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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.
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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
This came up in a thread with Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing, CELDF's Thomas Linzey replied "There are many things that currently prevent us from engaging in this new type of activism - one is preemption (both at the federal and state level); Dillon's Rule (the flip side of preemption which treats municipalities as children compared to the state "parent"), and corporate "rights" (that activism such as this violates corporate constitutionally embedded rights, including bill of rights and 14th amendment protections, as well as commerce clause "rights" under the constitution). Our organizing designs municipal laws to frontally challenge each of those impediments." Ultimately it comes down to who should decide in communities? Should corporate lobbyists influencing congress set the law and should we abide by these laws? Or, should we challenge them?
Laws like this pass because there's no reason to oppose them vary hard. They are illegal to enforce on their face and would result in potentially billions of dollars in liability for even attempting to impose them.
So the laws get passed, the companies ignore it and go forward anyway.
Maybe but in Pennsylvania, drilling companies have backed away: "Major gas exploration companies such as Chesapeake and Cabot are reducing their drilling significantly — and others like Talisman Energy have shifted some of that drilling to places like Texas where taxes are close to nil and where there is little opposition to the drilling unlike western Pennsylvania where environmentalists have come out strongly against the drilling and the city of Pittsburgh has passed an all-out ban." http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2011/01/24/drilling-companies-reduce-investment-in-pennsylvania/
The United Nations has proposed to make Internet access a human right. This push was made when it called for universal access to basic communication and information services at the UN Administrative Committee on Coordination. In 2003, during the World Summit on the Information Society, another claim for this was made. In some countries such as Estonia,[3] France,[4] Finland,[5], the United Kingdom Greece[6] and Spain,[7] Internet access has already been made a human right. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_Internet_access
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.
Prior to Brown v. Board of Education, segregation was the law of the land. It took the Supreme Court along time to catch up ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education
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.
Anyone with even the slightest knowledge of logic can smell your bullshit a mile away. You tried (and failed, miserably) to hide a third premise in there. That a right to the labor of other people is slavery. That's pure, grade A bullshit right there. If a parent is required to care for their child, rather than drop it in a dumpster, is that slavery? When I am required to stop at a red light, is that slavery?
You anarcho-libertarians are so fucking full of yourselves that you think that you can exist as an island. You can't. Everyone in this world relies on the labor of others. That isn't slavery, and for you to call it that is absolutely disgraceful. Real slavery is when a child in India gets pulled out of school, locked in a room, and raped several times a day until she's too old and ugly, at which point she ends up dead in a gutter.
Requiring people to help each other out is how society has worked for all of human history. If you don't like it, feel free to end your life, as that's the only way your existence won't in some small way burden others.
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.
Hey, my car is dirty. I have the right to a clean car, my friend over there says so. I require you to wash it, right now. After all, society works by helping each other out, doesn't it?
Saying "Say, how about helping me out with this?" or "Do this for me and I'll do something for you in return" is how society cooperates. Saying "I convinced some powerful organisation to put you in jail unless you give me that" is not cooperation, sorry.
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
Have you read the writings of Jared Loughner, the man whom shot congresswoman Giffords? Your first five paragraphs could have been lifted from him verbatim.
By that standard you have no rights at all, as all rights require someone else's "slavery".
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
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?
You have made the classic correlation = causation error in your assumption that the local ordinance in the Pittsburgh city area is causing reduced drilling over the entire state of PA. It is far more likely that aggressive state regulations, high nat gas inventories, a plethora of shut in wells and low nat gas pricing is what is causing reduced drilling in PA.
I like math too, but I like it for it's purity. Applying simple Algebra to society seems like a simplistic model.
Then the right to healthcare must equal "a right to the labor of other people (slavery)."
Yes look at all the Doctors being enslaved by the masses. Oh wait, that's right, you can't even give me a single example of that. However I could give you thousands of examples where people have become enslaved in debt, merely for getting medical care to survive.
This is why I hate philosophical debates that have no connection to reality, and worse, ignore the actual problems we have.
