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The U.N.'s Push for Power Over the Internet
Omnifarious writes "China (along with other member nations) is trying to push a proposal through a little known UN agency called the International Telecommunications Union (aka ITU). This proposal contains a wide variety of problematic provisions that represent a huge power grab on the part of the UN, and a severe threat to a continued global and open Internet. From the article: 'Several proposals would give the U.N. power to regulate online content for the first time, under the guise of protecting against computer malware or spam. Russia and some Arab countries want to be able to inspect private communications such as email. Russia and Iran propose new rules to measure Internet traffic along national borders and bill the originator of the traffic, as with international phone calls. That would result in new fees to local governments and less access to traffic from U.S. "originating" companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple. A similar idea has the support of European telecommunications companies, even though the Internet's global packet switching makes national tolls an anachronistic idea.'"
I was hoping that "Power Over the Internet" was analogous to "Power Over Ethernet". That would've been cool, especially if the protocol was compatible with wireless.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
This is a historical reference. Napolian asked 'How many armies does the pope have?
What are they going to do if we ignore their invoices? Hold their breath?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
A lot of big talk with absolutely no way in hell to enforce any of it.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
After all these years these guys are still trying to force X.25 down our throats. Unbelievable. How many times do we have to scream at them that.. NO WE ARE NOT GOING TO PUT STAMPS ON OUR PACKETS!!
Iran: Say, there Mr. Google, you owe us beellions and beelions of dollars.
Google: Who are you?
Iran: The Islamic Republic of Iran, that's who, now pay up.
Google: How about we pay you in Iranian rials.
Iran: Errr....no, no, we want dollars as our currency isn't worth very much right now.
Google: Okay, we'll get back to you on that.
Iran: Hey, you Mothers just removed Iran from Google Maps.
Google: Ooops, now who are you folks again?
The UN can kiss both sides of my rear - what have they actually done in the past 10-20 years that has actually been beneficial? I can understand the need to coordinate nations in order to maintain as much peace as possible, but having something like this with non-elected representatives makes no sense, especially since they try to govern things in all UN nations unilaterally.
The US should just cut off all connections from outside of the USA. Then what.......
Surely they can that now: just tap and bill the upstream partner of each layer 1 connection. If no payment is made then they're disconnected.
This may be idiot but if it's in the process of being done and theres no way to stop it, how about let them "create" their own Internet and let them rot there. This make me think of a small story of a company and a hacker. Some company create some kind of "easy" enough access as they know they will hack their system but they open a small breach so the hack can use that specific access. In the end, the hack is monitored and the company is "spying" and learning from the hacker. I think it's possible we could employ this method with this article.
China trying to *prevent* malware.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
Palm trees and 8
The malcontent within me actually looks forward to having the Internet governed by a coalition of China and a bunch of mufties. There are a lot of fools stumbling around the West that desperately need that experience.
The US government is not the one that decided on the rules that govern amateur radio in the US; those rules were set out by the ITU, and we just went along with it. What makes you think that the Internet would be any different?
Palm trees and 8
The cognitive dissonance this is going to create from the US-hating /tards is going to be hilarious.
No censorship either. Who the hell does the UN think it is? It doesn't represent the People of this planet. We don't even have a voice in the UN Assembly to make our objections be heard. And where's the UN Bill of Rights that forbids censorship of speech, the press, and expression?
The UN politicians are as honest as other men, not more so, and all the more dangerous since their power is not subject to the Elective control of the people, or the Shackles of a Constitution with enumerated rights. Time has shown that their power grows steadily and more expansive in reach. The UN politicians are setting-up a World Oligarchy without boundaries in its power.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
What rock have you been living under?
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
Because they want regress the internet into a locally governed and very much controlled and filtered service. Remember that it's politicians that push for this, old and wrinkeled people that do not use internet for much themselves other than perhaps a archaic email client at work, they will never wish your well, they just want to stroke their ego by gaining more power, because in their minds, their _opinion_ equals divine truth.
The same is true in the US, but for once, the giant corporate lobby is against such intervention.
