Slashdot Mirror
Network Neutrality — Without Regulation
boyko.at.netqos writes "Timothy B. Lee (no relation to Tim Berners-Lee), a frequent contributor to Ars Technica and Techdirt, has recently written 'The Durable Internet,' a paper published by the libertarian-leaning CATO institute. In it, Lee argues that because a neutral network works better than a non-neutral one, the Internet's open-ended architecture is not likely to vanish, despite the fears of net neutrality proponents, (and despite the wishes of net neutrality opponents.) For that reason, perhaps network neutrality legislation isn't necessary — or even desirable — from an open-networks perspective. In addition to the paper, Network Performance Daily has an interview and podcast with Tim Lee, and Lee addresses counter-arguments with a blog posting for Technology Liberation Front."
Stupid post FAIL
As long as companies are involved with some having more sway than others, you can expect them to abuse their position in the name of greed. It's simple human nature. Say all you want about how companies will police themselves or that the market will sort itself out. However, reality has shown us time and time again that this isn't the case.
This guy's the limit!
Since this is from the CATO institute, I will just go ahead and assume all their conclusions are bullshit.
this for an answer as to if in theory, it is going to happen.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
Another paper by the libertarian-leaning CATO institute also said this: Banks, financial lenders, and mortgage providers "work better" if they are responsible and provide only secure financial investments, and are therefore not likely to enter a worldwide financial meltdown. For that reason, financial oversight legislation is neither necessary nor desirable. QED.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
The companies in charge of access to the internet DON'T want it to work better. They would rather induce scarcity in order to scare servers like Amazon, Google, iTunes and so on into paying for their "packet protection service". Pure profit, no investment needed.
And no, as Bell Canada has just shown, thinking that competition is going to fix it is wishful thinking. Unless someone comes up with the trillions of dollars to rewire the entire internet at once and lock the behemoths out of the loop, you could make the most badass ISP ever and lose all your customers when the established players lock you out.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
first post /. seems neutral about this and this is nice to me ;-)
It's for these same exact reasons that America has the best cell phone and cable services in the world.
$traceroute slashdot.org
traceroute to slashdot.org (216.34.181.45), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 10.100.56.1 (10.100.56.1) 17.348 ms 17.801 ms 18.228 ms
2 10.220.17.1 (10.220.17.1) 3.171 ms 3.270 ms 5.564 ms
3 * * *
4 * * *
5 * * *
.....
28 * * *
29 * * *
30 * * *
May the Maths Be with you!
For anyone that doesn't have the effort to slog through 36 pages of Internet history that more or less tells us what we already know (that up until now, the internet has been pretty open), the gist of the conclusion is "We shouldn't bother with network neutrality regulation or worry about those in charge abusing their local near-monopoly status, because hey, the market will work it out!"
There's also a nice helping of "The government is the worst monopoly of all, and we should never allow them to pass laws to restrain the actions of near-monopolies, because hey, the market will work it out!"
In other words, we should trust that despite the massive amount of money and energy the companies controlling our "tubes" are putting into fighting network neutrality legislation, they won't ever abuse the privilege to screw us if we just leave things the way they are. But if they are not allowed to screw us, that's when we have to worry about monopolistic behavior!
Color me unimpressed by the overwhelming force of logic there...
The idea that neutral networks work better seems plausible enough; but that doesn't imply that neutral networks are what the market will achieve. If I can improve my position by building a walled garden and sucking everybody inside dry, that will impose considerable externalities, and probably represent a net loss in efficiency; but I'll do it anyway because I get the gains, and other people suffer the losses. Unless this paper has an atypically good reason for why externalities will be internalized in this market, I am wholly uncomforted by the fact that neutral networks are more efficient.
As long as politicians are involved with some having more sway than others, you can expect them to abuse their position in the name of greed. It's simple human nature. Say all you want about how government will police itself or that the market will sort itself out. However, reality has shown us time and time again that this isn't the case.
So, it's a nice theory, but Ontario (and most of eastern Canada) disproves it nicely.
"The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. The law embodies the story of a nation's development...it cannot be dealt with as if it contained the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
It is for this reason that the internet will continually be subject to attack. It is a public resource and history has taught us that public resources must be managed, regulated, rationed, and controlled. People here on slashdot and in the technical community believe that the internet is different, that it should not be subjected to the same restrictions that are placed on other public utilities like the roads, electricity, or other infrastructure. But our community is ignoring hundreds, arguably thousands, of years of human history which has inevitably converged towards the same result -- Public resources must be managed resources.
This is an unpleasant truth, and an unpopular one. We're terrified, in many cases rightly so, of the government coming in. But witness what the lack of government regulation has done. When the internet was first opened to the public, there was no commercial interest, but as commercial interests moved in there was no central governing authority. And so a myriad of organizational nightmares have evolved in every aspect. The DNS system has factured, with lawsuits and international pressure abounding. Peering agreements between large ISPs have become power battles that have sometimes resulted in significant fractions of the network being inaccessible to the whole, or degrading performance. We have governments erecting giant firewalls, and the thousand cultures of the world now battle for control over what goes in to their part of the network. Everybody has their own ideas, and it is now little more than anarchy. And none of these battles is concerned about performance, democracy, or the other ideals that net neutrality activists advocate.
We were so scared of the government that we let corporations come in and seize control of the infrastructure. Now the future of the internet is a question of economics, not idealism, and corporations are battling and lobbying to become the largest and most powerful. Consolidation is happening in the ISP market in every country in the world. And as that consolidation continues to occur, and fewer players are in the market, it will bias ever more heavily towards control and regulation... But it will be a control based on economics favorable to the corporate interests, not the users, not the private citizens.
It's time to admit that we need government involvement. It's time to sit down at the negotiating table and decide what the fairest way to ration and regulate this resource is. That's the only consideration of the law, and it's best we do it soon before these corporations become so entrenched that only the most desperate of solutions will bring relief. And once we decide what we, as a country, want to do with this resource, then we need to set about making treaties with other countries to bring some level of regulation to a global level.
This is going to happen. It has to happen. The only consideration now is how to guide this process toward a fair outcome.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Surveying the wreckage of the credit crisis, Alan Greenspan says he made one very big mistake.
The free-market cheerleader and former maestro of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board conceded yesterday that he wrongly thought banks had an inherent interest in shielding their institutions and their shareholders from risk.
That assumption turned out to have been dead wrong as financial institutions brought the banking system to the brink of failure in recent months after loading up on exotic mortgages and risky derivative products such as credit default swaps.
