Slashdot Mirror
Proposing a Model For Locally Imposed Net Neutrality
newscloud writes "Envision Seattle has posted a model legal ordinance (pdf) for communities wishing to enshrine status quo net neutrality as law. The ordinance is co-authored by the legal group that helped Pittsburgh's city council ban fracking and corporate personhood last November. The concept of local municipalities defying FCC authority is troubling to some but the group counters that FCC authority actually violates certain rights that we hold as people, and the right to govern our own communities as an element of the right to community and local self-government. If we have a 'right to internet access' or a 'right to communicate' via these pathways, there are certain actions that can be taken by government which infringe on those rights. In our view, it's up to us to create these rights frameworks, and then enforce them at higher levels."
if you get a few good sized markets to require it then it'd be too expensive to maintain one net for the non-neutral and another for the neutral. The best part is since the Cable companies have chased off the FCC you can't even say it's their job. The only real trouble is the markets aren't usually big enough to stand up to Comcast et al, and it's just divide and conqueror. That's kinda why we have a federal gov't in the first place.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
This goes beyond simple net neutrality.
The article also says Pittsburgh has also recognized the rights of nature. (Not natural rights, but the rights of the flora and fauna.)
http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/drafting-natures-constitution
That's really quite amazing that an industrial city like Pittsburgh would adopt such a radical provision, which could be good or bad depending on your view.
I wonder what the rights of nature would mean in practice. After all, Bambi can't file a lawsuit on her own.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
State preemption is an important concept, one which should not be faulted.
Regarding the drilling in PA, it is state preempt. Pittsburgh will lose in any court case regarding the challenging of drilling. They can make all the illegal ordinances they want, it will not be legal to enforce.
The same goes for firearms laws in PA, they are completely state pre-empt, as they should be. Cities wanting to ban guns in parks can't enforce such ordinances. The communities are safe from bigoted morons who believe lawful firearms owners are a danger. If they feel so endangered, they can move to another country.
There are some things that are not a matter of opinion. Anyone who has taken an introductory algebra class recalls the transitive property of equality. It states that if A = B and B = C, then A = C. A doesn’t “somewhat” equal C. It does not equal C most of the time. There is no moderate or extremist way to look at this theorem. It is just absolutely true without exception or qualification.
This mathematical/logical principle applies directly to our example. Consider the following:
If (A) a right = (B) healthcare
And (B) healthcare = (C) the labor of other people
Then the right to healthcare must equal “a right to the labor of other people (slavery).” The words “moderate” or “extreme” do not apply to this statement. It is simply true. One cannot partially agree or disagree with it.
In order to disagree with it, one must reject one of the first two statements in the theorem. Assuming that one does not want to reject the first statement (healthcare is a right), then one must take the absurd position that healthcare is not the labor of other people. Without accepting this absurdity, one cannot deny that a right to healthcare constitutes a right to the labor of other people. If that is not the definition of slavery, then what is?
The same goes for the bogus 'right to internet access' or 'right to education' or any other State created right that causes the property, work and money of other people to be put to use for the benefit of other people by force.
Net Neutrality is nothing more than a form of 'right to internet access'; in it, your ISP equipment and bandwidth are taken out of your control for the 'greater good' by force. Your company and your capital are being made other people's property, and you and your staff are being made into slaves because you are being forced to maintain these immoral rules.
If people want Net Neutrality, they should get together and form an umbrella organization made up of people and ISPs where the companies that own the bandwidth and equipment promise to follow the rules laid down by the 'Net Neutral Association'.
If the idea catches on, it will become the de-facto standard, otherwise, it will die. What is for sure, forcing people to cooperate with each other is not moral and people who have intact moral centers do not use force to make others do what they believe to be right.
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
I can get behind locally-enforced net neutrality. It makes sense, you set rules on how businesses in your community can operate. But tying this to a regulation that bans "corporate personhood" is going to doom it to failure. If it's a Right, a city council can't vote to take it away. If the Supreme Court says an entity has rights, a city council can't overrule that. The Supreme Court ruling may have been stupid, but it's the law of the land now and we sure as shit don't need city councils deciding who does and does not have rights within city limits.
Aside from the(no doubt sticky) legal issues, there is the problem that for most purposes, the most 'local' portion of the network is not the limiting factor in the network's utility:
There've been a number of real-world cases, I believe in Canada, where the local good-guys-mom-'n-pop ISPs have been "neutral/non-throttling"; but the Evil Telco Empire from which they had to lease their access was engaged in throttling, so the fact that they weren't touching customers' packets didn't end up mattering much. Either you could buy direct from Evil Telco, and have your packets die, or buy from the good guys, and have your packets die when they went further upstream.
In practice, I suspect that a much better deterrent to various nefarious telco practices is simply municipal fiber installs. Based on the frankly vicious legal maneuvering that comes up every time one is mentioned, it would appear that the incumbents are very, very afraid of them. This suggests that they are a good thing. Obviously, one wants to ensure that the local godbots/RIAA flacks/national security fascists don't insert a "no evil upon the people's internet" provision into the municipal fiber buildout; but, as best I've been able to tell, net-nonneutrality efforts, so far, have pretty much entirely been rent-seeking measures that crop up because of seriously tepid competition. It's not that telcos have some ideological axe to grind, they just want to squeeze as much as they can out of you. Compete with them, and they'll either stop dicking around with things that customers hate, or at least make sucky internet extremely cheap.
FUCK YOU
Disclosure: I'm somewhere between a libertarian and voluntaryist, and I'm against net neutrality laws/regulations.
But I'm happy to see this for a few reasons.
1) the idea of federal supremecy really rubs me the wrong way. States and municipalities, so long as they are not violating incorporated individual protections, should do whatever they like and tell uncle sam to fuck off. This idea that every single detail of our lives has to be managed from DC and has to be the same for everybody everywhere is really, really stupid and is very counter to the original vision of America.
2) If some people want something like net neutrality specifically, not doing it at the federal level is a great approach
2a) I don't think the FCC really has any constitutional right to exist, but that ship sailed a long time ago. The idea that it has the power to impose and enforce net neutrality regulatoins is dubious at best.
2b) I don't see that _all_ internet businesses eveyrwhere should play by arbitrary rules decided in DC. You could certainly envision high-density municipal internet services being provisiioned, used, and regulated differently than RRTA farmers in the dakotas. Let's let the people decide what they want at a _local_ level, and make businesses put up with it.
2c) incidentally, having different rules and regulatinos for every little locality PROMOTES small businesses and regional operators, and dissuades mega-corps who want to push out local incumbents with federal power
Now, I used to live in seattle and hated the politics of that whole festering sore of hippie socialists. But, I long for the idea that their right of supreme self-determination should trump and invalidate whatever Uncle Sam has to say about it.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Section 7 – Exploration of the City of Seattle as a Direct Broadband Provider - If broadband internet access service providers providing service to residents of the City of Seattle violate this ordinance in ways which evidence a pattern and practice on behalf of those providers to interfere with the rights secured by this ordinance, the City Council of the City of Seattle shall explore the potential for the City of Seattle to become a direct broadband internet access service provider to the residents of the City of Seattle.
That seems logical. I suspect that that is the part, if any, that would give it teeth.
Are you willing to take the bad with the good? What if some communities want to do away with net neutrality, or regulate any of a myriad of other things we've looked to the feds to regulate up to now? Pushing those decisions down to the local level means that along with stuff you like, you're going to get stuff you don't.
I thought this was a submission requesting Slashdot users come up with frameworks for software-based net neutrality tools. Obviously there are some issues that can't be solved that way, but something like that could be turned into a simple browser add-in that would at least stop some types of abuse. If flat out filtering and bandwidth control were the only ways net neutrality could be harmed, THAT issue would be easier to tackle since it's pretty black and white, and everyone knows the right answer. When we're dealing with shades of grey on shaping traffic and such, we're in danger of having our rights creep away bit by bit.
How about instead of fighting the government to support net neutrality, we instead encourage the government to keep its hands off the Internet entirely? Why don't we let the free market decide on net neutrality and allow ISP's to use the issue as a point of competition? Let the ISP's who want to tier traffic do so and those that don't want to not do so. Then, let customers decide with their dollars which ISP's live or die because of their policies.
Keep in mind, having the government mandating net neutrality is specifically saying the government has a right to regulate the Internet AND increasing government control of our lives. Why would we want that?
http://celdf.org/pittsburghs-community-protection-from-natural-gas-extraction-ordinance?
Section 4.1: Right to Water. All residents, natural communities and ecosystems in Pittsburgh possess a fundamental and inalienable right to sustainably access, use, consume, and preserve water drawn from natural water cycles that provide water necessary to sustain life within the City.
Section 6.3: Any City resident shall have the authority to enforce this Ordinance through an action in equity brought in the Court of Common Pleas of Allegheny County. In such an action, the resident shall be entitled to recover all costs of litigation, including, without limitation, expert and attorney’s fees.
So this basically says that if I live in Pittsburgh I can hire my lawyer friend to argue that I am entitled to get water supplied to my home for free, since it would be an excessive burden (and hence a bar to my rights) to expect me to actually travel to such a "natural water cycle", and then recover the costs of him and any experts I choose to hire?
Good luck on that one. Corporation v. Community... Corporation will win every time.
The "the right to govern our own communities as an element of the right to community and local self-government" is a can of worms that will cause major issues for any large companies or companies that work in many jurisdictions.
Here is a site with many state laws that have been struck down due to their effect on interstate trade. http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/statecommerce.htm
If every jurisdiction was allowed to make laws abut everything then the country would become a patchwork of sometime conflicting statutes. No company that works nation wide could deal with it.
Local self government has its limits. Should a local government be able to ban hazardous goods shipments(they can go around)? Should they be able to ban trucks built before 2005 for emission reasons? Think of the issues for a long haul trucker. At every state, county and municipal border he would have to check it see if he could take his load in the current truck through.
This whole issue seems to forget that DC is not a separate country. Everyone votes for representatives that go to DC. If you want a law that is controlled by the federal government changed the lobby your federal representative.
There are some problems with enacting a local ordinance enforcing net neutrality: the measure can be taken to the courts and nullified even less expensively than it would take to fight a county-wide or state-wide law or the ISPs can simply refuse to improve infrastructure in the local municipality that enacts a net neutrality law as a form of retaliation. If the ISP refused to invest in infrastructure, it would cause some adverse reactions like diminishing land values because no one will want to live in an area that won't have good access and school quality might be affected because access to information would be hindered. Although, I suppose the municipality could in turn create its own state of the art infrastructure should the ISP want to retaliate.
Section 7 – Exploration of the City of Seattle as a Direct Broadband Provider - If broadband internet access service providers providing service to residents of the City of Seattle violate this ordinance in ways which evidence a pattern and practice on behalf of those providers to interfere with the rights secured by this ordinance, the City Council of the City of Seattle shall explore the potential for the City of Seattle to become a direct broadband internet access service provider to the residents of the City of Seattle.
Here's hoping municipalities that try this don't get sued by the telcos.
TDS anyone?
If Congress would simply get its sh*t together, stop listening to the "special interests", and allow the FCC to regulate ISPs as Common Carriers under Title II (as it should have from the very beginning), the vast majority of these issues would simply disappear, virtually overnight.
Hello. You have a startling and insightful approach, that of revisiting the Civil War. Certainly include Nevada, because that brings the casino cash reserves as a defensive buffer.
I have not studied the topic of secession, so I ask of you: presuming those funds are not emergency-locked by Washington DC, how would such an entity survive the wrath of the military?
Copyright Video 1
I like math too, but I like it for it's purity. Applying simple Algebra to society seems like a simplistic model.
Hello. I enjoy applying simple mathematical models to help clarify complex situations. As long as the limits of the model are kept in mind, modeling can reveal insights.
For example, I regard current affairs as a fairly simple variant on the Prisoner's Dilemma. As long as we are yet unable to move swiftly as a united populace upon political matters, the current incumbents can maneuver into retaining abusive advantages for themselves.
However, soon we will have a social *voting* service, which has the potential to devastate politics as we know it. 100 million instantaneous simultaneous votes coordinated unanimously can vote out the *entire* federal government, all at once. Then with a new President, some 530 new members of congress, and other elected officials, we can start over and make ourselves a new country. Then at last the corporations will be put back into their place.
Copyright Video 1
As the owner and operator of an ISP, I have to say that Net Neutrality would destroy the internet 'experience' for most users. Different networks must be managed different ways for technical reasons. The wireless side of our operation requires prioritization for traffic types in order to maintain quality to each customer. This requires me to prioritize VOIP higher than FTP and say streaming video. Without this, the network would be trashed. There simply is not enough bandwidth available at each access point to support connections that are not throttled and prioritized. The only type of net neutrality that might work across all network types would be a more general approach: The ISP cannot prioritize traffic based on monetary requirements the ISP makes from upstream providers. And all traffic types of the same type (VOIP for example) shall be treated the same regardless of connection end-points.
That's a very good question, and I don't really have the answer. There's a couple of ideas: 1) the military won't want to use deadly force against fellow Americans (of course, that wasn't true in 1861 but those were different times, and the South shot first, I wouldn't recommend shooting first, I'd recommend peacefully separating and simply refusing to recognize the Federal government), and 2) the economy will collapse to the point where they won't have a choice but to let them go.
For a modern parallel, look just ~20 years back in time, to the fall of the Soviet Union. There were no shots fired there, no civil war. All of a sudden, we went from a giant Soviet empire controlling eastern Europe and most of Asia, to all the the Eastern European countries replacing their communist puppet governments with new democratic governments, and even the USSR itself dissolving into a bunch of separate republics (Ukraine, Belarus, Khazakstan, Georgia, etc.).
That's kinda what needs to happen here. Big Empires can't sustain themselves that long, nor should they; they're bad forms of government. The USA is just the latest in a long line of empires, except that it refuses to call itself one.
Unfortunately, most of the military bases are in the southwest states, Texas, and the southeast states. There's one in northern Utah, and several near Las Vegas. Adding Nevada to the country might be OK, but I'm trying to avoid adding southern California, because I don't think it's culturally compatible with this northwest nation. It would be better off joining Arizona and New Mexico and maybe west Texas and Colorado. I'm also trying to avoid adding Utah, because it's full of Mormons and again I don't think it's culturally compatible: they'd be happier and better off by themselves, or maybe they could convince Colorado to join them.
The best way this plan would succeed would be if several different large regions of the USA all decided to split up this way, at the same time. I just gave the northwest as an example (interestingly, I live in Arizona, not the northwest). I'll bet the northwesterners could convince the southeasterners to do the same thing; after all, the South started the idea of splitting up the USA 160 years ago. Also Texas; it probably wouldn't take that much to convince them to secede. Arizona sure seems to be on the verge of secession from what I can tell. If many large sections of the country all secede at once in a coordinated move, I don't see how the Federal government could hold them together. It's easier to put down such an effort if it's just one party seceding, but if there's 4 or 5 different parties all going different directions, that I think would make it much harder to act against.
Above all, I'm a proponent of people being in charge of their own destiny. If a group of people doesn't want to be part of a larger country any more, I don't think they should be, nor do I think any new nation should grab anyone else's territory and forcibly annex it. I'm just putting the idea out there that maybe a lot of people would be happier (and better off economically) if they separated into smaller countries.