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Obama & McCain Conflicting On Net Neutrality
longacre writes "For all their incessant bickering in the first two presidential debates over conflicts of interest and government regulation, PopMech columnist Glenn Derene is puzzled that the candidates have yet to be challenged on a vital issue directly related to both those topics: Net neutrality. John McCain and Barack Obama have stated elsewhere their opposing views on the issue, with McCain being opposed to Net neutrality and favoring light regulation of the Internet, while Obama is in favor of neutrality and seeks Government involvement. In any case, since there is no standard accepted definition of 'network neutrality,' until the candidates elaborate on their positions (which they both declined to do for this piece, nor anywhere else so far, for that matter), 'both sides can make a credible case that they're the ones defending freedom of innovation and open communication.'"
Obviously. Both sides refuse to clearly state their positions so that they can define them... after the election.
"Of course we mean X. We always meant X. Why, did we ever say otherwise?"
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This is a minor issue, not a vital one. I'm glad they don't waste debate time talking about it.
Even if both of them were to give an answer it would be so vague that it would probably make no sense what so ever. Now if you go back and look at their advisors you may get a better idea.
McCain I blieve has former RIAA lawyer as his Tech Advisor
Obama has a professor from MIT as his
source from a prior slashdot article but it is to early and I haven't had my caffiene yet.
Free market, to me, gives me the impression that I have a choice among many competitors. Unfortunately where I live this isn't true. DSL doesn't work and I have only one cable provider to choose from. If this happens to be one of the ones that decides net neutrality is evil then I'm screwed. So the government needs to force a standard. I guess to me, as a self described libertarian, I see the government as a sort of ISO standard body with military backing. Perhaps I'm off my rocker with that idea.
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the telecom providers to do what they want with their lines
Than stop worrying about it. Those lines are built on public land, and many of them became entrenched in their position due to government-granted monopolies. We have every right to tell them how to prioritize our packets.
What makes you think that the lines are the property of the telecom providers?
I don't know myself, but I think I've heard that they were built with public money, and not owned by the telecoms.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Posting anonymously because I modded in this thread.
You seem to misunderstand what Net Neutrality is. Net Neutrality is the principle that telecoms can't favor one type of net traffic over another. Since the telecoms are in a sense the gatekeepers of net access, then they have the technological power to do this.
The ONLY way to keep a business from doing something within its power is (obviously) to pass legislation against doing that thing.
Guess what? Legislation = "government involvement"
I'd be interested in knowing exactly how you'd MAKE Comcast stop downthrottling bittorrent without, you know, making them. Care to elaborate?
Where I work, these are the primary concerns of your typical voter that is calling in:
Net neutrality? Huh. Not even on their radar.
That's the flaw in your logic, it isn't their lines! It is our lines, the public's, because they laid them with our tax dollars. Just what the hell did you think the billions of dollars were meant to be used for? Just because they control the lines doesn't mean they actually own or much less actually paid for them.
The really sad part is that we've been taxed twice for those lines. The first time the tax dollars the government gave them (or was it loaned, but we apparently haven't collected on that) and the second time in our service bill for using those lines.
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While it's interesting to know where they stand on the NN issue, do you really wanna tell me *that's* what will determine to whom you're voting?
So explain to me how their positions are actually different?
Clearly you simply have no idea wtf you're talking about.
Net Neutrality == the idea that if I visit a website, that website won't get preferential treatment (in terms of bandwidth or latency priority) because they've paid my ISP for the privilege. Or: all content is created equal. Note: this does *not* rule out QoS to, for example, reduce latency for real-time applications, at the expense of increased latency for bulk transfers, as per Comcast's recent announcement, as that prioritization is not based on the source or destination of the data, but instead on the protocol being employed.
This definition says *nothing* how this fairness comes about. However, given the stances that telecom companies have taken recently, my belief is that the government may need to step in and impose regulation in order to ensure that net neutrality is preserved. And this just so happens to be Obama's stance. McCain, however, would prefer to leave private industry to sort things out on their own. 'course, given how that's worked for the financial world... well, colour me skeptical.
Exactly. The number one priority of being an informed voter is making sure we are never exposed to the other side.
</snark>
What's the Constitutionality of network neutrality legislation?
I fail to see how it doesn't *clearly* fall into the realm of interstate commerce.
you were right about that, what you were wrong about was which one was contradicting himself (I won't say lying about his position, because they are probably both doing that).
McCain claims he is against net-neutrality, but for regulation - they are the same thing. Of course, that could still be non-contradictory if you assume he is for regulation, but not the same type that net-neutrality would imply.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
PopMech columnist Glenn Derene is puzzled that the candidates have yet to be challenged on a vital issue directly related to both those topics: Net neutrality.
Hm, what a coincidence, I'm puzzled that they have yet to be substantively challenged on any vital issue.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
That statement is simply false. Of course anyone could quibble over the definition of any word ad infinitum, but the general idea is no tiered service.
I think it is more important for networks not to discriminate based on who sends the data, rather than how much they pay. It is certainly possible to have network neutrality even with tiered service.
In the real world, the post office is regarded as a common carrier but has still varying classes of mail (standard, priority post, next day service, etc). It is regarded as a neutral carrier because it doesn't discriminate based on who is sending the material. My letter being sent by priority post is treated no worse than one being sent by a major corporation.
When did "truly free markets" come to mean anything other than "each individual is free to do whatever he or she wants provided his or her actions cause no direct harm to others"?
So-called "barriers to entry", the number of "players", the existence of (unattainable) equilibrium -- these are all irrelevant. The market is free if and only if there is no systemic aggression (initiation of coercion; violation of others' property rights, including personal rights, or threats thereof).
The libertarian stance isn't really about the market at all; it's about aggression, and the correct response to it. In a libertarian society -- one which adheres to the Non-Aggression Principle and thus does not endorse or tolerate the initiation of force or fraud -- the free market is a natural byproduct.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
I think that the theory of allowing an unregulated free market to operate a public service has been pretty much tossed into the dustbin. "Run it like a business" is not really a positive thing to say at the moment.
As yet another not-quite-sure libertarian, I am receptive to the argument with one big reservation: it seems to be getting ahead of ourselves.
So far none of the theoretical problems with the free market version have developed yet. And at this point no one can truly say anything definite about how it may wind up sorting itself out.
I don't think it would be such a problem to sit on the issue for a while until it *actually* needs addressing, rather than trying to pre-empt it. It would be much more difficult to go the other way, and try to mobilize voters on "these involved economic analysis show that net neutrality is slightly less optimal" to get the law repealed.
One major point is that, yeah, not a lot of companies are in a position to lay more fiberoptic to everyone, but wireless may make that kind of moot.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
I've yet to see him say he is anti-net-neutrality, or that he wants government regulation.
Well those are really opposites, or at least orthogonal. In this case, it is government regulation that would theoretically enforce net neutrality by making it illegal for ISPs to throttle packets based on their source and charge said source extra to get better service. By saying that he doesn't want government regulation, he's at best saying he trusts private businesses not to do this, and at worst saying he thinks it's fine if they do whatever they want, and either way he doesn't support taking action to stop them from doing it. While not exactly anti-neutrality, it is definitely not a pro-neutrality stance.
Obama was very pro-net-neutrality, so he gets points for that, except the stance disappeared from his website, so the promise is less clear. This is also a guy who promised to vote against the FISA bill over and over again, even the day before the vote, and then voted for it.
Obama's stance has not change, it only became described in simpler terms on the website (and the old lengthy description is still available there). His vote for FISA was extremely disappointing. I don't think it means his position has changed, I think it means he's a politician (with all the negative connotations) running for office and he needed to deny ammunition to his opponent. Sad, but on the other hand, I'm sick of the kind of idealist who thinks the first thing you need to do is throw all practical considerations in the name of sticking to principles and thus ends up failing to accomplish anything. "Change I can believe in" to me means "Change that can win", even if that change isn't as awe-inspiring as my hypothetical ideal.
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To me, the free market doesn't necessarily mean that I have any particular number of competitors to choose from (though admittedly, it's hard to call it a "free market" when there's only one business in the market). Instead, I would say that it has to do with how free I am to choose between those competitors, and just as importantly, how possible it is for a new competitor to enter the market.
To my mind, you could have 5 or 50 businesses competing in the market, but if it's difficult or impossible for a startup company to enter into the market and compete based on their competency rather than connections/influence, then it's not really a free market. Sometimes this means that you need government "interference" (i.e. regulation) to ensure that a market remains free, which I admit is a bit of a counter-intuitive idea.
In the case of the Internet, however, the market is already not-free. Often there is government control (at some level of government) over who can dig ditches to lay cable. There's government control over who can use which radio frequencies to transmit data over the air. These government controls help reenforce the current big competitors and increase the barrier to enter the market, making it less free to begin with.
I'm not in favor of excessive regulation, but I think it's a horrible idea for government to interfere with a market without regulating the results. They should not give subsidies and special consideration to certain specific companies, giving those companies undo advantages, and then not regulate the effect it has on those companies respective markets.
Barriers To Entry
(that's assuming anyone is motivated enough to start an ISP so they can get a good Internet connection)
But you libertarians (I'm judging you by your response) say "But we'd remove the barriers to entry by doing away with all regulations!"
The problem is that when you turn the market into a free-for-all, the bigger and better-established companies rapidly outcompete the smaller ones, monopolies or cartels form, and they use their newly found free reign on everything to create new barriers to entry (say, heavily throttling inter-ISP traffic) which can't be broken down because there are no laws or regulations...and you're worse off than ever before.
Honestly one of the few political ideologies I just can't wrap my head around is libertarianism. One basic premise is good - minimize market regulations - but it's like you guys just want to do away with them all willy-nilly and you either don't think through the ramifications or have an incredibly simple and naive idea of what they will be.
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