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Lessig On McCain's Technology Platform
Agthorr writes "Lawrence Lessig has created a video analyzing John McCain's recently released technology platform (available here). Lessig's video touches on broadband penetration, competition, and network neutrality." Note that while Lessig has come out as a supporter of Barack Obama, this video is not from the Obama campaign.
McCain's has the foresight and intents (and motivations like "faith") of GWB. Not that Obama is a saviour, but let's try to minimize the severe damage the internet will suffer under either candidate (in America).
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Obviously Lessig would prefer to see more competition and open networks.
Personally, I think the broadband penetration number ("our rank has fallen to #22") is a bit of a red herring because the US is far less densely populated than most other countries and thus perfect broadband penetration is not feasible. And while I'm all for net neutrality, that issue alone is not going to determine who I vote for.
Despite the current lack of regulation I think I get a fairly fast, unrestricted Internet connection at a fairly low price. I think that as long as there are at least two providers available in any locality the market will force reasonable prices and net neutrality.
sadly those who have banned flash on their pcs can't access content that could have easily been done with 2-5 small images and a text based blog entry instead of making a 2 minute shockwave flash video and wasting everyone's bandwidth.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
> McCain will try to solve the broadband penetration "problem" by providing subsidies to the cable and telecom monopolies
Great. So regulation to protect Net Neutrality by preventing people from making an open market closed is bad, but giving tax money to monopolies is good?
As for broadband rank, I would like to point out that the Nordic countries do find in spite of having lower densities than we do. Also, if you look at coverage, it's concentrated in the rich areas.
I'm in the _middle_ of the 5th largest metropolis in the USA, and my choices are:
* Cable (With a pathetic 20 GB/month download limit, but decent speed... usually).
* 144 Kbps DSL (Which costs over $100/month, BTW. Those are kilo BITS per second; so downloads top out at 15-16 KB/s).
* A T1 line (I'm tempted, but it's something like $400/month and I don't have the income to support it).
* A city wireless network that I'm on the far end of the range for (and can't connect to reliably).
* Satellite (laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaag).
* Dial-up.
Supposedly there's FIOS to be had, but not in my area. Only over in the high-income areas. If we were smart, the government would set up some major fiber optic backbones and such to the population centers, then lease lines to local businesses. So the public would OWN the infrastructure (and therefore, care for it), while the businesses would innovate in making use of it.
Instead, we've given billions to telecoms and gotten nothing in return, because they want to keep the money and cherry-pick the areas they service without making expensive infrastructure investments.
And you can't do that on the state level, because it becomes "competition" to service people the telecoms *refuse* to.
Was the USA more densely populated eight years ago?
I'll point out that Arizona is more urban than the Netherlands. Almost all of Arizona's population lives in major urban areas; the Netherlands has a higher net population density but a much higher percentage of their population lives in nonurban villages.
This is by way of saying that population density is a red herring, because broadband penetration is measured by people, not square miles. The USA's ranking isn't being driven down by the lack of broadband on the Yuma Proving Grounds or the Plains of St. Augustin.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Lessig first refers to them as tax cuts; he obviously is not "confused" about the distinction, he quite deliberately equates tax cuts with subsidies, and the end result of a selective tax cut and a subsidy (assuming the subsidy is not larger than the amount taxed) is the same thing, as you well know.
I would have no problem calling a tax reduction on a demographic I don't belong to a "subsidy" rather than a tax cut, especially if the tax cut seems to have been applied arbitrarily. If it applied to myself, I might be able to fool myself into calling it a tax cut, but the only one fooled would be myself; to everyone else who didn't qualify, it would be a subsidy.
...
You seem to be basing your arguments on the notion that the money rightly belongs to the taxpayer, and than it is wrong for the government to take it. However, McCain is not proposing to repeal taxes altogther, but to take tax money from some and not from others. Supposing we were to agree that taxes are a necessary evil in order to support a civil society. Which would you consider in general to be the best policy: tax everyone equally, or tax some people and not others? (And I am aware that current tax policy does not tax equally, but that's an issue for another time.)
My argument is just as strong as the argument I was responding to, which claims that the quality of the media affects whether or not someone is going to listen to an argument -- ie, judging the book by its cover.
Except that it does, and people do.
Can you honestly tell me that you've never seen anyone get modded up for a well written post that didn't really say anything? Or conversely someone with a valid point get modded down because they write like an idiot?
That video added nothing to the point Lessig was trying to make, and in fact, actively detracted from it. I agree with every word he said and I thought that video was terrible. It was 16 minutes of poor PowerPoint emulation, bad parodies of Apple marketing, the implication that AT&T is *not* a villainous entity in the same vein as Comcast, and blatant political pandering (all of that Iraq war commentary was a distraction from his main point). Did you actually watch the video or do you just like arguing?
If I'm judging a book by it's cover, then you're too busy trying to see the forest to realize that the trees suck.