UN Takeover of Internet Must Be Stopped, US Warns
Posted by samzenpus on Fri Jun 01, '12 12:30 PM
samzenpus dupes himself with another run at this xenophobic scare piece.
How about we get rid of the UN instead? It is filled with corrupt power hungry ghouls and does nothing good for us.
The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
I'm a bit confused. Can the ITU in some technical manner remotely change how the Internet works inside the USA and Europe without our cooperation?
I believe it's time to apply the Sherman Antitrust act. Time to break-up Comcast, Cox, and other monopolies, turn-over control of the fiber optic bundles to the Member State government's roads authority, and then LEASE the lines to whatever company each customer chooses (Comcast, Apple, Honda, GM, Microsoft, Walmart, etc). We need to return to the days of Dialup where ISPs merely *used* the lines but did not own them.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
That would result in new fees to local governments and less access to traffic from U.S. "originating" companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple.
Ah, the truth wins out. They don't want to control the internet... they just want to tax the hell out of it.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
When the U.N. and other countries have ruined the Internet, there will be a comeback of BBS's and other services like Delphi.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
The UN is a worthless org. over 14,000 dead in Syria and the UN does nothing. Check out this movie: U.N. Me http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIzDt5NPYfI It is a documentary of the dangers of the U.N.
...overly powerful national governments often think the UN is a good idea.
What is the sum of many corruptions?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
This isn't about giving control to the UN. This is not a UN vs US issue. It is a few countries that want further control of their part of the internet, and they see the current US ownership of mechanisms and institutions as an obstacle. They cannot directly and publicly confront the US to try to wrest control for themselves without international backlash. By using the UN as a pivot, their action can potentially gain legitimacy and bring about a dilution of power (thereby giving local actors more control). So by dressing it up as an issue of wanting to transfer more power from the US to the UN, they seek to accomplish two things: 1. launder their intentions with the name of the UN, and 2. embark on the first step in altering the status quo so as to ultimately remove existing checks to their power (mainly the US) to act unilaterally on their local nodes.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Like the Trans-pacific Partnership for instance?
Daily read for tech news: Freezenet.ca
It's pretty obvious that the point behind this is for member countries to make "free" services have an actual cost to the provider, thus driving traffic from Google, Facebook, etc. to local version of the same services in each country.
what a silly comment....what is that supposed to mean?
Ah, back when there was consumer choice... but apparently free markets where people have choice and thus can effect company behavior by taking their business elsewhere are now considered communism.
"new rules to measure Internet traffic along national borders and bill the originator of the traffic, as with international phone calls."
Wow, what a great idea for continuing to oppress people. This way I won't share my wonderful ideas with people in their countries. I'll just setup a filter so they can't access my content. They lose and will stay back in the dark ages. How about we also build a brick wall around them?
Given the state of my nation's roads, I'm not sure I'd trust them with fiber-optic lines when they can barely keep asphalt maintained.
Everyone wants to use infrastructure but nobody wants to pay for it.
Am I the only one who would actually trust the UN more than the US to have authority over the Internet? At the very least, the UN has a history of being less effective and more enmeshed in bureaucracy ... which should mean they won't do much. Sounds good to me.
When I think of the ITU, I think of the regulations on another global communication system that can be used with equipment available to consumers: shortwave radio and amateur satellites. Consider the regulations ITU imposes on hams:
Now, can you give the reasons why similar regulations couldn't be imposed on the Internet? What reason does the ITU have in supporting the Internet as it is today? The ITU would almost certainly partition computers on the Internet into different classes (say, "clients" and "servers," where "servers" require special registration and must have some special identification), and would almost certainly create rules that force countries to respect the censorship systems of other countries. Hushmail-style backdoors are practically a given if the ITU has its way (which is not the say that the US would never impose such a thing within its borders; the difference is that the ITU would attempt to impose it globally).
Please, keep regulatory bodies out of the Internet. We should be working to return control of the Internet to its users, not to increase regulations on the Internet. I do not want the Chinese government deciding how the Internet is governed, or having any say in the rules of the Internet.