There are no such things as "human rights", you are born into this World, and hopefully are lucky enough to be in a 1st world country where you aren't a slave.
Freedom of speech enabled Hitler to rise to power and kill millions, I don't think free medical care will have the same side effects.
That really raises my opinion of him, if what you're saying is accurate.
However, your assessment disagrees quite strongly with what I've read about him.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Good luck on that one. Corporation v. Community... Corporation will win every time.
None of the human rights are "free as in beer". Even your right of freedom would be meaningless unless enforced and protected, and that requires resources.
Just because it is a right does not mean you get handed the access.... I have a right to keep and bear arms...did the government hand me a rifle or hand gun? NO.
A right to internet access means that if I pay to have the access, it can not be taken from me with out due process of law. (I.E. no 3 accusations and you are banned for life) and given that, I can not be banned from having access for the remainder of my life and more than likely, given the types of violations that would cause sanctions, the law would simply be able to reduce my connection speed tot he point that circumventing copyright would be impossible (think... dial up)....That is IF I CHOOSE TO EXERCISE THE RIGHT FOR AN INTERNET CONNECTION.
You seem to believe that the right to property as you envision it is inherent in the matter of the world and has nothing to do with the State. In order for us to be able to choose to hold property laws in the way we do - a social choice that could take many different forms, and in fact does across countries and cultures and time periods within the U.S. (can I assume you're from the U.S.?) - we have a State to provide enforcement of the "right" to property (and money as a medium of exchange for property, etc.). Sure, you are welcome in a (purely imaginary, of course) state of anarchy to try to beat up anyone who tries to take what you declare to be your property, or to find someone who holds the same beliefs as you do about the meaning of contracts and then to cooperate via a contract to achieve whatever ends you want to agree on. In other words, there are social mechanisms for enforcing a group's view of property outside of the bounds of a modern State. But if you apply your algebra-as-social theory model to the modern State in which you presumably live, you have, congratulations, enslaved everyone who helps to defend your property for you.
But wait! We pay police officers, the National Guard, or maybe your private security team, or whomever to take care of our property for us. Some people are willing to provide those services, and expressing that there is a "right" to receive those services does not imply that anyone will be forced to provide them. Just so, a "right to healthcare" or a "right to Internet access" is a formulation not necessarily premised on the use of conscription. In fact, I suspect the vast majority of people(s) who talk about these kinds of rights do not intend for them to be meant in that way - and it is not an algebraic fact that rights (with the magical exception of certain kinds of property, of course) entail slavery.
Of course, I have expressed an opinion, based though it is on logic and facts, with which it is possible to disagree and still use logic. Your algebra demonstration was perfect logic. Your flaw was to assume that human interactions are premised on the exact definitions and perfect logical properties of abstract mathematics such that a demonstration of logic applied to an ethical/social/political question is unproblematically appropriate.
No, by that standard you have a right *not* to be subjected to aggressive violence. This doesn't imply anyone else's slavery.
If a parent is required to care for their child, rather than drop it in a dumpster, is that slavery?
Parents have a duty to care for their child, they are not required to do it. That is a pure straw man argument.
When I am required to stop at a red light, is that slavery?
Stopping at a red light does not take anything away from anyone, so this example fails utterly.
Everyone in this world relies on the labor of others. That isn't slavery,
It is not slavery if people work for each other voluntarily; this is what you are deliberately missing out. You need to miss this out because if you do not, you are admitting that you are a supporter of the violent theft of people's work, money and property for the "greater good".
Requiring people to help each other out is how society has worked for all of human history.
That is a lie, and the logical fallacy known as 'Appeal to Tradition':
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-tradition.html
Im sorry that I rubbed you up the wrong way, but the logic of this air tight. You may be for the theft of other people's resources. Fine. Just admit it and be done, instead of flailing about with your ill thought out arguments.
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By that standard you have no rights at all, as all rights require someone else's "slavery".
This is not so. All the rights you have come into existence when you are born. They all stem from your right to self ownership. You own yourself, and all the fruits of your labor.
