fraud and therefore completely illegal.

Re:It probably won't make any difference.

[kcbrown]

Historically, totalitarianism of one form or another has been by far the preferred form of government, as evidenced by the fact that the vast majority of the people who have ever lived have lived under it.

Do you have evidence of this assertion? Or is it just conjecture?

You're kidding, right?

Look at the history of the world. The entirety of China has never lived under anything other than a totalitarian form of government (the specific form of totalitarianism has changed over time but the fact that the form has been totalitarian has not). The entirety of Russia has similarly done so except for the relatively brief period of time after the Berlin Wall fell. Those two countries alone are probably enough to make my case, but there's a lot more. India was totalitarian for its entire history until 1950. The entirety of Europe was totalitarian until the mid to late 1700s. The Roman Republic and the lands it represented were briefly nontotalitarian (for about 450 years) but were totalitarian otherwise -- the Republic lasted until the advent of the Roman Empire, which itself lasted about the same amount of time. After that, it was ruled by one empire or monarchy or another until about 1950. After that, it's been democratic (the specific time that any given territory of the Roman Empire went with democracy depends, but very few appear to have done so earlier than about 1800). And then, of course, you have the Egyptian Empire, which lasted longer than any other government ever.

See a pattern here? Throughout history and throughout the world, totalitarianism is the norm. Freedom and self-determination are very much the exception. Real democracy as a form of government (where the people have a real say in their government) isn't new at all, but it's rare.

Re:not the same

[westlake]

ISPs, fiber owners have built the lines with PUBLIC funding, on PUBLIC property. they DO NOT own the lines.

I hear this mantra repeated again and again on Slashdot.

Public investment in telecommunications in the U.S. has - historically - been negligible.

When the moon and stars have been properly aligned you just might you get funding from Congress for a demonstration project like the first Atlantic cable or an Appalachian Co-Op during the New Deal.

But, with these modest qualifications, it's fair to say that the privately financed American telco has always owned and built the lines. Western Union had a transcontinental telegraph service up and running in 1861.