Palm trees and 8
I think its time for a new Internet, the bureaucrats have ruined this one.
At least by creating a new Internet it will take 10 - 20 years before the politicians clue up that it exists and start legislation against its usage.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
The ITU (formerly CCITT, I think) is about as well known as an industry group can possibly be. They've been around since the 1800s, establishing standards for everything from iron-wire telegraphs to ASN.1.
This sounds like a John Birch Society member spouting off a conspiracy theory while frothing at the mouth about the UN/Illuminati trying to deprive people of their human rights.
Oh, it is the UN trying to violate 'freedom of speech' for totalitarian regimes.
Well, 'magine that.
Or just force them to divest the infrastructure into a separate company, and make said company a common carrier.
Comcast can split into Comcast that owns the pipes, and Xfinity for all their media bullshit. They can then make Comcast a common carrier, and bar them from favoring Xfinity in any way.
Russia and Iran propose new rules to measure Internet traffic along national borders and bill the originator of the traffic, as with international phone calls.
Like click fraud, I can just see some schemes developed where the packets from People You Don't Like are bounced back and forth across a few revenue borders before being delivered. Just to extract some more funds from deep pockets.
Have gnu, will travel.
Russia and Iran propose new rules to measure Internet traffic along national borders and bill the originator of the traffic, as with international phone calls.
http://bash.org/?142934
Remember when we used to joke about these things?
"Intelligence has nothing to do with politics!"
-Londo Mollari
As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
--Commissioner Pravin Lal, "U.N. Declaration of Rights"
(from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, 1999).
All this sounds like to me is a way to:
1) Enshrine censorship forever, including "agreements" that allow Country A to enforce censorship of "sensitive content" in Countries B, C, etc. For example, no more worries about information hostile to the Iranian government or supportive of resistance movements being hosted in a country that doesn't respect their propaganda needs.
2) Enable local monopolies on content and services by blocking large multinational content providers unless they pay some local tax. Either way, the local strongman's family gets either a check from Zuckerberg or his son-in-law gets to start the local version of Facebook, which will be the only game in town and have no competition. Fill in the blank for Facebook, YouTube, movie services, etc, etc.
What's so astounding is how crude and simple minded these power grabs are and how threatened these dictatorships are from a propaganda/information perspective. Putin, the Iranians and the Chinese Central Committee must lay awake at night just fuming about how their propaganda reality is deconstructed just outside their grasp.
The economic element of this is also not insignificant. Most tin pot dictatorships have shitty economies because the strongman's family gets a cut of everything or a local monopoly. This works with Coke because you bottle it there, but it doesn't work with Facebook or Google and it must make the local batshit knowing that all kinds of money is being made they can't extort.
and then in 12 years (or two governmental adminsitrations from now), comcast renames themselves and then repurchases their xfinity division... either that, or AT&T (bellsouth much?) does.
And a small group of powerful people deciding exactly who gets access to what products and exactly how much they cost is, of course, capitalism.
I see that we have a lot of work to do on the education front. I advise any citizens of the USA to live in one of these countries for a few months or longer and then come back to this discussion. The Department of Commerce is doing a good job of paying the bills and the AD-Hoc nature is working well for everything else. Vint Cerf even when out of his way to mention this recently. Always remember that the Internet started as a DARPA project to keep communication up when actions happen to prevent it.
The Internet is here. Its for looking at lolcats.
The GPL, for those that truely understand.
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't DNS the only thing that the United States controls about the internet as a whole? If the other nations do not like our control over DNS, why don't they come up with their own DNS network? If they don't like the openness of the internet, why don't they just have firewalls around their countries in order to only allow authorized traffic? There is no need for the UN to control the internet.
No, I was testing to see if it was true, and judging by the speed at which the post was admin-modded down it appears to be true.
Honestly, this article is just yet another US sourced scare mongering story.
