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Where the Candidates Stand On Net Neutrality
nmpost writes "Net neutrality is one of the biggest issues with regard to the internet today. At the heart of the issues is how much control ISPs will be allowed to have over their networks. Each candidate has come out with a strong position on the matter, and whoever wins will have a drastic effect on the future of the internet. Barack Obama has been a proponent of net neutrality. Under his watch, the FCC has implemented net neutrality rules. These restrictions did not apply to wireless networks, though; a gaping loophole that will be problematic in the future, as mobile internet is exploding in popularity. Until it is addressed, Obama can only be given a barely passing grade with regard to net neutrality. Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has come down on the other side of the issue. The former Massachusetts governor strongly opposes net neutrality. According to Politico, Romney believes net neutrality will restrict ISPs, and that they alone should govern their networks. The governor has stated that he wants as little regulation of the internet as possible."
I have seen no evidence that any of them do. Republican or demonrat, it makes no difference.
He's anti, though he claims to be "pro freedom." In actuality all that means is that he opposes regulation.
Obama talks out his ass too. The police state has increased dramatically under his watch. Whistleblowers, leakers, spying, assassinations, erosion of civil liberties, illegal wars, you won't get anything positive out of either of them.
You mention auto regulation. Not sure why. Cars are much safer than they have ever been, fuel efficiency is better than ever (and will continue to increase due to regulation). Cars have not increased at a faster pace then inflation. They properly regulated auto manufacturing industry is a perfect example of how things SHOULD be done.
1. If someone thinks the regulations we have are bad, the solution isn't no regulation, but good regulation
2. The oil, loan, and investment industries are mostly self regulated, as their regulatory bodies do not have the manpower or resources to actually verify the things they do.
Hence the constant string of disasters in finance and the dumping of unfiltered wastes by the oil/fracking and mining industries.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Regulations on ISP's take away rights.
And granting them monopolies takes away our rights
So, the solution is obvious. Net neutrality would be a given in a truly competitive business environment.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I hate to defend McCain but:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llef8ZRTWQo
He did actually speak up. Could he have said more and altered tone? Sure, but he wasn't silent about it.
As a side note, you should really stop trying to label entire groups of people based on douche bag members of that group. Every group has people that the group itself should be ashamed of but that hardly justifies tar and feathering the entire group. That's called applying stereotypes. Two examples of applying stereotypes that you may be familiar with are racism and sexism.
You seriously cannot see how Net Neutrality is the enforcement arm for SOPA?
I sure as hell can't.
Net Neutrality means that your ISP cannot discriminate based on content, services, hardware, applications, etc etc etc.
Further, they cannot interfere with your connection because of any of the aforementioned reasons.
SOPA has nothing to do with that.
If you'd care to explain how a law/regulation that prevents discrimination = the copyright police, I'm all ears.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Were you asleep the day they discussed 'natural monopoly' in EC101?
Do the candidates know what Net Neutrality means?
I have seen no evidence that any of them do.
I just turned in a term paper on Network Neutrality issues and regulatory approaches to them.
One thing I discovered was that Obama (or at least his relevant policy wonk and/or speechwriter) was quite aware of the issues and was coming down strongly on the side of regulating to prevent entertainment/ISP conglomerate oligopolists from using their control of the pipes to strangle their content and services competition and shaft their customers.
Which may not be the right approach. But they did seem to be QUITE up on things.
Relevant Obama quote, from a June 8 2006 podcast:
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
He wasn't stereotyping. Stereotyping would be saying that all republicans are crazy extremists. He's not saying every republican is crazy, he's saying the crazies are leading it, and the sane ones aren't stopping it.
Global warming denial, irresponsible tax breaks, partisan obstructionism, preventing homosexual marriage, going after contraceptives, etc it's good that most republicans aren't into all those things. However, if they tolerate the crazies and allow them to dictate what the party does, then yes, they are partly to blame.
"Can you name ANY ISP that blocks traffic from any competitors domains as you claim?"
Yes: every ISP/TV provider out there counts Netflix against your bandwidth cap, but not the pay-per-view choices you get through their service. Phone calls are free, but Skype counts against your bandwidth cap. Watching live TV doesn't slow down your internet connection, but streaming a video through Youtube does.
These are the beginnings of non-neutral networks. These are the beginnings of telcos and cable providers cracking down on possible competitors on the content side by leveraging their last-mile assets. At the same time, these large incumbants have multi-billion dollar legacy networks and content assets that prevent any new startup gathering enough cash and clout to make a go at competition on the last-mile end.
We're already seeing where this road leads: the US is falling further and further behind the leaders in the internet race, since the incumbants would rather spend their time cashing out on their legacy networks and strangling (or merging) startups to death rather than compete by building out new technology. This is what happens when you spend 10 years "letting the market govern itself": it doesn't work, and continuing to do nothing is just going to mean that we continue to fail as we have for the last decade.
Oh well, at least the ISPs didn't manage to cock up the stock market, like what happened when we let the banks "govern themselves."
No, go read up. Obama understands and promotes net neutrality, which has happened under his administration through very reasonable FCC rulings. Romney has stated his anti-net-neutrality position, though like most topics, we don't really know what he knows or thinks about this issue. Ryan, on the other hand, has co-sponsored every piece of anti-net-neutrality legislation written for the GOP by AT&T and friends. He clearly understands the issues, and sides with the internet toll trolls.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
People who argue for right-libertarian viewpoints almost never correlate with "people who studied economics" and only rarely with "people who studied at a university".
Indeed, they love to spout off about how economics courses at universities are utterly useless because they are so Keynesian biassed. Which is just a nice way of saying "when every economist in the world points out how batshit insane our ideas are we can accuse them of bias instead of having to argue that inconvenient empirical evidence of theirs".
The worst thing is that they claim to stand for personal freedom. Biggest load of bullshit ever concocted. One-dollar-one-vote is NOT freedom and that is what an unregulated market INEVITABLY becomes. Unregulated capitalism ALWAYS and INEVITABLY can ONLY devolve into outright fascism [syn: corporatism] (which is exactly what is happening in the USA right now).
Capitalist libertarians call the government a necessary evil - socialist libertarians believe it's not necessary at all, and the reason WHY the Randian's think they can't do away with it is exactly because it destroys rather than maximises individual liberty.
Their freedom only exists for those who are already privileged. People who work in sweatshops are NOT doing so by choice - no matter WHAT Ron Paul believes. They are NOT. "Work in hell, or starve outside" is NOT a choice, it's NOT freedom. That's just slavery with a sugarcoating.
Hell even their great intellectual founders would be appalled by what they are doing today. Adam Smith was the first American economist to PROPOSE a state pension fund. He also stated that the ONLY kind of market which is REMOTELY sustainable is one where labour is by far the most expensive product you can buy. Because "high wages are good for society as a whole, while high profit margins for business is bad for society as a whole."
Not to mention - if you read the actual John Locke books on his labour theory of value (which is the basis of both Rand-style capitalism AND communism I shit you not) - and especially his definition of property (which Murray Rothbard quotes at least 10 times in every paper he ever wrote) then you can see just how patently stupid their ideas on property rights are.
Hint: there is NOTHING except the word "man" in there that prevents a beaver from legally owning a beaver-dam.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
ISPs (AT&T, Time Warner, Comcast, Verison, and friends) are 100% behind Romney. There are no significant ISPs putting money behind Obama. On the other side we have Microsoft, Google, eBay, Vonage, Netflix, and Amazon, who are all companies that provide content and services over the Internet, and they are 100% behind Obama.
I guess elections are nothing more than proxy wars between corporate interests.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”