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Al Franken's Warning On Net Neutrality
An anonymous reader writes "Democratic Sen. Al Franken weighed in on Net Neutrality over the weekend at the Netroots Nation conference of liberal activists in Las Vegas, calling it 'the First Amendment issue of our time,' and warning against Republican plans for less regulation. More from a blog post on CBSNews.com: 'Speculating on what the Internet could morph into under the Republicans' preferred lack of regulation, Franken asked the audience of bloggers how long it would take before the Fox News website loads significantly more quickly than the Daily Kos website. "If you want to protect the free flow of information in this country, you have to help me fight this," he said.'"
understand that their whole business model is dependent upon a neutral net?
when unfettered access is outlawed, only outlaws will have unfettered access.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
This is one of those areas where I WANT the government to intervene. "But they fuck up everything, what makes you think they can get this right???" How about the fact that ISPs already fuck with us, and if left unchecked, they will just get worse anyway.
We should at least TRY to get things under control. The "free market" theory is obviously worth as much as tits on a bull when it comes to ISPs.
Living With a Nerd
Typical elitist liberal agenda.
Ensuring that ISPs can't discriminate against the little guy (such as myself) is elitest?
What the fuck are you smoking?
Living With a Nerd
Franken asked the audience of bloggers how long it would take before the Fox News website loads significantly more quickly than the Daily Kos website.
The more likely model of what will happen is not that the internet companies will favor conservatives over liberals, but rather that they will favor companies by size. The cable companies will say that companies need to pay their fair share for bandwidth, and so they'll announce that any internet hosting that doesn't pay a certain amount of usage fees to the ISP will be throttled. So yes, it's likely under this model that Fox News will load faster than DailyKos - and that MSNBC will load faster than the Drudge Report - because those large media organizations will have the cash to give kickbacks to Comcast to make sure that they get full speed downloads, while the smaller bloggers and indie organizations may find themselves unable to meet the ISPs' demands.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
If this were RedState warning the exact opposite, it would never make front page. It'd be written off as right-wing paranoia.
Here's a little interesting bit of news: the Republicans aren't the majority party. Here's another one: the Democrats are at least as much in bed with the telecoms as the Republicans. Franken's own damn party is as likely to create a pro-telecom, anti-everyone else regulatory environment as the Republicans if their past behavior on... pretty much any issue that concerns Democratic donors is any indication.
The FCC is, at this point, a textbook example of regulatory capture. Like it or not, that's what it is. Stridently defending what could be is not even remotely compatible with what currently is and likely will be if the FCC is given the power to act. The odds are much greater that the FCC will end up fucking Google, Apple, etc. up the ass than maintaining a policy of genuine openness.
The main problem is that the pro-business argument here (mostly Republican, but plenty of Dems too) tries to predicate this on "free market" principles. But there is no real free market in the ISP sector, because there is no real competition. You have a handful of large broadband ISP's (AT&T, Verizon, Time-Warner, and Comcast alone probably represent about 80%+ of the entire market). And most consumers have all of two (three if they're lucky) choices for ISP. In my area, you can choose between Comcast (cable) and AT&T (DSL) and that's it. If both those companies degrade or block a particular website, that's it. There is nowhere else to go for decent performance (and even AT&T's DSL is inferior to Comcast, so there is really only ONE place to go for anything above 3Mbps).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I always liked the idea of net neutrality, and obviously there is something to be said about one website loading faster than another, but aren't there many more far reaching implications than just "Fox News loading faster than Daily Kos"? Like throttling of any downloading whatsoever unless it's a Fox News PDF or torrents being completely handicapped or something just because they are torrents.
I just feel like he could have used a much more hard hitting example than that.
Ahem.
It's not about their servers -- how many there are, or how fast they are -- it's about them colluding with the ISPs to throttle other sites.
In a pure capitalist, free market, collusion happens, and I suppose everyone is okay with it.
But the internet was originally built with my tax dollars, and I don't want rich pricks colluding to slow down some content and not others.
In an ideal world, we wouldn't need the government to intervene. If my ISP suddenly started loading their "preferred" sites faster, I would simply leave them and go to any of my dozens of other choices. Information on which ISPs were mucking with speeds would be public and well documented for everyone to access in order to make informed purchase decisions.
In the real world, however, most people have only one or two broadband ISPs. If my cable company mucks with site speeds, I might be able to go to my phone company. If they muck with the speeds also, I have no options. (Actually, I'm stuck after the cable company as Verizon doesn't have FIOS where I live.)