This. The people asking what the ITU has ever done for them are clearly ignorant of the vital role it plays in the area of communications and technology standards, especially through its ITU-T arm (formerly CCITT). Basically, global standards of the letter-dot-number format are from the ITU. Like T.80, which we know as JPEG. V.34 modems with V.42 error correction. The whole series of G.99x standards, which we know as DSL. H.264 video. H.323 VoIP.
Only recently have things gotten to the point where traveling to a different country no longer requires renting a local mobile phone for the duration of your trip. Without the ITU, we'd still be in those old days - and it might not just be mobile phones that failed to interoperate between countries, but also VoIP, video, images, modems, you name it.
As far as the FUD goes, I'm one of the apparently few Slashdotters who's gotten to see the UN from the inside (I say apparently few because the vast majority of comments make it clear that posters have absolutely no clue what they're talking about, when it comes to the UN). I haven't been to the ITU, but I've seen all kinds of other stuff get negotiated, and the general rule of thumb is this:
No member state (i.e. country) will allow any wording to be agreed that requires it to do anything that it does not want to do, or otherwise jeopardizes its sovereignty.
Remember, the UN tries to work on a consensus basis. Voting is an absolute last resort. So whatever actually gets agreed to is something that almost 200 countries all looked over and said "hmm, let's see, doesn't obligate us to do anything we don't want to do, and probably lets us just keep doing whatever we're doing." This means agreements usually end up being vaguely and weakly worded - and I'm as cynical as anyone about that. On the other hand, vaguely and weakly agreeing to at least be on the same page, so that my phone and my passport can both be useful in the same day, sure beats the alternative.
It's highly ironic, though, that the same people who always spread FUD saying the UN is out to steal American sovereignty (can't happen, for the reasons I just described above) at the same time want control of the Internet to stay in American hands - thus depriving all the other countries of their sovereignty when it comes to how they choose to run the portions of the Internet that lie within their boundaries.
If anything, upcoming discussions at the ITU might lead to more countries exercising their national sovereignty when it comes to the Internet - which I definitely favor, and which I'd expect "pro-sovereignty" Americans to also favor, if I didn't already know them to be hypocrites.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
The typical US paranoia that anything not run by them is bad.
Sure, some countries want to do some things. As if there weren't tons of people, special interest groups and even political parties who want to spy, censor, become Big Brother, outlaw homosexuality and declare pi to be equal to 3.
Just because there are some crazies who want to do crazy things doesn't mean it'll happen. Writing your articles with such a focus is dishonest fearmongering. It would be trivial to write an identical article opposing US control of crucial Internet parts by pointing out some crazy demands by some dimwit backwater politician, of which there is no shortage.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Yeah and for every positive comment you make about some random old person, you can make it about me, a young person who's as smart as they come. You think intelligence is restricted to your generation, old timer? We all build on the generations that come before. The baby boomer generation in particular, however, "do not use internet for much themselves other than perhaps a archaic email client at work." Therefore it's reasonable to say that this generation by and large is out of touch with this whole intertubes things, especially considering that older people in general tend to be fixed in their ways and inflexible.
Then just bar them from being allowed to do so. They're corporations, not human beings. Restricting them to divert a power grab is never a bad thing.
As I recall the original mandate of the UN to stop wars between countries, and to provide a platform for dialogue. (Wikipedia) It has evolved since it's inception but I hardly think the UN should be the governing body of the internet. There's too much politics as it is and it's a wonder how anything actually gets done over there. Yeah...not a good situation.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
Sherman antitrust has been almost entirely a tool to prevent the most efficient producers from offering better goods and services to society in order to protect mediocre producers with better political pull. Comcast, cox and the rest would not be targeted in any meaningful way by such laws because they themselves are extremely connected to the state given how protected from competition they are.
Citations:
US telecommunications protectionism - http://mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/RAE9_2_3.pdf
Sherman trust targeting the productive companies - http://mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/RAE6_2_3.pdf
List of dozens of high profile cases of how the sherman act laws are really used - http://library.mises.org/books/Dominick%20Armentano/Antitrust%20The%20Case%20for%20Repeal.pdf
To sum those articles up, what were labeled as trusts were expanding output and dropping prices 4 times faster than the rest of US businesses on average. Those businesses that gained dominance as a result of this legal action(and were found later to have had significant involvement in starting the legal action against the more efficient producers) were on average less able to reduce prices and expand productivity than the rest of businesses(let alone the 'trusts'). Trusts were not monopolistic. Government protected corporations were.