Property rights are the root of all rights. Your 'right to a free press' is actually a property right in the paper and ink you buy or make to distribute. Your right to publish is actually your right to distribute your property as you see fit. Your right to association is actually your right to take your own body to any place where you have a right to be (i.e. not violating someone else's property right in their house or land).
When you look at rights from the correct position, it is easy to spot what a right is and what a right is not.
have a look at this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-Lb8YitPs8
for a very good lecture on rights.
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Yes look at all the Doctors being enslaved by the masses. Oh wait, that's right, you can't even give me a single example of that.
I think you are not going deep enough into this; if a country taxes people (theft) to pay for the healthcare of others, the doctors who perform the work are being paid with stolen money, and the people who provide that money are the slaves.
Its the same with the BBC. They take stolen money (the 'TV License' collected under threat of jail) and then provide programmes for 'free'. In every case, the taxpayer is the slave.
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I would submit that your substitution of your causes is no more valid than the GP's.
After all, if drilling persists in other areas of PA, but not in Pittsburgh itself, then the GPs attribution of causes is at least as valid as your own.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
So then stop working. Slaves are forced to work, you aren't forced to work. Especially in the UK, you can stop working, go on welfare and not be a slave at all. By being a citizen of whatever country you are in, you are bound by their laws and contractually obligated to pay taxes. Move to Amish country if you want to get out from big government, you can ride your horse all day without being taxed.
I suppose you could think of having to pay taxes making you a slave, but what's the alternative. Without taxes your entire country wouldn't exist, nevermind roads, schools, police, and all the rest that go along with civilized society.
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.
The United Nations has proposed to make Internet access a human right.
That's as far as I got before I rolled my eyes. Is the UN paying for it? It seems the people who call for things like internet access to be a basic human "right" are A) unable to pay for it themselves and want someone else to, or B) people who advocate for those previously mentioned, but also expect someone else to pay for it.
My kingdom for a mod point!
Further, there is inherent in this declaration of the Right to Internet Access the assumed obligation of someone to build that internet. Its not just a matter of someone having the RIGHT to BUY internet access. After all, a RIGHT (to free speech) is not something you have to pay for each time you open your mouth. Poll taxes were declared illegal, in part because they interfered with the RIGHT to vote.
So its a small step from the Right to internet access to mandating a government provided internet, computers, etc.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Taxes are a fact of life for anyone living in a civilized society.
Taxes are used for the betterment of said society, either through security, communications, transportation, or the helping of it's citizens who are in need (among other things, overly short/simplistic list).
Taxes being used to help those in need of medical help, is a good use, in my opinion. It doesn't make me a slave because I pay taxes that might someday save YOU or the life of someone you care about. That's just misusing the word, slave, to try to give weight to your argument, which apparently needs the help of emotion laden words.
If you are going to invoke math in this sort of discussion at least get the frelling math right. Transitive equality is NOT a theorem. It is an axiom. It's truth in not proven, only assumed in most mathematical systems.
Therefore your use of it outside the context of math where it is an axiom is a logical FAIL unless you provide a set of axioms and a proof of it. Which you didn't.
So you FAIL.
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.
So then stop working. Slaves are forced to work, you aren't forced to work. Especially in the UK, you can stop working, go on welfare and not be a slave at all.
I'll bite. First of all, you cannot collect welfare if you are able to work, so you are indeed forced to work, and have a portion of your labor stolen from you. When you do so, money is stolen from you. Every time you spend money, 20% of the transaction is stolen, and if you are buying gasoline, alcohol or cigarettes the percentage is much more than that. Do you really think that its 'fair' that people can simply stop working and have everything provided to them by the people who do work? Even if it was moral, do you really believe it is sustainable? If you do, I have some beach front property in Arizona for you cheap!
By being a citizen of whatever country you are in, you are bound by their laws and contractually obligated to pay taxes
This is not true. When people are born in a country, are you claiming that they are automatically bound by a contract? That is the same as being born a slave, with no option to opt out. By what right does a country claim a human being as its property, simply because it is born inside an artificial border? Its completely absurd.
Without taxes your entire country wouldn't exist, nevermind roads, schools, police, and all the rest that go along with civilized society.
