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No, Net Neutrality Doesn't Violate the 5th Amendment
An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday we discussed the theory that net neutrality might violate the 5th Amendment's 'takings clause.' Over at TechDirt they've explained why the paper making that claim is mistaken. Part of it is due to a misunderstanding of the technology, such as when the author suggests that someone who puts up a server connected to the Internet is 'invading' a broadband provider's private network. And part of it is due to glossing over the fact that broadband networks all have involved massive government subsidies, in the form of rights of way access, local franchise/monopolies, and/or direct subsidies from governments. The paper pretends, instead, that broadband networks are 100% private."
Further back even... while they were "loans", it was still interfering with "private enterprise" to pass the Rural Electrification Act in 1936. I imagine that electrical power would still be in much the same state that broadband to rural communities is today without it.
Thanks for letting me know that government interference always fucks things up on the government-created information network. It would be so much better if I was unable to hear your insightful commentary. The internet sure has fucked up our economy.
The enemies of Democracy are
My word you've been busy spreading some free market love and dry humping that ideological leg today. Are you one of those plants I hear so much about?
So government only fucks things up unless it doesn't fuck things up, those times don't count. Gotcha.
Except, of course, the times where it didn't fuck up the economy. Or the times where government action was necessary to prevent a fucked-up economy that would have run unchecked if private enterprise was allowed to run amok.
Anti-trust and public infrastructure (roads, canals, harbors, etc) being the most glaring exceptions to your "Every. Single. Time." malarkey.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
No. Private enterprise did not want the internet. In large part they said "it's just a fad, no significant amount of commerce will be done over the internet." Were you asleep all through the 90's? Here is a typical such article from Newsweek in 1995:
http://www.newsweek.com/1995/02/26/the-internet-bah.html
One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces. - PF
The Internet's early beginnings were in the networks of the 1970s, but as a network resembling what we have today you'd have to go forward to the 1980s. There were a number of "free market" networks that also sprung up, or became popular, during the 1980s, including most successfully AOL and Compuserve. By the mid-1990s, the Internet was still immature enough for Microsoft to believe it had a chance of promoting its own alternative, the original version of MSN (which used Microsoft networking technologies, not TCP/IP, in its original incarnation as a Windows 95 thing.)
When the Internet did take off, the backbones and computer servers relied upon by the majority of users were outside of direct government control, with only academic sites, in practice, being government subsidized.
The Internet did not become popular because it was the only thing capable of doing what it was doing due to the government providing it with a big collection of servers, it was popular because it was a neutral, open, network, and the alternatives were closed and locked down.
While it's possible for the free market to introduce open, standardized, networks, the reality is that most of the time such standards only achieve success through government support. The Internet is an unqualified success, successful in large part because the government could provide the neutrality required to ensure it would work for everyone. And right now, the "free market" continues to be at the mercy of a handful of parasites who, on getting into the right positions, are willing to lock down and de-neutralize the network, putting short-sighted control goals ahead of the long term welfare of our network. You couldn't have picked a worse example of "governments stepping in causing failures" if you tried.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The internet would be born no matter who designed it. [snip] And who knows, had private enterprise designed the internet from the start, it could have more elegant solutions and such.
Ah, the youthful imagination of how things might have been, unhindered by knowledge of how they were, knows no bounds. And in that imagination, the Internet comes to be in its current form regardless, only better!
But in reality, we already know what private enterprise would have created, because they did create it, or rather them. And they were called Prodigy, AOL, CompuServe, MSN, and others. Of course they were largely piggy-backing off the government-created telephone network, but let's skip that for now.
And you're right, they had some very elegant solutions. For example, they dispensed immediately with the idea that every host should be able to act as both client and server, and that it should be possible to host data outside of on the singular corporation's servers and without their approval. Why it would be so much more efficient if we couldn't waste our time on Slashdot because it violated the AOL community standards.
And talk about elegance -- how about having multiple, mutually exclusive networks! This whole "one global network" thing is totally inelegant. Oh sure there was some consolidation due to buyouts and mergers, but we'd still be waiting for that process to conclude. It's only because of the existence of the Internet, and it's obvious superiority to anything private industry had provided on its own, that forced AOL, MSN, and the other few remaining private networks to first provide Internet access, and then ultimately become simply ISPs with only minor portal websites to remind you of what had been. Though even as this was happening, Bill Gates was saying the Internet was just a passing fad and he was betting everyone would come back to the safe walled garden of MSN soon -- oh yeah, he was just about to create something even better than the Internet. Uh-huh.
Had it not been for the Internet, we wouldn't be having this conversation because you'd be on MSN and I'd be on AOL.
We know what private industry would have done if there was no government interference, if you had your way. And it would have sucked ass.
The enemies of Democracy are
The more I hear of this the more I think we should declare the lot of them "Common Carriers"
"A common carrier holds itself out to provide service to the general public without discrimination (to meet the needs of the regulator's quasi judicial role of impartiality toward the public's interest) for the "public convenience and necessity". -- Cut some out -- in the United States the term may also refer to telecommunications providers and public utilities" -- Wikipedia
Stops the whole "Net Neutrality" issue and gives them some extended protections. If they want to say thay are not common carriers, I say we throw the lot of them in jail for transportation of child pornography. Every one of them provides it to there customers and seeing as they are not protected as a common carrier then they can be responsible for what they carry.
Just my 2 cents
Wow, you're new here on Earth, aren't you?
Private enterprise didn't "largely" build the Internet. After the "very early phase" when government actually built the thing, it was publicly-funded universities that did the heavy lifting.
Private enterprise has mostly been "me too!" when it comes to the Internet, doing their best to turn it into cable television when they finally got a clue. In fact, I think if you were to point to the things that you love the most about the Internet, you'd find that they were mostly already in place before "private enterprise" got up to speed online, while the things you hate most (Flash, advertising, spam, spyware, etc) about the internet have been almost entirely the result of bright ideas from private enterprise.
You are welcome on my lawn.