Slashdot Mirror
Obama Picks Net Neutrality Backer As FCC Chief
Ripit writes "President Obama on Tuesday nominated Julius Genachowski as the nation's top telecommunications regulator, picking a campaign adviser who has divided his career between Washington, D.C., political jobs and working as an Internet executive.
Genachowski is likely to continue the Democratic push for more Net neutrality regulations, which are opposed by some conservatives and telecommunications providers. He was a top Obama technology adviser and aided in crafting a technology platform that supported Net neutrality rules."
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for the sentiment behind net neutrality. But rather than just regulating, which we know never goes wrong, why not foster a more competitive market as well? I hear that sometimes helps keep capitalism from sucking.
Haiku for you!
Subject says it all.
Being against neutrality is like being against equality. It's the internet equivalent of racism and discrimination. There are man many laws and regulations against discrimination, as there should be for net neutrality.
Thanks to recent efforts by the RIAA/MPAA, the threat now isn't just that ISP's will throttle P2P, it's that they will outright BLOCK it (and any sites related to it). Their counterpart in the UK has already succeeded in this effort with most of their ISP's, and you can bet it will happen here too soon. If this guy doesn't step in with some legal protections (and threats) for these ISP's, the days of typing www.thepiratebay.org into your browser and getting any message besides "This site has been blocked for copyright infringement" are numbered.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Please explain how forcing banks to make bad loans in the name of "social justice" proves that regulation keeps capitalism from destroying itself.
End anonymous moderation and posting on
While that is a particularly emotional analogy, it's far from a perfect fit. In the naive case, proponents of tiered service argue that the internet is just a bunch of roads (sorry, not pipes in this case). And while we all get to ride cars, some people are in fire engines and ambulances. Voice traffic gets to be so blessed because it can be used for 911 calls.
Implementation is, of course, another matter entirely, and I do not pretend that it will only be restricted to voice or 'necessary' services. But calling tiered service 'discriminatory' or 'racist' is fallacious and needlessly confuses the issue.
Food and drug labeling laws made companies actually research drugs, instead of just giving mothers laudanum (opium and alcohol) to treat teething infants. Very effective - they behaved like angels. Until the stuff wore off.
I just want to know; can I sue if my 911 call is delayed due to my downloading of porn while engaged in asphyxiation-heightened auto-erotica?
Now we see the violence inherent in the system.
Why does anyone think a Net Neutrality bill wouldn't come with a couple of hundred billion more in spending for special interests, some new regulations mandating national content filtering, maybe even taxing E-mail and so on...just sayin'..
How do you go from "plenty of democrats are opposed to net neutrality" and then turn and say "it's a very liberal agenda"?
I'm not quite sure how you are able to make that statement.
I'm a very liberal person, and I 100% support network neutrality. The idea of networks not being neutral has far reaching implications to our information structure that isn't just about piracy.
We are already seeing the "market" trying to cap internet growth. With recent caps instituted by Comcast and other cable operators, we're seeing competition (in the form of internet streaming services) being held down.
If Comcast could get away with it, they would just charge you extra money for "high bandwidth use" (internet streaming). This cap is their way of instituting this functionality without actually coming out and saying it directly.
Furthermore, what they really want to do is charge the providers of these services. So while Comcast charges its customers, and say, AT&T charges its customers. Comcast wants to charge AT&T's customers to have "priority" bandwidth on their network. And that's where the idea of "network neutrality" comes into play. That all data should be treated equally, rather than separately on tiers.
So this way, Comcast would charge netflix to deliver "priority" packets to Comcast's customers. Netflix's ISP would charge Netflix to have any access to the internet at all. Comcast would charge its users for access to the internet, and then again charge its users for "priority" access to netflix.
So its a completely BS and loaded term, like fair, that can be used to side step the actual debate?
Lets try to make intelligent arguments. Please leave these kind of arguments for the politicians.
That was before our litigious society and the internet. Society has changed a lot since those days. I like to think that a self-regulating body would come about if we abolished the FDA. Much like the ESRB came about because they didn't want government interference - and they now are arguably stricter than the gov would have been with their ratings.
