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The Right's War On Net Neutrality
jamie writes "To understand the debate being waged in the United States over Net Neutrality, it's important to understand just how drastically one side has been misled. The leaders of the American Right are spreading the lie that Net Neutrality is a government takeover of the internet, with the intention of silencing conservative voices. (Limbaugh: "All you really have to know about Net Neutrality is that its biggest promoters are George Soros and Google.") This may be hard to believe to those of us who actually know what it's about — reinstating pre-2005 law that ensured internet providers could discriminate on the basis of volume but not content. Since the opposing side is so badly misinformed, those of us who want the internet to remain open to innovation and freedom of expression have to help educate them before the debate can really be held."
Yeah, like there are only two two kinds of people in this country ... and there are just as many on the "American Left" who will happily and blindly lap up what their "leaders" tell them to.
This appears to be a combined case of blind partisanship ("they support it, so we must oppose it because they're the other side"), stupidity, and "a free market isn't defined by the presence of competition or the ability for all parties to make free, informed choices, but rather whether large corporations have any restrictions on them or not".
I have no love for a lot of the "American Left" as most would think of it, nor for the "Right". But this is just fucking stupid.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
Not "whenever." But in this particular case, yes, people who oppose net neutrality because they believe it's about censoring conservative voices on the Internet are misinformed.
The only way their argument makes any sense is if they believes that ANY gov't regulation will inevitably lead to oppression, which is, frankly, a pretty childish belief. Put down the Ayn Rand, folks, and come back to the real world. Gov't regulating lead-free drinking water is not an attack on liberty.
Mr, Kesuke Miyagi: [sighs] Daniel-san, must talk. [they both kneel] Walk on road, hm? Walk left side, safe. Walk right side, safe. Walk middle, sooner or later, [makes squish gesture] get squish just like grape. Here, Internet, same thing. Either you Internet do "yes", or Internet do "no". You Internet do "guess so", [makes squish gesture] just like grape. Understand?
Daniel LaRusso: Yeah, I understand.
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I'm pretty right-wing... but I have some awesome arguments about this with other right-wingers.
Some of them can't seem to evaluate the situation for themselves so they just go with whatever their media talking head tells them.
None of them can explain how the Internet is supposed to work, nor how companies are screwing it up, nor what net neutrality means.... but they are pretty sure that gay socialists are going to take over the internet.
I usually paint it like this:
What if ISPs and common carriers started deciding to block FoxNews.com because they didn't like the message? That seems to get thru to some of them.
The right-wingers have one point though:
Liberals usually work incrementally. It starts with simple net neutrality rules. Then later on, they add some more rules. And more. And more. A Killswitch and some hate-crimes legislation later and before you know the government is all up in your intarwebs.
Now before you liberals get all self-congratulatory on your enlightened position.... none of my liberal friends can think for themselves on several liberal bandwaggon issues either.
THL phish sticks
There were many people in the previous Slashdot thread about Network Neutrality, that complained that they supported the noble goal of "Network Neutrality", but that what the FCC was passing was not "the network neutrality they supported".
So the disconnect is that many people (NOT just Republicans) are warning you about the Network Neutrality you are about to get, not about the fantasy Network Neutrality the Daily Kos wishes to be. The Daily Kos claims it is "lies" because what is being said does not match the definition that the Kos holds for network neutrality - when in reality NONE of us have seen the regulation recently passed - I still cannot find the exact wording, isn't that rather a bad sign that we are not allowed to see what they pass before they pass it?
The Network Neutrality you are about to get was crafted mostly from feedback my media companies and telcos, and large companies like Amazon and Google. Worried about too much corporate control over the internet now? It doesn't get any better when you put the power of regulations into the hands of a small number of companies that have the resources to lobby the FCC on issues.
And all this to stop what EXISTING problem? There's a lot of danger in creating open-ended rules to solve problems that are only imagined, and do not exist. Have we learned nothing from handing over a lot of power to government organizations like the TSA that control to some degree how we travel now? Why would you want similar control over ISP network management on behalf of the FCC?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
In this case, though, the pattern (seen here on /. as well as from Rush et al) is that the right wing set up a straw man of what net neutrality it is in order to knock it down. Specifically, they claimed that the proposal was about something similar to the Fairness Doctrine, when it is fact completely different.