This is not true. America (for example) was built without taxes as we know them today. Roads, Schools and police could exist very well, and in better forms without these theft based services being provided by the state.
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You rely on the coercion of others all the time. People have to eat. People need a roof over their heads. As a result they toil away the majority of their lives at work.
How many people would work voluntarily if there wasn't a basic need for food, clothing, housing, etc? They might do something "cool" of their own choosing but they certainly wouldn't be making your morning coffee at Starbucks, flipping your burgers at McDonalds, killing and cutting up animals for you, growing vegetables for you. Modern capitalist societies are giant coercion machines by their very nature.
"Liechtenstein is the world's largest producer of sausage casings, potassium storage units, and false teeth."
if a country taxes people (theft)
The moment you start redefining words from their common meaning to support your extreme viewpoint, is the moment when everyone stops listening, because the rest of your logic becomes completely incomprehensible (how could it be otherwise, when you speak words but mean something entirely different from how people normally understand them?).
Bad analogy.
If you want someone to fellate you, there's a giant number of "providers". Just go downtown and look for scantily-clad women standing on street corners. There's lots of providers all competing with each other, not one single organization. Of course, in most places this is an illegal service, but that's bad government, but you can still go to Las Vegas to find legal providers.
Finally, there's no reasonable argument that you need to be fellated. If you want to get off, use your hand, or convince your wife/girlfriend to do it for you. Access to open communications is a real need in order to have an advanced civil society. The American Founding Fathers recognized this, which is why they enshrined freedom of speech into the Bill of Rights at position #1, and also why they explicitly authorized the Federal Government to own and operate the Postal Service in the Constitution, with the requirement that it deliver mail everywhere in the nation, not just in profitable areas. The Founders would be ashamed if they came back today and saw us fighting over net neutrality; it's certain they would have supported this. (Don't forget, the Founders were not fans of big corporations.)
If a parent is required to care for their child, rather than drop it in a dumpster, is that slavery?
Where exactly are parents required to care for their children?
Here in Arizona, if a woman doesn't want to take care of her child, she can drop it off at any fire station, no questions asked. It's really too bad that more young women don't take advantage of this service, as so many of them are in poverty and doing a terrible job of raising their children.
Nobody ever notices the most important part of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, namely Article 29.
(1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.
(2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.
(3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
THAT'S the problem! When your rights come from government, then the government can limit them or even take them away entirely. Do as we say or lose your rights! Still want to depend on the United Nations to protect your rights?
I have sympathy for what you are saying, but there's another point of view.
When you do so, money is stolen from you. Every time you spend money, 20% of the transaction is stolen, and if you are buying gasoline, alcohol or cigarettes the percentage is much more than that.
This is only when you purchase something using currency provided by the State. Bartering is legal and is not taxed, however when you use Dollars, there are lots of hidden costs that need to be paid for, like the fed reserve and all that jazz. When you purchase from a store, there are many more hidden costs, and the taxes pay for them. Food inspection, safety inspections, contractual laws, infrastructure, and all the other things that have allowed that store to exist and offer you merchandise. Take a trip to country that lacks much government and sure you don't pay taxes, but things are more expensive or not available at all.
Your advocation for zero taxes isn't realistic anyway, and you are railing against both income and sales taxes, what's left, property?
As far as taxes on gasoline and alcohol and tobacco, those three cost huge amounts of money. Considering beer is still about the same price as water, $1/beer or $1 bottled water, I don't consider that a high tax. Gas taxes were supposed to be used to pay for roads, which makes perfect sense, instead of a toll on every single road in the country, just tax gasoline. Cigarette taxes help reduce tobacco use somewhat, and you can always roll your own for a fraction of the cost, but people would rather pay more for Marlboros.
The income tax came into effect for war time spending and without it Germany would be ruling the world, so yes the country wouldn't exist without the income tax.
By what right does a country claim a human being as its property, simply because it is born inside an artificial border? Its completely absurd.
