Slashdot Mirror
Congressmen Send Letters, Hope For Net Neutrality Fades
The odds of the FCC implementing net-neutrality rules just got much longer. "A bipartisan group of politicians on Monday told FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, in no uncertain terms, to abandon his plans to impose controversial new rules on broadband providers until the US Congress changes the law. Seventy-four House Democrats sent Genachowski ... a letter saying his ideas will 'jeopardize jobs' and 'should not be done without additional direction from Congress.' A separate letter from 37 Senate Republicans, also sent Monday, was more pointed. It accused Genachowski of pushing 'heavy-handed 19th century regulations' that are 'inconceivable' as well as illegal. ... [U]nless something unexpected happens, the fight over Net neutrality will shift a few blocks down Independence Avenue from the FCC to Capitol Hill. (In an editorial Monday, The Washington Post called for just that.)"
How can we download an entire movie within, say, one minute?
Getting the speed up is more important than deciding how to allocate it. But what have ISPs done over the years?
What phantom jobs are they talking about? Broadband infrastructure investment in the US is dead dead dead. Verizon was the last company investing in broadband infrastructure with their FiOS deployments. They've already announced that they're stopping. No more FiOS. No more broadband.
How can an industry with a current investment level of ZERO be providing jobs? There are no jobs, because there is no investment. Congress is protecting phantom jobs that don't exist!
The jobs at risk are the congressdroids' - they are fearful their corpocleptocractic campaign donors will support someone else if they don't stop this return to normalcy. Fuckers don't even realize they are acting against their own interests - just wait until they end up having to pay extra to all the ISPs so that the voters can get to their own campaign websites.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The problem is that the approach Genachowski wants to use means adding ISPs into the existing structure used to regulate telcos. While this would insure net neutrality it would also open a giant can of worms in applying the rest of a giant regulatory structure to ISPs.
You won't like that.
The correct approach IS new legislation that narrowly addresses the issue of net neutrality.
The government MUST control the flow of information. Otherwise, the balance of power could rest with the people.
The way I see it, net neutrality needs to be mandated for ISPs using state or federal funds to "modernize" America, if they use substantial portions of public lands they also need to use net neutrality. If they use no public funds or public land, let them do what they will. But since most ISPs use public land or funds, we, the taxpayers have a say in their operations.
This isn't about "regulations" its about getting what you paid for: to "modernize" America with faster internet access, not access to a handful of sites, no non-traditional ways of getting content, etc.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
My how I hate articles which don't reference the main subject. http://netcompetition.org/House_Democrat_Letter.pdf http://netcompetition.org/Senate_Republican_Letter.pdf
Vote for ANYONE but republican or democrat. Anyone. I don't care who. Whatever you do, absolutely do not vote for a republican or democrat. Please?
Bi-partisan only means that the same corporation has bought you both. That is the only thing that word means anymore.
Think Of The Children!
Your Country Needs You!
The War On [Insert Topical Cultural Demon Here] Must Go On
Burn The [Insert Topical Cultural Demon Here]!!
There are of course loads more. Anyway, it all sounds as if no-one has moved on since the 11th century so let's remind those that order soldiers around that you can't always get what you want and usually, you regret what you wish for.
Cue the unending stream of lobbyists, please. They're on next.
Seriously, how many people ACTUALLY think that this was anything more than Congress muscling the FCC aside to better suckle at the corporate teat?
Maybe I'm just being cynical, but I don't see Congress getting territorial over any issue that isn't backed by multi-billion dollar industries.
I say the FCC should license a nice fat chunk of wireless spectrum for high power ad hoc peer to peer networking. Then people can put up their own antennas and run their own community-wide public access points. Then maybe the government can help out by connecting the major cities with the longer haul infrastructure. I have to wonder how big of a mess it would be to start, but I also kind of wonder if it might self-organize into a new internet. It'd be delightful to see Comcast's reaction to something like that.
Kind of like modern IP laws...
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
Making a viable third party in this country would require a staggering amount of time, effort, and money. Any such third party would have to have a pretty solid message, with some pretty solid heads on its shoulders, to have a hope of getting anywhere. The rank level of dissatisfaction with the current party structure means that yes, it is probably possible. But if you're going to tell me to vote for and possibly help promote a third party, you'll get a much better reaction if you show me some damned smart people working on some damned smart platforms. Most third parties are not run by the best and the brightest that this nation has to offer.