It was rather clever of them, really: They took the fact that "Neutrality" and "Fairness" were similar ideas, and used just that to make a large segment of the population think that what "Net Neutrality" meant was "Barack Obama ensuring that nobody can say anything bad about him on the Internet".
I am officially gone from
Fox "News" viewers are the most misinformed people when it comes to pretty much everything, so it's hardly surprising that they have no fucking clue what they're talking about on this either.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
You are misunderstanding Rush. Believe me, he has one hell of a research staff, and often he isn't saying what you think he is saying. If he is masterful at anything, it is at parsing words. If he says something like "The Chevy volt is only gonna let you drive 40 miles on batteries" and other think that means it will only go 40 miles, well, thats ok for him. He even plays back his "quotes", and again, he parses his words carefully so that in a single quote, the meaning might be obvious but in the full context, it may be misleading. Lots of "what if....[statement]" or " maybe...[statement]...who knows" type of noncommittal comments.
In other words, he talks out of both sides of his mouth. He is entertaining, and I see the attraction. I used to listen. But remember, he is an entertainer, not a journalist. Even he admits that, then acts like a journalist.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
"The right" is against NN for the same reason "the right" rejects global warming: the rich and powerful don't want it.
We've got an enormous problem with political ignorance and naivety in this country. The Republicans want to run the country in whatever way helps the rich get richer quicker. (If you don't accept that premise, go back and look at whose interests they consistently looked after when they held the White House and both houses of Congress, vs. whose interests they occasionally threw a bone to. By the time of the 2006 elections the leaders of various socially conservative movements were complaining that they were bringing in a lot of votes and not getting much of anything in return.)
But there's a problem if you want to run a republic for the benefit of the rich: there aren't enough of them to win elections. So you have to find ways to get people to vote against their own best interests. But any decent politician knows that if they can make your knee jerk, they can make your finger twitch in the voting booth. So Republican politicians have offered the country things like the Southern Strategy, and the new Southwestern Strategy that they've been rolling out for the last ~5 years, and of course their association with the religious right. I.e., appeal to people's worst instincts rather than their best.
But now, due to the aforementioned political ignorance and naivety, people think that whatever the Republican politicians want is an inherently conservative position. So we get idiotic ideas such as that global warming and net neutrality are leftist ideologies. People in this country need to wake up and smell the bullshit before they've been fucked beyond the point of no return.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
no, even more so than the democrats. they do not have any hesitation in opposing giving healthcare to 9/11 first responders, even after drumming up the nationalism/patriotism card for a decade.
democrats have at least SOME consideration in regard to principle. they at least try to make whatever filth they are doing seem to fit their ideology, even in appearance. republicans dont even have that concern.
whatever their private backers, corporations want at THAT given moment in time, they drum it. if the corporations want the exact opposite 2 months later, they see no issues reverting back. they even dont care whether someone may notice and make a fool of them in media. and at the end they end up the greatest material for news comedy shows.
Read radical news here
To me the fight between big Government and Big Corps is almost the same as those debating who takes away more rights the (D) or the (R) in power.
In the Case of NN, I'm all for NN, provided that it doesn't harm business, and government doesn't get more power. Those on the left don't see government having power as being a problem, as long as it is their kind of power.And this is why the people on the right have concerns, because it isn't beyond the left to limit speech that "offends" them in some way, or if the threat of "fairness doctrine".
Just recently the far left Senator Rockefeller mentioned taking FOX news and MSNBC off the air. And it doesn't matter if he was "joking" or not, simply saying it shows how these people think; that if you don't agree with them, you should be silenced.
THAT is the concern for many people who don't want government control of the internet, because once you start defining that the government CAN control it, it is just a matter of time before it controls the whole of it in one way or another.
On the other hand you have douchebags like Comcast who won't update their peer links to realistic expectations and are artificially putting choke points into their internet models so that they can extract more cash from content providers, and protect their monopoly.
The answer isn't a simple "let the government regulate it" as many people think.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Karl Marx supports communism.
Steve Wozniak supports net neutrality.
Karl Marx had a beard.
Steve Wozniak has a beard.
Therefore, Steve Wozniak is a communist and net neutrality is communism.
Similarly:
Clowns are have painted white faces and entertain people.
Rush Limbaugh has a white face and entertains people.
Therefore, Rush Limbaugh is a clown.
Normally I would dismiss your post, which seems full of crazy conspiracy theories that you're pulling from memory "but can be found on Google". However some bright sparks have seen fit to moderate your post as +5 Informative. So please, give me some citations. The only things I've been able to find on Google are completely unverifiable claims from conspiracy-theorist websites.
But more fundamentally --- what is the implication of your post? That opposing Net Neutrality legislation is going to make it harder for governments to censor? Cause it seems to me that a small number of powerful telecoms dominating what people read is more or less a precondition for a modern totalitarian state.
There is one, simple, crucial fact that the right is missing in these debates. There is no free market in broadband access. If you are extremely lucky you can pick between your telephone company and your cable company and they tend to not compete on either price or service and quickly move to adopt the same draconian policies introduced by their "competitors" -- and again, this is if you're lucky, most people are stuck with their cable company. Not even the right will argue against regulating monopolies, we all realize that in the absence of competition monopolies will provide poor service for rates that border on extortion.
If you want to win the net neutrality debate with the right then offer a simple concession: IPSs which open up their network to third party providers can operate without regulation. Those providers that have no competition or only one competitor must put up with regulation.
You can also remind everyone that the government invented the internet (arpnet was a darpa project) so the Internet was never created to be run by businesses anymore than the national interstate system was, but that doesn't resonate nearly as well as shifting this back to a monopoly vs. consumer debate.
No, just evil people who grab and increase their power over us because we are dumb enough to let them. We've even let them destroy the language -- liberal used to mean something a lot more like "libertarian"
No it didn't. The libertarian position is one that honestly did not exist in politics until about 50 years ago.
I know, in conservative mythos, the founding fathers were libertarians, but they were not. Liberal, in that day, was basically anti-classism and anti-crown, a position that really doesn't exist anymore in modern politics.
Once the crown was gone, it continued to be anti-special-rules-for-the-ruling class, a position it still holds, at least in theory. (As we don't actually have any liberal political party, it doesn't really hold any position anymore.) All liberal fights, though the entire history of this country and back to John Locke, are to stop one group of withholding power-sharing from another group, with the groups being the crown, nobles, slaveowners, the superrich, the corporate owners, the whites, the straights...and, apparently, the superrich again. Except now the superrich have intelligently bought both parties.
(Please note when I say 'liberals', I am, indeed, aware that liberals used to be on the right, and flopped to the left around when I said 'the whites')
Libertarianism is not classical liberalism, it is neo-classical liberalism. It reinvents the idea that the problem is 'the crown'. Which, frankly, would be a rather strange idea to various classical liberal thinkers, whose biggest problem with the government is the fact that it often failed to enforce laws equally, and not that those laws existed at all!
and "conservative" used to mean, you know, look before you leap, spend less than you make, stuff like that. Or even "not all change is for the better, so examine it first before deciding".
Here, you're right. Conservatives, to paraphrase something David Brin wrote on the topic, used to be the serious guys in suits at NASA who did the math. The guys running around in the background monitoring stuff that seemed entirely pointless (Until it was wrong, then they calmly and efficiently saved everyone's life.), and wasn't glamorous, and they went home to their family and read the paper each evening. Whereas liberals were the astronauts and the sci-fi writers and the dreamers, and got all the credit, but without the guys in suits, wouldn't know how to do what they were trying to do. There's the guys who try to do everything, and the guys who figure out what can and can't happen and managed to get some of it done, while otherwise raining on the parade.
But that ended about two decades ago, when it was decided that the best way to rule the country is not to point out the parts of the left's plans that can't work, and invent better ways...but to simply assert, very loudly, that anything the left wants is wrong. Morally wrong, politically wrong, won't work, every single possible objection.
Even stuff like cap and trade or the public mandate for health insurance, both of which were conservative alternatives to the left's previous plan. Or stuff like bills attempting to stop child 'marriage', which the Republicans shot down for absurd reasons two week ago. (Apparently, educating women that it is not acceptable for them to be sold to older men when they're 13 as his 'wife' is...um...pro-abortion.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
"We need a Fairness Doctrine for the internet. For example maybe you'll visit foxnews.com and a popup will ask if you want to read democrat.org too. We need to include that as part of net neutrality and other FCC regulations."
[citationneeded]. I can't find any record of a quote like this.
"We need to pass a law to remove MSNBC and FOXnews from cable television." The latter came from a Congressman Kennedy who is a nobody
I can find a Kennedy who has opinions on MSNBC and FOXnews, but he isn't a Congresman, and he does not appear to be calling for censorship. George Kennedy - former managing editor at the Missourian and professor emeritus at the Missouri School of Journalism. He says:
"I’m not arguing that our traditional approach to journalism is inherently superior to the ideological model. After all, that model has served Great Britain and much of Europe pretty well for a long time. But it’s sure not what we’re used to, and confusing to many, even within the industry.
For us consumers, the important thing to remember is this: Fox and MSNBC are playing by different rules than the broadcast networks or NPR. If you like your news straight up, you’ll prefer the latter. If you like it with a twist, you know where to look."
There was a Senator Rockefeller who said:
“There’s a little bug inside of me which wants to get the F.C.C. to say to Fox and to MSNBC, ‘Out. Off. End. Goodbye.’ It would be a big favor to political discourse; to our ability to do our work here in Congress; and to the American people, to be able to talk with each other and have some faith in their government and, more importantly, in their future.”
A lamentation of ideologically driven news media - quite different from the claim that he is actively seeking laws to shutdown ideological news organizations.
And then of course there's Obama himself who gave a college speech advising them not to read the internet news sites and only listen to WH press releases
What he actually said:
The class of 2010 is "coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank that high on the truth meter," the president said, earning an honorary doctorate of laws degree during the ceremony.
"And with iPods and iPads; and Xboxes and PlayStations -- none of which I know how to work -- (laughter) -- information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation. So all of this is not only putting pressure on you; it's putting new pressure on our country and on our democracy
With so many voices clamoring for attention on blogs, and on cable, on talk radio, it can be difficult, at times, to sift through it all -- to know what to believe, to figure out who's telling the truth and who's not. Let's face it, even some of the craziest claims can quickly gain traction. I've had some experience in that regard,"
Funny that you interpret it as an attack on freedom, when even FoxNews acknowledged that this bit of the speech was a reference to some false internet rumours: "Obama has endured some nasty rumors at the hands of the Internet. Blogs and comment pages continue to allege that the president has not been honest about his place of birth -- Hawaii -- or about his religion -- Christian."
So if there's confusion by Republicans, it's because of what they are he
What amazes me is how many in this country now believe "free speech" means "only those things I agree with are allowed" and it is fine and dandy to get rid of anything else. It reminded me of watching TV with my grandfather when the Nazis were gonna march on Chicago. Now this was a man that spent four years fighting Nazis, that helped to liberate one of the Polish camps so he knew first hand what Nazism was really about, and who got to end the war by spending nearly two years in a full body cast thanks to a Werewulf unit dropping a wall on him along with his unit, two of whom died.
So if there was ANYBODY on this earth who had a legit reason to want to see them gone it was him, yet he made sure I knew he supported those Nazis 100% in their right to march. He said "THAT is what we were fighting for, and what made us different from them. Here we allow everyone to speak, to debate, to print their ideas, even if we don't agree with them". It is just a damned shame that so many have forgotten that, and day by day they take away that right by saying this or that is "offensive" and they just keep moving the line on what is offensive. I support Rush and Maddow, Beck and Stewart, hell I even support the "pro pedo" book guy who is currently rotting in jail for writing his thoughts on paper. We must ALWAYS support the right to speech we don't agree with, because tomorrow some politician or activist may decide YOU are the offensive element and shouldn't be allowed to speak. Which is why we have to stop the censors like Rockefeller at every turn. I may not agree with your words but like my grandfather before me I will damned well fight for your right to say them!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.