Yes, exactly. You are born in the US, you have to abide by US laws and tax codes. You can't go kill someone without consequences, and those consequences cost money to enforce. The transition from local taxes and authorities to national taxes and authorities is a natural consequence of communication and transportation technologies making the world smaller. It's completely impractical to go back to locally controlled communities. Even if we did, it would allow safe havens for racism, strict religious views, high pollutions pockets, high crime pockets, and everything else that led to a more national approach.
Yet people used to be able to satisfy their needs for food, shelter, and clothing without government and without me. And some can even do it without any other humans around at all.
Not really true any more. It's not possible to just go out and "live on the land"; that land belongs to someone, either a private party or the government, and they're not going to let you just live there. Moreover, there simply aren't enough resources for people to live like this. That's why the hunter-gatherer societies disappeared roughly 9,000 years ago, and were all replaced with agricultural communities. There have been a few aberrations, such as the Native Americans in North America until 150-200 years ago, and also settlers moving out to "the frontier" and doing the same, but that's all over now and only existed because the Americas were geographically separated from the rest of the world by water. There simply isn't enough land and wild animals for everyone to go back to being a hunter-gatherer, or even a small number of people. The lifestyles aren't compatible (as good land is in short supply); your ideas are several thousands years out-of-date.
Perhaps I should concede that going on the dole just because you don't want to work and would rather live of the taxes from other people is ridiculously immoral and is becoming a huge problem in many 1st world countries.
If you recognize that laws against prostitution are bad government do you also recognize that the reason we have sole-provider problems in some areas for internet service are _also_ bad government?
Of course, but the thing is, the solutions are different. For prostitution, the proper governmental action is to legalize it and regulate it in the interest of public health and safety (i.e., make sure the hookers get weekly STD tests, and don't allow them to work if they're infected). Prohibiting something that lots of people want has never worked.
For internet access, the solution can either be having the government provide it directly (as it does with the USPS, while still allowing competition from private companies), or having the government strictly regulate it as a utility monopoly(/oligopoly).
Usually, the fix for bad government is not more government..
What's your proposal then? No government at all? I've never heard of any successful anarchist societies. This is what's called "throwing the baby out with the bathwater".
The fix for bad government is to fix the government. You can't do without government; it's been a necessary part of human society since they created communities and invented agriculture.
Yeah, except there NEVER has been any nat gas drilling in Pittsburgh, and there were no plans to do such drilling at the time the ordinance passed.
Minor but important facts.
I was a lot more Libertarian before I found out Australia has a $15/hr min wage with 4 weeks paid vacation and has lower unemployment than the US, which goes against the libertarian view that you can't just legislate wage increases
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).”
By your logic:
If (A) a right = (B) voting
And (B) voting = (C) the labor of other people
Then the right to vote must equal the labor of other people, which you call slavery. Don't believe me? Then you must hold the absurd position that ballots and counting votes doesn't require human labor. Doesn't the paper for the ballots cost money? Doesn't earning money require labor of other people? Don't the counters get reimbursed for the time spent counting votes and verifying their results?
I'm pretty sure you wouldn't want that precious tool that could provide people that share your ideologies power taken away, now would you?
The fault is with 'common meaning' and not with the truth of what taxation really is. Its up to you to come to an understanding of what the truth is.
In all societies, public opinion is determined by the intellectual classes, the opinion moulders of society. For most people neither originate nor disseminate ideas and concepts; on the contrary, they tend to adopt those ideas promulgated by the professional intellectual classes, the professional dealers in ideas.
Throughout history, despots and ruling elites of States have had far more need of the services of intellectuals than have peaceful citizens in a free society. States have always needed opinion-moulding intellectuals to con the public into believing that its rule is wise, good, and inevitable; into believing that the "emperor has clothes." Until the modern world, such intellectuals were inevitably churchmen (or witch doctors), the guardians of religion.
While opposing any and all private or group aggression against the rights of person and property, the libertarian sees that throughout history and into the present day, there has been one central, dominant, and overriding aggressor upon all of these rights: the State.
In contrast to all other thinkers, left, right, or in-between, the libertarian refuses to give the State the moral sanction to commit actions that almost everyone agrees would be immoral, illegal, and criminal if committed by any person or group in society. The libertarian, in short, insists on applying the general moral law to everyone, and makes no special exemptions for any person or group.
But if we look at the State naked, as it were, we see that it is universally allowed, and even encouraged, to commit all the acts which even nonlibertarians concede are reprehensible crimes.
The State habitually commits mass murder, which it calls "war," or sometimes "suppression of subversion"; the State engages in enslavement into its military forces, which it calls "conscription"; and it lives and has its being in the practice of forcible theft, which it calls "taxation."
The libertarian insists that whether or not such practices are supported by the majority of the population is not germane to their nature: that, regardless of popular sanction, War is Mass Murder, Conscription is Slavery, and Taxation is Robbery. The libertarian, in short, is almost completely the child in the fable, pointing out insistently that the emperor has no clothes.
Throughout the ages, the emperor has had a series of pseudoclothes provided for him by the nation's intellectual caste. In past centuries, the intellectuals informed the public that the State or its rulers were divine, or at least clothed in divine authority, and therefore what might look to the naive and untutored eye as despotism, mass murder, and theft on a grand scale was only the divine working its benign and mysterious ways in the body politic.
In recent decades, as the divine sanction has worn a bit threadbare (slashdotters are almost all atheists, so divine arguments always fall flat), the emperor's "court intellectuals" have spun ever more sophisticated apologia: informing the public that what the government does is for the "common good" and the "public welfare," that the process of taxation-and-spending works through the mysterious process of the "multiplier" to keep the economy on an even keel, and that, in any case, a wide variety of governmental "services" could not possibly be performed by citizens acting voluntarily on the market or in society.
All of this we libertarians understand is a lie: we see the various apologia as fraudulent means of obtaining public support for the State's rule, and we insist that whatever services the government actually performs could be supplied far more efficiently and far more morally by private and cooperative enterprise.
And we can prove it.
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By this sort of logic any set of laws puts those governed into a state of slavery.
So given that all humans are subject to laws we are all slaves.
Since this is established we can eliminate this terminology as being meaningless and move on to something that has meaning.
A major problem here is that there are two definitions of "rights": rights as freedoms from some form of coercion, and rights as entitlements to some form of benefit. These two, and the differences between them, are akin to negative and positive reinforcements in behaviorism.
For example, the right to bear arms, as someone else pointed out, is the right not to have weapons summarily confiscated at the whim of the government and without due process, as well as the right to be able to purchase various weapons: it's a freedom from undue restrictions on bearing and buying weapons. The right to bear arms does not, however, guarantee cheap or free access to weapons, or that the government will hand them out to everyone: it's not an entitlement to a good or service.
On the other hand, some people use "right" to mean "entitlement," in a socialistic sense of providing at public expense goods or services to those who cannot or will not pay for them (in better-organized societies, this is somehow restricted to those who cannot afford them rather than who choose to pursue laziness at the expense of others). This can still be a net benefit to society: for example, entitlements to vaccination and sanitation may help improve the quality of life for everyone within a city, and its long-term effects may, by increasing the overall profitability of a city, repay those whose capital was used to fund the entitlements. This form of "right" can be abused, of course, to reward laziness and punish endeavor, but such abuses are naturally infrequent, because the lazy rarely cooperate for their own benefit, which would take effort, and the endeavoring generally exercise more real control in any given society than the lazy. Fear of such abuse of entitlements is much more often a rhetorical strategy to manipulate the successful than it is a well-founded anticipation of some sort of social upheaval.
Since the two sorts of "rights" are not identical, there is no correlation between the net neutrality story and the healthcare example provided by the parent post, since the labor/slavery argument clearly relies on the idea of an entitlement. The parent really ought to be marked offtopic for making such a bad analogy: health care and Seattle's internet access ordinance are nothing alike, to the point that health care serves only as a straw man.
Getting to the main point of this story, the model net neutrality ordinance is an example of the former type of right, a freedom from restriction, not of an entitlement. Nowhere in the ordinance cited does Seattle guarantee free service to all residents. Rather, it prohibits restrictions from being placed on that service for customers. Restrictions, contrary to the beliefs of some in the sway of monopolistic abusers of the free market, do not arise solely from governmental coercion: restrictions are also a tool of manipulating markets unfairly to eliminate competition. Under Seattle's ordinance, all customers get unrestricted access to whatever sites they wish to view: an ISP isn't allowed to block Fox or MSNBC because of political leanings or to retard access to a site to prevent video streaming or to make a site unusable. This is in no way slavery: no one is being coerced into yielding up capital or labor for the benefit of others. Rather, customers are protected from companies attempting to create monopolies by silencing competition: on the one hand, customers are protected from companies in the service provision market from colluding with companies in the content provision market to preclude other entrepreneurs from using their own labor and capital to compete honestly in the content provision market (i.e. if an ISP blocked Fox to keep them from competing with MSNBC); on the other hand, customers are protected from companies in the content provision market from colluding with companies in the service provision market to preclude other entrepreneurs from using their own labor and capital to provide access to the content providers (i.e. if MSNBC blocked access from ISP B because ISP A was giving kickbacks).
I won't bother with your points as such, since they have been re-hashed and debunked countless times already (as an ex-libertarian of the most extreme variety, I should know, having been on the receiving side of that!). Google is out there for everyone to use. Sapienti sat.
However, one thing I would like to recommend is that you do not speak for all libertarians ("we libertarians" etc). Your position is that of an anarcho-capitalists. Many - in fact, I would expect, the majority - of libertarians are minarchists: they understand that state is needed to enforce property and contract rights, that defensive war in response to outside aggression is a necessary evil to maintain a libertarian society, and that some taxes must be collected to provide for those state services. Being a social democrat, I do not agree with their position, but I respect it as internally consistent and implementable - a viable option in the spectrum of choices of a democratic society. What I do know, further, is that most of those folks very much dislike when someone ridicules anarcho-capitalism while referring to it as "libertarianism" without any further qualification - they agree that it is quite worthy of ridicule, and would prefer to distance themselves from such views.
(as a side note, coming from a proponent of the most extreme individualist philosophy ever in existence, "we" is quite an oxymoron regardless of anything else!)
I'd like to beleive there was a government that would protect my rights as its first and only priority and functoin. But so far, no such thing has existed in world history.
And so one wonders, "is the baby the same as the bathwater"?
As I said elsewhere, I am somewhere between a libertarian and a voluntaryist. If i were convinced that an ethical state were possible, I'd be a libertarian. But I'm no longer convinced the state can exist morally.
The USA was the most exciting experiment in limited or self government that had been tried at that point in history. I'm not aware of a society that has done a better job since. But suppose that the 1700s model of the USA was not the endpoint on the gradient of prosperity and individual rights, but merely as far as we've gone thus far? What if there is something better waiting ahead?
In other words, the lack of existance of a well known, successful anarchy doesn't preclude one from ever existing. And anarchy isn't my goal per se, my goal is more liberty.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
I agree. If the county or city is allowing use of its right-of-way or equipment there should be no reason why it can't regulate it and require any company using it to be neutral. Charters for such things occur at the local level.
But I see no way a community could have any say about corporate personhood. The only way we are ever going to get rid of corporate personhood is constitutional amendment... and it's a constitutional amendment we most desperately need. Corporate rights were deliberately left out of the constitution because the founders did not want to give corporations too many rights (because of the East India Company). The only reason we have corporate rights is because of judicial activism in the mid-1800s. Every time the "strict constitutionalist" judges vote for corporate rights the hypocrisy is almost palpable.
I didn't write this for you, I wrote it for the other, open minded people who are reading this thread. I already know what you think, having read your other replies.
from a proponent of the most extreme individualist philosophy ever in existence, "we" is quite an oxymoron regardless of anything else!
I excerpted all of that, save the last sentence, from Murray Rothbards 'For a New Liberty'.
You do know who Murray Rothbard is, being an ex-Libertarian and all.... right? :)
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In other words, the lack of existance of a well known, successful anarchy doesn't preclude one from ever existing. And anarchy isn't my goal per se, my goal is more liberty.
