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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.'"
Literally, one with as few rules as possible.
Not even close. Many of the posters here are describing the "free market" as perfect competition. For perfect competition, the following must be in place: 1) liquidity (lots of buyers and sellers), 2) Low market entry/exit barriers, 3) Perfect information, 4) free (as in beer) transactions, 5) no differentiation between products other than cost, and 6) all market participants try to maximize profits.
Most "free market" ass hats have been snookered by corporate interests to believe that all you need is #6 to have a free market and ignore the rest. The result, is that libertarians unwittingly support oligopolies, where corporations use their size an power to minimize #s 1 through 5, and therefore destroy "free markets" (perfect competition). If you look at the players fighting net neutrality, they are trying to tilt 1 through 5 in their favor.