"I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms," Mr. Greenspan bluntly told a U.S. congressional committee exploring the role of regulators in the financial crisis.
"Something which looked to be a very solid edifice and, indeed, a critical pillar to market competition and free markets did break down.
"And I think that ... shocked me. I still do not fully understand why it happened."
The staunch belief that banks could manage their own tolerance for risk underpinned Mr. Greenspan's aversion to heavy-handed banking regulation during his record 18-year tenure at the helm of the Fed.
Mr. Greenspan was an early devotee of author Ayn Rand, whose 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged inspired a generation of libertarian thinkers who believe in the right of individuals to live entirely for their own interest.
Proponents of self regulation don't get that the scale is too small for it to work, even planet-wide.
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
There are enough cases, eg, NebuAdd, NX-domain wildcarding, P2P traffic disruption, where the ISP gains a large net benefit from behaving in a non-neutral manner, and as high-bandwidth ISPs are a duopoly at best for most individuals, unless you can reveal their practices AND the threat of regulation & marketplace rebellion, the net becomes unneutral.
Remember, the "market will take care of itself" was also promulgated by CATO in respect to Wall Street, and we know how well that worked out.
Test your net with Netalyzr
The article is just full of utter nonsense that should be clear to anyone knowing anything about the internet. The ONLY way to gaurantee that ISPs will not censor the net is to gaurantee that they dont, in the only truly enforceable way, with law. It is all too easy for the ISPs to implement hardware and software that will restrict access to or impede access to certain content. The consumers, given the near monopoly position of the ISPs, would have little other choice than to put up with this. It could also be that only exorbitantly priced service tiers would offer unrestricted access to the internet, meaning access to the full internet would only be available to a small, wealthier segment of the population. Furthermore, even though an uncensored common carrier, whether it is postal or electronic, is essential to free speech, I am unsure if enough consumers would realise the great importance of this to take demand a change of their ISPs behaviour. ISPs of course can just reject that request and leave consumers without recourse.
Net neutrality can only be assured, adn free speech therefore, with it being required by law and ISPs being recognised for what they, as common carriers and that they should be required to carry all information over their networks unmodified. To allow otherwise is to open the door to censorship, and to make these corporations the functional equivalent of the Chinese government, blocking whichever sites which suit them. This would have an effect exactly equivalent to government censorship that it should be considered the same as government censorship.
Net nuetrality is also unnecessary for the ISP. They claim it is needed to raise revenue to maintain the network. This is utterly incorrect as they can use bandwidth tiers to do this. Speed and performance levels should apply without discrimination to all content flowing over the network.
Net neutrality is to protect consumers rights and free speech rights, by assuring every person can access all information made avialable on the internet and publish their own content which can be accessed to anyone else, without it being blocked.
We can expect conservative organisations to be prejudiced against the interests of free speech and the people and to be high biased towards large corporate interest whom they represent and who finances them. They are highly ideologically biased to an approach which endangers individuals freedoms in favour of large corporations, by dismantling the voice of the people, our democracy, and removing all restrictions from corporations which turns them into an unelected plutocracy which takes the functional role of a totalitarian government. I oppose totalitarianism in the form of corporation or government, often either which are different in name only, and therefore I oppose censorship of the internet by corporations or government, and I support Net Neutrality laws passed by our democratic government to assure that ISPs are not permitted to block access to content.
The only thing ISPs care about by default is that their users aren't abusing access to the Internet through means like taking up too much bandwidth or doing illegal things. They don't care whether you spend your day on Slashdot or Stormfront. If left up to their own devices, which they have been so far, they let their users go wherever they want until the law says otherwise. What makes you think that the government is more likely to come in and say that they must do this, rather than come in and tell them they have to block access to certain sites and opinions? There's already precedent for the latter, but not the former, in many Western states.
Even granted the premise that a neutral net works better, this does not mean that ISPs will tend toward neutrality - people do NOT act rationally, which is one of the many problems with libertarianism.
Much more likely the owners of networks will feel that there is a profit to be made by throttling services and then charging.. even though everything works more poorly and even though they might even make less money in the long run. That's irrelevant: what business leaders, like anyone, act upon is their PERCEPTION of what makes money. Worse, people (read: ISPs) will try to stop other people (read: Google) from "taking advantage" of them, even when it doesn't hurt their business and in fact helps it.
the meltdown is due to human psychology. i did not know you needed regulations to create panic and fear. i suppose if we had no regulations, the very concepts of panic and fear would disappear?
fact: an unregulated market is subject to times of irrational exuberance, and times of panic and fear. there is absolutely no prerequisite to these truths, and no escaping them. the only way to save ourselves form the excesses of irrational excitement or hysteria is regulation
if you don't believe or understand that, you ar ein some sort of denial and choking on some massive propaganda
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Net neutrality is to protect consumers rights and free speech rights, by assuring every person can access all information made avialable on the internet and publish their own content which can be accessed to anyone else, without it being blocked.
Your crazy if you think that is what the government will actually do. Look at the direction those same governments have gone so far with respect to civil liberties and freedom of speech. You want to hand the keys to the entire communication infrastructure over to them and say, "promise to do the right thing, okay". You will be delivering censorship on a silver platter, in a more augmented and frightening way. Large corporations can become corrupt, that's inherent in human nature, but there are steps you can take to combat them. Large governments, tend to become tyrannies and removing them typically requires lots of people to die. On an unregulated Internet we are free to write our own applications, encrypt communication and take our own steps to work around greedy, short sited ISPs. Once the government is involved, you will either be a terrorist or pedophile if you do so. Think about it because once you hand it over you will never get your truly free Internet back again.
But who watches the watchmen?
The second major point of the original article which is not mentioned in the summary above is that any government agency created to regulate net neutrality would be subject to regulatory capture.
It would be interesting to hear a rebuttal of that point here by any advocates of net neutrality.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
I certainly didn't real 44 pages of ramblings. What I _did_ read was examples all based on an environment of enormous competition where anyone could provide a solution. Does anyone really think this is the case with ISPs? For the physical lines coming into my house I have two options. The telco or the CableCo. If you're lucky you get to choose your ISP, but even that doesn't seem to guarantee you neutrality if the Bell Canada story summaries are correct.
The point being, when competition doesn't exist, like is the case with most peoples choice of who provides them internet service (i.e. legal monoplies), Lee's whole argument falls apart. Comparing THAT to someone inventing SMTP, or VoIP in an open environment is a ridiculous comparison.