Lets provide an example for him shall we?
"The most remarkable historical example of a society of libertarian law and courts, however, has been neglected by historians until very recently. And this was also a society where not only the courts and the law were largely libertarian, but where they operated within a purely state-less and libertarian society. This was ancient Ireland — an Ireland which persisted in this libertarian path for roughly a thousand years until its brutal conquest by England in the seventeenth century. And, in contrast to many similarly functioning primitive tribes (such as the Ibos in West Africa, and many European tribes), preconquest Ireland was not in any sense a "primitive" society: it was a highly complex society that was, for centuries, the most advanced, most scholarly, and most civilized in all of Western Europe.
For a thousand years, then, ancient Celtic Ireland had no State or anything like it. As the leading authority on ancient Irish law has written: "There was no legislature, no bailiffs, no police, no public enforcement of justice . . . . There was no trace of State-administered justice."9
How then was justice secured? The basic political unit of ancient Ireland was the tuath. All "freemen" who owned land, all professionals, and all craftsmen, were entitled to become members of a tuath. Each tuath's members formed an annual assembly which decided all common policies, declared war or peace on other tuatha, and elected or deposed their "kings." An important point is that, in contrast to primitive tribes, no one was stuck or bound to a given tuath, either because of kinship or of geographical location. Individual members were free to, and often did, secede from a tuath and join a competing tuath. Often, two or more tuatha decided to merge into a single, more efficient unit. As Professor Peden states, "the tuath is thus a body of persons voluntarily united for socially beneficial purposes and the sum total of the landed properties of its members constituted its territorial dimension."10 In short, they did not have the modern State with its claim to sovereignty over a given (usually expanding) territorial area, divorced from the landed property rights of its subjects; on the contrary, tuatha were voluntary associations which only comprised the landed properties of its voluntary members. Historically, about 80 to 100 tuatha coexisted at any time throughout Ireland."
[...]
http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp
File under 'Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence'.
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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.
There are still people who manage to live without the assistance of others or participation in society, inspite of the very real societal obstalces to doing so you've mentioned.
[Citation needed]
Damn, your whole Mom's basement?!? :-P
What is wrong with you people these days?!? An inalienable right means your gov't can't take it away from you. It doesn't mean you don't also have to go out and get it from a willing provider.
Some of you Yanquis have completely lost the point of why you're still allowed to live there in (relative?) freedom. You fought for it and earned the right to be left alone there. Who "provided" the inhabitants of the USA with freedom from British rule? Those who stuck their necks out and demanded and fought with their lives for it! Did you think Gen. Washington petitioned the International Court in the Hague for it?!?
Sad.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
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.
Some of you Yanquis have completely lost the point of why you're still allowed to live there in (relative?) freedom. You fought for it and earned the right to be left alone there.
That's right. There was a price to gaining freedom. Just like there is a price for internet access. Based on our constitution, our inalienable rights were given to us by *gasp* our Creator. But someone had to pay a price (fight the British) in order to secure them. Internet access, however, is NOT listed as one of our inalienable rights.
See Article one. Freedom of speech or of the press don't apply? I think they do, and if your courts don't agree, they're wrong. You should fix that.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
See Article one. Freedom of speech or of the press don't apply? I think they do, and if your courts don't agree, they're wrong. You should fix that.
Article one contains nothing about freedom of speech or the press. Perhaps you mean the First Amendment? That's not an inalienable right. Inalienable rights are spelled out in the Declaration of Independence, which is not the Constitution.
We'll get right on fixing the courts for you, because if they disagree with you, they are wrong. After all, you've displayed expert knowledge of the US constitution.
Yes, drat. Thanks for pointing out the error.
Yeah, see what they did to you there? Supercede your inalienable rights with a document that creates the US Empire but ignores that inalienable rights garbage? Queue the SCOTUS! :-P
Oh, be nice. At least some of us out here try to understand you guys. When's the last time you read the BNA Act or our repatriated constitution, or whatever Mexico uses for itself?
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit