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US House Subcommittee Votes To Kill Net Neutrality
angry tapir writes "A US House of Representatives subcommittee has voted in favor of a resolution to throw out the US Federal Communications Commission's recently adopted net neutrality rules. The communications subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 15-8 along party lines for a resolution of disapproval that would overturn the FCC's rules."
you fools gave your houses to the right wing party. right wing parties anywhere around the world, always support corporations over people.
it doesnt matter what your reasons or excuses for voting for a right wing party. you may even be quite right and correct in your reasons. BUT, a right wing party will always support corporations over people, in every way they can. even their acts which appear pro-people, will end up being pro-corp in the long run.
Read radical news here
Walden added. "These regulations will cost jobs," he said.
I know, this is the standard-issue republican response to anything they don't like, but really could we have an explanation this time? Exactly how would net neutrality kill jobs?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
from TFA: "If the Republican-controlled House approves the resolution, it would then move to the Senate, where Democrats hold the majority. The Senate is unlikely to pass the resolution."
summary fails to mention how this vote probably won't actually go anywhere.
Republicans have just killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. The replacement goose's eggs are gold plated, cracked and spoiled.
Did you see where the summary said, "voted 15-8 along party lines"? How does that support your thesis that every politician comes from the same party?
Let's take Comcast and Netflix. Comcast hates Netflix because Comcast is also a content provider. They want you to pay $6 to watch their on-demand movies. With Netflix I can watch tons of movies for $6, and Comcast has to carry the traffic. Without Net Neutrality, Comcast would tell Netflix "you use too much bandwidth. We're going to throttle you down until your movies are unwatchable unless you start paying us a fee. That fee will increase until we make as much money from people watching your movies as we would if they bought them from our service".
Netflix would have to increase prices until no one would pay, thus forcing them out of business and all you would be left with is Comcast, which then jacks up the prices for their on-demand movies.
Net Neutrality provides choice.
there's a third option you missed that is having some success in the middle east.
Indeed. The corporations have owned Washington for many decades now. Even back in the 1950's, Ike Eisenhower warned that America's military-industrial complex had become too strong. Now look where we are: America has a military budget that's larger than that of all other countries combined, yet at the same time a substantial number of Americans live below the poverty line.
Even worse, many of our laws have now been drafted by lobbyists -- a fact that some of our politicians have even been happy to admit. The lobbyists continue to play the politicians and the politicians continue to play the people for whom the latter continue to vote. It's a vicious cycle that's only made worse by the poor state of America's educational system, which has been deteriorating for many decades. The electorate has now largely been reduced to a mass of ignorant, overly-religious, flag-waving zombie-consumers whose only purpose seems to be in making the rich richer.
Unfortunately, I'm not certain that there is much reason to believe that America can get out of this rut, which is like an extreme experiment in unbridled free-market capitalism that has gone badly wrong. The problem is that its people have wished this upon themselves. In this way America are kind of like Afghanistan; a country to which we've tried to introduce democracy, but whose citizens do not recognize the value of it and are thus not willing to fight for it, i.e. a horse that has been led to horse to water, but will not drink. Americans, of the other hand, had their freedom, but then gave it away willingly to the corporations... and continue to do so. Like the poor Afghans, they don't understand that their usual behavior is not in their best interest either.
Oh, well...
PS -- This is a bit of a rant, so go ahead and mod it down.
Hi. I live in Wisconsin. Maybe you've heard of the protests we've been having these last few weeks. Care to tell me how exactly the Republicans and Democrats are the same because it's pretty obvious here that they're not.
His point was not that they have different party names, but that their policies are all but indistinguishable. Which is how it looks to me, too.
As a New Zealander, I have to say that the Democrats are more right wing than our current ruling right wing party. You have nothing as left as our left wing Labour party, who are not especially leftist, by NZ or world standards. I'm not sure I that most Americans appreciate just how right wing, conservative, pretty, ill-educated, reactionary, selfish, jingoistic, partisan, anti-intellectual, anti-science and anti-reason US politics appears from the external point of view. I look to politics in the UK, Australia, France, Germany. I understand what's going on there, it looks similar to what's going on here. I look at US politics and I'm thinking "What the.,..."
I really don't understand how a country that purports to be a democracy has allowed its political discourse to be so railroaded into one tiny spectrum of ideas. You have two parties which are largely indistinguishable. You change the name of the party in charge, but the ideas don't change. You guys really need to ditch first past the post elections - most of the rest of the world has already figured this out.
I'm not sure I that most Americans appreciate just how right wing, conservative, pretty, ill-educated, reactionary, selfish, jingoistic, partisan, anti-intellectual, anti-science and anti-reason US politics appears from the external point of view.
From your external point of view, or from the point of view that's been sold to you by your own media and politicians? I'm sure it's pleasing to imagine that you hold some privileged frame of reference, but maybe it's possible that the people telling you these things are telling you the things you want to hear, and the things they want you to believe.
Unless you are looking at us from his point of view, you have no means by which to criticize his point of view. And as a matter of fact, most of what he says is true, something you'd realize if you looked at the U.S. system objectively. Our politicians ARE all right-wing. That's the only way that abortion of a "health care" plan could possibly have been passed last year. You know, the one that funnels billions of taxpayer dollars to the insurance companies? And the fact that all politicians in both parties will only ever talk about cutting taxes, never about the need with our huge deficits to, oh I dunno, INCREASE income to pay for things? Or how it's impossible to get elected in this country if you are an atheist or agnostic? And how those in both parties are all too eager to cut spending on education. Or how our "liberal" president is perpetuating the abomination that is Guantanamo? Or how no politician will get rid of the "Under God" clause in the Pledge of Allegiance (or even get rid of the Pledge at all)?
A true "liberal" would fix at one or more of the above, and we haven't had anything resembling a liberal in the White House since Carter. And he has somehow been demonized as "the worst president ever" when the evidence (if anyone bothered learning it) clearly says otherwise. So don't even try to claim we Americans aren't anti-intellectual or any of the other things claimed above. We're guilty of all of it.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
Ummm, no, not from my external point of view nor a view "sold" to me by "your own media and politicans". For a start, New Zealand is too small to produce all our own media for world stories, so it sources media from all over the world - BBC, CNN, Al Jazera et al. But personally, I don't watch a lot of TV news - I compare sources online and see what the US channels are putting out from their own feeds directly. It's mainly Fox & Glenn Beck that gives me an insight into how warped America has become. So if you want to blame the media for my point of view - blame your own. When I was revolted at Tea Party members hurling abuse at Muslim Americans in Orange County, that was entirely brought to me by YOUR media. MY media didn't cover it at all.
Furthermore, my point of view is not external. I have been to America before - admittedly, just the south, mainly Birmingham, for work and even then, that was quite a few years back. I have also lived with Americans before and seen and discussed their viewpoints and heard their comments on the difference between American politics and the rest of the western world's politics. In fact, one of the really interesting comments I got was from a lovely Bostonian girl who said the difference between democracy in the US and in NZ was that in the US, everyone was free to make all the money they wanted (regardless of whether they had any actual ability or chance to do so) whereas in NZ, it was more of a democracy of opportunity, where everyone (relative to the US) had the opportunity to succeed.
You say "I'm sure it's pleasing to imagine that you hold some privileged frame of reference". Well, I'm sure it pleases you to denigrate my point of view by imagining motives for me... but I wasn't claiming a privileged frame of reference, I was claiming that politics in the rest of the western world makes sense to me. I know, having talked to many other Australians, British, French and German people that we all share broadly similar views on how democracy should work and we all pretty much think American politics is mad. My claim wasn't that my point of view was right (although, knock that strawman over if it makes you feel better) but that represents a very common western view of American politics.