AccountKiller
So he isn't REALLY a Free Market advocate.
In before "no true scotsman"
It's getting easy to pigeon-hole libertarian rhetoric that seeks to divide politicians and government in general from the people they represent.
The argument that "we should do nothing, because we suck at it" (where "we" means us and our government by the people) just doesn't pull weight for me anymore. It's not as if we have more influence over commercial network operators through any other means.
Sure, market fundies are always telling us that we can exert influence within a robust, competitive marketplace. NEWSFLASH: 2 options for millions of consumers is NOT competitive! Foster some real competition in the marketplace, and then you can use the competition argument.
And, gee, who do we call to enforce competition? Could it be, government regulation?
So much for doing nothing.
The idea that a technology "works better" is also conveniently vague. There are many goals to a network. Some people want to communicate. Others want to make money. These two do not always mix. I'd like my interests in how to reconcile the conflicts of these interests represented by some policy other than "always give the businesspeople what they want".
Maybe the FCC sucks, but it's //mine//. Your oligopolist ISP is not.
Greenspan was one of the people responsible for changing regulations that led to this crisis. Once he became FED chairman in the 1980's he started circumventing the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/wallstreet/weill/demise.html
In 1933, Senator Carter Glass (D-Va.) and Congressman Henry Steagall (D-Ala.) introduce the historic legislation that bears their name, seeking to limit the conflicts of interest created when commercial banks are permitted to underwrite stocks or bonds. In the early part of the century, individual investors were seriously hurt by banks whose overriding interest was promoting stocks of interest and benefit to the banks, rather than to individual investors. The new law bans commercial banks from underwriting securities, forcing banks to choose between being a simple lender or an underwriter (brokerage).
In August 1987, Alan Greenspan -- formerly a director of J.P. Morgan and a proponent of banking deregulation -- becomes chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. One reason Greenspan favors greater deregulation is to help U.S. banks compete with big foreign institutions.
In December 1996, with the support of Chairman Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve Board issues a precedent-shattering decision permitting bank holding companies to own investment bank affiliates with up to 25 percent of their business in securities underwriting (up from 10 percent).
Late 1999:
After 12 attempts in 25 years, Congress finally repeals Glass-Steagall, rewarding financial companies for more than 20 years and $300 million worth of lobbying efforts. Supporters hail the change as the long-overdue demise of a Depression-era relic.
Just days after the administration (including the Treasury Department) agrees to support the repeal, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, the former co-chairman of a major Wall Street investment bank, Goldman Sachs, raises eyebrows by accepting a top job at Citigroup as Weill's chief lieutenant. The previous year, Weill had called Secretary Rubin to give him advance notice of the upcoming merger announcement. When Weill told Rubin he had some important news, the secretary reportedly quipped, "You're buying the government?"
Greenspan was the major player in repealling the legislation which would have kept this mess from ever happening. It is very doubtful that Greenspan didn't know why Glass Steagall was enacted in the first place.
Of course he is going to plead ignorance. He doesn't want to get put behind bars and flogged by the masses by admitting he is a criminal.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
"because a neutral network works better than a non-neutral one"
That's an extremely subjective comment. Especially when we look to other aspects of our society with non neutral paths: car pool lanes, speed limits on on trucks that are lower, express trains, buses, and lanes; affirmative action, and illegal immigration. All of the fore-mentioned allow users to skip ahead of others based on an established criteria. If load balancing or whatever the term is for biased net traffic worked in our favor, I doubt we would complain. I am sure students would not complain if their status as student granted them the privilege of faster downloads and faster media downloads over business traffic.
I think a neat experiment like this might lend some insight: Example: What if AT&T loaded balanced only subscribers to AT&T net access - while allowing non-AT&T subscribers a neural experience on their tubes. This way, the user gets to purchase privileges access through AT&T or choose neutrality by not choosing AT&T for access. Overtime we will see which system is preferred, or "works better" from the consumer point of view.
All this boils down to the have-nots wanting what the haves can afford - yet are unwilling to compensate for the preferred experience.
The CATO Institute is "libertarian" the way that "libertarian" is "corporate anarchist". They oppose people creating governments to protect their rights, because those governments get in the way of corporate power to exploit those people.
--
make install -not war
Unfortunately, neutrality makes the net work better for the latter, and the latter don't provide the service or define the terms.
You could call the US market an "Oligopoly."
But that's understating the case.
In >80% of the US market currently, the customer is functionally given three choices: Dialup, Monopoly ISP (Cox, Comcrap, AT&T, etc), or NOTHING. They don't have a "choice" at all.
For example: no DSL is built to my home. Verizon can't/won't build out FiOS because, they claim, they don't "own the physical phone lines" so while I could switch to them as my phone provider, they have no ownership/authorization to push FiOS. Functionally, I am limited to Dialup, Comcrap, or NOTHING and even the dialup companies are dying fast.
The 'net cannot stay neutral WITHOUT legislation when you have big companies like Cox and Comcrap that have monopoly status over far too many of their customers. Hell, that's how we got this fucking-stupid "250 GB" traffic cap setup as well.
In an actual competitive market, the customer can go to the best provider. In a monopoly market, the customer is inevitably given the "choice" of either crap service or no service. Unfortunately, government regulation to protect consumer rights (which was signed away by both Clinton and Bush, little by little) is necessary because otherwise the market devolves into monopoly control everywhere, and the only "competition" happens on the fringe edges where you might have two big mostly-monopolies trying to horn in on each other's monopoly turf.
the 'free market' was supposed to ensure fair competition and fair share in television and radio broadcasting, and printed media too.
did it deliver?
no.
in all countries, more than half of the publications and broadcasts belong to 1-2 cartels, which are generally aligned with a particular political party, and they ensure that the persons who will support their own ends will get elected.
the 'free market' was going to assure fair competition in finance world and would regulate it itself, according to alan fucking greenspan.
did it deliver ?
yes it delivered. it delivered RIGHT up to our butt. we are STILL on the opening stages of the crisis.
just a month ago the proponent of that sermon came up in front of u.s. senate and admitted to his fault, said that he couldnt believe what happened.
he knows what happened, we know what happened. CEOS, high level executives, shareholders are people too. there are crooks, bastards, irresponsibles, slackers, shysters, all kinds among them. there are those among them who wouldnt hesitate from breaking ENTIRE global economy to reap benefits.
thats the human factor.
human factor is there at the controlling helms of the internet connectivity providers too. which, not surprisingly generally belong to big cartels that own already trivialized broadcasting and printed media.
one would be utterly stupid as to think that repetition of what happened in financial sector is not possible.
Read radical news here
Because you have otherwise to prove that it isn't the lack of regulation that has not caused the problems.
Go find one.
the more such organizations post crap like this, the lesser my respect for that political viewpoint becomes.
it appears that libertarian view is becoming a refuge for the shysters that screwed entire world through the 'let everything be' preaching of holistic economists, since republican party is down in fortunes these days.
DONT accept them into your view. they will screw not only you, but entire world, again, if you let them.
Read radical news here
Which would you rather have?
1) A bunch of large corporations dueling it out amongst themselves, with the ones who gain and maintain the largest market share being the most successful.
2) A bunch of large corporations dueling it out amongst themselves, with the ones who gain and maintain the ears of the most powerful government officials being the most successful.
Yes, companies will abuse their positions in the name of greed. There is no way around that. When you get government involved, however, you're simply raising the stakes. Sure, you can vote out the current crop of greedy politicians who favor the corporations, but you're still stuck with the bad laws they made because it's a hell of a lot easier to pass a bad law than to repeal one. Libertarians think that it's better to pass no law than a bad law.
Additionally, as other posters have done, I challenge you to point to some concrete examples of the free market failure you believe is so rampant. (You might want to avoid pointing to the Great Depression, as that has been debunked before and will no doubt be debunked again should you do so.)
Your brain is not a computer.
That's easy! The people should keep watch on the regulators. If some regulation is wrongly or poorly implemented, then the voters should express their dissatisfaction at the ballot box. (At least in a perfect world.) Yes, sometimes it takes a long time before the voters say "Enough!!!", but eventually they do.
Then fix the system: http://www.metagovernment.org/
So there's some libertarian conspiracy now where bands of brain-damaged libertarians roam slashdot modding down contrary opinions because they can't figure out how to form an argument? More likely, slashdot simply doesn't have many actual libertarians but many people who lean that way on several topics (personal liberties, national sovereignty, etc) and anti-libertarian arguments are often modded down because, rather than refuting their arguments on merit, people revert to statements like:
If they can't refute your arguments, they will try to stop you from arguing.
or
Libertarians aren't smart enough or educated enough to argue their case, so they mod you down in the hopes that no one sees how badly their philosophy fails. Most libertarians are only capable of parroting back other people's arguments, so when you present them with an argument they haven't seen before, they don't know what to do. I think libertarian indoctrination must cause brain damage, because very few libertarians can actually think for themselves.
Ironically, while bashing libertarians for failing to put together an argument, you have completely failed to put together an argument.
And, as insurance, you even claim that "Most anti-libertarian arguments on Slashdot get modded down," so that if anyone mods you down (Off-Topic, Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated all seem to apply well to your post) they're just supporting the will of the brain-damaged libertarian horde. Well done.
No, no, the burden of proof falls on the one making the point. You're both making points, so you both have the burden of proof. He doesn't have proof, because none exists. However, you also have no proof against his points. A free marked has never been allowed to occur, so there is nothing to cite for or against it.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it" -Voltaire
If they can't refute your arguments, they will try to stop you from arguing. Most anti-socialist arguments on Slashdot get modded down. Socialists aren't smart enough or educated enough to argue their case, so they mod you down in the hopes that no one sees how badly their philosophy fails. Most socialists are only capable of parroting back other people's arguments, so when you present them with an argument they haven't seen before, they don't know what to do. I think socialist indoctrination must cause brain damage, because very few socialists can actually think for themselves.
There. fixed it for you. Isn't ad-hominem fun?
C'mon, seriously? This isn't a libertarian thing -- people tend to mod down stuff they disagree with, it's human nature. Give me a break...
Libertarians aren't smart enough or educated enough to argue their case
Ahhh... ok.
Most libertarians are only capable of parroting back other people's arguments, so when you present them with an argument they haven't seen before, they don't know what to do.
Seriously? You're going to try and make the "sheep" argument against a small group of people that decided to stray out of the left/right democrat/republican fold, and think for themselves about what could be if we had more freedom and less government involvement in every part of our lives?
Really? You want to go down this path?
If you do, let's do it. Leave out the ad hominem attacks, and present a real argument in favor of government intrusion into the free market system, and I'll debate with you.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Hmm... It all comes down to money and power. We've got alittle money and we usually pay monthly subscriptions to an ISP to connect through them to "the internet." They in turn have various amounts of money and power and try to use it to assure that they will always have money and power...
I don't think that they are thinking long term. They are just trying to screw their end consumers, all the content publishers, maybe the government and other ISPs for as much as they can. The government is our tool for clubbing all those ISPs that we can't usually affect.
Apologies for replying (first, even!) to my own post.
I should make it clear that I am not opposed to good, well-thought-out network neutrality legislation. While I lean libertarian and find government intervention distasteful, I am increasingly of the opinion that the Internet should be considered a public resource and should be treated as such by law. ISPs (should) play a similar role to water or power companies, who have no right to dictate how I use the water or electricity or throughput that they provide.
My previous post was a high-level statement of why government's role should be minimized as much as possible and did not deal with the specifics of this case.
Your brain is not a computer.
Ahh, CATO. We can always count on the High Priests of the Invisible Hand to explain how if we would just stand back and let the market work, we would all be better off. Why do I feel like I'm about to be crushed by the Invisible Thumb?
You know, I remember a time when FidoNET was "The Net" and legions of individuals ran servers in their homes.
It's entirely possible to return to that in a highspeed manner.
I've got wireless radios, I've got cantennae. I'm fairly certain that with a little bit of work I could get a gigantic wireless mesh network with SID of "TheInternet" put together in the city I work in.
We would lose some commercial content, but I think plenty of people would be willing and able to mirror things onto our new internet from their uncapped connections to the commercial internet.
I can see some problems with oversease connections, but not ones that are insurmountable.
There's not really any way for "The Government" to screw with "the internet", we can always move it.
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
a small group of people that decided to stray out of the left/right democrat/republican fold
I wouldn't call them that. They take the liberal point of view that people should have rights, and augment it with the right-wing point of view that corporations should have rights. In other words, they want it both ways.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
... the Devil ever played was convincing people he does not exist
%s/socialist/apple/g
go study the banking panics of the 1800s
panic sets in, feeds off itself, and destroys the entire marketplace
your comment is in direct contradiction to established historical fact
what is wrong with you free market fundamentalists?
a little regulation HELPS. it can do nothing but help. let go of your bizarre irrational fear and your cult-like approach towards free markets. you're not logical or reasonable in your approach, you're like arguing with a creationist: you've taken a single act of faith: that a completely free market is always good, and in spite of all common sense and reasonable evidence to the contrary, you will not let go of your religious deathgrip on a fundamentalist absolutist concept
the best market is a sandbox: free within certain parameters, regulated when the marketplace swings to extremes
go ahead, dispute that. i expect you to. you're not a reasonable person, you're a member of a fundamentalist religion, beyond the reach of reason
no, a completely free market is not a good thing, it is a stupid thing
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Well, after seeing stories like this, I have to conclude that regulation is inevitable, so I'll go with good regulation rather than bad regulation.
I was honestly hoping that they had some kind of idea that didn't amount to "believe in the power of the free market" but they don't. And if the people don't regulate, the lobbyists WILL. For that matter, we know that they ARE.
It's sad, really. When this issue came to light, left & right joined forces against it. The ACLU teamed up with the Christian Coalition. Nobody wants to let them pull that crap. But now, they've managed to divide us against each other so that we'll be stuck with infighting while they find a way to shove it down our throats.
Okay! That was trolling, this is arguing.
First, the free market has well known failure modes: natural monopoly, where the marginal cost of entry into the market increases dramatically after the initial entry. Roads, sewers, electric and phone lines are a great example. Information asymmetry is another, and externalities are the third.
Second, money is power, and power can be used to oppress. A free market is a similar choice mechanism to a democracy, except that in a free market, it is one dollar, one vote. The more money you have, the more you can use your money to change the parameters of the market.
Third, choice. A free market does not provide real choices. It provides the illusion of choice. And where it does provide real choice, it seeks to hide the real differences in those choices, making picking the better item or service difficult.
Fourth, Destruction of intrinsic motivations. A competitive market destroys intrinsic motivation to do something. For instance, go to a bar and ask all the women if they will sleep with you. You may get lucky. Now, same thing, except offer to throw in ten dollars. You will strike out every time, because you have destroyed intrinsic motivations.
Fifth, duplication of effort. A competitive market requires duplication of effort where a socialist system does not. Each company must repeat the efforts of all other companies in a given market, instead of sharing effort.
Sixth, closed communication channels. In a competitive market, innovations aren't shared as freely as they could be in a socialist system, because that would be giving away advantage.
Seventh, waste and mismanagement. A competitive market develops its own special kinds of parasites, who add nothing of value to society yet make a lot of money. Advertisers, for instance. Or the insurance industry. These people are professional manipulators, con artists, gamblers and frauds, yet they are richly rewarded in a capitalist system.
Eight, real world examples. No company is set up internally as a free market system. None. If the free market is so great, why don't companies organize themselves that way internally?
There's plenty more where that came from, but lets see if you can refute even one of these points before I bring out the big guns.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I've heard this sort of rhetoric dozens of times. And the answer is always the same. If the proposed regulation "isn't needed" because it's exactly what would happen anyway without regulation, then the proposed regulation shouldn't pose a problem for anyone... so why is there any objection to it? Why not humor the people who want it?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Mmm, ad hominems ARE fun! I love trolling libertarians. Not even socialists are as self righteous and uptight. Religious fundamentalists come close. The only people who are more self righteous and uptight are Apple fanboys. If I ever get a chance to troll a religious fundamentalist libertarian who loves Apple, my life will be complete.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The free market may be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but free market theories fall apart when you're talking about a duopoly with huge hurdles for any third-party competitor to overcome. I can't figure out if these libertarian types are being deliberately dishonest or if they're just so in love with their theory that they're blind to the realities of the situation.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Thank you! Trolling libertarians is my favorite pastime.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
First, the free market has well known failure modes: natural monopoly, where the marginal cost of entry into the market increases dramatically after the initial entry. Roads, sewers, electric and phone lines are a great example. Information asymmetry is another, and externalities are the third
Your right that there is a thing as a natural monopoly. Your wrong that it invalidates a libertarian stance. Libertarians are not 100% against any government - that is anarchy; if you can't understand and acknowledge that, please just stop reading now. But the government has done nothing to LOWER the bar in these natural monopolies - in fact, they have raised them.
Second, money is power, and power can be used to oppress. A free market is a similar choice mechanism to a democracy, except that in a free market, it is one dollar, one vote. The more money you have, the more you can use your money to change the parameters of the market
As opposed to our current system where your vote counts about 1/300Mth towards decisions. But whatever, I'll give you that one.
Third, choice. A free market does not provide real choices. It provides the illusion of choice. And where it does provide real choice, it seeks to hide the real differences in those choices, making picking the better item or service difficult
That doesn't compute. Can you please explain how your socialistic utopia will provide more and better choices?
Fourth, Destruction of intrinsic motivations. A competitive market destroys intrinsic motivation to do something. For instance, go to a bar and ask all the women if they will sleep with you. You may get lucky. Now, same thing, except offer to throw in ten dollars. You will strike out every time, because you have destroyed intrinsic motivations.
Now, same thing, but don't make it an insulting amount of money. $100 would have a better chance for you than no money. $1000, for sure. But it just changes the motivation for that single act and nobody says you HAVE to offer money. This is a really dumb one.
Fifth, duplication of effort. A competitive market requires duplication of effort where a socialist system does not. Each company must repeat the efforts of all other companies in a given market, instead of sharing effort
True. But it also creates a desire to better than others in your field. A single, socialistic internet provider has no incentive to provide better service, other than good nature. A free market makes you want to do better because your business (then you, then your family) will do better; and you can still just do it to be good natured.
Sixth, closed communication channels. In a competitive market, innovations aren't shared as freely as they could be in a socialist system, because that would be giving away advantage.
Now you are just repeating yourself. See your #5.
Seventh, waste and mismanagement. A competitive market develops its own special kinds of parasites, who add nothing of value to society yet make a lot of money. Advertisers, for instance. Or the insurance industry. These people are professional manipulators, con artists, gamblers and frauds, yet they are richly rewarded in a capitalist system.
True to an extent.
Eight, real world examples. No company is set up internally as a free market system. None. If the free market is so great, why don't companies organize themselves that way internally?
Because that is a market system, not a government, that is elementary. Most companies are a form of dictatorships, care to explain why that is? Should we become a dictatorship because businesses (and most household, for that matter) are?
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
'Libertarian leaning' doesn't quite describe Cato. Catonians are true believers, ideologues and as such should be taken no more seriously than your mechanic discussing the intricacies of brain surgery. Cato is also an almost-paid mouthpiece for big business. And, as dcollins points out, they were very in the wrong about Wall Street and the financial markets. One of the examples of self-regulation that Tim Lee sites is AOL going under. AOL and those like it, only went under because no one else was using their model. AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy for example, provided a closed model to their customers, which collapsed once their customers discovered they could go anywhere with the Web browser. If the on-line service provider model became institutionalized, everyone would adopt it and we'd be back to a closed off network in which we'd all pay a premium to leave your providers network.
Really, you think "wireless broadband" will be the savior? It's got more problems than wired (latency issues, distortion/signal strength issues, materials penetration issues, interference issues).
And if that weren't enough, if anything "Wireless Broadband" is already MORE restricted than wired (DSL/Cable/FiOS) offerings. For example, both Verizon and AT&T cap you at FIVE GB. Your own example (Wi-Max) sneakily enters into underlying "service provider" agreements to pull the same stunts.
Again: a FIVE GB cap, even when advertising their service as "unlimited." Use anything over that, and they cut your account instantly (while insisting, of course, that if you want to get out you have to pay them severance charges).
"Wireless broadband" is not your savior.
Oh christ. I am a long time anarcho-syndicalist, and you are a fellow who doesn't know what libertarian OR anarchist means. Libertarians are anarchists. Specifically individualist anarchists. 'Anarchy' doesn't mean what you think it means. It means, 'no tyrant' not 'no government.' Please, go read some basic introductions to anarchy.
Libertarians do not want ANY government regulation. US Libertarians, that is. In the rest of the world, libertarian is just a synonym for anarchist. In America, it means a member of the Libertarian party.
When the market is guaranteed to fail, you need regulation or democratic control.
Socialist utopia provides better choices by removing the incentive to lie about choices. If you aren't trying to prop up crappy products and business practices in order to make a buck, you will get better choices.
The $10 for sex was just an example. There are plenty more. For instance, my brother is an artist, but he hates making art now that he works for an ad agency doing it for money. The basic premise is that, once you offer money for something, it becomes all about the money and any original reasons you may have had for doing it become moot.
Prove that competition makes people want to do better. If that were true, companies would internally organize as multiply redundant departments competing against each other. They don't.
Five and six are similar, but not identical. The work alluded to in five is not necessarily research, but may also refer to economies of scale that are not achieved in a competitive market.
So, you admit competitive free markets aren't as efficient as dictatorships. Therefore, the government should dictate to companies what they should do. A democracy of the people can still be a dictator to corporations.
The flea market is a great example of market failure. Few sellers gets a truly fair price because of unbalanced market forces. Specifically, information asymmetry. Sellers know more about the real quality of items than buyers do, therefore, buyers must systematically undervalue the merchandise to protect themselves from dishonest buyers, resulting in lower prices across the board, even for honest sellers.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
And WTF? libertarians support the PATRIOT act or unilateral action against sovereign nations? you know some funny libertarians, and I'm glad I haven't met them.
You must be fortunate enough to have not heard the radio show of Neil Boortz. He's a registered and self-proclaimed Libertarian, but he's strongly in favor of a muscular approach to terrorism.
Basically, he's a Republican who isn't religious (and thus doesn't buy into the culture war issues) and doesn't like the War on Drugs. He's arguably in the border. I'm not sure whether dismissing him as one is justified or an example of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
You go into great detail about the history of the act, but neither you nor you link explains the connection. Honestly, I think this is just the left-wing variant of blaming the Community Reinvestment Act -- neither claim seems true. Note that mortgage securitization was around for decades prior to 1999, so that's not it.
you understand the concept of someone who irrationally adheres to an absurd faith, in spite of evidence to the contrary... and then you go ahead and do that anyways
dude: study history, the banking panics of the 1800s. a completely unregulated market has severity and consequences WORSE than one that is regulated. all you need is panic, a basic human psychological phenomenon to make this happen. panic feeds off itself, the market drives itself into oblivion: its historical fact, established time and time again
accept historical fact, or remain just like a creationist, believing in an absurd idea, routed and disproved many times over: a completely unregulated marketplace is a powder keg of destruction, with far worse consequences than a regulated one
solid, established historical fact
read, learn, educate yourself:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_run
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Just as we needed a certain piece of regulation called the Bill of Rights to prevent the powerful from abusing the weak, so we need other forms of regulation to prevent the rich from abusing the not-rich. Maximum freedom is indistinguishable from anarchy.
I piss off bigots.
Replace ISP with King of England and you could have been a founding father.
If you live in the city or most 'burbs you have at least DSL and cable. Also dialup and satallite but they suck. Classic Oligopoly.
Markets rarely devolve into monopoly (outside the fevered imaginations of 'know it all college hippies'). Much more typical is the other way around (additional competitors enter the market over time), which is why wireless is so important. Much lower barriers to entry.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The basic premise is that, once you offer money for something, it becomes all about the money and any original reasons you may have had for doing it become moot.
This is obviously false. It precludes the notion of someone being paid to do something they already love doing. Let's say you're a sex addict and you really enjoy sex with strangers (these people are out there), do those feelings magically disappear just because you decide to start getting paid for sex with strangers?
Most well-paid people ENJOY the work they do, that's a big part of WHY they're well-paid.
Hell, go out on a limb and say that being paid for something you love doing will probably INCREASE your love of that thing because it will increase your sense of accomplishment. Getting paid for something is positive feedback.
you need regulation for a healthy market
you need regulation, in fact to keep it free!
i leave it to your boundless imagination as to why that is
hint: left to its own devices, the marketplace would devolve into a...
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
When's the last time you've seen an actual socialist post on Slashdot, and how often do you see that compared to libertarian ones?
I think you're using that word without knowing what it means. Most people who oppose libertarians on Slashdot are fans of a balanced approach to economics, but it's not atypical for fanatics who follow an extreme philosophy to paint all the people who disagree with them as belonging to the other extreme pole. The debate here isn't Black v. White so much as Fanatics v. Moderates.
(That said, I find it equally funny that every single thread where you find one side dominating the positive moderation will include several posts whining about how people with the same viewpoint get modded down. The real trend on Slashdot is that several high level libertarian posts get modded up, and then 5x as many rebuttals get modded up, and then petty little jerks from both sides go back days later and mod down people of the opposing side. Ah, politics on Slashdot!)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Given that being gay is pretty much inconsistent with being a religious fundamentalist, I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you :).
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
you are left with an oligopoly
see the things about "free" markets is they favor the dominant powers. and lets for the sake of a thought experiment, imagine the libertarian utopia of a market of equals. after a few iterations, this market of equals devolves into a few dominant powers. its inevitable. only regulation can save us from the from the unsymmetrical power the dominant players have in an entrenched marketplace
this is a fundamental basic weakness of all libertarian arguments in fact: wealth accumulates in a few hands, and this process accelerates, and remains entrenched, and warps the playing field. you can't have a market of equals, it always devolves into haves and have nots. you have to have intrusive laws, regulation, and a busy body governmental force to constantly even the playing field. the whole libertarian ideology is a fantasy utopia, incompatible with reality
oh and btw, i'm not changing my argument, i'm expanding upon it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Corporations should have rights. There would be no point in forming one if they didn't. People should have rights. It wouldn't be a civilized society if we didn't.
One doesn't have to cite a completely free market to demonstrate a need for regulation. One could just cite an instance where deregulation failed.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
The flea market is a great example of market failure. Few sellers gets a truly fair price because of unbalanced market forces. Specifically, information asymmetry. Sellers know more about the real quality of items than buyers do, therefore, buyers must systematically undervalue the merchandise to protect themselves from dishonest buyers, resulting in lower prices across the board, even for honest sellers.
That's an interesting statement. I notice this all the time when I go buy a lot of things (especially phones, games and technology.) I'm talking about bugs, and if a seller communicated that my phone will crash several times a month, and another seller gave me a warranty that mine wouldn't, guess who I'd buy from. This information assymetry concept, it now gives voice to my thoughts on ebay, market scams, buggy software and phones, all the abuses that companies perpetrate on me. E.g., they're lying to me to get my money.
So basically, you're a commie. Thanks for clearing that up. I won't argue with you, since arguing with a communist is like arguing with a pig. When I get mod points, which is fairly often, I will moderate you down.
Commie scum like you need to be killed.
Those who tagged the article - a thoughtful libertarian proposal - as 'astroturfing' all deserve to be killed.
It's time for the pro-freedom, pro-capitalism crowd to start funding death squads to deal with the regulationists.
let's put this way: i have now advanced two logical and reasonable assaults on the folly of free market fundamentalism and the idiocy of libertarianism. you have responded to neither assaults. meanwhile, you vomit up "regulatory capture" as if that esoteric sideshow is suppose to dispel either of the two rocks of gibraltar sitting in front of you you fail to address:
1. a market without regulation will fail due to panics
2. a market without regulation will devolve into unsymmetrical powers, an oligopoly
this is the essential folly of libertarianism: it is a set of ideas incompatible with reality. in reality, if you made an experimental libertarian society, classes would emerge, and completely destroy the necessary equality required for a libertarian utopia to work. the truth of libertarianism is this: it supports entrenched classes and the established rich. it doesn't work amongst equals, because it destroys the equality between the players in a "free" marketplace. to keep the marketplace truly free, you have to actively exert intrusive regulatory forces to suppress the power of dominant players
this is the truth, it is ironclad, it is insurmountable. understand why libertarian ideals lead to inequality in reality, or understand nothing
i am sorry, but you are going to need to open your eyes. you have a propaganda-addled mind. you are probably some very well-meaning college philosophy minor, too many books under your belt, and not enough real life experience. consider the nature of the human being in your thought experiments. currently, your ideas about how libertarianism and free market is supposed to work depends upon human beings behaving in ways no human being has ever behaved in any culture in all of history
you're green, ignorant. you'll grow up someday and realize your folly
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
if the quality and functionality of the network was something that the people involved in it care about.
They don't, they care about their own profits and more precisely how those profits affect the salary bonuses of the people making the decisions.
A non neutral internet probably is sub-optimal, but so long as it's sub-optimal in a way which maximizes the salary packages of the execs who run the backbone ISPs that won't matter.
I concede the point that corporations should have certain rights. I definitely overstated the case by trying to put my thought into a simple aphorism. But where liberals and libertarians diverge is that liberals don't believe corporate interests should trump individual interests. Yet if you have any regulation designed to prevent such a thing from happening, libertarians will jump all over this as interference with the sacred "free market".
In my original point, I was arguing against GGP's assertion that libertarians were somehow outside the traditional classifications. More often than not, when forced to choose between major parties they will align with Republicans, and thus with right-wing philosophies, in spite of their otherwise liberal inclinations. Some may not see a contradiction in such a position. I do.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
No need to get all butt-hurt about it.
Banks knew they were making these loans. They knew the assets they were holding on their balance sheets. They were responsible for holding sufficient reserves to cover the risk on their balance sheets. They underestimated the risk, were woefully undercapitalized and overleveraged, and failed.
In addition, most of the financial instruments causing losses aren't even real mortgages. Credit-default swaps on mortgages were initially a way of decoupling credit risk from interest-rate risk: so you could buy a securitized mortgage, but also buy effectively default insurance. Except, you could buy the default "insurance" if you didn't own the mortgage too. And people totally unconnected to the mortgage could sell the swaps. End result: every outstanding mortgage had on average seventy times its value in outstanding derivatives.
The problem was not that some $300k houses foreclosed. Even semi-competent banks could handle that without the entire financial system collapsing. It's that each of those $300k houses had $21 million in financial instruments riding on it. And whose fault is that? The unregulated free market, combined with the financial industry being run by incompetent idiots who couldn't do credible risk estimation if their business depended on it (which it did).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If you do some game theory, you might run into the term "Cost of Anarchy".
In some games [which you should really read as "models of economic situations"], if everybody acts in their own best self-interest, you reach a stable state, put the payoff to the citizenry is less than what it could be if the players were regulated.
In particular, I remember this coming up in a game dealing specifically with either building networks, or routing packets on them.
If the economic realities are such that the citizenry is better off when regulated, I want regulation. I want the most people to be the best off, and I won't hold on to an ideal of freedom that doesn't produce that.
Now, _implementing_ it, that's the hard part... maybe we could make all market regulations last for three years and be renewable, all at the same time. Then the government can plan ahead based on experience from the past three years, better economic models and such. Let's call the set of regulations... uh... I dunno... ;) Something about building a windmill?
I believe that the purpose of society is to first and foremost ensure the life and well-being of its members. Since freedom is important to the well-being of a human being, it is also important to ensure that, but not more important than to, say, ensure that everyone have enough to eat. It is also important to note that the freedom is not the same as liberty: you can have total liberty to act as you will, but unless you also have resources to take some action, you aren't free to do so. This requires ensuring some minimum level of wealth to all members of society, which is usually done through social security or other public assistance. Furthermore, since resources imply power, great amount of resources must come with restrictions on how they can be used, to prevent the rich from becoming dictators. The purpose of Government is to oversee all this.
That good enough for you ?-)
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Please allow me to be ther first to say: "Ha!" At best this man is someone who should not be allowed out into the real world.
I'm an economist, and market forces and the invisible hand as much as the next guy,
This is the same paradigm that Alan Greenspan had when he was against deregulation. And to quote Mr. Greenspan a week or so ago "I have found a flaw... and been very distressed by this fact."
To put it simply: ISP's do not bear the full costs of their decisions.
Libertarians are Anachist
Libertarians hate govt regulation, so therefore, so do Anarchist
You want the govt to dicate what corporations?
You do realize that a corporation can be a single person, or family in my case. You want nobody to be able to open a business and make a living for themselves?
Agreed, I have no idea what your definition of Anarchy is. I think the other poster said it, you sound more like a commie, using some crazy definition of Anarchist to pass off your views as better than what they really are.
As for the flea market... why do you care what the sellers make? Don't you just want the consumers to be the ones that win? I thought you didn't care for "companies" (aka sellers). Again, you seem to be contradicting yourself.
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
Lee addresses counter-arguments with a blog posting for Technology Liberation Front."
As opposed to the Technology Liberation Front of Judea?
Unfortunately for you, science is on my side. And you don't understand what I'm saying at all. Money is an extrinsic motivation, but it is a motivation. The studies show that money does not add to intrinsic motivation, it replaces it. And most extrinsic economic motivation. Here is a link to a neutral-to-negative critique of Motivation Theory to get you up to speed and give you a few actual, you know, educated arguments against it. Sigh.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Everyone is both a seller and a buyer, and therefore should desire a mechanism that arrives at a fair price, which the free market does not. And I am not talking about MY definition of Anarchy, I am talking about THE definition of anarchy, that is, the things that all anarchists have in common, not what my branch of anarchy is all about. And it's not communism, though it's close. Anarcho-syndicalists believe in private property, just not individual control of natural resources.
What made you think I'm against "companies?" You are reading too much of your anti-commie paranoid fantasies into what I write. The free market has a place, it works well where it works. It just doesn't work everywhere. For instance, any sector with low barriers to entry and healthy competition should have as little regulation as possible. Only regulate the failure cases, like the natural monopolies of utilities, or the externality of pollution.
Look at all the privatization of socialist or communist countries in the last two decades. What worked, and what didn't? Privatizing factories, and especially commodity production, increased efficiency overall. But privatization of utilities decreased it. The free market works for some things, but not for others.
We all stand to gain by using the right tools for the job. Libertarians see everything as an economic nail, because all they have is the hammer of the free market. They dislike government because they do not have the tools to govern.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
More neocon "the free market will take care of everthing" mythology horseshit. If there actually were anything like a truly free and open market when it came to the Internet, such simplistic mumbo-jumbo might, just might, have a chance of playing out in the way the dittoheads would like to believe. In practice, the "series of tubes" (and more importantly the business decisions that dictate where the tubes go, how big they are, what they carry and when, etc.) are far more complex. Business is business and where it is profitable to act in a given fashion, that is how business will, and arguably should, act. If that action is to stifle competition and cheat customers out of contracted services, as is currently happening, that is what they will do, absent any other influence. Why is that so hard to grasp?
I don't believe that offering money or paying money makes the task all *about* the money. I think it has to be more of a spectrum, like just about everything else. If I was in a situation to live my life without money, I don't think I'd give up doing something - I'd get really bored. I'm lucky in that I like my job enough, I wouldn't just go off and do something else random, but likely would still enjoy doing what I do, even without pay.
I'm sure there's many people who would never go back to work and would instead take up different things to spend their time on. I think there are few who would just sit around doing nothing however. Even retired people I know get bored of watching TV all day, every day.
Back on point - there are people who are lucky enough to like what they do at work. Doing something enjoyable might well be something you'd do without the money.
For instance, my brother is an artist, but he hates making art now that he works for an ad agency doing it for money.
This is the example I think is too anecdotal to really tell us anything. I like playing around with Computers, setting up servers or configuring hardware and software to do new different things. I did this at home quite a lot, before getting a job doing system administration. Now I get to do it with more hardware and different software that I couldn't afford at home, and even better, I have real reasons to set up network monitoring software for instance, something that has been a lot of fun for me, but I wouldn't ever do it at home, as there's no reason to. I've gotten better at scripting for deployments at work, something I don't need to do at home.
But I still like to set up servers at home. I just got an OpenSolaris raidz2 NAS setup. Great for backing up my PCs at home. Not something I'd do at work however.
I know a mechanic who works on cars all day, every day at work, yet still loves to work on and build up his racecar.
I could go on, but not everyone decides to stop doing what they like, just because they got a job doing it.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
Of course. All I am saying is that, on average, if you get money for something, whatever motivation you had for doing it aside from receiving money is decreased.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Would it be any less of a contradiction to align with the liberals and their big government philosophies?
Seems part of the way there, but you haven't advocated the abolition of private property, completely bottom up ownership of industry, or really any of the extreme ideology associated with full-on socialism and the ending of capitalism.
All of the things you mention are compatible with a mixed-model economy that still embraces capitalism wherever it's practical.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Since when does liberal == big government? You are falling for a canard that's been pushed by right-wingers (not conservatives, by the way) for over a quarter of a century. I'm a 70s liberal who never in his life favored "big government" and never subscribed to the attempt to redefine the word "liberal".
Here's something you could read about who "big government" is.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And that's why libertarians are very supportive of the first amendment.
Oh, wait....
http://www.lp.org/issues/freedom-of-speech
http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2007/04/libertarianism-the-stuggle-ahead/
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/libertarianism.html
Not only did the article explain how the internet is opened now, it shows that it started closed and through praticality and market forces it has become more open. It also proved how quickly the internet reacts to bad business decisions, so the internet is even more sensitive to market forces than other areas of business. There is a nice helping of how regulatory agencies change thier mission after corprate insiders find there way in. Maybe you should read it instead of scimming through it.
Are the people in this form worried that Coke will come out with a new Crap Coke? Are they worried that they will do this so they can sell the good coke at twice the price? Of course not and regulation does not need to be put into place to keep coke from creating crap coke.