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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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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.
"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?