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.
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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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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?
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.
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!)
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