Adult Role Playing Forum
It accused Genachowski of pushing 'heavy-handed 19th century regulations' that are 'inconceivable'
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I am officially gone from
It's not as if net neutrality really had a chance. The incumbent ISPs were going to buy enough politicians off to get the concept killed.
corpocleptocractic
Government by body-snatchers?
But I couldn't figure out what was going on from either linked articles ? Seeing as net neutrality has become a term that has been so completely trashed by both sides, there is really no way to tell from the information provided. I will say this liberal or conservative, democrat or republican you really don't want these people writing rules to control monopolies. They are the same people that gave us 80 years of overpriced phone service, allowed ATT to use incomprehensible invoices, and had us paying a telephone tax for the spanish american war till after the year 2000, .What we need and there is no way we are getting is laws that allow more companies to become ISPs. More unlicensed wireless spectrum, must carry laws for cable and telco isps, or anything that makes these peoples wires less of a monopoly isn't on the agenda.
it clearly needs government regulation to fix it. :/
So, that's 74 democrats and 37 republicans who are either too stupid to know/bother-to-learn how common carrier laws work or who are wholly owned by communications monopolists.
Where's the list of assholes who signed those letters?
The people who pass the DMCA and the Sonny Bono copyright act lose the right to complain about g 'heavy-handed 19th century regulations'. Corruption in the US seems to have reached new lows.
What concerns me even more is that world-wide it seems like politicians are more willing than ever to act against the best interests of the people they are meant to be representing, or pass universally unpopular legislation that a well informed public would never vote for directly. Now THAT is corruption. And there seems to be nothing and no one anywhere with the will or ability to stop the landslide.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Watched a old documentary, Net Neutrality (2006) (PBS NOW). /.ers do not even seem to notice.
It was amazing how different the issues were then, anti net neutrality then is now common practice that even
One of the main reasons that the people back then were given to allow the anti net neutrality was that the ISPs could never go overboard and do anything really bad, since the FCC had the ability and power to stop them.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
This site has the letters on the left-hand side.
The Democrats, The Republicans.
Sure wish they'd put the names in these news articles, so people had a better idea of who to vote for or against.
This may backfire with the Congress people's wishes. It is only a matter of time before someone starts working on better anonymizing protocols. Right now, people don't tend to use tor or I2P. However, if abuses pile up [1] (ISP deciding to route all traffic from acme.com to ajax.com, sell login information gleaned from non SSL connections, fake SSL connections with bogus CA toplevel certs, intercept and take associate credit for click ads, drop connections to VPNs, sniff E-mail and account passwords and selling those to any/all comers, intercept VPN logins and route them to fake domains, intercept message in transit and change them, so E-mail messages are tampered with, and so on, blocking packets to and from game servers unless a premium surcharge is paid, blocking access wholesale to websites unless they pay a connection fee, and a bandwidth fee to their end), people will get fed up with it and start working on a low-latency network that encrypts traffic hop to hop, with perhaps only a temporary public key being the way that an endpoint knows another endpoint by, similar to how a machine outside of a NAT only knows a temporary port number on the NAT server for communication with the host on the other side.
Of course, the cat and mouse game will continue until ISPs block anything encrypted on any port, including SSL connections which persist and have data transfers over a certain limit. However, there will be a point where data has to be transferred encrypted, and ISPs can't do a thing about it, similar to how ISPs do not block VPN connections to businesses overtly. Eventually the encrypted setup will win, assuming it doesn't get infiltrated/cracked first.
Joe Sixpack doesn't want to worry that the list of pr0n sites he visited yesterday will be in the hands of his boss and ex wife's divorce attorney tomorrow, so he will learn somehow to use proxies or an encrypted network.
Of course, this would make legitimate interception for law enforcement impossible.
[1]: Right now these are in theory. This is not saying any ISP is doing any/all of these yet.
let company's like comcast keep running out of control. they are aruldy losing there subscribers in mass to competing isps and satlite providers.what does that mean for people that are stuck with comcast you guess it even higher rates for throttled lower quality internet. i know people will start the dsl is slower fight but faster does not mean better if you cant use it for anything other then email. and that's what comcast whants and without the fcc stepping in that's what they will get. and by time joe user catches on to this it will be to late. i relly encourage voters to contact there congress and express there disagreement with them stoping the fcc.from forcing these isps to be fair. the fcc should also appeal and go back to court over that ruling that hurt there move badly.