So expecting comcast and the like to be meaningfully allowed to be subject to competition from the rest of society is going to leave you disappointed so long as you turn to the legal system to do it.
The "media bullshit" is what paid for the pipes. Without the media component the pipes very well might not be economically viable. The model of a generic carrier passing data selling bandwidth neutrally is a nice model in terms of minimizing interference, the problem is there is no evidence that it is actually marketable to most customers. People, and even most companies buy a service that includes are requires bandwidth they don't buy bandwidth.
No, a rent-free right of way across MY REAL ESTATE is what financed the pipes.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
There's nothing to break up. Those cable companies have local monopolies because the local governments gave it to them. The monopoly problems in the cable industry were caused by government interference with the free market. They granted monopolies in exchange for certain guarantees (like 99.8% of the population had to be covered, or payments made to the city). Take away the government-granted monopolies and the problem fixes itself, no need to break up companies.
The Boston suburb I lived in during grad school was one of those which granted a cable monopoly. The year before I moved, they reconsidered and allowed a second cable company to offer service. My cable bill immediately dropped $10/mo without me even having to switch.
Well, turning over privately-owned hardware to the State is Communism. But your intentions are in the right place, if poorly expressed. Basically, the companies which own the lines should be prohibited from selling what's carried over the lines. That's an obvious conflict of interest. I've felt the same is true of the mobile phone industry. The phone manufacturers should sell you a phone, the carriers should sell you a service plan, and the carriers should "build" a network by leasing towers from other companies which own the towers. Having one company own the towers, provide the plan, and sell you the phone is too stifling for the free market.
You're forgetting that the telecommunications industry is an economy of scale. It's cheaper for customers to have a monopoly as long as the company is not charging excessive fees. Remember the Telecom act of 96 that opened up the market to competition? It was still too expensive for many small firms to lease the lines so now we're back to RBOCs.
Have gnu, will travel.
OK so you can show me the billions of dollars in invoices your right of way generated?
They tried this with electricity generation in California. It was called Deregulation, and it was going to be great.
You might have heard the story of how that experiment went. If not, look up Enron.
The USA did not "build the internet". Various companies and governments all over the world built various parts of it.
The USA did fund the development of stuff like TCP/IP and then acted in a civilised manner and opened it up to everyone.
What most "users" call the internet was actually invented at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee. He also acted in a civilised manner and opened it up to everyone,
The USA has continually re-proved that it is not fit to run the internet. Mega Upload is just the latest example. Pushing your horrendous copyright and patent messes onto all of us is even worse.
Anyone who considers the ITU "little known" is not well enough informed to make any useful statements or judgements on this matter. Please sit down and read up on politics, world affairs and technology first.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Well, the bucketloads of communication, imaging and video standards ought to account for some fame right?
I want to pay for it. Raise my taxes. While we're at it, raise yours too.
Those who cannot compete regulate.
By the using the UN they know they can inflict their will on most Western nations all the while casually ignoring any complaints about their own activities.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
This happens often enough that there's a name for it: policy laundering.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Just because California politicians are stupid and actually REGULATED the market (companies had to go through the government to trade power) instead of deregulating (no government), doesn't mean it can't work. In the two states I have lived, the electric lines and natural gas pipes are owned by the century-old utility. The customer then decides between ~50 different companies to buy his power. The result is pricing that is ~10% cheaper than it used to be.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Yep. Since the fiber optics are already built "in" the roads, along with the sewer and water lines, it makes sense for government to own all of it as a single package.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Look up "Australia NBN". I think you'll find plenty of articles and discussion on the points you raise.
In a nutshell:
Govt forms a company in which it initially holds 100% shares - it's called the National Broadband Network (NBN)
NBN borrows capital on open market to fund construction. Borrowing guaranteed by Govt.
