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Legal Trouble For Multiple ISPs
Ars Technica reports that Comcast has been hit with three new class-action lawsuits due to the company's traffic-shaping practices. "The lawsuits ... ask that Comcast be barred from continuing to violate various state laws, in addition to unspecified damages." Meanwhile, members of the US House Telecommunications Subcommittee have asked Charter Communications' president to stop testing a program which uses Deep Packet Inspection to track the habits of its customers. A number of privacy groups have voiced their support (PDF). As if that weren't enough, it seems the City of Los Angeles is suing Time Warner for fraud and deceptive business practices. The Daily News notes, "... the City Attorney is seeking $2,500 in civil penalties for each violation of the Unfair Competition law as well as an additional $2,500 civil penalty for each violation described in the complaint perpetrated against one or more senior citizens or disabled persons."
If you run from injustice instead of fighting it, guess what, you are going to lose.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
The bandwidth shapers...the crack dealers will destroy themselves.
Is it more just to go after those who CHOOSE to break the law, or those that OPENLY do it because they are big business and feel they can do what they want when they want?
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
You have to pay extra for access to YouTube, UDP traffic, images in HTML, Java Applets, Embedded Flash - and you must accept that we inject some commercials in the pages you visit.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I'm sorry but I'd rather have sniped connections and over-zealous QOS than take a giant step backwards and have internet billed like a cellphone service.
Any company that tries to meter me to "improve customer efficiency" will get a reminder that customers are supposed to get what THEY want. They will get my service cancellation call, regardless of any potential contractual penalties.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Yeah. OPEC, and prohibitive taxes and restrictions on domestic drilling, plus increased fossil fuels demand from developing nations.
It is because speculative corporations...
No. Speculators perform a valuable function in the free market. You're only looking at one half of the picture (the half that allows you to demonize speculators).
Speculators buy a commodity in the hopes that the price will rise. In doing so, they decrease the supply, thereby further driving up prices. (this is the "bad part" that you've fixated on). However, by driving up prices, they decrease consumption (and *please* don't trot out the "but gas is price inelastic!" argument. It's not).
The part you've neglected to mention is what happens when speculators decide to start selling their stored commodities. When a speculator guesses that scarcity is at its peak, they start selling. This increases the supply, and drives *down* price, and allowing consumption to increase.
A better way to look at speculation is this: Speculators act as "buffers" for supply and demand. They actually smooth out the peaks and valleys of supply and demand. Also, you left out the fact that speculation is *not* a risk-free enterprise. Speculators take considerable risks in storing commodities. If the price decreases, they've lost out! In addition, consider the fact that the rising price in oil incentivizes energy companies to develop alternate forms of energy, and maybe will even help politicians in the thrall of mindless environmentalist special interest groups see the folly of preventing domestic drilling for fossil fuels, and the development of a nuclear energy infrastructure.
If your opinion is that we ought to be consuming less fossil fuels, then speculators are doing you a favor! If your belief is that fossil fuels ought to be cheaper, so we'll use more energy, then why not just advocate for the development of nuclear power, or drilling in ANWR? Why not vocally denounce the unethical price-gouging behavior of OPEC nations? There are a lot more culprits to blame for this than speculators. In fact, they're the least of our worries.
But just because they happen to be making out like bandits right now, they're easy targets for ill-considered and thoughtless rhetoric.
"... the City Attorney is seeking $2,500 in civil penalties for each violation of the Unfair Competition law"
WTF These fines are laughable. In fact we have to rethink our policy on fines. They should be based on a percentage of your gross annual income. This should be for individuals, organizations and corporations. I would be in favor of doing this for something as simple as a parking ticket. The way it is now, the corporate board just treats it as a cost of doing business.
Seriously, how much are the telcoms paying you to make these posts?
There is no reason to get self-righteous about this. It's not as if people go to jail if they choose NOT to buy the service because they dont like the idea of subsidizing heavy users. They as light users don't see noticeable service degradation from heavy users, and they still choose to buy it. there is no "injustice" being perpetrated.
There is NO CREDIBLE REASON to charge for internet like cellphone service. What kind of stockholm syndrom do you have where you can defend this practice?
Does fedex charge by the mile? I contest that people who ship using flat-rate envelopes to the neighboring state are subsidizing people who ship using the same envelopes cross country. Do you see how stupid this sounds?
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I think the big fiction is that there has to be a "last mile" monopoly in the first place. That made sense back when a. there was only one telecommunications provider and b. running that last mile was prohibitively expensive. The telcos have been milking that for all it's worth: maybe it is time to eliminate that monopoly and allow some serious competition.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
it's called a republican--corporations have a god given right to march over the "lazy" people who aren't rich--appointed FCC allowing local monopoly frachise agreements. In the majority of areas there are 2 choices, "the cable company" or "the dsl company", assuming both options exist.
telecom lobbies have exercised regulatory capture for at least a decade now, and, while their agendas are much less invasive than the RIAA, have considerably greater lobbying grip on our legislatures.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Without control by government busy-bodies you'd have companies using sawdust as filler in their sausages... Pressing chalk dust into tablets and calling it "aspirin"... Paying children $1/day to work in hazardous conditions... You get the idea.
And without control by government busy-bodies, as we're seeing now, companies will sell you 20 GB/month and call it "unlimited".
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
They actually smooth out the peaks and valleys of supply and demand.
While I agree with you in theory, if you add in leverage and valuation bubble driven lending I'm not so sure it works out that way. The game changes when lending creates money.
If the price decreases, they've lost out!
If the price decreases they go bust and the lender loses out, which apparently translates into the Fed and taxpayers bailing them out. Structured correctly over several deals, most of the speculative profit is retained anyway, and the losses get almost completely socialized.
Supporting the freedom of the market is one thing (and a good thing, IMO), but you also have to realize that certain segments of what we have today is nothing like a free market. The banking industry in combination with fractional reserve lending distorts the effects of what _should_ be rational (and market smoothing) speculation.
They only act as buffers when they buy low and sell high, as you would expect rational speculators to do.
When they take the "free" the money the Fed keeps printing and buy high, because they think the Fed is going to keep on printing "free" money and hence it's going to go higher still, they are not buffering. They doing the reverse, and making the peak higher, when the sell they'll make the low lower too - the opposite of smoothing things out.
But it's not their fault, they're being rational enough, it's simply Fed induced inflation at work. You'd be mad not to leverage as much as you can into positions that will do well in inflationary times (which is commodities...)
If they did that then a large number of customers would defect to another company who does *not* go through their packages. Capitalism works.
It is NOT "their traffic" at all. This is bandwidth that's been SOLD to the customers. It's not like using, say, a school or corporate network where the owner who pays the cost can shape and set policies of use at will.
A paying customer has an absolute right to use what they paid for. Dropping packets, snooping on the flows, overselling their capacity, et cetera are all inexcusable.
Really, with Comcast and Time-Warner, all we need to look at is what these company's core business is. They are content providers whose business model is threatened by the Internet.
Really, they seem to be trying to recreate the "old days" of closed and propreitary services like Compuserve or AOL.
In a supply and demand situation, scarcity doesn't mean just 'a limited supply' it also means 'a fixed supply'. The price of oil (and thus gasoline) certainly isn't being set purely by supply and demand, but a significant portion of the price is due to the relative amount of supply and demand, and it takes months and years to start producing new oil, so it is very difficult for producers to increase supply in response to higher prices, even when they want to.
There is probably a good argument to be made that (at similar volumes to today) whatever the lowest future price of oil is is reflective of the amount of demand built into the price of oil today. If we never see anything less than $80 (inflation adjusted) oil, then that is at least a starting place for how much of the market is being driven by actual consumers, rather than speculators.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The network with 5% in use cost the same as the network at 95%. It only starts to cost more when the network has demand over 100%. If your phone company set you up with frame relay, you pay for a QOS of some bandwidth (ex. 1mb/s, 5mb/s,...). They will let you use more then that but the packets get marked. If the network can't deal with anymore they start dropping the marked packets. You can even get a QOS of 0mb/s vary cheap.
Deep packet scanning would put more load on the network, than if they just send the packet.
There is 2 resows they do the scanning.
1.) Outside of network uses. The Cable co. have to pay for the bandwidth to the internet.
2.) Cable co. wants you to pay them for movies, and music. They hate youTube, and any other ways that you can see movies (copyrighted or not). Even if they block other things while blocking copyrighted things.
Cable television is a perfect example of one of the fatal flaws in the dog-eat-dog capitalism models of the Chicago School of economics, so beloved by various Libertarians, anarcho-capitalists etc. It is an illustration of a rather obvious real-world property of the so-called "free market" which, contrary to carefully fudged "models", allows for (and in fact inevitably leads to) formation of large industry/geography-specific monopolies, even without any governmental interference whatsoever.
That is so simply because in the real world, unlike on paper, there are a number of physical, geographical, technological and other conditions which lead to an automatic formation of unsurmountable barriers to entry for competitors, especially after a local market consolidation by one market player. In this particular case it is simply the physical limitation of the cables themselves: no community can allow for 20 companies to dig up every road every which way to lay cables to any and all houses in that community, not to mention the fact that the upfront cost reduces the number of viable competitors to a mere handful nationally to begin with.
And in this particular case the only entity which can restore competition (and thus "free market") is ... the government. Municipally owned last mile cabling/fiber, bandwidth of which is then rented to any number of competitors who compete for the customers based on their service and price is of course the only sane way to deal with this. But it contradicts the Holy Theory Of Ultimate Greed which proclaims that everything in this world must be owned by some mogul, and therefore it will never come to be, at least in USA. A future of regional communication monopolies getting away with murder is the only alternative really, regardless how many silly lawsuits are filed. The only choice remaining under such market "freedom" being as to which one of the 3 or 4 mega-corporations will be given a strangle-hold on what community.
Sorry, but inflation solely occurs by government counterfeiting of the money supply. The exact same goods which exist before every trade exist after every trade occurs. Money is just another good which is itself subject to supply and demand subjective valuations. But only morons would think fiat paper which can easily be manipulated into an infinite supply is a good sound monetary policy.
The world is waking up to the fact that every fiat currency in the world is a house of cards game of hot potato nobody wants to be holding when the music stops. Say hello to the new gold, say hello to the new money. It's called oil.
Who thinks it's a good idea to save your money at 2% interest rate as the Federal Reserve counterfeits so much money that your saved money is worth 10% less next year than it was last year? That's precisely why people took on debt to speculate on houses (even if it meant buying a bigger house than you otherwise might have bought) to avoid having their savings stored in rapidly devaluing fiat currency. Now that we have ran out of new suckers to pay the highest prices for houses, it's a better bet to convert savings into commodities.
So you wrongly demonize speculators, and give government interference in the free market a free pass? No voluntary willing trade occurs between any two people unless by definition that which is received is valued MORE than that which is given away in exchange. If both parties to the trade didn't simultaneously profit in strict economic terms, the trade would not occur. Demonizing speculators makes about as much sense as some third party making your computer hardware and software purchases for you without your consent.
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
The government tends to "set up" monopolies first rather than outright enforce them. When you are a giant corporate telecommunications infrastructure player and get *billions* in subsidies for laying your network, new competition isn't going to get those same subsidies. So if you want to compete against Comcast, your business plan needs to be billions of dollars more efficient than Comcast's business plan since you won't be getting network infrastructure subsidies.
And "loosely" enforcing (aiding and abetting more accurately) monopolies ensures campaign contributions, ensures nice jobs for your friends and family, and ensures future lobbying work for yourself in the future when your political career is over.
Strict regulations also make it too expensive for new competition to gain a foothold.
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
Because that solution depends on another point of systemic failure: litigation.
A system whereby the municipality owns the last mile (or conduits etc) requires no constant regulatory supervision as long as all competitors are given equal access. A system dependent on forcing an unwilling company, in whose best interest is to thwart all your attempts at forcing them to do this, requires constant monitoring, constant regulatory loophole fixing and as the final result endless litigation, all to questionable effects as all these measures are reactive and do not take effect for years after the harm to consumers was done.
One solution is simple, effective and has a few easily observable points where it could possibly go astray, the other is complex and depends on endless litigation and political maneuvering as primary mechanisms of control.
The only reason to prefer the complex, unwieldy and unreliable over simple and effective is ideological zealotry.
Try not to fall in a trap of blasting loaded words like "capitalism" and instead focus on the economic and epistemological reality of observed actions of exchange. As someone who took classes from 5 Nobel Prize winning economists at the University of Chicago, there are certainly some flaws and valid methodological criticisms which can apply. But you haven't demonstrated any of them. And you yourself have never once walked into a single grocery store and traded money for food that did not by definition immediately simultaneously make you and the grocery store better off.
All voluntary trade whatsoever only occurs because that which is received in exchange is valued MORE than that which is given away in exchange. If this was not necessarily always an irrefutable epistemological, scientific, economic law, then trade would never occur and the division of labor wouldn't exist.
You also make a fatal economic and epistemological assumption mistake in arbitrarily without substantiated basis assign benevolent angelic motivations to individuals arbitrarily labeled "government actors" while assigning bad devilish motivations to individuals arbitrarily labeled "business and corporation actors". How do corporations get power? How do they get chartered? By government laws interference in the free market granting special privileges. So you want more power which caused your original problem to be granted to solve the problem which was caused by that very same original granting of power? You mean after all those laws, regulations, and heavy taxation, government still isn't even close to solving your problems?
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
As drug use is generally a self-destructive behavior, are you willing to subsidize these people? Obviously, they can't hold jobs. Would you hire a drug addict for anything, especially something that offers the opportunity to become addicted to something else?
The first problem is that people choosing to use drugs in significant quantities essentially choose to devote their lives to the practice. This is pretty much mandated by the term "addicted". The addict has no option, no choice in the matter - they are addicted.
The second problem is where do they sleep? Either we, collectively as a society, put them out on the street, or we take them in. If we take them in, it is a Chinese obligation - we own them and have to take care of them, probably for life.
The third problem is growth. If a reasonable lifestyle choice was to sit around stoned all day, not having to work and having someone take care of your basic needs, who would choose it? Today we see a small fraction of the population making that choice without the side benefits other than just sitting around stoned. If we make it tolerable, neigh even attractive, who will choose it? I'd say we could be looking at significant growth in the US.
So, as a hard-working American, are you prepared to pay taxes at the level required to support those that make this choice? If not, then you want drug use to be as unattractive as possible, including criminal penalties for use. If you are, then I think you are in a minority but one that may be visited upon us soon. Both Hillary and Barak have made statements about "equalizing income" lately. I guess that means if you make too much the government takes the excess in taxes. If you make too little, you get grants. Then everyone is equal, one way or another. Equality for all, right?
My guess is that if drugs were legal with no stigma or penalities and use was effectively subsidized for those that couldn't hold a job while addicted we would see 30% of the population of the US vote with their feet to join the drug-addicted.
Which has no bearing on the matter whatsoever. Subsidies are wholly unrelated to the problem of physical limitations of last-mile cabling.
Non-sequitur.
Yes, the "school" which rejects empirical evidence in favor of ideologically motivated "deductions". A fringe lunacy even amongst other fundamentalist capitalist lunacies.
Oops. That would not be in line with the Austrian School's main premise that observation and empirical evidence takes a second seat to the priesthood's "deductions". Even you cannot keep these fruit-cakes straight.
Nobel Prize in economics is like the Buttville Chicken Farmers' Award for the longest piss from the roof of Orville's farm. Except that the pissing farmhands cannot cause anywhere near the misery, suffering and death these Nobel "winners" did. Macroeconomics, as a whole, is an exercise in pseudo-scientific shamanism of the highest order. None, I repeat, none of the so-called "models" developed by any of these "schools" have been demonstrated to have even the slightest of predictive powers or most tenuous relationships to reality. Which of course never stops these frauds from pompous posturing and lecturing sanctimoniously.
The last time these Nobel "winners" have tried to apply their oh-so-superior understanding of economics to something practical we ended up with a wee little oopsie called the "Long Term Capital Management" hedge fund. Look it up.
Which has nothing whatsoever to do with the issue of telco monopolies.
LOL. That is one of the Holy Dogmas of the Capitalist Religion. In practice people trade hoping to receive value equal to that what was paid. Sometimes receiving far less. The extra "value" in excess of the trade itself is supposed to be a systemic property and as such never enters the mind of individual traders. And so the trade would have occurred irrespective of its presence.
This bit of illogical, rabid zealotry is pretty much self defeating. The trade always did and would occur if value of what you pay for is merely equal to what you get.
Say what?! Government is (at least in theor
Here is your fundamental error: LOL. That is one of the Holy Dogmas of the Capitalist Religion. In practice people trade hoping to receive value equal to that what was paid. Sometimes receiving far less. The extra "value" in excess of the trade itself is supposed to be a systemic property and as such never enters the mind of individual traders. And so the trade would have occurred irrespective of its presence. This bit of illogical, rabid zealotry is pretty much self defeating. The trade always did and would occur if value of what you pay for is merely equal to what you get. If what you traded was *equally* valued then why wouldn't you infinitely trade back and forth the exact same things in an infinite loop? That would be absurdity. This is precisely why trade only occurs because a strict mathematical greater than sign applies to the value of that being received and a strictly mathematical lesser than sign applies to the value of that which is being given away in trade. Trade occurs because both sides *prefer* what the other side has. And value is individually *subjective* and not constant. And of course nobody would voluntarily make herself worse off from any trade.
That's why my self taught economic analysis method always begins by examining the action of trade exchange. It clears away the garbage that clouds analysis. Say what?! Government is (at least in theory) merely a representation of the will of the community which it governs Then by definition of will government interference is completely superfluous and only causing wasted energy and wasted resources to allegedly duplicate that will. But of course government only forces someone to do something they are not voluntarily willing to do, a clear violation of the alleged duplication of specific individual wills. Its purposes have nothing to do with "benevolence" and are unrelated to purposes of companies and other market players whose only purpose is profit All individual action whatsoever only occurs because the actor desires to go to a state of lesser dissatisfaction from a state of greater dissatisfaction. There would be no purpose in acting otherwise, for then acting could only make one worse off from the unacting utopia they resided in. Thus, the purpose of all actions, the purpose of all individuals, is as you say, "profit". Thus the government operates in a different work space than private entities. Sometimes the private entities are better suited to tackle some societal tasks, sometimes it is the government, depending on the task and the set of capabilities and strengths of each. We should aim to minimize violent compulsion, and maximize voluntary peaceful cooperation. This is the only way society can exist. Free trade is by definition voluntary peaceful cooperation. Trade of any kind cannot exist without governance. Trade is by definition "self governing" precisely because no voluntary trade ever occurs unless that which is received is valued MORE than that which is given away in exchange. At the very bottom of it is the fact that an authority of some kind must exist to enforce contractual obligations between trading parties, such as for example value of IOUs (read: banknotes) etc and so on. In the absence of governance all trade must, by definition, become barter. All trade is strictly *barter* in spite of any government interference. Trade is a *voluntary* action by definition. If you are forced to do something against your will, the word "trade" ceases to apply. That's why taxation is called taxation and not charity contribution. That's why "subsidy" isn't called business trade transaction.
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
A huge portion of crime in this country is drug related. Gangs commit crimes over drug turf constantly. The only reason drugs are so expensive, leading people to resort to crime to do them, is because they are illegal which drives the cost up. IIRC cocaine cartels from south america allow (pretty much give to the authorities) one out of every seven ships transporting huge amounts of cocaine and simply write it off because of the insane amounts of money they make off of the other 6.
Free market is not "broken" (whatever that means). It is simply an imperfect, flawed economic system (one of possible many) which is applicable only to a particular subset of human activities, under specific conditions. My objections are not to the concept itself but to rampant and frankly quite maniacal attempts by various ideologues to apply it to pretty much everything with religious zeal, irrespective of its fitness to the task.
This silly "reasoning" can be extended to luxury food, then semi-luxury food, then all drinks other than tap water, then all clothes other then a converted potato sack, all shelter other than a cardboard box etc and so on.
The point being of course that if one removes all competition in one area and allows a complete monopoly to take charge then there is no reason not to allow the same process everywhere else, is there?
Since in this particular case they involve geography, I think they will be with us for a while. Furthermore, allowing a monopoly to exist merely for a generation or two (a "temporary" affair from the point of view of history) is equivalent to allowing it to exist for the entire life span of some people, which for them, subjectively, is indistinguishable from "forever".
Apples and oranges. There are very little in a way of physical (or even technological) barriers to entry for Google's competitors. As time progresses that might change (with Google's expansion into mobile phones etc - causing hardware based lock in) but it is still on a wholly different scale when compared to communities being dug full of holes like by a rabid pack of prairie dogs which is what would happen in the case of unrestricted cable laying in most cities.
Again, Internet is a place with one of the lowest (if not THE lowest) barriers to entry for any activity. Most barriers to Internet based businesses exist outside of it, in the "brick and mortar" world. You are again comparing apples to oranges.