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Comcast Proposes Self Regulation and P2P Bill of Rights
Torodung writes "In a recent move, Comcast has proposed a 'P2P Bill of Rights,' joining the ranks of every great monopoly when threatened by government regulation for alleged misbehavior. They have instead proposed comprehensive industry self-regulation and cooperation with major P2P software vendors as a lesser evil: 'Comcast is looking to further position itself as proactively — and responsibly — addressing the issue of managing peer-to-peer traffic that traverses its network, announcing Tuesday it will lead an industry-wide effort to create a "P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" for users and Internet service providers.'"
Finally!
Wolves propose sheep "Bill of Rights".
Now why would anyone be concerned about ISPs meddling with their traffic? University of Washington researchers are set to release a paper today that says one percent of the Web pages being delivered on the Internet are being changed along the way... http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/041608-isps-meddled-with-their-customers.html
Yeah, right. The ISPs have gotten so far into bed with the RIAA that the only thing listed in the "P2P Bill of Rights" will be the right to remain silent.
Comcast is beginning to feel the pressure, they are stalling for time now with faux "rights bills". Now is the time to push EVEN HARDER for full Net Neutrality legislation. We have them on the ropes, don't let up now!
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Not surprising that missing from their list of "industry experts" are groups like Free Press, Public Knowledge, and the EFF.
Wow. It took it almost 10 years for major corporations to see how P2P can be used effectively for a lot of things other than just 'sharing illegal mp3s'.
Capitalism is good, but not when lead by blind corps with no consumer interest in mind.
And here's the catch:
cooperation with major P2P software vendorsWhich still means that if the P2P "software vendors" (who are these?) pays them, they'll allow it. Great neutrality.
c++;
They suggest SELF-regulation...
I wonder how long this regulation will actually last before it goes back to the status quo.
or, how about instead they just provide the service people are, um, you know paying for?
Just move my packets around without f'ing with them, please and thank you.
"joining the ranks of every great monopoly when threatened by government regulation for alleged misbehavior"
I loved ridiculously ignorant statements like this. How did it become a monopoly in the first place? What stops another company from springing up to provide cable internet services for cheaper? Answer - government intervention. Saying that government regulation is somehow going to fix what government regulation broke is absurd. If you want to get rid of a monopoly, get rid of the government regulation that prevents competing companies from existing. Creating the illusion of choice through increased regulation is not going to be good for consumers. They're going to continue getting inflated prices and idiotic restrictions like what was attempted for torrents.
I didn't actually RTFA but I quickly skimmed it, as I save my reading for writers who don't put me to sleep, except when I read in bed. Where in the article does it say what rights P2P users should have?
My guess is "you have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law."
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Reminds me of a poorly translated sign I saw on a third-world trade shop picture: "We won't cheat you too bad."
BitTorrent was originally designed to be VERY tolerant of ISP's needs. Prior to the obfuscated protocol expansion, the first thing sent by each connection, on both sides, was "BitTorrent protocol", easy for a protocol analyzer to discover and assign a lower bandwidth tier.
So what did ISPs do? They throttled it to zero, rather than to an intermediate level we all could live with.
The end result: Encrypted BitTorrent, and ISPs using drastic methods like spoofing reset packets.
this might even work in today's anti-regulatory environment.
y'know, if the us govn't was willing to subsidize infrastructure ... then you might not have these problems. ... to avoid all those american mods who mod down for 'anti-american sentiments' rather than modding up for 'common sense'. The two seem to be mutually exclusive.
Yeah, I posted AC
And this is there way of co-opting use profiles very handily into their plans. Instead, it's time for them to invest capex and opex into new and improved facility for Comcast shareholders and most importantly users -- to keep up with demand.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
This is what happens when you let an ISP service also become a very large and controling media outlet.
Comcast wants to make money off of the ISP service, their media services and any access to media (mostly make money off of others media) in one way or another.
I can see how they would want to make money off the ISP side and the media side, but when they want to control media though control of their ISP business they are crossing a line which I'm sure they will be fully allowed to.
If they are allowed to start controling p2p service like they will be allowed to control how not only how people access the internet though their network but what they access it will be yet another step towards them controling nearly every aspect of what you see when you use them as an ISP provider.
TruePunk | Games
Where is the SMTP bill of rights and responsibilities?
Or how about a bill of rights and responsibilities for ISO downloading? HTML surfing?
When only one protocol/application is named, we are in for a long line of regulations (self imposed by ISPs or not) regarding every type of use for our Internet connections.
Car analogy? The speed limit is 75 if there is only one passenger, but 55 if there are three or more. 35mph if you have a child under the age of 12 in the vehicle. That is unless they are blood relatives, then the speed limit is 65 regardless of passenger count.
Rights and responsibilities have already been defined by the contract you sign with the ISP in the first place. They have gone to great effort to tell you what you can't do in that contract, and vaguely explained for what reasons your account might be canceled.
This new effort is an attempt to go back on that agreement, to modify it without pissing end user's off, and to get away with throttling in such a way as there is NO government oversight nor any other kind of oversight.
Sorry, sounds like I'm being bitchy, but if you don't push back on each little thing, it will be 'give an inch, they take a mile' and we'll end up with an Internet connection that is little more use than a dial up connection, and the price will continue to rise while service degrades.
No, I'm not wearing a tin-foil hat, I just see the writing on the wall here.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
I'd been following this Comcast P2P news in the past, but I hadn't really noticed any issues with torrents over my Comcast connection. So, naturally, I didn't think much of it since things were working fine. But in the past week when I try to download any torrent, web browsing is slowed to the point of being useless -- and that's _with_ upload speeds throttled to 3kbps. I know something changed on their end, because everything has remained identical on mine -- I don't even own the stupid Comcast-issued modem.
Normally I'm really patient about all this sort of stuff, but I'm paying $59.95 per month on a student budget for shit internet. Fuck this and fuck Comcast. If only I could set up something with a place like Speakeasy and resell to my neighbors... but I can't afford the sysadmin time cost, nor do I feel as comfortable now that Best Buy owns Speakeasy.
Don't think it's just P2P that Comcast is trying to control. I've noticed that when I attempt large downloads from Apple (regardless of material, I've seen it on both iTunes movies and the iPhone SDK), they just craaawl along. (~200 kbps).
When I switch to the VPN at my company, the speeds suddenly shoot up to around 7-8 Mbps, even with the encryption/tunnel overhead, and still traveling over Comcast's network. Can't just be coincidence, eh?
I'll ask the obvious question here... Why subscribe to these providers that limit or restrict your traffic?
You may respond that, they are your only choice. Well unless you choose to go without or you choose to help lobby for better legislation then you're stuck.
Also are you willing to pay more for your internet? I choose to go with a DSL provider who is 1/3 the speed of Comcast and I pay a little more every month to be with them. Why? They don't limit my traffic and they let me have a static IP. To me it's worth it.
Just my two cents. I see a lot of people complaining but most don't want to do more then just that. Vote with your dollar! Donate to lobbies that are fighting for your cause. Otherwise stop complaining.
Must have taken a page from the G W Bush playbook by naming something the opposite of what it is. Patriot Act, No child Left Behind, Clean Air Act, now P2P Bill of Rights.
Anyone care to explain to me why a completely informal, unenforced "Bill of Rights", between Comcast and whatever commercial entities exist in P2P, is any better for consumers than government intervention?
Or answer this: If Comcast really is willing to cooperate, why are they so terrified of government regulation? Why is a legally mandated "Bill of Rights" worse for them than what they are proposing?
The obvious answer is, if it was a law, they couldn't simply violate it.
Next question: Why is Comcast working with BitTorrent, the company? Why do they need to "work with" any P2P corporations, rather than simply dropping their packet shapers and letting P2P protocols work well? Smells to me like Microsoft cutting a deal with Novell -- Microsoft obviously can't cut a deal with Linux itself, as it's a completely distributed, fault-tolerant community, so there's no one CEO to buy -- so they make a deal with Novell, while leaving everyone else out in the cold. Smells to me like Comcast is trying to do the same with P2P -- they can't make a deal with every single filesharer, everywhere, and they won't accept simply falling back to net neutrality, which is what we really want -- so they make a deal with some company which does filesharing, leaving everyone else out in the cold.
Gotta love the smell of bullshit in the morning.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Self regulation beats government regulation, by and large. It can avoid bureaucracy and calm fear in the market.
On the otherhand, Comcast has been doing underhanded things with their traffic. Do you really trust them to adhere to any self-regulation proposal?
On the third hand (if you're Zaphod), this might be a good opportunity for concerned internet users to air exactly how they think an ISP should treat their traffic. Maybe the technocrats at the IEEE can get involved too.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
I just want the unlimited package that I was promised by my ISP when I signed up! Quit giving us this when we pay for that!
Man, I have been very disappointed with the switch from INsight to COmcast in Illinois. Even though they are using the same hardware locally, upload speeds (and download to some extent) have been severely reduced---over an order of magnitude. I don't run a server, but I sync my home and work computer with rsync scripts nightly, and it takes forever now. I am guessing they are doing a LOT more filtering and traffic carving which has screwed with throughput.
As soon as the hubbub blows over, they'll start modifying their "regulations" to suit themselves. Some sort of government regulation is needed... at least if Congress or the FCC can be trusted to do the Right Thing.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
All the players who have power: (read the large businesses), get together and have a scrum. Not invited to the table are the (1) the public, or (2) the content creators. - both of which are large and mostly unorganized groups of individuals.
Sounds suspiciously like the process the industry went through to re-invent copyright law.
One only needs to be guaranteed "Rights" in the context of Wrongs. Comcast and Virgin and others should get their head completely out of their ass and start providing a real **customer** focused service (instead of profit-driven) and this whole issue goes away.
So you have the right to be screwed over by the corporations, who have the right to buy whatever Congressmen they need to get their consumer-unfriendly legislation passed to maintain their monopoly.
Ain't it grand?
If Comcast were the last surviving ISP on the planet, I'd go back and totally focus on Ham radio. There is not enough money in the world that could get me back to Comcrap. The service was terrible, customer service even worse. They hire the most unskilled people to do the work and rely on a few people with skills as leads. They are so over priced for what you get it isn't funny.
Comcast can keep their so-called agreements. They need federal regulation big-time!!!
All content in this message is copyright (c) 2008. All rights reserved. RIAA is prohibited here.
Finally?
I think you misunderstand.
Rights are for the ISPs.
Responsibilities are for the users.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Much this will depend on whether or not our Internet connections are considered commodities or utilities.
If Comcast and other cable companies want to consdier connectivity a commodity, it would mean that Comcast is essentially providing the information we're accessing and have a say in exercising control over what we can have.
Personally, I would prefer our Internet access be regulated as a utility, like water and electricity. The water and electric companies do not generally limit or restrict our access to water or electricity except in exceptional circumstances like a severe water shortage or power grid failure. As a public utility, ISPs should not be in the business of censoring what traverses their networks or favoring certain content over others except as prescribed by law (e.g. the earlier post that mentioned giving bittorrent packets a lower priority but not throttling them completely).
However, if we adopt a utility model that does not allow ISPs to charge based on content, it may also allow ISPs to charge based on metered usage, just like we pay for water and electricity. Part of the regulator's job is to ensure those charges are fair and equitable.
Either way, the days of low-cost flat-rate free-flowing Internet service may be numbered.
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
Now that's a COMCRAPTIC idea if I've heard of one before. Then again, I guess that the bonus checks were a little light this year...
Simply put...If you lie down with dogs...you get up with fleas.
Greetings, Exhalted ones! I am Anonymous Coward, Slashdot Nerd, and friend of P2P. I know that you are powerful, mighty Comcast, and that your anger
with P2P must be equally powerful. I seek an audience with Your Greatness to bargain for P2P's life. With your wisdom, I'm sure that we can work out an arrangement which will be mutually beneficial and enable us to avoid any unpleasant confrontation. As a token of my goodwill, I present to you a gift: these two Britney Spears torrents. Both are overrated, but will serve you well.
You can profit from this, or be destroyed...
I expect that the definition of "Rights" in "P2P Bill of Rights" will be the same as the one in "Digital Rights Management". There will be a whole lot you can't do, and very little that you can do, which you already had before the bill.
P2P Bill of Restrictions?
Not that comca$t would ever go for it...
But they could alleviate a CRAPLOAD of the alleged "stress" caused by BT.
They should write a "BT proxy" that intelligently caches torrents and saves them craploads of border router bandwidth.
Just like an HTTP proxy, it would localize information and make it go faster.
CC might not save any internal bandwidth, but since they won't be able to stop BT, they could at least step aside and reduce strain on its edge routers.
My rights as a consumer is unlimited use of your network, as you advertised it as "Unlimited Internet."
Anything else is weasel-speek and semantics. You sell unlimited broadband internet. Stop trying to get us to not use what we paid for.
Well this is good news. I guess we have nothing to worry about now. All of you Comcast subscribers should be able to sleep easy now that there's no worry that your 50 gig hentai video pack torrent won't get shut down in the middle of the night.
Comcast is proposing this because only they want to control it. We don't need regulations, we need Comcast to the right thing. If they sell a 8/2 line (or what ever it is) then they should actually provide 8/2 24/7/365 .. It's not our fault that most of their users don't use maxim capacity on the line.. they cant bank on that.
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
Somehow I was under the impression that the Internet is a decentralized network with all traffic on the Internet running between two peers. What, then, falls under the category of P2P? What doesn't?
Incorrect. Anti-trust regulations came into existence precisely because what you said looks good on paper, but doesn't work in the real world. Example: Standard Oil.
Comcast came into existence because of a government granted monopoly. Take away that status and they don't lose their market-monopoly power overnight. Oh, you're definitely idealistic, bright eyed, and bushy tailed. You're either a huge celebrity, or you're young. Good luck to you.
This highlights the fallacy that the ISPs use in the discussion: That there is something special about P2P traffic. All traffic on the internet is peer to peer. The internet is not a top-down network like cable TV. A web server is just a computer that is connected to the internet, like my computer or my neighbor's. The attempt to legitimize P2P throttling is a spearhead for demolishing network neutrality.
That reminds me of a favorite quote: "A democracy is two wolves and a small lamb voting on what to have for dinner. Freedom under a constitutional republic is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."
It's usually spuriously (IMHO) attributed to Ben Franklin, and the quote changes as you find it across the net, but it's always deliciously entertaining in the spirit of Poor Richard.
Exactly the self-regulation model the airlines have been getting away with for years. Look where that's gotten us. Stranded, starving, stuck in voice mail hell and grounded. Self-regulation has never been of the slightest benefit to the consumer.
So yeah, why not trust ComCast and their ilk when they say we can trust them not to rape us in the wallets in some imaginative new way? Either the "Bill of Rights" will have loopholes a whale could fit through or penalties for violating it won't match a CEO's shoeshine bill.
Regulate these assholes now, and make penalties for failure to comply really, really hurt. Something like 1% of their last quarter's net profits, increasing by 1% per day until they do as they're damned well told.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
How about this?
1) Comcast's customers shall fulfill their obligations (i.e. pay their bill).
2) Comcast shall fulfill their obligations (i.e. deliver any network traffic without prejudice).
QoS is a set of defined IETF protocols. By injecting RST packets as a form of QoS Comcast is defining their own QoS standard without IETF ratification.
By dropping Comcast's AS routes due to non-compliance with RFCs wouldn't this "encourage" them to change their tune quickly?
And this is different from a ToS with punishment for breaking it ... how?
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
You'll never be batting 1000 where fallible components (read: people) are involved. So stop wasting your time and that of others.
Of course perfection is usually out of reach, but that's never a worthy argument against improvement.
Especially with *limited* goals, and the parent poster stated one that's perfectly achievable. Having a *justice system* that doesn't execute innocent people is exceptionally easy: don't have executions as part of the justice system.
Nature (think the universe, not a forest) has no compunctions about innocents dying. We're merely a tiny subset of nature
And we care about it, and since, by your argument, we are part of nature, nature apparently does care.
Hell, maybe we're even one way by which nature's trying to solve a given problem.
Attribution of motive to probably motiveless mechanics aside, the truth is that whether by intention or accident, we're here in nature with both some degree of problem-solving skills and values. There's no reason not to apply the problem-solving skills toward those values.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Is how long until they start using the cameras they want to put in settop boxes to take pictures of people downloading music through P2P and sell the pictures to the RIAA.
Why do I think this is going to be more responsibilities than rights?
What worries me even more there, is that it seems to be rather called a "Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" of users. Seems to me more like they want to formalize the "thou shalt not actually use all the bandwidth we sold you, and thou art an evil spawn of Satan and, yeah, verily, a ruthless predator upon thy neighbours, if you actually use more than 1/100 of all that unlimited, unmettered usage we advertised" bullshit that disgusts me of ISPs already.
Now, I'm not a Comcast subscriber, and I'm not even a heavy user. Other than Slashdot and the like, and the mandatory gazillion banners on the average web page elsewhere, my biggest downloads are the occasional MMO patches. They're not that big, so actually I'd rather stop subsidizing the heavy downloaders.
But if I'm to look at it impartially, and through the glasses of whatever ethics my education stuck into my head, it smells like pure BS.
It's _not_ some shiny-hippy... err... happy communal sharing scheme. If it were, I could maybe see the point of trying to tar and feather anyone who's used more than his fair share. But that's not it. It's one company selling a service to a person. It's their job to see that they can actually provide the service they charge for.
To illustrate the fundamental difference:
- if me and the neighbours were to have a potluck dinner, then it's ok to be annoyed if someone eats ten times more than they brought to the table.
But if we go to an "all you can eat" restaurant, then it's the restaurant owner's problem to make sure he can provide what he advertised. If a particularly high-metabolism co-worker finishes half the buffet by himself, tough luck, you may even have my compassion, but it's _not_ ok to paint him as some ruthless predator upon the other patrons and kick him out. If other patrons end up hungry, it's not because of that guy, it's simply because the restaurant didn't provide enough food for the bargain they offered.
- if me and the co-workers pool out petty change and buy a Wii and a TV at the office, then it's a communal sharing thing. It's not nice to be the guy who hogs it full time. The others should get a chance at it too.
But if we go to some (hypothetical) arcade that advertises that you can play all day for the flat fee of a ticket, then that's it. It's their job to see that they have enough machines and space for that kind of offer. If I find an old Penetrator machine and hog it for the next 16 hours for nostalgia sake, well, that's what was advertised there. I'm just using what I paid for.
Etc.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they _should_ provide free unlimited anything whatsoever. It's up to them to decide whether they can afford to do that or not. But if they decided to advertise it that way, then it's their problem to have enough of it.
Even briefer, I don't feel any _responsibility_ (since we're talking a "bill of responsibilities") to _not_ use a resource that was sold to me as an unlimited and unmetered resource. The users there paid for a service. They're not pooling their funds to create some communal internet scheme (and indeed ISPs have fought tooth and nail against municipal ISP ideas), they have paid fair and square for a service, and have _no_ duty or responsibility to leave enough bandwidth for the others. The contract isn't with any other users, it's with the ISP.
I honestly don't see why the ISPs are any different from any other service provider. If I buy a monthly ticket for the bus, then everywhere in the world I'd feel free to use it as much and as often as I need to. If I have to make 20 trips in a day, heck, that's exactly what such tickets are for. If the transport company doesn't have enough busses to serve everyone they sold tickets to, then it would be seen as their shortcoming. Not as, basically, "some evil, unscrupulous users use more than their fair share of bus trips, and we must tar and feather them." They don't get to draw up bills of customers' responsibilities, to weasel out of providing the service they sold.
I don't see what makes ISPs that special, basically. In the name of... exactly _what_, do they get to draw bills of customers' reponsibilities?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Dan Kaminsky suggested at a talk last year that once it really catches on for ISPs to edit the ads of web pages on the fly, then everyone with an ad-supported web page will have an incentive to do everything over SSL.
He also suggested a different way to discuss net neutrality: he uses the phrase "provider hostility" to describe the opposite of net neutrality.
"Bill of Rights"???
This phrase doesn't mean anything to anybody anymore unfortunately. It's just a marketing slogan in this context.
It's a (false) euphemism, like "Greener Forests Act" or "No Child Left Behind" or "Patriot Act" or "Department of Defense". And in this case, it's coming from a corporation that we all already know has (or is in pursuit of) an evil monopoly.
Public school education taught me that I already had a lot of these rights protected by (or required for) our democratic free-market capitalist society's existence. The real world has so far only shown me otherwise.
Move all sig!
STEAL is an awfully strong word, and one which comes with all sorts of connotations which hold in the case of real-world meatspace ownership but not in digital media.
Framing the debate in this way will only serve to poison the well when there are real, legitimate rights that need to be discussed.
If you honestly need a primer about the things which are at stake that do NOT involve piracy, then you probably can't do better than looking up a Larry Lessig lecture or two on YouTube.
Regardless, the "industry needs to change" rhetoric is real. Whether you trust the motives of the people advancing these arguments or not, (sure, a lot of them just want stuff for free) the point remains that the big players in the content industry wagered their livelihoods on certain engineering and technical ideas (like scarcity) which are simply no longer true. For their business to continue, the rest of us will have to live with legislating away all of the abundance which digital technology could be providing us.
Copyright or not, that is not something I'm willing to live with.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
You're neglecting the obvious answer of Apple's servers being overloaded. Might wanna do some more testing.
I'd rather trust a goverments incompentence than a company's greed. Thank god I live in a country where they don't charge tolls.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Are you prepared to just grow some fucking respect for other peoples hard work? or do they FORCE you to download copyright material.
fucking moron.
That is pure BS. I do not download illegal software online yet I do still care about this issue. Amazing eh? I DO download linux distros over bittorrent. I DO send large files over the net for work or to friends. I DO stream legal music quite often while I work (mainly from thesixtyone.com). And I DO spend far too much money for a higher speed connection and I WILL get royally pissed when my spead appears to be throttled.
I do not mind working WITH ISPs however to ensure bandwitdh isn't being wasted. Most people that abuse P2P don't even realize they are doing it. They leave programs open that constantly upload files and they are for the most part totally unaware of this fact. So troddling down P2P uploads to a RESONABLE speed and not a tiny fraction of what it should be, is ok with me.
They could also send automated emails to high traffic users and let them know that their usage appears high and there may be something they should be concerned with. After all, if they have a trojan and their system has been turned into a ZOMBIE and is spamming traffic all the time, they probably want to stop that just as much as comcast does. An email with some information and links might also get some people to better understand their usage and curb it without comcast even having to use all these catch all methods that just piss people off.
Yep. I wish there was some sort of way to measure true legal p2p traffic vs. illegal downloading of movies, music, and games. Just off the top of my head, I'm guessing that the illegal portion is somewhere in the high 90% range, as a modest guess. Just because you don't like the rules doesn't mean they aren't the rules. Its too expensive to buy the song on iTunes or some other online music store? Then don't buy it. It doesn't give you the right to go download it because you disagree with the price. Everyone is pissed at the RIAA and every claims that "they can't PROVE that the file was actually the song it was named." And you are right, and the RIAA is asking for way more money then is owed them. But do you think any reasonable and sane person is going to believe that you just happened to have 4000 files with different names that were all song titled differently? Coincidence? Hardly. Stop crying because you got caught.
Comcast is trying trying to control P2P applications by deciding what applications can use P2P technology. So in my mind, Comcast wants 'authorized' P2P software to add a fingerprint to their torrent files being shared to determine if the software is not illegal. This in turn, gives them control over what is transmitted over the internet. So Comcast will not throttle all P2P files, rather only P2P files not identified as legal content. Comcast wants to control content over the internet in my eyes.
[Political Attack Warning]
Comcast is a capitalistic business and the company now sees the chance to cash in on a budding technological advancement. No longer will the socialistic approach to the internet exist, instead the Internet will transform into a business model controlled by money.
Couldn't agree more. Sadly it's becoming 'accepted wisdom' here that stealing peoples work is 'sticking it to the man' and 'fighting for internet freedom'.
*sigh*
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Beware your saviors that come dressed with hardhats.
For each example you have given on how the US government has not provided adaquit service (schools, roads and the like), please provide an alternative private sector alternative (schools, roads and the like) that also provide for access that is as fair and public as the services you say are inadequate.
For what it's worth, I agree that the US government isn't doing what it needs to. I can't say I agree that that failure means that government can't work, it just means that the US government isn't working.
http://www.unfocus.com/
But I will be the last! And, if I have the last laugh, Comcast can't have it!
HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA!
Wolf offers to herd sheep and keep them safe.
Got any proof of your assertions?
Then shut up. (Notice how I just assume the answer is no?)
You aren't describing me or anyone that I know well enough to know whether you could be describing them. I'll accept that there ARE people such as you are asserting "the majority" to be, but I don't know anyone like that, so unless you have proof that it is common, moderate your tone or just shut up.
I suspect you of describing yourself, but I have no proof that this is so. And perhaps you are describing at least some of your friends. But I've already acknowledged that such people exist. That is no evidence that there is any sizable number of them. The popularity of iTunes argues against it.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It would seem, judging by the behavior of modern ISPs, that this is happening anyways. Prices are high, service is mediocre, and now we're getting a game of content provider (and ultimately consumer) extortion.
Market forces aren't working because there's an insufficient amount of competition. Either there needs to be regulation, or there needs to be a breakup of the large ISPs. If government shouldn't do this, then who should? If the market can give no remedy to the consumers, then who does?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Swarms and multicast are just like poop and flies, they may stink and you may not like them, but they belong together.
There really are no alternative to public roads. Private roads, as in "500 evil big business companies neglecting 500 duplicate roads to everywhere and nowhere" is a strawman favored for those who oppose private anything.
The private alternative to public roads is private maintenance of public roads. There are dozens of construction companies listed in my local yellow pages alone. It took at least 14 years for my city to fill a large pothole (it was there since before I was born) despite it being off a main thoroughfair. I'm pretty sure ABC Building Co. or ZZ Thomlinson Inc. could've done as good a job or better.
Why not have a system where individual citizens can create issue tickets - "there's a car-sized pothole in the middle of x street!" or "we should really have another lane here!" - private companies can bid on them, and a municipal committee accepts or rejects the bids?
Private schools can easily provide access that is "as fair and public" as public school. Just give them the same tax dollars public schools are given - it's called a "voucher program."
What say Public School #123 educates at an average cost of $5687 a head. Give every student a $5687 coupon they can apply towards public or private school tuition. That simple - in fact, more people would have more access to more schools.
Now, I'd like you to cite an example where government services anywhere have outperformed any competitive, private-sector service. Amtrak would be a "great" place to start.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Now, I'd like you to cite an example where government services anywhere have outperformed any competitive, private-sector service. Amtrak would be a "great" place to start.
Publicly owned electrical co-op in my town of College Station, TX: provides electricity at about 30% less per kWh than the privately owned electrical utilities in surrounding towns.
I agree to the part where services are separated from line ownership. I agree with your points about government ownership. But, wires is where the monopoly actually lies and monopolies don't self control. The services can and should be let to compete with one another on equal footing (i.e. no one has undo control over the natural resource in question).
Anyone can provide the services, and it should be up to market forces for us to pick and choose between what services offer us the most value for the dollar (rather than a monopoly owner, government or corporate making that decision).
The true monopoly is the physical wires, and market forces won't control it very well. When it suits them, telco/cable companies like to use "wireless" as their competitor, but it's a matter of physics that wireless will always be inferior. So, either the government needs to own it, or it needs to be some non-profit organization, but it must be somehow separated from services.
If there were any parallel possible, the more ideal choice is something like Linux for Wires. A group of people who care about our communications infrastructure and keep it up and running, and find ways of using private interests to keep it funded. But much like public transportation and police work, sometimes the government is the only body available. It's often corrupt, subject to spying, etc. which is why I woudln't nominate a federal government for this.
Interesting. And here in Wisconsin, WPS/"WE" energies/whatever they are now is providing power cheaper public utilities elsewhere.
I suppose another factor in cost would include how much capacity the plant needs to maintain - if you only serve 80,000 people, I would imagine you would need a smaller, less maintenance-intensive plant.
Now, in a competitive world, the surrounding towns would be able to buy their power from your plant.
DATABASE WOW WOW
How will you get competition if the threshold of entry is kept so high? I'm sure his point in the municipalities owning the lines was to increase the level of competition.
If we let the companies own the line you get 0 competition even when the government attempts to force it. Just look at DSL.
Straw man arguments are lies.
We have a gas co-op in Southfield, MI and our charges are also less than our non-co-op neighbors. On the other hand, one of my neighboring cities offers WOW in addition to Comcast cable. In that city, Comcast's prices are much lower.
what the hell are you even talking about, AC? Do you have a response to my post or not?
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
The problem is a monopoly on cable right-of-way granted by government. If the government owned the lines, there would still be a monopoly, and competition would still have a problem getting in.
Ever notice that all the serious competitors for last-mile connectivity service in the US (cable, telco, electric company) are the ones who already have negotiated access to that right-of way?
The solution is not allowing anyone to have monopoly control over that right-of-way. Regulated access, sure, but no contracts with (say) Comcast saying no other cable company may provide service to this area.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
What? Is this a joke? Like the poster child of abusive and targeted filtering suddenly wants to proposes their version of a "Internet Bill of Rights". Somehow, I question your motives....
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
Note to Comcast: You've already had self-regulation. It didn't work and that's why you're in this mess.
For each example you have given on how the US government has not provided adaquit service (schools, roads and the like), please provide an alternative private sector alternative
Some of those things, like roads are not widely available as a private sector business. So let's look at retirement, Social Security costs 15.3% of every paycheck. From everything I've seen, it won't actually be there for me to live off of when I reach retirement age. However, if I save only $500 a month at 4% interest for my 40 year career life span, at 65 I will have $590,980.66. Granted that's not huge, but it's a nice bit better than the nothing I will be getting from Social Security. And that's only if I save $500 a month, if I could save $1250 a month (15% of a $100,000 a year job) then my retirement fund would be $1,477,451.67. Which in a 4% yield savings account would give me $59,098.04 a year to live on in my retirement. So retirement, as managed my the US government sucks worse than a lemonparty link.
Now let's look at schools, I think the Washington Post has already explained this one nicely. There is a Snopes discussion of this very topic, but the main point made there is that private schools are selective, they send back the troublemakers and under performers, but that is not true of all private schools. I would like to point out that the second boarding school I linked to costs less for one year room, board, and education than what DC spends per student on education only.
We are all just people.
What a surprise that your government-owned electricity company has lower prices than the private alternative. Subsidies have that effect.
Its = possessive. It's = "it is"
Something like the competition we see between UPS, FedEx, DHL? They each own their own roads and airports from point to point, oh wait, hey they are using municipal roads and airports to operate their delivery equipment and provide a competitive service in a free market. What a concept, now lets apply it to the monopolies you just mentioned to they too can compete in a free market.
burnin
You have a completely misguided view of how all of this works (i.e. you are wrong). People don't download music they would have otherwise surely bought. In fact that's usually not the case. To say it's always a choice of "buy or download for free" is to be disingenuous, because it is as likely to simply "download for free or not do nothing." As for why, it could be to sample something before choosing to purchase it. It could be because $1/song or $15/CD is too expensive for many people and they couldn't afford to pay even if downloading for free weren't an option.
So, most downloads are NOT lost sales even in theory.
Oh, by the way, the whole "you don't have the right to download it" rhetoric is misleading. You don't have the right to distribute. That's the right the RIAA+gang is claiming infringement of. Piracy is ripping + distributing. Downloading is not piracy.
I like basketball!!1!
The problem with your "free market" mentality, of course, is that there are more than two options. Between "free market solution" and "government monopoly" there are many situations in between that are unacceptable, and many of them are rabidly defended by the "free market" crowd. It isn't a "free market" unless there is perfect information, and in industries such as telecom the price of starting up a competitor is so high that effectively very few players can ever participate.
Government regulation is necessary to keep "free market" actors from acting in their own best interest when that is to the detriment to society. When society has chosen to give special perks and breaks to a certain group to serve the community in a way they claim they otherwise wouldn't have they are no longer working in a "free market". The only choices left are the government (regulation and/or complete ownership) or private entities feeding at the public trough.
That or much more likely is that you go a different route from your company to apple.com than you do using Comcast; and that route is less congested, etc.
To get to Apple: Comcast may send it's data from your house to ATT to MCI to Apple
To get to Apple: Comcast from your house to work, work to BellSouth to MCI to Apple
If there is a choke point from Comcast to ATT you will get poor performance if work to Bellsouth is uncongested
An interstate normally is a lot faster/shorter than surface roads to get to places... except when there is an accident, at 5pm, etc. then using going out of the way to use surface roads can be faster.
During the Enron/California rate hikes, PG&E and SCE customers saw their bills double or triple, on top of the now-infamous "rolling blackouts". Los Angeles District of Water and Power (DWP) customers, on the other hand, did not.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
That is why they are not going after the downloader. They are going after the distributors. If $1/song or $15/CD is too expensive then go without. Whether you would have bought the book or not doesn't give you any more RIGHTS to the music for free. That is such a bull$hit argument. Whether you would have bought it or not doesn't make it OK that you download it for free. If a band or record company wants to allow people to sample tracks (like they do in the stores and online at most music sites) then that is their business to respond to what the customer wants. You don't have the right to tell them what to charge. Its not yours, keep your grubby hands off if you don't like it. I would love to know when listening to someone's songs became some Right that the RIAA is trying to take away. YOU have a completely misguided view of how all of this works (I.E. YOU ARE WRONG).
Comcast wants to do this so they can control it.
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
Yeah because local, state and/or national governments have done such a wonderful job with their ownership of the Retirement plan (SS almost bankrupt)
I'd argue that's because it's at a federal level. The further away you get from "the people," the more fucked up things become. Besides, retirement planning (or lack thereof) is a personal issue. It doesn't really affect me whether or not you save for retirement. It does benefit everyone to have a reliable communications network.
the roads (rising tolls and decreasing maintenance)
What tolls? Oh, sorry, you live in a state with toll roads. Well, our roads here aren't perfect, but they're good enough, and I can get around at good speeds. The interstate is actually really well maintained.
the right-of-ways for cable tv lines (bribes to politicians to gain permanent monoopoly)
Um, that issue would be totally gone becaue the government would, you know, be getting the right of way and laying the cable.
and the government-owned schools (duh; where's the U.S. located on a world map? Who knows? Certainly not a gov't graduation.).
What a wide brush you paint with. I went to public school, and certainly know where the US is on a map. I actually learned enough in HS chemistry to get most through almost all of my college chemistry classes. Not bad.
Anything the government touches is doomed to provide poor service and/or esclating prices. The best way to solve a problem is to keep government as far away as possible, and instead introduce competition between multiple companies (i.e. have Comcast, Time-Warner, and Cox all competing to supply television/internet to your home). A free market solution is preferable to a poorly-run, poorly-managed government monopoly.
You're right, that's why my lights are always going out, and my electric bill is through the roof. Don't get me started on city water, or the fiber network my city rolled out... oh wait, all of those city provided services are reliable and reasonally priced.
And I now have 8MB syncronous internet, where as before I didn't even have the option of DSL (even though I was in city limits) and comcast offered only 2MB down, 768k up. Well, they did until the CITY rolled out its FTTH network.
The only non-city services I have are trash removal and natural gas.
4th sentence should reference song, not book.
> Private schools can easily provide access that is "as fair and public" as public school. Just give them the same tax dollars public schools are given - it's called a "voucher program."
You call it a "voucher program" I call it immediately inflated prices to cash in on government handouts. No one knows how to cash in on government money like private business.
> Now, I'd like you to cite an example where government services anywhere have outperformed any competitive, private-sector service. Amtrak would be a "great" place to start.
Public schools, even when woefully underfunded as they are now, have always outperformed private schools.
Additionally, most of the 37 countries that rank higher than the US in terms of quality of service with regards to the healthcare industries, are public systems (socialized medicine). Many of them are privately run, and government funded (like single payer systems), and can rank near the top - despite most of them costing far less per capita, than the US's completely private system.
To again attempt to build some common ground, I have no problem with government hiring private companies to provide public services (single payer healthcare for example). That's just effective governance - when used appropriately - one type fix doesn't work for every situation - privately contracted bridge maintenance contracts, like they did with the Brooklyn bridge recently, don't work out well.
http://www.unfocus.com/
I'm not sure what you're getting at, since you're describing the same thing I did.
Here in Burlington though, the city IS offering their own services on their own lines. There's competition now, since Comcast has it's own lines. According to everything I read though, the city department WILL allow other companies to offer services over the city lines that compete with their own offerings.
Reagen tended to cut tax rates and decrease the size of government, especially unearned entitlements.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Why should customers who do not use Peer-To-Peer Applications suffer the lack of bandwidth from those people who do nothing but download and upload Content? I am all for blocking/limiting/restricting P2P applications if it will allow me to use my internet at full speed and not be slowed down due to the Battlestar Galactica geek next door downloading seasons after seasons of the show, and taking up bandwidth I pay for.
Yes, and people went to jail for it. I think what should be altered in such situations in this removal of the legal personhood of the company so that the shareholders get fines and jail terms relative to the amount of stock they own. I think the markets would work a lot more responsible if those investing in companies, even if its hundreds of thousands of them, were directly responsible in proportion to their ownership for the misdeeds of the companies they invest in. It would make shareholders a helluva lot more critical of the people they put in power.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"If I find an old Penetrator machine and hog it for the next 16 hours ... I'm just using what I paid for."
"There really are no alternative to public roads. Private roads, as in "500 evil big business companies neglecting 500 duplicate roads to everywhere and nowhere" is a strawman favored for those who oppose private anything."
Incidentally, this is not a strawman that I've ever heard used to oppose private sector public services.
"The private alternative to public roads is private maintenance of public roads. There are dozens of construction companies listed in my local yellow pages alone. It took at least 14 years for my city to fill a large pothole (it was there since before I was born) despite it being off a main thoroughfair. I'm pretty sure ABC Building Co. or ZZ Thomlinson Inc. could've done as good a job or better."
You do understand that, in theory, this is already what we do for the bulk of public construction and maintenance projects, right? The DPW guys who fix potholes are basically just community handymen. At least in my area (Western Massachusetts), it is nearly as common to see private contractors doing repairs on public roads as it is to see DPW guys doing it. That said, the system you described is subject to extreme corruption and requires a huge amount of administrative overhead to actually implement... sound familiar?
"Private schools can easily provide access that is "as fair and public" as public school. Just give them the same tax dollars public schools are given - it's called a "voucher program."
Why? Private schools do not perform universally better, and the ones that do significantly outperform public schools cost a great deal more per student than public ones. Even here, with our supposedly dire public education problems, places where public schools are supported and respected are almost never the places cited as problem areas... chronically underfund and neglect your schools, and you have no right to be outraged that they suck. Besides, your vouchers don't even lower the tax burden, so what's the point?
"What say Public School #123 educates at an average cost of $5687 a head. Give every student a $5687 coupon they can apply towards public or private school tuition. That simple - in fact, more people would have more access to more schools."
Again, why? Public education can and does work just fine in other Western industrialized nations, and even works just fine in those parts of this one where people who want it to work are able to do so. Beyond that, I'm pretty sure you would just see private schools adopt a base price of (in this example) $5687 in order to maximize profits, $5687 that comes directly from tax revenues... so much for your cost saving measure.
"Now, I'd like you to cite an example where government services anywhere have outperformed any competitive, private-sector service. Amtrak would be a "great" place to start."
How about health care instead? According to the WHO (whose opinion on international health care, I think we can all agree, is going to be much better informed than any American lawyer or businessman) our health care system is outright worse than virtually any other industrial nation and also one of the least socialized in the industrial West. They also find that Americans, on average, spend 56% of income on health care, a figure that dwarves virtually all other industrial nations' expenditures. In fact, I went through the WHO's top 10 health care systems and found that Singapore is the only non-socialized health care system in the top 12 (I got tired of researching it and stopped after Norway... I don't see any nations above Saudi Arabia on the list that would would guess aren't socialized as well).
As for Amtrak... we're too focused on automobiles, long range train transit is just anathema to most Americans, and any deficiency in Amtrak's service (which, in my experience, isn't actually that terrible) is both inconsequential to and perhaps a result of that focus. As with schools, other nations can do it just fine, so there is no reason to believe that we can't make it work too.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
gov't incompetance v. company greed == monopoly v. multiple choice.
While governments and corporations equally suck, with government you are stuck with a monopoly. With corporations you can dump JCpenney and shop Sears. Or dump Sears and shop Target instead. Or...
So gov't monoply corporate multiple choice
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
So gov't monoply [is far inferior] corporate multiple choice.
As the Libertarians like to say: "I'm pro-choice on everything" and therefore support having multiple companies (comcast, cox, tim3e-warner, verizon) available to every home. Give each home a choice.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Torodung--apt handle.
Comcast doesn't even approach being a monopoly and it operates in a highly competitive environment. Was anyone paying any attention to the bandwidth auction?
If it's trying to position itself in self-defence against government incursions in the market, one can only wish it well, watch carefully as events unfold, and try to learn something from it.
One of the minor comedies on slashdot is watching people twist themselves into knots on the subject of government interference. The primary principle seems to be "The government should leave me alone, but it's OK if it interferes in your life."
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
The monopoly only exists because of government mandate to grant Comcast exclusivity.
If government stepped out of the way, then other companies like cox or verizon or time-warner could offer their services to compete. (But govt won't allow that.)
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Public schools, even when woefully underfunded as they are now, have always outperformed private schools.
Right—that's why people who can afford it send their kids to private schools. They're just plain stupid, which explains how they got rich enough to send their kids to private schools. It's the people who are smart enough to stay poor that send their kids to the vastly superior public schools.
Thanks for the comic relief.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
Not the same thing. There's not enough room to run a separate road for UPS, DHL, etc.
But there IS enough room for Time-Warner, Cox, etc to run wiring parallel to Comcast's wires, and thereby give each home multiple choices. A solution that gives power to the People (voting with their dollars).
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Bias would be if I colored Comcast as "self-serving," "dishonest," or "besieged by wicked P2P pirates." I did call them a "great monopoly," because I had decided against the word "successful" as too biased. As far as the rest of the summary, the only color commentary I made was to describe government regulation as "evil" (through inference) by suggesting that Comcast thought self-regulation would be a "lesser evil" to government intervention, which so near to an inarguable fact that I would classify it as style.
But since you are offended, I apologize for that bit of bias. Government regulation is not "evil." It is just slow, blunted by committees, outdated by the time it becomes law, and historically plagued by unintended consequences, not the least of which was encouraging the lack of competition in the cable markets that makes Comcast a monopoly in the first place.
I amend that to a "necessary evil," when the consumer has nowhere else to turn, or when previous regulation has serious unintended consequences which cannot be remedied by market forces. That's more than a mouthful, and I'm glad I didn't put it in the summary.
Other than that, if you don't like the facts surrounding the case, that's tough. Comcast's alleged actions have prompted an FCC hearing. There are claims that they are forging packets and that service is declining across the board because they have supposedly overpromised bandwidth and are engaging in arbitrary denial of service. I would be utterly remiss to fail to mention that Comcast is a monopoly in many areas, and that it is responding to FCC pressure.
That is the context surrounding Comcast's P.R. statement, which I quoted in the summary, and linked as an article. If it made the linked P.R. exercise seem shady, it is your bias that makes it thus.
I honestly hope Comcast can fix this internally, and as a writer, I am a strong proponent of copyright. Your analysis of the kind of person who is angry with Comcast's monkey business is marred by specious assumptions and personal bias.
--
Toro
All the Comcasts of the world really need to do here is to reorganize their offerings so they make sense.
If I'm paying for x mbps up and y mbps down a month then that seems to imply a given volume up and down. They've been shown to surreptitiously cap people that actually use that implied volume. So they should be truthful about $billed_amount = $upspeed_rate * $upvolume_rate + $downspeed_rate * $downvolume_rate
They'll either try to enforce a higher price than they should because a lot of their customers are currently overcharged (ie, don't use near the implied volume) or they'll lose money.
In the first case, customers will look and say, "I'm not paying the same amount as before for the same speed but much lower volume." Comcast will be forced to be reasonable in their pricing.
So then they will be in the business of promoting more use than now, to keep their revenue growing. They'll have a great incentive to increase their network capacity.
-HobophobE
Nothing laughs forever.
>>>"What tolls? Oh, sorry, you live in a state with toll roads."
You dope. We ALL have toll roads. Every time you buy gas, you are charged the toll that funds road maintenance. You seem so intelligent; I can't believe you never realized that obvious fact (gas taxes==the road tolls).
As for your comment "The further away you get from the people, the more fucked up things become"..... it's [retty much all levels that are flawed. After all, it was the dumbass LOCAL government that granted Comcast a monopoly in my city. Had they been smart, they'd have given us three or four companies to choose from.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
You really do believe that everyone starts at the same starting line. Are you really so misinformed?
People send their kids to private schools for prestige, and for access to specific social and economic class groups, and because they can - and not usually because they "pulled themselves up by their boot straps" - and they know it. That work is usually done by previous generations.
They are not stupid, but they are not any brighter either than every else, and the education, the a secondary consideration of that access they pay for, is demonstrably less effective. Of course it makes sense that they would achieve less, when you consider how much smaller the talent pools is for them to draw from.
I'm really not sure how your world view allows you to believe that simply because these people are born with large sums of money, that they have somehow earned what they have, through any kid of merit. It's just weird.
http://www.unfocus.com/
Sooo it looks like they are actually now afraid of being legislated/regulated out of existence, or just broken up like they should be.
Not that anything they say will be binding or actually happen, but its nice to see customer outrage is having an effect after all. I figured they were beyond that stage already.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Whenever somebody says "social security won't be there by the time I retire", you know why I roll my eyes?
Because seniors vote in record numbers.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
Actually, things like cable, water, and power are often considered "natural monopolies". You can't blame the government for this.
One reason is that the barrier of entry is so high: it's not like opening a new restaurant or computer store where customers can choose to come to you. If you want to start a new cable company, you need to run wires all over the city first, or else make your potential customers wait for weeks or months to begin service. Running all those wires costs a ton of money.
Another reason is that we don't necessarily want a dozen parallel sets of wires running down every street. It's inefficient and ugly.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
So what if the government has a monopoly? Where I live the railroads were once state-owned. The trains were on time and the price was fairly low. Then the privatising started and now the trains have become later and the tickets way more expensive.
Also, monopolies happen. See Microsoft, see internet connections in the US. And I rather have a person trying to do something but failing, then being squeezed by a big monopoly.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
That's an interesting definition of "decrease the size of government", considering that government spending (and debt) increased under Reagan.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
But those figures for retirement don't take into account inflation, which is usually right about the savings account interest rate.
I was really talking about how a publicly owned municipal power was able to keep the lights on without raising prices at a time when no one else could. But I get the connection; fix the private sector so that it isn't a distant second to the public, in this instance.
That's an interesting statement you made, but your idea only works in three situations.
(1) You don't purchase stock, so you don't have to worry about it. No 401k, no IRA, no problems.
(2) You only purchase stock from a very small number of very small corporations where you can show up every day and keep an eye on everyone. That way you can stop Bob from stupidly getting his laptop stolen with unencrypted customer information on it. Then you won't lose your house and go to jail with him.
(3) You only purchase stock from very large companies where your personal liability is so low that you don't care what they do. Like today, except that only the megacorps survive.
These are not, of course, practical solutions.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
I'm tempted to resort to sarcasm here, because what you said is so stupid. However, I won't, because if you're that stupid, you will think that my sarcasm is agreeing with you. Instead, I'll point out that it's the greed of competing entities that forces them to be honest or lose your business. Who competes with the federal government? Other country's governments? The transaction cost of switching is a little high. That's why governments are incompetent -- because they're greedy and have nobody to keep them honest. If Verizon pisses me off, my transaction cost for switching is $175.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
One alternative to government schools are home schooling. It's legal in all 50 states, and even though it's fairly expensive in terms of one parents' time, more and more people are opting out of the government school system.
Interstate roads are obvious: let anybody build, and tap into the electronic toll system. That even works for state routes. Where it becomes difficult are the local roads leading to people's houses. But do you realize that most of these roads were built by the housing developer, and handed over to the local municipality. If the road was built to their standard, they take over maintaining it. But your property taxes are paying for the road anyway, so why not just have the developer continue to own the road, reduce your taxes, and he can subcontract for maintenance.
As for the rest of the services you name ("the like") I name "the like" solutions.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Use cooperatives instead of the municipality. The problem with paying things through the municipality is that their bonding gets paid-for by everybody. Ask any of the towns which bonded to build railroads that didn't get built a hundred or so years ago. Harpersfield, NY is one example: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20D12F7355C15738DDDAA0894DB405B8884F0D3 but there are many others.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Without regulation, there would be more companies like Comcast, not less. The barrier to entry isn't laws limiting companies from laying cable, but the cost in doing so. And of course once a company ponies up the money to do so, they're going to try and keep anyone else from doing the same. Also known as a monopoly.
You have the right to your own opinion, but you don't have the right to your own set of facts. And the fact is that government investment and regulation means more competition amongst ISP's, not less, as other countries have proven. It means faster access and lower prices; some people in Asia or Europe can get better access than your local college for half as much money as a Comcast customer pays for a small fraction of that speed.
Deregulation for the sake of deregulation is as foolhardy as more regulation for the sake of more regulation. Air fares were falling faster before the airlines were deregulated. Since then, airlines have lost billions while prices have gone up for anyone not traveling between major metropolitan areas. Countries with single payer health care get better treatment for less than half what Americans pay for private insurance.
Finally, telecos can complain about regulation when they pay back the subsides they were given to build networks and start paying rent on all the land that their lines run across. Until that happens, they can take their regulation - and like it.
Great idea. Let's jail people for technical failures.
Let's see... electricity demand's higher than it's ever been in history. What can we do?
Build a new plant? No, no, no. Coal pollutes a lot, oil pollutes as much and is too pricey anyway, nuclear is too dangerous, wind turbines don't produce enough power and spread a highly contagious form of "not-in-my-backyard-itis" and solar is impractical for anything other than providing a house with hot water.
Can we expand an existing plant? There's less red tape here, but most plants have been expanded as much as is practical already.
Can we get people to use less electricity? Nope. You can't raise rates, and of course you can't just cut off service.
So... we get rolling blackouts. We can't make as much electricity as what people are using.
And we jail people for this? And you want investors, the people providing the money to expand the power grid, to go to jail, too?
I hope you're powering your terminal with a crank right now. If not, you will be soon.
DATABASE WOW WOW
... Seems to me more like they want to formalize the "thou shalt not actually use all the bandwidth we sold you..."But if we go to an "all you can eat" restaurant, then it's the restaurant owner's problem to make sure he can provide what he advertised. If a particularly high-metabolism co-worker finishes half the buffet by himself, tough luck, you may even have my compassion, but it's _not_ ok to paint him as some ruthless predator upon the other patrons and kick him out. If other patrons end up hungry, it's not because of that guy, it's simply because the restaurant didn't provide enough food for the bargain they offered. So, it seems like you are saying that Comcast is a bit like John Pinette's chinese buffet owner?
"You go home now, fatboy! You been here four hour!
That's right, the 'old boys' club doesn't exist and it never did. Graduates from private schools start at the bottom like everyone else. Just because they are set to inherit the company when grandpa drops of the perch doesn't mean they get special treatment.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
How about COMCAST sells 6mbit service to its consumers with the knowledge that each consumer has paid for and expects 6mbit of transfer AT ALL TIMES. You do not sign up for 6mbit for a quick burst, you sign up because thats what you want and thats what you're paying for. If they need to charge more, then do so; but COMCAST NEEDS TO STOP SELLING A PRODUCT THEY CANNOT MAINTAIN OR START SELLING A PRODUCT THAT THE BUYER CAN USE AS ADVERTISED AND PURCHASED. Thats the simple answer. The BBB needs to slam Comcast for selling a promise they won't keep.
The lack of supply that caused the rolling blackouts wasn't due to a lack of capacity, it was due to "...a poorly designed system that was manipulated by traders and marketers. Enron traders were revealed as intentionally encouraging the removal of power from the market during California's energy crisis by encouraging suppliers to shut down plants to perform unnecessary maintenance, as documented in recordings made at the time." Wikipedia link So they were just playing on the free market to raise prices by artificially reducing supply, much like DeBeers with diamonds. So they were in fact "increasing rates".
"So what if the government has a monopoly? Where I live the railroads were once state-owned. The trains were on time and the price was fairly low. Then the privatising started and now the trains have become later and the tickets way more expensive."
How much were you paying in taxes for that level of service from the railroad? Or did you really think government provided service is free? When you say "cheaper" are you including the taxes you had to spend whether you road the train or not?
"Also, monopolies happen. See Microsoft, see internet connections in the US. And I rather have a person trying to do something but failing, then being squeezed by a big monopoly."
How is a government run service not a monopoly? At least monopolies in the relatively unregulated markets have to compete against potential rivals (if they raise prices too high other firms will pop up to compete). Government monopolies never have to fear competition from newer firms with lower prices, because they get paid the price they ask no matter what (through taxation).
Creative Demolition
You dope. We ALL have toll roads. Every time you buy gas, you are charged the toll that funds road maintenance. You seem so intelligent; I can't believe you never realized that obvious fact (gas taxes==the road tolls).
No, you're the dope. Toll roads do NOT include roads funded by other means. A gas tax is not a toll, by definition.
As for your comment "The further away you get from the people, the more fucked up things become"..... it's [retty much all levels that are flawed. After all, it was the dumbass LOCAL government that granted Comcast a monopoly in my city. Had they been smart, they'd have given us three or four companies to choose from.
I guess you elected stupid or selfish leaders then. My city has done very well rolling its own service. It's cheaper than Comcast and offers better service all around.
See, at the very least at the city level you can change something. Even if you're in NYC, your vote is one of only 8,274,527. That's a lot of people in the "community," but the flip side is that at the national level, you only count for one in 300,000,000. So.. which one do you have more hope of changing for the better?
This is NOT flamebait.
It's my opinion of government monopolies (I'm against them), and just as valid as someone opining about how they hate Comcast/corporations.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Well said.
Here in the U.S. trains in the 1800s were privately-owned, and they provided fantastic service to the population. And they continued to provide fantastic service into the 1960s. ----- Then the government took-over with its monopoly (Amtrak) and, no surprise, it sucks. (Literally, it sucks down billions of taxpayer dollars every year, operating as a loss.)
Of course none of this has any real relevance to my proposal to let Cox, Comcast, Time-warner, all provide wires to every home. That's what we need. MORE choice to every customer, not a government monopoly over the lines.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
(sigh) (try again)
gov't incompetance v. company greed == monopoly v. multiple choice.
While governments and corporations equally suck, with government you are stuck with a monopoly (Uncle Sam runs the whole ship). With corporations you can dump JCpenney and shop Sears. Or dump Sears and shop Target instead. Or.....
So gov't monopoly (is far inferior) to corporate multiple choice
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
California was NEVER a free market. Never.
The politicians designed a system that was strictly regulated by the California Legislature. There was no free market; it was yet another government-run market with strict price controls (and typical of government; poorly run).
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Poor people support vouchers.
They want to escape the poorly-run inner-city schools and take their kids to a private school. It is only the Teachers Union who cries foul at that suggestion, because they want to protect their income.
Me:
Since vouchers are not popular, I'd rather see "school choice" which would enable any child to attend any government school of their choice. So if you don't like the leaky, falling-down inner-city school, you have a right as a U.S. citizen to choose any other school (like the suburban school 20 miles outside the city). I want to see a system where government schools have to compete with one another for students. Those that succeed, thrive, and those that do not succeed, close-up.
Competition removes failed schools & rewards successful school. It's Darwinian in principle.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
"When it comes to the education of our children, money should be irrelevant."
Isn't that what people typically say? Funny how they suddenly make it an issue when school choice is proposed. "Oh we can't do that; too expensive." So which is it? Money is no object? Or money matters?
Personally I see a benefit to competition, even if it does cost a little extra.
Competition kills failing schools & rewards successful schools.
It's Darwinian... survival of the fittest school.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
>>>"Actually, things like cable, water, and power are often considered "natural monopolies"
No, yes, yes.
Cable in not a natural monopoly. There's no reason why I can't have 3 or 4 companies (comcast, cox, time-warner) feeding wires into my house. None at all, except that government won't allow it to happen, because my Senator Arlen Specter receives bribes. (As do the local county commissioners.)
We would have Cable TV competition if the government just stepped out of the way, and allowed multiple companies to serve every home.
Instead we have a government-approved monopoly (a bad solution).
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
If he's using the same calculator that I've used, then YES, it does take into account future inflation. That's 1.5 million of REAL inflation-adjusted dollars.
Which is better than $300 a month checks from the Congresscritters.
(Worse, if you die before age 70, your children get the 1.5 million from your private savings plan. It stays in the family. But from social security? Your children get squat. All the money you paid into the government just disappears. That's basically theft.)
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Debt increased.
Spending went down. Taxes went down. We need someone like Reagan now who will say, "The government needs to go on a diet," whether it's McCain or Obama or Clinton. I don't care... someone needs to cut spending.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Road maintenance IS funded by gas taxes. If gas taxes were set to 0 cents, the roads department of each state would literally cease to exist. That is self-evident.
Furthermore "The head of the U.S. Dept. of Transportation stated on 15 August 2007 that 100% of highway and bridge construction comes from gasoline taxes." (wikipedia)
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
>>>"See, at the very least at the city level you can change something..... at the national level, you only count for one in 300,000,000. So.. which one do you have more hope of changing for the better?"
That's true. You have a valid point. However, I find it more effective to cast a vote of 1 out of a household of 1. In other words *I* decide if I want Comcast or Cox or Time-warner to enter into my home. I am not at the mercy of others.
Multiple choice is ALWAYS better than a monopoly.
Always.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
(I rambled here an there, but I don't have time to edit it. It's still fun though. :-) )
I do realize that local roads tend to be built by private contractors. Most things that are built are built by private contractors, even when government funded.
They turn the maintenance over the government for very good reason though, and that's the part that people don't like to admit.
When it comes to economic issues, there are two primary areas that the government has responsibility for. One is providing a service in which there is no profit - like road maintenance. The other is providing access to services that the population has deemed a human right. Today the debate has turn over whether or not access to medical care is a human right - I believe it is, and we can't cover everyone if we don't have a government program to do it. The same goes for schools - basic education is a right, and a necessity.
If we are going to have a vibrant functional market system, then we need to have fair access to that system, and we need to maximize the opportunity for as many people as we can (ideally for everyone, but I'll settle for as many as possible). This means making sure that people are prepared enough (education) and healthy enough (healthcare) to be able to participate. And the same logic can be applied to most other public services, they are all essential to proper market function.
It also does mean making sure we don't over regulate, but also that we don't under-regulate - we don't need these mortgage problems, and we don't need individual or small groups of abusive companies stifling whole markets. Over dominate companies can stifle a market just as effectively as an over regulating government.
About that usage tax idea (the road toll idea) - usage taxes are extremely regressive. More working people use roads to commute to work every day, but you can't tell me that the bosses that own the place those guys work at aren't reaping huge benefits from that system. Taxes should be levied based on who gets the most benefit from a system, and not against the individuals that may use them the most. The same thing goes for healthcare - people who have cancer will use the healthcare system more than healthy people. They should not be required to pay more for that service. We all get the benefit of that system, bosses more than workers, and we should pay for that system accordingly.
Finally, just to answer the public school problem - yeah, public schools are in decline, but I believe it's not a problem that is currently being addressed by anyone, although the home schoolers are definitely reacting to a problem that most of them probably haven't understood, but can all identify.
Public schools need a new mission statement. I hinted at what that would be above, but they were originally set up to convert farmers to factory workers, and they still function the same way as they did over a hundred years ago, when they were created. That's the problem, it's the reason they are seen as ineffective, and why no one wants to pay for them.
The fix is to refocus them on preparing kids to take advantage of our economic system, by teaching them how it really works, and by providing actual useful skills to take advantage of the opportunities that an open market provides.
http://www.unfocus.com/
Christ, I never said roads weren't funded by gas tax. But that's a TAX, not a TOLL. A TOLL is something you pay each time you use.
The gas tax is a sales tax. You pay not for the use of the road, but a fixed amount per gallon. Yes, the gas TAX goes to help pay for the roads (supposedly, although the feds take money out of it for lots of other projects), but it's not directly tied to a particular road. I still pay the tax whether i use the gas to power my car or my lawnmower. Also, if I have an electric car, I CAN STILL USE THE PUBLIC ROADS. The only time I'd have to pay in that case is if I come to a TOLL road, where you had someone money before they let you drive on it.
Except you rarely have competition, it's typically Comcast or nothing. Verizon or nothing. My suggestion wouldn't limit competition, it would help it because multiple companies would be allowed to compete over the CITY owned lines. The city owns and runs the physical layer, private companies would offer services over that layer.
The barrier to entry is leveled for everyone, the lines would be run as cheaply as possible, and service companies would compete to offer the best phone, internet, and TV access.
"even though Reagan dramatically reduced tax rates, he actually dramatically increased total government spending, particularly in the areas of defense, and ironically, social welfare programs. Although Congress cut billions of dollars a year from the social welfare agenda, the rate of spending was still increasing. The American President Biography series noted that social welfare spending increased between 1980 and 1988 from $313 billion a year to $533 billion a year."
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
No, yes, yes.
Cable in not a natural monopoly. There's no reason why I can't have 3 or 4 companies (comcast, cox, time-warner) feeding wires into my house. Cable is no different in that sense from water and power. You could just as easily say there's "no reason" why you can't have 3 or 4 companies feeding power lines or water pipes into your house, and it would be just as wrong: there are reasons, as I explained in my earlier post.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Here's what one power co says in their pole attachment FAQs: " If you are working on a State or County Highway, you must obtain a highway work permit from that agency. You should also check national, state, county and local municipal codes."
So it would appear the government can stop you from cutting a deal with the utility pole owners. As for laws prohibiting cable company competition, the Cato Institute disagrees with you: "Consequently, most municipalities intervene in the market and do not permit two cable companies to compete directly for subscribers.
Research, it's a wonderful thing!
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Reaganomics is a sham, it's a complete falsehood that spending went down under his administration. Military GDP skyrocketed under him, battles (not wars) were fought under him that were completely pointless other than to use the military as international corporate police, in South America, in Latin America and in the Middle East.
You can say all you want he cut spending, but he created the Federal Department of Education which wastes billions and destroys the already great state school systems we have with these top down policies, dangling federal money over states to do their bidding with standardized testing. And while I consider this a good thing, he pumped a ton of money into NASA as well.
But conservatives like to think he cut money b/c he cut it from the people they don't like, the poor, the blacks, AIDs research, the arts, the environment, etc.. and gave tax breaks and money to those they do like, like corporations, nuclear arsenals, battles against "communism", the rich, straight, and WASPy mother fuckers.
So screw him, I'm glad he's dead.
In the Army, I went to school on "b" shift, twice the utilization of the fixed costs.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I took Econ with two guys that were power station operators and they told us because the public services commission limits them to 10% profit and almost automatically grants rate increases to meet the 10% limit, there is no reason for a utility to limit expenses because the more they spend, the more they make!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I don't know anything about US vouchers, where I come from we have decent public schools in cities, suburbs and the middle of nowhere. Perhaps the only thing comprable in this country would be some of the more depressing aboriginal settlements. Sure we also have expensive private schools for those who want their children (or even themselves) to rub shoulders with other rich kids.
If you read Stephen J Gould you will find darwinian evolution is an imperfect optimizer since it climbs peaks of varying height seperated by valleys in a curved plane, it's unlikely to optimize any social/legal system but it sure to reinvent a few nasty ones as it continues to grow and pull down civilizations.
Darwinian competition is how many systems develop over time, it's results can be viewed as either a good or bad thing depending on the measure of success, a well funded secular eductation for your neighbours children is currently the best protection against darwinian social collapse.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
No, I didn't think you'd try to back up your craven strawman. Loser.