NBN uses income from network to pay back debt as network is rolled out.
Success of project is guaranteed by granting a monopoly for fixed communications network to NBN co.
Project: The three technologies.
NBN lays FTTH to all premises reachable in towns with population > 1000.
High speed fixed wireless is provided to more sparsely populated areas.
High speed duplex satellite is provided to remote populations.
NBN co. cannot retail services - only wholesale to ISPs and other large users (utilities?)
Retail service providers may not own or compete with NBN co fixed infrastructure. No vertical integration allowed.
After project is complete (10+ years) Govt. sells off its holding of NBN co shares. Shares to be sold at a commercial rate that recoups investment + profit for Govt outlay.
Political views (abridged and rough)
Left and centre-left, and centre-right, "brilliant, finally a government doing something that needs to be done"
Right and far right, "communism, pure and unadulterated socialist attack on the freedoms of all"
Technophiles, "OMG finally something nearly right, but the interfaces aren't quite right and opportunities are being missed."
Rupert Murdoch, "this is a direct attack on my media, cable tv, telephony empire. Change the government now".
Opposition parties, "it's too expensive, under costed, inefficient and we'd do the same thing but not as good, but cheaper and anyway you only want it to watch porn and I have an ipad anyway, so there."
It is generally agreed that to attempt the same project in the USA would be laughable. Something about the constitution et al.
So you'd "take" the fiber bundles and "turn then over" to the "Member States" and the companies would have to "lease them" back?
Keep in mind many of those fibers were paid for by the government in the first place.
Many parties are trying to grab Internet for their own selfish gains
Some wants to carve out the Net, into walled-gardens, so that they can make their visitors "captivated audience" and then profit from it
Others wants total control over Internet because they are scared of free exchanges of idea that may weaken their own ideology
And then there are those who want to restrict the flow of contents on the Net - with ridiculous claims of how "piracy has greatly damaged the economy"
I've been on the Net for decades. In fact, I've been online way before there was "Internet"
John Perry Barlow of the Grateful Dead once penned "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace"
It was a very nicely worded manifesto, but unfortunately it did not have teeth in it
Looking at what is happening to the Net as we speak, is there a way to keep the Net truly independent?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
You have it completely wrong if you think California was any sort of example of "proper" deregulation. Power companies were required to sell their power at the same cost they always had, but were "free" to purchase power at market prices. Unfortunately for them, Enron's traders simply traded power back and forth across the California border with neighboring states until they'd soaked up capacity and created an "emergency", allowing an explosion in power prices. When I say explosion I mean up to 10x prior costs. PG & E was not allowed to pass that cost onto consumers. I'm not actually a defender of regulation but it's clear what happens when you let the interested parties write the rules. They write in loopholes and profit, too.
That should read defender of *deregulation*, by the way. I'm ok with it if the striations are prevented from ownership or co-ownership by cooperative parties. I'm all for it if each layer is forced to compete and the market is efficient. I'm all against if it the competitors are simply allowed to by each other and integrate until choice is back to two or three bad choices instead of several good ones.
Nobody tell Telstra that they might be able to charge for "long distance" internet. All Australia needs is for our internet connections to get MORE expensive.
Zero, and that's my point. By not being allowed to charge the telcos fair market rent for use of my property, they get a free ride.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Perhaps he personally couldn't collect billions, but if right-of-way wasn't handed out by local governments for free to various utilities, it could easily total into the billions.
And, unlike China and Iran, has veto powers.
Ummm... China does have a veto.
Need to type accents and special characters in Windows? Use FrKeys
We were talking about generating revenues for telcos. You are talking about an addition fee you want to change them. That's money flowing in the opposite direction.
I have no doubt that if local governments charged utilities fees they could be very very large. But we were talking about money generated by utilities charging them extra fees just makes the economic problem worse not better.
As an aside I don't think it really turns into much more than a tax. The utility pays a right of way fee to the owners of land which then get passed through as a cost for the using the utility i.e. water, gas, telco... All that does is move money from utility users to landowners which the local government could just do directly by decreasing property taxes and taxing utility use more.
The internet is dead, folks. It's only a matter of time until these kinds of controls are first, established, and second, exercised.Without (possibly repeated) violent revolution against oppressive governments and corporations, all freedom will be destroyed or forced underground, and that includes the 'net. While new technology may be able to occasionally open new frontiers for free speech and action, those will eventually be usurped and suppressed as well. The oppressor must be destroyed before freedom can openly exist.
Deja Moo: The distinct feeling that you've heard this bull before.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, it was the far right that saw a threat in US membership in the United Nations.
Today, that threat ought to be apparent to everyone, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.
The United Nations is the greatest criminal organization in the history of the world. Already it collects tens of billions of dollars annually from taxpayers in the more-productive countries; but it has plans that would allow it to steal hundreds of billions, mainly through carbon trading and taxes on financial transactions.
Letting the UN do its thing while we ignore it and go our own way, is not a positive longterm strategy. Right now the Senate is debating the Law of the Sea Treaty, which should have been killed off once and for all back in the 1980s. But instead we ignored it and now it's back; if ratified, then the UN would collect royalties on undersea mining, etc., and the bureaucrats would keep 50% or 90% before redistributing the remainder to the corrupt governments of "underdeveloped" countries.
It's basically placing full sanctions on one's own country.
The sanctions that we fully expect will topple regimes in a country. It never seems to work out that way, but the people certainly do suffer.
The OP might say that the US is far more self-reliant than Iran or North Korea, but the country is very dependent on foreign trade now, far more than in, say, the 30s.
The US -needs- foreign oil. The US -needs- foreign-produced goods since we can't manufacture our own anymore.
The US has already pissed away its sovereignty, it just hasn't realized it.
I'm not talking about government fees. But for the government exercising eminent domain and then handing right of way to the utilities, they would have to negotiate with each and every private property owner to gain rights to run their cables. I doubt they could even manage it. The sheer bulk of the paperwork would bury them. They would have no recourse whatsoever if one guy in the neighborhood refused to deal.
Given that rather large boon from the government, they owe all of us a sweetheart deal but they seem reluctant.
We get a sweet heart deal. In every state there is a public utility commission that sets rates and policies. States have the right to do that because utilities utilize government services. The government doesn't get to set the price of a meal at restaurants.
Electricity is pretty well regulated in most states, but broadband regulation is crap.
Everything you say makes sense. For this crime you must be destroyed.
At the state level, agreed. The policy right now is only to allow LFAs to tightly control rates in near monopoly situations: http://www.fcc.gov/guides/regulation-cable-tv-rates
However they are doing major cost shifting from urban to rural: http://www.broadband.gov/download-plan/
What would you want regulated that isn't?
Based on what has been achieved elsewhere, we should have 100MBps service with caps not lower than a TB for ~$40/month. This is especially true given the billions in subsidies over the years. There should be no packet inspection or shoot-downs of protocols that the ISPs don't like. We don't have that.
This is especially true given the billions in subsidies over the years.
What billions in subsidies? Telcos are heavily taxed, infrequently subsidized. The only subsidies they get are to deliver connection to rural parts of the country to compensate them for a losses.
I'm not sure where you are getting those numbers about elsewhere as far as speeds and costs. You are talking dual DS3 speeds there, I'm shocked at what a good deal consumer broadband is compared to commercial internet. America has some of the cheapest internet around. In terms of cost, FIOS for example tops out at 300/65 (for about $180 /mo more). I get 25/25 for a $10/mo premium over the standard 15/5.
Here is a start for you. Add in decades of government granted monopoly status. Good for you getting FIOS, most of the country can't get it. We were all supposed to have it several years ago and we gave the telcos a big wad of cash to make it happen.
Yes, commercial connections cost way more than home connections. That's because home connections offer no committed rate, no real uptime guarantee, and response times measured in days while a commercial circuit gets 5 9's uptime at a committed rate and guaranteed 4 hour response time to any failure (including just not being at full speed). It's only natural that the commercial connection would cost more.
Google can be your friend!