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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.)"
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 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.
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.
They've bought congressmen. No need to invest any of that profit in infrastructure when you can just pay some lobbyists to ensure that your consumer-raping-business-model doesn't get threatened.
They've bought congressmen.
What happened to the hope, change and a new kind of politics?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
You actually believed that? *snickers*
Circumcision is child abuse.
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'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.
Clearly he didn't. Anyone who did believe it has either 1) Conveniently 'forgot' about it, or 2) Still believes they are getting it.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
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.
Funny, it sure seemed to work just fine up until the Brand-X ruling in 2005.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Congress is protecting phantom jobs that don't exist!
That's not true. There's the pilot who flies the CEO around. There's the undocumented laborers that maintain his property. Toss in a few lawyer friends from University for good measure.
Look at all these little things! So busy now! Notice how each one is useful. A lovely ballet ensues, so full of form and color. Now, think about all those people that created them. Technicians, engineers, hundreds of people, who will be able to feed their children tonight, so those children can grow up big and strong and have little teeny children of their own, and so on and so forth. Thus, adding to the great chain of life.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
That's exactly the fucking way to do it too. It will never ever EVER be encouraged by government or corporations either.
For one, government would just create those "long haul" infrastructure points at considerable cost without any national-security-I-can-see-you benefits. The most they could hope for is setup massive analysis points along the way to deep scan packets and possibly decrypt them. That's not possible too. For all the NSA's scariness and bluster they can't slice and dice their way through AES256 for each and every citizen in real time. I would give them credit for having the resources to do it in a reasonable time frame on a very small scale, but not at a national one. Without the ability for the National Security apparatus to at least isolate where the communication is coming from they can't be motivated to proceed. Look at Clipper and Carnivore. I seriously doubt the government would go along with the creation of any infrastructure that created technological obstructions to carry out the ideals of such data interception programs.
The other very serious issue for law enforcement is that mesh networking would have no way to establish, without any doubt, the business-customer relationships where money was exchanging hands, and consequently, there would not exist a 1) Fairly consistent and reliable information about the customer paying the bill and 2) Reliable way from a networking perspective to establish the identity of the customer.
Mesh Networking is the Holy Grail of Freedom, Anonymity, and Privacy on networks for average citizens. It would be extremely hard and time consuming to identify a single one person on it, especially if you added some TOR/Freenet/Darknet to the equation . At that point all the citizens in a densely populated urban area might as well be a single citizen.
There would be so much pressure against us to get that started I sincerely doubt it could ever get off the ground. The moment that Mesh networking gets serious at all watch how fast from local municipalities up to Federal Government makes it illegal and uses the FCC to make such transmissions dangerous.
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?
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)
What's better? Voting for the lesser evil, knowing that it's still evil and basically the same turd sandwich, or voting for someone who you know can't win but would be the right candidate for you?
I keep hearing the myth of the "lost vote". Voting for someone who has no chance of winning is "throwing away" your vote. Know what? Casting it for someone I don't want is throwing it away.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Whatever the excuses used to sell or whatever the details of the initial net neutrality regulations or legislation are, the end game is to give the government control over the flow of information.
Even those who think that being paid with tax dollars automatically makes a person wiser and more ethical than someone paid with money earned by running a successful business will be outraged if and when the government succeeds in gaining the authority to micromanage the internet and internet traffic. No one should believe that regulators will be motivated by a desire to make consumers happy.
Despite the histrionics of the usual /. bashers of the free market, the best way to provide high-quality, affordable service to consumers is to open up competition, not smother the industry with mountains of regulations and legions of government bureaucrats.
The USA only has Corporate Citizens, the human has been disenfranchised.
USA and EU Democracy is simply periodic insubstantial public fanfares, China saves millions by avoiding the public fanfare.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
I still believe it, but you shouldn't mistake the republican version for the one that Obama actually ran on. See, republicans want you to believe in Obama as some sort of savior, and then be disappointed when that fails. What Obama actually ran on was that the populace should have more hope, and the populace should enact the change. He wanted people to get involved in government again.
So maybe you should quite your partisan wining and actually DO something about net neutrality.
How can we download an entire movie within, say, one minute? Getting the speed up is more important than deciding how to allocate it.
Is it? Who gets to decide how much speed is allocated to the connection between you and the site you're downloading from? Without net neutrality, the answer will be "whoever pays your ISP". In other words, the only sites that will see decent bandwidth are those to which you've subscribed in some way, probably - because it's those sites that will be able to bribe your ISP.
So where are you getting this movie? Also note, since you made the movie example, that in the absence of net neutrality, the MAFIAA will be even stronger - they'll pay your ISP to throttle non-cartel sources of music/movies in favor of their own offerings.
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.
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
not disenfranchised, relegated. relegated to the status of livestock.
Humans need livestock to feed off, corporations need humans to feed off.
TLDR: read the third paragraph.
Voting for third party candidates isn't so much about what policies you want to see in place now, as much as it is about wanting a long-term change in the voting system. In other words, your strategy is not based on winning this election, it is about just trying to win some election in the future.
People may want to vote for third parties, but don't because they don't expect others to- it's basically a reverse tragedy of the commons. People interested in third parties may be willing to vote for such a party after seeing them get 10%, 15%, etc. of the popular vote- more additional voters would be expected as you increase how many votes you get. In that sense, it is rational to vote for a third party candidate, as you would be helping to trigger this snowball effect. Your only rational way to improve the odds of a third party eventually winning, is to continually vote for them and encourage others to follow suit (voting reform would be more helpful, but not likely until third parties get involved).
I would love to vote for a candidate I actually agree with, but doing so right now would guarantee I will never get a good candidate in office. What we must do is pick green or libertarian and vote for them regardless of whether we agree with their platform. Don't stop until the two party system is thoroughly broken. Chances are, we will need voting reform before we move beyond 4 viable parties- we won't get that reform until we have at least 3 parties.
In short, you aren't voting for a candidate. You are simply voting against the two party system.
My webcomic
What's better? Voting for the lesser evil, knowing that it's still evil and basically the same turd sandwich, or voting for someone who you know can't win but would be the right candidate for you?
That's a false choice. What's better is voting. Vote in every election for every office, from President to sanitation commissioner. If you've every missed an election because you were too lazy to get off your ass then you are the problem.
But what's better still is voting for somebody good that can also win. That means voting for a Republican or Democrat for higher office, and voting Libertarian or Green for local offices.
No, he said "So maybe you should quit your partisan whining and actually DO something about Net Neutrality".
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)
The United States is not a dictatorship and one person cannot, by law, rule unilaterally. Obama tapped Julius Genachowski to head the FCC, and thus had done more than anyone reading this thread to promote network neutrality. When you consider the myriad issues facing the USA, and how intractable most of them are, it's remarkable a single person is expected to fix even a fraction of them.
Indeed, it's a miracle that politicians accomplish anything at all considering the electoral minefield they enter every time they attempt anything of consequence. Many of these people entered politics with dreams of saving the world, then learned that votes come not from sound policies but from hyperbolic promises and expensive ad campaigns. They learn that trying to do their jobs right garners nothing but controversy, disapproval, and well-funded enemies; play-acting for the cameras, pork-barrel projects, screwing the future for short-term gain, and funding their campaigns with corporate-sponsored bills are the secret to staying in office.
And for that, the blame can squarely be laid upon the people. It's called a representative democracy for a reason: The quality of the government reflects the quality of the voters. The voters by and large are ignorant masses that vote for whatever politician promises the world and asks for no sacrifices in return. Later, when the politician fails to deliver on the impossible promises—the ones he had to make to get elected in the first place—the voters toss him out in favor of the next guy with fancy TV commercials and exactly the same promises.
If you want to change the representatives, you need to change the voters. Start a campaign to educate your community about the truth behind important issues. Get them to ask tough questions and to expect real answers instead of sound bites. Get them to vote not for the candidate with the biggest promises but the one who offers detailed policies. Explain the federal budget and where tax monies really go, and how it might be fixed. Explain the issues that matter most to you. And if you can't find anyone to represent your views in congress, run for office yourself.
But if you can't be arsed to do anything but make hollow demands, expect your representatives to do nothing but make hollow promises.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Let's not forget that the US voting system robs people of all hope for third party candidates so most vote for a guy they don't like but still don't hate as much as the other.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
More like "Hope and Change!" /fine print/ We Hope you don't wake up and notice that the only Change! is a Democrat cashing the checks and sucking the corporate cock instead of a Republican.
The only nice thing about it is after 8 years of Obama (because the repubs will run a tea party kook) it should finally silence all those fools that say "You can change it by voting!" and get them to finally accept what many of us already know, that short of armed revolution all you can do is take every dime you possibly can get from mommy government and wait for the whole thing to collapse.
It does make me wonder if this is what the Romans felt like during the last decades of their empire, as the wealthy looted while the government tried to keep them passive with bread and circuses. Were they this apathetic? Did they see their empire was falling apart and simply realize it was beyond hope? Of course our empire has a shitload of weapons (pretty much the only thing we are #1 at any more) so it will probably be a whole lot nastier. But Obama should have finally drove a stake through the lie that votes matter, they don't. Only big fat checks and cushy corporate positions after "public service" matter anymore.
As for TFA, did ANYBODY here actually believe the FCC had a chance in hell against an entire congress full of corporate blowing whores? Hell I'm surprised they got as far as they did. In today's climate if it is good for the people but bad for a corporate bottom line the answer will always be NO, period. When was the last time you saw congress pass anything that was truly "for the people"? Can you even remember back that far? And please don't say health care, because that was an insurance company wish list granted by the government. If it was for the people we would have had a single payer option and a cap on drug prices like the sane countries do.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Wow how naive can you be? Obama came to power with an agenda to implement certain things that left had wanted to do for years and finally got their chance (no 1 being the healthcare bill). That's the change he was talking about. According to any poll, majority of people were against the bailouts, majority of people were against the stimulus, majority of people were against Obamacare, majority of people are in favour of Arizona type immigration control. I guess the change the according to you the populace should enact would be very different to the change that he is actually enacting. Dems were elected simply because people were sick of Bush and neo-cons, they never got the mandate or popular support to do any of those things they are doing.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Believe it or not, constituent sentiment is taken into account.
If every single constituent sent a nasty letter to their congressman you can bet they would think long and hard before jeopardizing their seats. Unless they *really* strongly believed in it and were willing to sacrifice election chances they will bend in the wind of public opinion.
This and other results bear our your thesis.
The same was true with the "Corporate" Healthcare Bill. Almost all of the Democrats had their hands out for the Corporate Millions.
And they voted predictably.
If possible the Democrats may actually be More Corrupt than the Republicans.
Unless they *really* strongly believed in it and were willing to sacrifice election chances they will bend in the wind of public opinion.
Then how do you explain the fact that the health care "reform" legislation passed when a large majority of Americans were opposed to it?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
"The sad thing is that I can't see how this changes without bullets . . ."
This system is going to collaps under its own weight. We've been printing and borrowing to avoid dealing with recession ever since the beginning of the Bush administration, and it has only accelerated in the last two years. Every day that they continue this nonsense makes the day of reckoning worse. This year alone the Federal government will borrow and spend at least $1.5 trillion. That's almost 10% of GDP. Then, they'll release official BS statistics which claim that the economy "grew" by 2-3%. Remove the unsustainable debt spending, and the economy clearly shrank. Furthermore, if they balanced the budget tomorrow, it's an immediate 9+% drop in GDP.
It won't take bullets to change things, just another few years of the status quo.
When the asshats in D.C. refuse to deal with a glaringly obvious fiscal crisis, why should we have any hope that they're going to do something like network neutrality?
[Obama] wanted people to get involved in government again.
And do what, vote?
No, he wants people to apply government jobs and/or government cheese.
Wow how naive can you be? Obama came to power with an agenda to implement certain things that left had wanted to do for years and finally got their chance (no 1 being the healthcare bill). That's the change he was talking about. According to any poll, majority of people were against the bailouts, majority of people were against the stimulus, majority of people were against Obamacare, majority of people are in favour of Arizona type immigration control. I guess the change the according to you the populace should enact would be very different to the change that he is actually enacting. Dems were elected simply because people were sick of Bush and neo-cons, they never got the mandate or popular support to do any of those things they are doing.
Actually, if you look at the polls, a majority of people had no fucking idea what they were talking about on any of those subjects. Not the first clue. We have got to have one of the least informed electorates in existence.
a government takeover of healthcare, which Obamacare is most certainly not
Sure it was. The Government will control what kinds of coverages insurance companies can offer and will mandate that we purchase it. It's actually worse than a pure government takeover -- it's a government takeover via for-profit middlemen.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.