They're not wholly owned by the telcos. They just hold shares of the congresscritters, nobody needs to buy a complete polidroid. You can rent them these days, you just have to pay more than the guy opposed to you.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The letter confirms The Corporate Welfare state that replaced the Social Welfare state provides reason to stupidity.
We pay for what we get, what the government gets, what the business C*Os get, and what our government gives to business with privileges, tax breaks, civil rights, kick-backs-by-proxy....
Corporate Institutions are more enfranchised than private citizens in the USA a pure plutocracy of the entitled of Corporate American Governance.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
You do realize that ISPs are not and have never been common carriers, right?
Government by employed, thieving, body-snatchers.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
and we see how well the telecos are doing. Maybe there is a chance that they can do it better. Besides, I think we should be believers in that balance of power thing, where the legislative tells the executive to shove it. You sure were rooting for it 2 years ago.
The "Domino Theory" has again proven to be fallacious logic. Politicians are such idiots, I am amazed we won WWII, maybe the other fools politicians were that much worse than ours. Then again, maybe currently our politicians are that much worse than ....
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
When did the FCC become the Dauntless Defender of the Little Guy?
Give him the +5.
He meant government by corporate thieves and probably didn't give a moment's thought to the Latin deconstruction, which was an even better description.
C'mon, that's a double pun, that's clever shit! You didn't think of it, goddammit!
That's the solution. A router in every pot.
Personally, I think it should be coproclepticratic... Government via the uncontrolled theft of people's shit.
Congressional donation specialists, campaign staff, lobbyists, and many many more. Allowing the FCC to have its way could decimate employment in the Washington D.C. area. This is not the time to endanger the fragile recovery.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
they are fearful their corpocleptocractic campaign donors will support someone else if they don't stop this return to normalcy.
And thanks to a recent supreme court decision uncapping corporate election spending, they're right to be fearful.
they are acting against their own interests - just wait until they end up having to pay extra to all the ISPs so that the voters can get to their own campaign websites.
As long as incumbents are good at falling in line with the interests of people with money, higher expenses for all comers actually give them an advantage, because it's easier for them to raise money than it is for contenders, and they probably have a war chest from past elections.
Tweet, tweet.
That's precisely the problem we're trying to fix. It hasn't been a huge issue until now, because they've historically operated roughly as if they were common carriers.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I am convinced that those of you naive enough to beg the government to regulate the Internet will eventually get exactly what you wish for.
I am amazed we won WWII
There are times I have my doubts.. We seem to be in a new age of appeasement and the love of money
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Of course, the fight for the public's rights belongs in Congress where it can be carefully watched and modified by legislators bought and paid for by the telecommunications industry. It doesn't surprise me that the Post would get on anti-net-neutrality (i.e. the telecommunications industry's) side of this.
The good part is that this is just a letter. The claim that what the FCC may be thinking of doing being illegal may be just the opinion of the senators signing the letter. It would be most interesting to see what corporations dumped money into their most recent re-election coffers. If we learned one thing from the Nixon administration it's: Follow the money.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I work in politics (not in the USA) and this is EXACTLY what is required. The system is a democracy, its just that the lobbyists are getting to more voters than we are. So unless you get off your ass and start telling people about this, and not just the regular crowd of believers but your family and friends about how important net neutrality is then there won't be any change. Obama doesn't have any power of his own, the only power he has is the millions of people who agreed with him and who said they would support those things.
The FCC proposal is to designate ISPs as common carriers which will subject them to net-neutrality regulation.
Technically, ISPs should already be common carriers under the definition in the 1996 Telecom Act, which applies to all persons who engage in "interstate or foreign communication by wire or radio or in interstate or foreign radio transmission of energy..."
It's just that the FCC has been treating them as "information service providers" so now the FCC will have to make a finding that they are, in fact, common carriers and then will make rules governing them.
There's a whole lot of paperwork and public hearings involved, but it's entirely within their authority so any opposition from congress will either have to involve passing a law that changes that authority or (as was previously mentioned) coercing the FCC chair by screwing with his budget.
Slashdot poll for the best protest date wins. We then all descend on Washington in favor of Net Neutrality.
:)
A new, visceral type of slashdotting
Imagine if electricity utilities were allowed to put out the wattage level they saw fit. Ya, that'd work well... Same goes for the interwebs.
Read that as coprocleptocratic first...
Government. We take your ****.
just wait until they end up having to pay extra to all the ISPs so that the voters can get to their own campaign websites.
That will never happen. Ever notice how the politicians write themselves nice exemptions from the law that the plebeians have to obey?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
just wait until they end up having to pay extra to all the ISPs so that the voters can get to their own campaign websites.
If only relatively well-off voters can afford to keep tabs on congress, that will suit the congresspeople just fine. They don't even WANT our votes if we're poor; Who wants the burden of representing people you hate?
Parent is not satire.
Parent is dead serious, these are his actual beliefs.
If the FCC has the authority to classify ISPs as "telecommunications providers" instead of "information providers" it should do so regardless of what Congress says.
I wish more people in Washington had the guts to do what Julius Genachowski is doing and stand up to those "suits" in their fancy leather chairs in the executive offices at Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner, Cox, Verizon, Sprint, Qwest and the other ISPs. Those ISPs do NOT have a right to make profit at the expense of consumers and I applaud the FCC for having the guts to do something about it.
Here's a tip for Comcast... Instead of blocking BitTorrent, just charge those customers who use more bandwidth (regardless of what they use it for) more money each month. And implement QoS that shoves BitTorrent packets to the back of the queue to give everything else a chance.
Of course, if they actually did that, people might stop paying for expensive cable channels and start downloading the content instead. Cant have that now can we :P
Who do we want in control of the infrastructure? Corporations which cannot be held accountable because they are owned by foreigners? Or the government which while still possibly owned by foreigners is at least somewhat accountable.
It's your choice. I think as a libertarian rather than anarchist, you need a government to maintain freedom/liberty for the consumer. Corporations are on their own and in my opinion using the government to promote and support corporations is collectivism.
I'll miss it, when it's gone.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
No seriously you want a mesh network for every person on the internet. How would you store that many whohas entries in every node?
The only reason the internet is viable is because of the way isp's bottle neck everyone through a small number of gateways where the routing tables are stored. although I would be intrested to hear peoples solutions to this.
If the US doesn't support net neutrality, I'm pretty sure no other country will stick up for that either. A slippery slope for the quality of the internet. I expect/imagine we'll all be having a sucky internet in a couple of years because you can't reach any interesting bits.
to say that we shouldn't have "intrusive" net neutrality regs and should "let the market decide" instead.
How's it working out for you guys? What are you going to do when the "free" market, dominated by a few huge players, decides to throttle or block traffic outside of their network? Switch to one of the other huge players that does the same damn thing? This is doubly true given that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are people and that said huge players don't have to open up their networks.
So, I put the question to you: Where's this "free" and "open" "competitive" market you guys keep droning on about?
You'd need the mesh to self-manage some sort of pseudo-hierarchy.
That's not what I was proposing.
There would be a traditional network infrastructure that is viable in the way you mention it. It provides "free" access to wireless connections made via local mesh networks. So you would not need a direct connection to any part of the "backbone". As long as you were within a reasonable distance and could have a couple of nodes relay your traffic you would be fine.
Obviously the farther away you are, and the more nodes you need to get to a backbone the quality of your connection would diminish. Hence, the need of governments and cities to intelligently expand the backbone as required.
So every mesh node connected straight to the backbone would have a public IP address routed in the traditional way. The value in the mesh network is that anonymity is assured through reasonable doubt. Of course Germany's laws assigning responsibility to that mesh node regardless if they could prove the owner committed the act makes this idea problematic to say the least.
As for the problem you mention, distributed content networks like Freenet go a long way to addressing that. For websites and services that can't work in that kind of environment I would see them hosted in data centers no different than anything else today.
What you would get out of this is the elimination the "last mile". Everything is moving towards the Internet anyways. I think it is only logical that a citizen connect up to a Neutral Network via wireless connections eliminating the costly infrastructure in the streets and the houses. Would be a lot easier in many ways and anonymity is practically assured.
I seriously don't think government operating the backbones could be any worse than private companies, which are trying to also control the content due to a conflict of interest.