Don't get me wrong, I think plenty of people would try to circumvent the private 'FDA' association and buy non-label products... but I think they would be hard to find with such high chance of litigation. Stores wouldn't carry them. People should have the freedom to use unsafe products if they really want to. I wouldn't deny people a proven safe channel, either, though.
Additionally, with so much information at one's fingertips nowadays, there's no reason why people shouldn't be researching drugs they put into themselves. Doctors often don't know what they're talking about - they just care about getting you out of their office. It's really the pharmacists who know their shit, and even then I wouldn't trust them 100%.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
The internet is not and never has been a bunch of "roads". The internet is a series of interconnected post offices. Sure, there are "roads", the fibre and wires and cables that carry signals. But that's not what the internet is, just like the roads and the warehouses and the green vans are not what the post office is. The post office is a service that delivers post.
When I subscribe to an ISP, I am not paying to drive on their "information superhighway". I am paying them to deliver packets from to other IP addresses, and to deliver packets from other IP addresses to me. This is the internet. This is the way it has always been and this is the way it is as it scales upwards from users to ISPs, to Telcos.
Now big Telcos want to turn around to companies like Google and Twitter who are making money and charge them more for deliveries simply because they are deemed able to afford it. In addition, they also want to charge you more for delivering your packets to and from these companies sites. This is bullshit and everyone with half a brain knows that it cannot be allowed to stand.
When I pay for a stamp and post my letter, I don't expect the post office to turn around and say; "Oh, you're sending correspondence to your great uncle? Suit you sir. But I'm afraid that will cost you a bit extra owing to the fact that your great uncle is a man of some means. You'll have to buy a special stamp." Or "Hmmm sir. It seems your business made quite a lot of money last year, and management feels you can afford to pay an extra few pence for deliveries." Is this acceptable? Can anyone justify that?
And don't give me bullshit about "international stamps, etc". That's not what this is about. True, bandwidth corresponds to charging by weight, but on the internet, there are no foreign countries. Every computer is a local one. If you want to separate sites in Europe from one in the States then you may as well just shut the whole network down altogether, because you will have irreparably broken it.
Can anyone give one morsel of justification for why delivering my packets to google.com should cost more or less than delivering to slashdot.org? Do I give a flying fiddlers what kind of "tubes" were used to send them? Do I weep for the packets waiting milliseconds in the queue while mine is processed? Do I contemplate the strain on networks caused by shameless charlatans like myself who actually use the bandwidth they paid for? No, because the whole point of a post office is that I don't have to care how you get my letter there, I just pay you to do it.
Packets are packets are packets. IPs are IPS are IPs. Data is Data is Data. There are no tubes, no roads, no cars, no tiers, no premium IPs or domain names. Net neutrality is the only sane answer.
May the Maths Be with you!
I was wondering what you all thought of this idea and what the feasibility of it would be:
If I can see my neighbor's wireless hub, and he can see the next neighbor's down the street, and he can see the next neighbor's further down, aren't we getting to the point where we can begin decentralizing the internet from the handful of ISPs? IIRC, the early internet was basically a system of interconnected switches. By interconnecting our own personal wireless hubs, we can begin recreating the internet at a grassroots level. While not perfectly protected from government interference, it helps isolate it more. International communications would be compromised, but perhaps someone could come up with a similar solution therefor. Its not perfect yet, as not everyone is within range of their neighbor's system, so we would still need regional wireless providers in rural areas.
But it seems that we're almost getting to a point where, if we approach it correctly, we can completely get around ISPs or at least drastically reduce their control over OUR internet.
Feinstein, Biden, Boucher just to name a few.
Proof: DRM
So, everyone is making it seem like it's only republicans against Net Neutrality.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Lets take a recent example. How did Mortgage backed investments get so overvalued and rated at AAA status, even though by all accounts they were overvalued and overrated. Oh yeah, it's because the rating agency was unregulated and was Paid based on the rating they gave the investment.
Thanks, you just killed my neice and nephew who are allergic to peanuts. If the peanut recall that spread for weeks and weeks taught us anything, it's that we aren't buying directly from the local guy anymore. Suppliers barely know where their supplies come from, or where their suppliers get their supplies from. Also, without a regulatory agency that is impartial and looking out for the consumer, cost is the only thing that rules. A milk company could use melamine for months, paying off the "self-regulators" until the "good milk" suppliers are driven out of business, because their milk costs more. Then we are left with a cheap substitute for milk that is harmful. I'm simplifying here, but when it comes to Food, I really really appreciate an outside group verifying that my food isn't full of harmful substances.
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
I'm disgusted by the blurb for this one. Since it's supposed to be news, not editorial, can we do away with the slant? That's one of the reasons I gave up on mainstream media long ago, most of them write editorial commentary and call it news.
"...opposed by some conservatives and telecommunications providers..."
And supported by plenty of conservatives as well.
But Obama is evil and hates the internet! All those things he told us during his campaign were lies! I'm not going to believe this and instead am going to point out every other example that he is in the pocket of the telcos and the media companies.
Telcos have long claimed non-responsibility for content because they're just providing the information and that they have no way of filtering it. It seems, then, that to promote tiered service breaks down this legal defense. After all, if they can pick and choose between types of traffic based on origin, it erodes their ability to say they can't filter on other criteria.
Should I also join you in the assumption that a rebellion or invasion didn't take place on 2001-09-11?
9/11 was a tragedy, a horrific crime, and a terrorist act. That said, calling it an "invasion" is beyond a stretch. It's interesting the way you phrased this; you're essentially making an implicit association between saying that the September 11th attacks weren't an invasion and trivializing the deaths of 3,000 people. Clever, but I'm not falling for it. This is precisely the sort of thinking that we need to guard against in order to preserve our freedoms.
Nations become dictatorships through a perpetual state of "national emergency" all the time. Terrorism isn't a "new" threat, despite what people may say about it. The threat of terrorism has been around since before recorded history, yet every time a major terrorist attack happens and someone in the government wants to use it as an excuse to increase their power, they claim that it's a New Kind Of Threat.
We're never going to be completely safe from outside threats, no matter what we do. Denying our own freedoms because of that is un-American.
Wow, I find it amazing that your actually willing to spew this shit outside of your little I hate Bush Camps. Did you forget where you are or are you really that stupid to think your misconceptions would remain unchallenged at a site that is known for the frequent association of smart people.
First of all, the constitution stops the freedoms of it's citizens from being trampled on by it's governments. I hope you understand that because a lot of other countries don't have near the same freedoms and the constitution does nothing to give it to them. In fact, it doesn't give freedoms to anyone in the US either. "We the people of the United States" does say we the people plus those terrorists or we the people plus our enemies or we the people of the entire world. It has already been ruled on by the courts that the constitution doesn't extend to foreigners unless a law makes it so. On that same note, a law can also make it not so. And yes, the law your referring to didn't include citizens that weren't involved an act of war against the US would constitution Civil Rebellion by definition.
Actually, that would be conservatives in both cases. Don't confuse one with the other just because you saw one that was both. Don't let your own ignorance punish your image by making such stupid statements.
This is the part that I read and realize you were so brainwashed that you needed to be put in place. The vast majority of the "tazing" police incidents happened in towns controlled by democrat leaders and by local police under their control. The Politician speaking tazing incident was John Kerry's, a democrat not a republican where the security staff tazzed a student repeatedly for asking fucking questions. I think on the paramilitary issue, you are going to find the same answers too, democrats are behind them just as much as any other political entity. You are a damn fool for attempting to claim it was a one sided issue and you are a damned idiot for believing it yourself.
Ad for Clinton's "budget", it was held together by gimmicks and smoke screens unique to several specific years of his administration. The 2000 budget would of had us balanced for the next 10 years too if shit didn't change. Your also wrong about the "8 years of nearly unfettered Republican rule" There has only been 2 of those 8 years that the republicans control the house, senate and the executive and of those 2 years (2003-2005 and of that majority, it was only one by one senator. The entire idea that republicans controlled everything is nothing but a fallacy created by the democrats to excuse themselves of the behavior they are supposedly against. In your enlightened way, you swallowed it hook line and sinker.