Network Neutrality opponents argue that "the market" will fix any problems, but how can "the market" fix the problem when you have a monopoly or duopoly? I'm not a huge fan of government regulations, but there are places where they should be and this is one of them.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
"Speculating on what the Internet could morph into under the Republicans' preferred lack of regulation,...
Well, just look how well lack of regulation worked with Credit Default Swaps in the financial markets, e.g., these past few years.
Not that I'm necessarily keen on big government, or more regulation.
To the Republicans, the "little guy" is Enron. The Big Guy is the government.
You are not the little guy. You are less than nothing.
Your analogy is deeply, misleadingly, and vexatiously flawed. Net neutrality legislation doesn't enjoin people attempting to produce content, as do the printers of your example. It enjoins people attempting to take part in a public infrastructure which transmits that content to would-be consumers. As it happens, the founders did have an opinion about that, and the US Postal Service was established in an attempt to give equal access to that service.
For a lot of reasons that should probably be obvious, I don't think that the USPS makes a very good point of comparison with the Internet. But your analogy is simply ludicrous, unless you think that the passage of Net Neutrality is going to force, say, HBO to produce my four part special on toe cheese.
How about setting the precedent that the government can?
First it will be FCC's "Net neutrality", then it will be a mandatory proprietary iCHIP for parental controls in every ethernet adapter.
Based on what information? This sounds an awful lot like the "information" Glenn Beck is spewing. Just in case that is where you get your "facts," you should know that when Glenn Beck did his show about Net Neutrality, everything that he described as being part of Net Neutrality actually has nothing to do with it. He didn't cover what it actually is, he just listed a bunch of "Marxist" stuff and falsely claimed that that's what Net Neutrality is.
I guess he feels like he can get away with it because it's all stuff that supposedly could happen, if you take the least probable things Beck says at their most far-out extremes as absolute fact.
you are really confusing your agendas.
The FCC, via congress, is already capable of something like the iChip. Such things do not come from net neutrality, they come from a special interest from the far right religious lobby. Independent of Net Neutrality, the FCC is being lobbied for parental controls and anti pornography policies. The religious freaks in Massachusetts are trying to get a bill passed that would make internet pornography illegal. But that is another story.
There is still this conflict between limiting liability of common carriers and giving the carries the right to control content. If carriers had give up limited liability then they would like move towards neutrality. Let Comcast deal with a few 100,000 law suits over content and they would quickly rethink their strategy.
If you think the net neutrality is is about regulating the Internet then you should rethink your position. Net neutrality is about who controls the content. Is it you, or Comcast and AT&T?
Keep in mind that democrats == republicans anymore. There is little difference in stupidity asshole factor
Net Neutrality == internet providers are regulated to provide fair and equal access to the 'net for everyone == Very good for all
Dems may wish to tax the internet, to much resistance from the general public
But Republicans want to deregulate the internet, which is double speak meaning circumventing net neutrality. This is very very bad!
Historically, every time Republicans deregulated a public service or utility, the service has turned to shit. Costs go up and service goes down.
Support Net Neutrality
Oppose Internet deregulation. Don't let them do it!
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
Hypocrite-- harping on the fears of the left, who couldn't give a crap if the opposite scenario happened. Listen, it doesn't matter who's in office. Right now, the Democrats can pretty much pass any legislation they want, yet we don't have net neutrality yet. Either this means the Democrats are self-interested mega-capitalists too, or they are also fearful of a less-free internet that's heavily regulated by the government. If some loser ISP decides to throttle Kos, do you really think that deep-pockets George Soros won't start up or buy a competitor? Are you all buying the rhetoric of the progressives that all of our problems are caused by "conservative" capitalists, while ignoring the Eco-capitalist carbon credit corporations run by Soros and Gore? They would love to silence dissent, as well.
When in doubt, don't give the government more power.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
There has been much confusion regarding "Net Neutrality". Much of it, I contend, deliberate on the part of politicians and government bureaucrats.
I'm all for "Net Neutrality" if it's defined as fair practices in traffic shaping, throttling, routing & etc, PERIOD. A bill to accomplish that would only need to be a few pages long at most.
The problem (and the reason I oppose the current iterations) is that what Congress is contemplating is a (relatively) huge piece of legislation that expands government control over the internet using "Net Neutrality" as cover for a power grab.
Those like Franken are hoping people are stupid enough to not look past the title to see what is actually in the bill and what it actually accomplishes.
Don't be as stupid as those in Congress think you are. There's too much at stake.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.