Because if Network Neutrality goes, the companies get to censor you. They get to censor anyone they feel like, and there's not a damn thing the Constitution will do for you. It only applies to the Government, not private companies. If there's no Network Neutrality, the regional provider will tell you where you can and cannot shop. So you change provider, right? Wrong. There's not much in the way of competition at tier 1 and you don't get to pick what tier 1 your ISP uses. Besides, with much of the redundancy cut out of the Internet as it stands, there IS no way for you to circumvent such restrictions. Oh, and that means that if one backbone provider blocks vendor X, then vendor X will be essentially blocked from ALL backbone vendors downstream of that location. A puritanical backbone provider in one State can impede the commerce in another.
Sure, sure, the providers claim they can't handle the sheer volume of Internet traffic and some small fraction of users use most of it. They can use QoS. ECN, Hierarchical Fair Service Curve and an adaptive packet-dropping scheme like BLACK would be sufficient. (There are a number of schemes, including BLACK, that are designed to prevent packet streaming from clogging up the network. ECN messaging allows the network to tell servers and clients when they need to throttle back. HFSC ensures that nobody can game the system and take unfair advantage of the resources.) This would not be contrary to Network Neutrality, as it ensures that all users are treated absolutely as equals. The networks would be true Common Carriers, rather than Mafia bosses.
Oh, and that reminds me, have you considered that when the RIAA and MPAA started to form and seize power, there were probably people - in all innocence - saying that the industry should take care of itself, that interference would cause problems, that the corporations needed all this extra power for the benefit of the poor, starving artists. Given that the money collected by the RIAA and MPAA never gets seen by said artists, and no serious opposition to this exists, do you seriously expect me to believe that the ISPs and backbone providers will spend the money they rake in through the ultimate protection racket will ever get seen by the poor, starving engineers? Give me a break. You'd have to be insane.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
What's really needed here is something to take as much political influence out of the process as possible, and to eliminate as far as possible the resulting laws'/regulations' ability to be used to control/silence speech.
Many people feel the internet is another world. I'd agree with this basic concept with the exception that at this point the internet is more like another country and deserves it's own Constitution and Bill of Rights in order to grow, prosper for all, and fulfill the promise the internet holds for every human on the planets' future.
We need something along the lines of an Internet Constitution & Bill of Rights amended to the US Constitution setting out specific duties, powers, & limits to what the government, ISPs, and backbone providers may do along with a set of basic individual rights for the internet.
We don't need to re-classify the internet under telco regulations or pass some massive multi-thousand-page monstrosity of a bill that will be a political payoff and power-grab by *somebody* in the end, with very little to address the actual concerns of most here while almost certainly making things worse in multiple ways for most internet users.
Unfortunately, the only way I can see getting something that isn't a power/wealth grab by one political/corporate interest or another is to have it be a grassroots movement of some sort, as anything coming from politicians of any stripe is nearly guaranteed to be corrupt, or at least end up corrupted by the time it's passed. It would have to be a powerful enough popular demand to overcome fierce resistance from the entire political/governmental structure.
Well, one can dream.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Wouldn't that be corpclepticrappocratic ?
74 corrupted Democrat rats and 37 corrupted Republican scoundrels.
When it comes to "stuff that matters", they are all the same.
One cannot be a decent moral person nowadays and support any of the two animal houses.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
> American democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner, and then they eat one of the wolves because the sheep has better lobbyists.
And the sheep STILL has the nerve to complain about the taste...
Look up the Korean "Aachi wa Ssipak". Oh yeah, it's been done before.
corpo-cleptocractic
I would support you, but your views are too heteroradical.
Wait, hetero-radical... crap.
Google still believes in net neutrality and has more money for lobbyists than the ISPs and communication companies acting in their own interest. It could happen. It IS Google, right?
Personally, I think it should be coproclepticratic... Government via the uncontrolled theft of people's shit.
We already have that.
The USA is a republic, NOT a democracy.
Congress sees "net neutrality" just like they see the "interstate hiway system." They can set speed limits, weight limits and length limits and prevent some trucks from going on small roads (No Truck Routes). Congress mentality is simple. Oh, and they want to grab as much power and money as possible.
I'm not certain their regulations will be harmful at all. We need to be vocal about our concerns in any regulations.
Any regulations will be to protect us from ourselves, right?
Internet access is not a luxury like entertainment and is more necessary than television or radio.
The FCC and some forces in the government logically wished to treat internet access as a utility but it appears that legal Corporate graft has won instead.
And this has happened where the ISP's are virtual monopolies!
Some of the new possibilities include finding your internet access restricted to a handful of sites unless you buy access to additional sites for extra fees.
Wish to access non-US or EU sites? Good luck finding a package for that!
Since ISP's are becoming liable for Copyrighted material why won't they just remove access to sites and services that people use to access material?
What percentage of the Internet will Americans even have access to?
And of course they can use bandwidth throttling to make sure only advertising comes through at high speeds. True Internet Hell!
So we need ISP alternatives! With today's technology their must be ways around the US ISP monopolies. What could a satellite dish and equipment do?
Is it feasible to setup a "Whole Internet" Coop with WiFi in an area? Or are there regulations making it illegal to bypass the monopolies?
Not wholly owned? On Capitol Hill they all know that once the payment is received they are obligated for any requested services.
I'd be surprised if there was anything they wouldn't do short of murder or starring in porn movies. Then again.
just wait until they end up having to pay extra to all the ISPs so that the voters can get to their own campaign websites.
You obviously don't known anything about how the government works. More than likely, that premium would be paid by tax payers, at a premium. They get a free ride via mail service too. In other words, everyone losses except for ISPs/Telcom/Cable, their CEOs, and the associated lobbyists.
Besides, if it takes an extra two seconds for your congressman's web page to render, who cares. They are already using services such as YouTube and Google Video to disseminate video messages, not to mention Face Book and Twitter. They are already riding on someone else's bandwidth so at the end of the day, they're really not that likely to be negatively affected at all.
'someone thinks of the children'.
A: Because they can.
No sig today...
Someone mentioned that we need to vote for candidates that have detailed plans for everything rather than voting for those with slick ad campaigns. So put yourself in the situation of someone running for office. Are you expert enough to lay out detailed solutions to issues concerning telecommunications, agriculture, commerce, defense, transportation, welfare, immigration, international relations and all the myriad sub-fields they contain? Nobody can possibly be a competent expert in all of these areas yet congress has to regularly make long-lasting decisions that impact these fields. How can they possibly make an informed decision for every bill? Enter the lobbyist. The lobbyist is an expert in his or her particular field and is more than happy to inform a congressperson what the important issues are regarding House Bill 714.
We don't need "informed" politicians because nobody will ever exist that can make competent decisions on every or even some of the issues he or she will face in their political careers. We need to somehow neutralize the power and influence a lobbyist holds in our government without removing the essential service they provide - access to expertise and the ability to provide a cliff note summary of the topic at hand. What the answer to that is I don't know but it's clear why corporations seem to run the show - because they have all the experts. How did you gain the expertise in whatever vocation you decided to practice? More than likely you gained it by working for someone, maybe even a large corporation or two.
THAT is probably about the only thing that they could understand.
Internet campaigns can cost far less (maybe just volunteers), and may "Virtually" negate TV/Radio time and location appearances.
This would be a good reason for the status-quoe plutocrats to advocate net-nepotism and end net neutrality.
It could be the only nails in the US Democracy and Freedoms coffin.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
havent these same people used the same word for preventing regulations into wall street ?
what happened after that ? or was it a parallel reality ?
Read radical news here
these posts as such are being made in order to derail discussions. just observe how long the bullshit went on for pages after you started responding to this troll post. its premeditated, planned trolling. do NOT respond to such trolls that post in the first posts of a discussion.
Read radical news here
I don't see any reason to stay in a country that is intent on killing free speech, innovation, and it's own economy.
Slashdotters, is there anywhere safe to move to?
I used to think Declan McCullough was a reasonably intelligent fellow, but this is just a propaganda piece.
You really need to do a little background check on Mr. McCullough. Google his name in relation to LiViD (the earliest attempt at getting DVDs to play on Linux. He was single handedly responsible for getting the MPAA riled up against the free software world, and the legal troubles of several developers at that time.
They weren't the last free software developers that jerk shit on, by a long shot.
He is obviuosly still butt-buddies with one or more of the editors at slashdot since they still seem to give his appalling tripe preference over more intelligent and balanced news stories (I won't use the term 'reporting' for McCullough's form of yellow 'journalism')...must be some nice kickbacks in there for the slashdot people.
Honestly, I've been posting on this site for many years (as you can probably see by my relatively low /. id), but this love affair between /. and that particular piece of excrement makes me want to reconsider. Replacing links in submissions as happened with yesterday's "tabnapping" story just reinforces the notion that a better portal than slashdot is sorely needed, and soon. (No, I don't mean digg, much as I enjoy it at times)
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The news never says "US citizens" unless it's a kidnapping or a plane crash in foreign lands.
Nope, the news says "US consumers".... US consumers this, US consumers that...it's all you are to the politicians.
No sig today...
Don't worry; any law Congress passes always exempts themselves from its most dastardly features; think the political exceptions for Do Not Call and the like. The law will most likely require that policical sites get priority, tariff-free status.
That usually goes by IRS, or DEA, or Local Law Enforcement. They have many names.....
Where's the list of Senators? I want to send a letter of my own. Why doesn't the linked story include it? Fail, Declan.
My stupid web site
Body-snatching corpocleptocractic congressdroids...
Well now I've got a villain for my next D&D game.
Of course the ISPs are against net neutrality. The money is in the content business not in the utility side of it. The anti net neutrality FUD right now comes from "Americans for prosperity", funded by cable providers and AT&T.
If you remember the "CO2 is live"-slogan, that's where it's going. Net neutrality= governement regulation = net brutality. Keep the government of my internet, Growth is only possible in an unregulated market. The government took over banking, auto mobile industry, and health care, now they want to steal your internet.
I am looking at changing to a local ISP right now.
You mean it's not already?
So... individual members of Congress wrote to the FCC, trying to direct its actions? Wrong branch of government. They have neither the power to interpret the laws passed by previous congresses nor the power to manage the organization directly. If they want to pass new laws, they should get on it.
You do realize that ISPs are not and have never been common carriers, right?
That is ridiculous. The entire purpose of the Internet (as a network) is to be a common carrier of data packets. When the FCC previously decided that Internet access providers should not be considered common carriers, it only demonstrated their prior regulatory incompetence.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure he's talking about those people. You know, the unwashed masses that are in a shithole and want a better life. And they can get it if they come here. Kind of like our great grandparents.
Also, I've yet to meet anyone going through the legal immigration system that just loved the process. They'd probably ask for the right to competent paper pushers.
Also also, wanna bet how many federal crimes you've broke in the last year? The answer: you don't know, and neither do the feds, but if they wanted to they'd find something.
about voter registration?
The problem is, it worked and the corporate machine publicized a made-up scandal as if it were true. Now ACORN is defunct.
Any citizen-involvement drive in government will receive the same malevolent treatment, unless that drive is working to put more power into the hands of corporations and the wealthy few (e.g. teabaggers).
AFAIK the 'rerouting around damage' process may only work in a net culture where most users are technically savvy. But it isn't 1997 or even 2001 anymore. Internet communications are driven by herd mentality, which I fear will result in a situation where anyone wishing to re-route around the damage will have to cut themselves off from now-essential services unless they want to foot the bill for both the megacorp and re-rerouted versions of the net at the same time.
good, they all signed their own retirement papers when we vote them out of office in november.
WTF!
What d!ck with mod points calls a request for political activism trolling?!!
Its sad to see so many smart people on slashdot be so economically ignorant.
Net Neutrality is a terrible idea. We have a free market. If one ISP wants to intercept/throttle data, vote with your feet and move on. Forcing them not to can only possibly lead to higher prices - as otherwise they wouldn't be doing it.
What you would rather choose from? Unlimited internet where P2P is sometimes capped depending on ISP and low prices, or internet where the government prevents capping, but there are now download limits, and high prices? All you need to do is take a glance at the rest of the world and you will see the answer is obvious.
Net Neutrality is another 'social justice'. It seems like a good idea that is fair, but its actually a terrible violation of freedom. You are free to choose your ISP and not choose an ISP, your ISP is free to offer or not offer a service. If they don't want to offer an unlimited peer to peer internet connection, they shouldn't be forced to.
Once Net Neutrality is gone, everything will be tolled. Until the USA finds itself so far behind the rest of the world, that it will be to late. With Net Neutrality gone, the ISPs will have enough clout to prevent new businesses (in Telecom) from forming, as the ISP clubers will control that new business's access to bandwidth. The government established the nations highways, it is time they established the nations telecom highway. Do we need another President Eisenhower to build this nation's telecom industry. Yes, highways have speed limits, and the global network should allow every user to travel at the posted limit. If not so allowed, the impact will be quite serious on technology and industry. My son lived in Riga Latvia, a former Soviet bloc, and his termination at his apartment was fibre, at 8+x the speed of dsl or 3x the speed of cable. This same termination should be available to every household.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada