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Federal Court Kills Net Neutrality, Says FCC Lacks Authority.
An anonymous reader writes "According to a report from Gizmodo, a U.S. Appeals Court has invalidated the FCC's Net Neutrality rules. From the decision: 'Given that the Commission has chosen to classify broadband providers in a manner that exempts them from treatment as common carriers, the Communications Act expressly prohibits the Commission from nonetheless regulating them as such. Because the Commission has failed to establish that the anti-discrimination and anti-blocking rules do not impose per se common carrier obligations, we vacate those portions of the Open Internet Order.' Could this be the final nail in the coffin for Net Neutrality? Or will the FCC fight back? This submitter really, really hopes they fight back..."
It's past time to just classify them as common carriers and stop trying to make an end-run around the rules.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
There's a comment in the article stating that the court found the FCC regulations are not needed because consumers have a choice in broadband providers. That argument always make me shake my head. I have one broadband option - Comcast. Verizon FIOS isn't here. I suspect most people are actually in the same boat as me. There really is no viable broadband option to my local cable provider. Who/where are these people that have these so-called choices?
It's dead, it died years ago.
smallwebsite.ext cannot be found. Please verify you have bribed your ISP to allow access, and that you have typed the domain correctly.
If you are still having trouble, try being a larger corporation again later.
Sigh... if only 'lefties' hadn't been blocked from appointing justices for so long... *facepalm*
Nuff said.
Isn't the appeals court is ruled by the Bush judges? Right-wing? :o
The free market, especially in the broadband sector, has shown time and again, across all state lines, through cities, and in local neighborhoods, to be a fair, equal-service provider to all customers.
When I had Cox Cable, and they were the only provider available other than Dial Up, i was treated with respect, my calls were answered promptly, and my network node was NOT overloaded for months.
As soon as Verizon FIOS moved in, however, it was hell. Prices doubled, speeds were cut to 1/5th what they used to be, and service calls took 2 weeks longer to get answers on...
I, for one, wish they'd bring back the monopoly carrier. At least then I was treated fairly. I mean, just look at what Google is doing -- they moved in, and prices went up 3-4x ! and the speeds are 10x slower!
Hello AOL days again.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
As opposed to when the people on the right are left with their hands in the cookie jar ... Fraud, abuse of power, general asshatedness.
Sorry there, dumbass, but politicians of all stripes are douchebags.
The ones on the right just pander more to large corporations and their drinking buddies, to the detriment of all of us.
The FCC won't fight back, in fact this result was probably the intention along.
Prior to joining the FCC, Chairman Wheeler was Managing Director at Core Capital Partners, a venture capital firm investing in early stage Internet Protocol (IP)-based companies. He served as President and CEO of Shiloh Group, LLC, a strategy development and private investment company specializing in telecommunications services and co-founded SmartBrief, the internet’s largest electronic information service for vertical markets. From 1976 to 1984, Chairman Wheeler was associated with the National Cable Television Association (NCTA), where he was President and CEO from 1979 to 1984. Following NCTA, Chairman Wheeler was CEO of several high tech companies, including the first company to offer high speed delivery of data to home computers and the first digital video satellite service. From 1992 to 2004, Chairman Wheeler served as President and CEO of the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA).
http://www.fcc.gov/leadership/tom-wheeler
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Generally speaking the idea of anti-Net Neutrality is an anti-business, conservative idea. It "stifles" the "free market" by forcing regulations on businesses. The conservative's "free market" approach would be to let ISPs decide if they want to charge on a per-site basis and let consumers go to other ISPs who will simply do the same thing.
They want this so badly since its a game changer for the ones who have $$$ lets hope FCC have the power to go against this ruling.
That depends on which Appeals Court it is. There are thirteen of them.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
we hardly knew you!
Sigh... if only the 'lefty" judges assigned to this case hadn't AGREED WITH VERIZON...
Seriously, apparently the only dissenting opinion is from the Reagan appointee
Hey! Lefties are just as capable as righties. Sure, we might need special scissors, but, damn it, we're people too!
And yet the only dissenting opinion in this case came from a Reagan appointee... :o
It sounds like this is a technicality because the FCC's rules are inconsistent with law. They need to fix them.
I am reposting this comment by "CakeStapler" from GizModo because it explains it well:
As we explain in this opinion, the Commission has established that section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 vests it with affirmative authority to enact measures encouraging the deployment of broadband infrastructure. The Commission, we further hold, has reasonably interpreted section 706 to empower it to promulgate rules governing broadband providers’ treatment of Internet traffic, and its justification for the specific rules at issue here—that they will preserve and facilitate the “virtuous circle” of innovation that has driven the explosive growth of the Internet—is reasonable and supported by substantial evidence. That said, even though the Commission has general authority to regulate in this arena, it may not impose requirements that contravene express statutory mandates. Given that the Commission has chosen to classify broadband providers in a manner that exempts them from treatment as common carriers, the Communications Act expressly prohibits the Commission from nonetheless regulating them as such. Because the Commission has failed to establish that the anti-discrimination and anti-blocking rules do not impose per se common carrier obligations, we vacate those portions of the Open Internet Order.
(Emphasis mine)
So, the FCC will remove their exemption from treatment as common carriers, reenact the regulations, and there's nothing to see here. 20 minutes ago
Everyone gets unlimited data provided they go to an approved closed garden.
Other sites will be accessible at insane rates. Torrenting will be destroyed.
The Internet was fun while it lasted....
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
And solve this problem for good?
can the ISP now block access to commercial VPN providers in the USA?
Oh well, with NSA, GCHQ, and the Chinese stealing whatever they can from the 'net plus the Facebook/Google+ integration throughout all websites, it was only a matter of time.
Sure, but the conservative's "free market" approach would also leave it up to companies to decide if they want to pollute, allow car dealers to lock out Tesla (because they don't want competition), absolve Monsanto from liability, further deregulate the financial industry to allow Wall Street to rob us like they were doing before the '08 meltdown, and further extending copyright.
In other words, more crony-capitalism where the rich are free to make backroom deals which benefit them, and which harm the rest of us, and the 'freedom' of the market mostly restricted to big players who paid off the politicians.
No, this requires government interference with the free market (legislation against Tesla's business model). In a free market, Tesla could... *cough* MAR-KET freely to whomever.
sig: sauer
Lol, if only that was true, since the current administration, which is so far left, has completely pandered to every huge corporation...but keep spewing...
Breaking my no AC rule
I thought, like gingers, lefties have no soul?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
uh isp's were already throttling competing video services while not counting their own service against the throttle allowances.
that is quite simply the whole reason for the whole debate.
imagine if google as an isp would throttle netflix unusable and just allowing google video - or throttling bing search unusable. that's the scenario.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
It was ALWAYS a tool to impose government control over the internet.
Yeah, it's not like the government had control over the Internet before. Except for:
- when it was run by the Department of Defense for the early part of its existence
- when it was opened up to the public by then-Senator Al Gore and placed under the jurisdiction of the FCC
- when they paid AT&T to build and improve the network
- when Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton tried to stop all Internet pornography
- when the FBI created Echelon under the Clinton administration
- when Admiral Poindexter started the Total Information Awareness project in 2001
- when the NSA cooperated with Google and AT&T and Verizon and a bunch of other major corporations to spy on everybody..
So clearly Net Neutrality was the thin wedge that was going to give government control of the Internet, right?
I am officially gone from
I for one, welcome our new corporate overlords.
The difference between truth and fiction is that fiction has to be plausible.
You haven't seen any cases because there was this thing called "Net Neutrality" that wouldn't let the things "Net Neutrality" protects you from happen.
No, they just pander to *different* large corporations. Though there are plenty of areas pandered to by both.
Right, the point was that no leftist is involved here. Defeating net neutrality is not a left leaning idea, it's a right leaning idea.
No, "Net Neutrality" means "Keep the laws going that were in place before".
The laws, unlike many, had a sunset clause, and the sun set, and the law was still definitely needed, so they had to make laws to put the regulations back in.
THIS IS FUCK ALL to do with "a tool to impose government control over the internet.", the only tool here is YOU.
Over the years there have been two competing versions of "net neutrality" -- the one that favors content producers / distributors, and the one that one that favors consumers.
Which one is this story about?
Yeah, it took legislation to stop Tesla from selling in Texas. They were doing fine before that.
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
Just because our souls are black and twisted doesn't mean they don't exist! *pout*
Everything is better with chainsaws.
That's not true (nor is the AC response to your post). My initial knee jerk reaction was certainly that it's anti-business and over regulation (read that again - over regulation is a problem; regulation might be needed, but over-regulation is bad). But after giving it some thought, I am completely on board with the idea of net neutrality. I am my ISP's customer, not the content provider. If Netflix is using my ISP's bandwidth, it's because I, as the customer, requested it - and I'm paying for it. If my ISP doesn't like how I'm using the service that I am paying for, their beef is with me.
The obvious reason they want to go after the content provider is because then their internal competitor to the service (in this case, video streaming) gets an unfair advantage... even if they're "paying," it's only "funny money" if they are owned by the same parent company. If, however, they went after me, then both services are equally penalized. That's a second strike in favor of net neutrality.... what the ISPs want is obviously anti-competitive... that is NOT something a free market person supports. I MIGHT support "anti" net neutrality if the ISP was barred from competing against services that they would otherwise be charging access fees for... but even then my former complaint is still valid.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
No Net neutrality was a actually good and is kind of the opposite of what you're saying.
The key is here:
'Given that the Commission has chosen to classify broadband providers in a manner that exempts them from treatment as common carriers'
The commission was corrupted by the RIAA/MPAA to make ISPs different to common carriers, as that makes them responsible for the actual data they pass. So now the RIAA/MPAA can act as the censors of the whole internet and make all ISPs have to prevent access to any data or site they alone decide is 'undesireable', which amounts to anything from business competitiors like the Pirate Bay etc.
You trolling me? Net Neutrality was preventative to say that it never stopped anything is like saying that stoplight never stopped anyone from T-boning someone. It didn't happen because the FCC didn't allow it to. I believe most if not all the major ISP's were hoping to have a tiered system and have been saying so for years. It's well documented their lobbying on the matter.
As for the Snowden bullshit do you think for a second that just by not having net neutrality corporations are not going to hand over information to the NSA? Government is going to be involved in data traffic regardless of who is the carrier and how they handle it. They could care less in that regard. That will change nothing with privacy at all. So why allow companies to fuck everyone over with their large oligopoly.
Yes, by conservative lawmakers who claim to be proponents of a "free" market, when in fact they're in proponents of crony-capitalism.
In other words, the conservatives braying about a free market (which is a myth) are full of shit (which isn't a myth).
You don't understand the root cause of the financial crisis. Clinton tried to encourage home ownership among lower income brackets by forcing banks to make a certain percentage of their mortgages to those borrowers (can you say "quota"?). In order to make that happen he changed the laws on how mortgages were approved with his National Homeownership Strategy. None of that came from conservatives or Wall Street. It was a liberal agenda run amok.
I would rather be able to choose my ISP from a rich selection of carriers and not have other ISPs (or my own) interfere with my communicating with businesses.
Because, just like cable TV, they'll end up getting soaked each month AND having to watch ads. The fear/assumption is that the promised benefits will lose out to the opportunity for profit.
-almitydave
So, if they aren't common carriers based on this ruling, does that mean that they are now liable for all the traffic that passes over the network including child porn or other illegal materials?
Reagan was a RINO (Republican In Name Only) by today's standards.....
Corporations are legal fictions that are run in the manner that the government allows them to be run. Is putting them in charge of the Internet better?
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
What part of full spectrum corporate domination don't you get? It's oligarchies all the way!
There were NO problems before the FCC introduced the rule. How do you explain that Einstein?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You don't understand the root cause of the financial crisis. Clinton tried to encourage home ownership among lower income brackets by forcing banks to make a certain percentage of their mortgages to those borrowers (can you say "quota"?). In order to make that happen he changed the laws on how mortgages were approved with his National Homeownership Strategy. None of that came from conservatives or Wall Street. It was a liberal agenda run amok.
Mortgage-backed securities were not a Clinton idea. They were a banking scam for which they got away with the crime. Every American should be outraged by that.
Sadly there is NO left or right wing in the USSA anymore and hasn't been for several decades. What we have is "pro media fascists" and "pro wall street fascists" and that is it, the so-called "left" is just as fascist as the right the ONLY difference is one is pro media cartel while the other leans more towards Wall street. Oh and one gets a really big stiffie when they can kick a poor person, but that's really it.
As the late great Bill Hicks put it over 20 years ago "I think the puppet on the left shares MY beliefs, well i think the puppet on the right has MY interests at heart...hey wait a minute, there is one guy working both puppets!"
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
uh isp's were already throttling competing video services while not counting their own service against the throttle allowances.
WRONG.
ISP's were throttling ALL traffic equally, while sometimes offering local content that didn't get throttled BECAUSE IT WAS LOCAL.
Can you not understand why from a technical sense it is perfectly reasonable to offer local content unthrottled, when all content coming from external pipes has a cap?
That's just how networks work. Or it is until the government says you have to throttle local content to match the remote stuff. That is WORSE for consumers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You're missing the part where Wall Street and their cronies passed off junk debt as if it was AAA secured and sold it to everybody else, thereby making shitty debts incurred in the US the problem of everybody else on the planet.
That people with lousy credit were being given mortgages, sure, that could have been Clinton.
That the turd that was that bad debt was polished (laundered) and misrepresented as good quality, that is squarely on the financial corporations, the greedy assholes on Wall Street, and the Republicans who have been gutting the banking laws designed to prevent such things.
But don't think for a minute that if the financial companies hadn't LIED and sold their bad debt to other people, that the meltdown would have happened.
Essentially the US turned their bad debt into a global ponzi scheme. And when it collapsed, everyone else was left holding the bag except the people responsible. Essentially the US financial system committed wholesale FRAUD on the rest of the world.
Don't believe me? Google for "Asset Backed Paper Commodities". It wasn't the existence of bad debt, it was off-loading that to others in a fraudulent and dishonest manner which caused the financial meltdown of '08, otherwise it would have been restricted to just the US.
The cable company model won't last. Google doesn't have to pay a dime. The cable company customers will open 1000s of support tickets when they have problems accessing Google's services. It will be death by a 1000 pin pricks when they pull that nonsense.
In this case, Obama's FCC is fighting against Verizon and other telecom companies and defending net neutrality. But don't let basic facts right in front of your face influence your pre-prepared bullshit.
Exactly correct. They're hindered by Texas franchise law.
sig: sauer
Sorry to break the news to you, but by international standards Obama is center-right wing. Definitely not a lefty.
The problem is that the entire political system in the USA is so extremely skewed to the the right wing that politicians leaning a tiny bit to the center appear to you as a lefty. But they aren't.
If Obama is a lefty, all of Europe is dark red with rampant communists.
This also assumes that there are choices. In my area, my choice for wired Internet (e.g. not cell provider) is Time Warner Cable. I could also get Verizon DSL, but Verizon has repeatedly shown that they want to ditch DSL as soon as possible so I don't see why I should go to a slower, older technology that the company wants to get rid of. Were Time Warner Cable to start anti-Net Neutrality actions (for example, slowing NetFlix to a crawl unless they paid TWC), I would have no options to switch.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
If Obama is a lefty, all of Europe is dark red with rampant communists.
Seems accurate and agrees with what's going on there.
"So you want corporations to control the Internet?"
Between them and the government, yes.
Because there is only ONE government. If you don't like it, too bad.
If a company operates in a way that you dislike - you use a different company. Unless of course, the government prevents you from having choice as they do with cable monopolies... But there's always DSL or even wireless options.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Neither conservatives nor liberals believe in a free market. Each side loves to bend the market to its own ends, to pay off its corporate sponsors in furtherance of crony capitalism. Only libertarians believe in the free market..
O rly? I use the cableco's VoIP? No cap. Vonage? Cap. I use Windows, updates don't count against the cap, Linux or OSX? Cap. I use their PPV? No cap. netflix? Cap.
Sorry but THE ENTIRE REASON that anybody started talking about NN was the ISPs WERE ALREADY BONING US and walling of as much as they could. More and more of the USA now has caps and if you were to bother to look just a liiiiittle bit closer? they ALL punish you for not using THEIR services.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
This is all moot. if tcp/ip would allow to SIMPLY be connected to multiple "ISPs", then we could all do routing.
but as it is, 99% of users live their lives as a cule-de-sac.
so my neighbor has isp A and i have both A and B, why not let me route traffic for him?
we are so aversed to sharing our wifi, but in reality the "endpoints" should really start peering amongs each other.
no more "spoke-wheeled" internet, but a real mesh?
-
to wit: yes, tcp/ip can do routing but that's "carrier grade" tech and hardly ever seen in "consumer" gear.
Oh and one gets a really big stiffie when they can kick a poor person, but that's really it.
They both do. When the left kicks a poor person they do it as an abusive spouse and the poor person just comes back for more.
so instead of the government "screwing" with the internet, would you prefer monopolizing corporations to slice up the internet and favor certain protocols and services over others? there HAS to be a better solution than that. we can't trust the companies, we can't trust the government, but maybe we can trust a system where the government has to balance out against the megacorps.
Netflix should very loudly sue all of the major ISPs in the states, asking the court to affirm its right to reach its users at the same rate content-partners (or other business units) of the ISP pay.
They should make all sorts of noise about anti-competitive practices, damage to the Internet, corruption and bribery, lack of last-mile competition, lack of common-carrier status, etc.
They wouldn't win any judgments, but at least they could provide exposure and coverage in mainstream media so more of the population would grasp what's at stake here.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
They consider Verizon Wireless a competitor. Which is bullshit because Comcast and Verizon Wireless advertise each others' services. Competitors rarely do this. This is of course aside from the obvious reason that it is physically impossible for wireless broadband to come anywhere close to the quality of landline cable or fiber.
But you probably know by now that they don't actually believe their own arguments. Debating their validity with them is a waste of energy because this is not a symptom of their poor judgement but rather of corruption--we live in a plutocracy. It's only going to get worse, and Americans are so misinformed that there's a chance they won't ever realize how bad they've got it.
If you want real competition any time soon, the only choice you have is to move somewhere else--for instance, Europe. You'll probably be happier there anyway.
I guess I shouldn't be too surprised if Amazon Prime and Netflix streaming videos are further bandwidth limited in the near future by ComCast/Xfinity, Time Warner and other carriers. Why not, since they directly compete with Streampix and other ISP On-Demand movie services?
If you assault people, you might get shot.
I generally operate under this belief where I live.
Who handed authority over the international networks to the US Federal Government?
Also, since they are not common carriers, the ISPs should be sued if they deliver child porn. When they fight so hard to not be common carriers, we should make sure they feel the brunt of that choice. Got harassed by someone online? Sue the company that delivered the harassement. If they were a common carrier, they'd be blameless. They fought long and hard to not be a common carrier, so they should feel the sting of their choice.
Learn to love Alaska
Money > Common sense.
With the head of the FCC a former cable lobbyist you can be assured that consumers will now suffer.
Those loans were unrelated to the problem. If none of those loans had been made, the crisis would still have happened. The cause was the banker fraud when reselling loans, and amplification of risk to increase returns. Any slowdown would have caused the same result.
Learn to love Alaska
There are thousands of corporations, and not a single one of them is accountable to the public.
All of them are. If they do something the government dislikes, the public stops using them.
Witness the latest Target breach. Millions stopped shopping there and Target was (rightfully) forced to take numerous steps to draw people back in.
A grocery store near where I lived stopped carrying a lot of things I liked to buy. So I stopped shopping there.
Basically any company that has customers, is accountable and will self-regulate based on customer feedback.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Republican here Ralph Wiggam is righ- umm.. Correct. :)
One thing Obama's administration has gotten right is an FCC that is at least TRYING for net neutrality. I own stock in AT&T and think what they are Verizon are doing is a bunch of crap.
I had a sucky sig.
Time for a change.org campaign. Not to mention for Congress to get off their asses and work FOR the people, NOT the corporations.
Though the ISP could throttle, demand a ridiculously expensive network usage fee to make the service unaffordable or even block services all together such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime, I doubt they would. Any of those services would likely sue the ISP for anti-competitive practices.
so instead of the government "screwing" with the internet, would you prefer monopolizing corporations to slice up the internet
Since that cannot happen, it's a false choice. AOL tried and was destroyed because of it.
You ignore the fact that the danger you fear is utterly unrealistic.
we can't trust the government, but maybe we can trust a system where the government has to balance out against the megacorps.
The government and the megacorps are locked at the hip (and frankly a lot of other parts). The way to make that better is NOT to make sure that the only ISP's who can afford to operate because of regulations, are ISP's run by megacorps.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Administrative Procedure is the kind of thing that makes even most lawyers go to sleep. From my brief review it appears that the court thinks that the FCC does not have an internally consistent logic for the treatment of the broadband carriers within the statutory limits set for it by Congress.
It could well be right. That court does practically nothing else but review the actions of administrative agencies. It is very good at doing that.
Not that Congress can do anything useful about anything. Which is another way of saying it cannot break things even more badly if you look at the bright side.
Sure, and I live on the moon.
What's worse for consumers is the conflict of interest involved in the situation you describe existing in the first place. If the FCC were doing its job, ISPs wouldn't be allowed to be content distributors.
There's more to the internet than just google, idiot.
Name a system of government in which people are effectively prevented from making backroom deals which benefit them.
For congress to MAN THE F UP and give the FCC the power it needs.
In other words, more crony-capitalism where the rich are free to make backroom deals which benefit them, and which harm the rest of us, and the 'freedom' of the market mostly restricted to big players who paid off the politicians.
No conservative runs on, "I plan to screw everyone else for the benefit of corp x or corp y". Almost no conservative voter, wants this. Yes, some Republicans and some Democrats do screw everyone for the benefit of corp x or corp y. But no one runs on it.
What blows me away is when the Democrats basically say, we are going to raise the minimum wage (completely against any economics education). For the sole purpose of screwing all other consumers for the benefit of their voters/groups/unions (union contracts often have clauses that if minimum wage goes up, so does their pay).
Anyway, conservatives do not believe in crony capitalism. We are pissed off when our guy does it or if the Dems do it.
Do you have any evidence that Conservatives, as a group of voters, are for crony capitalism? Janet Rino suing banks to make them fund subprime loans is clearly not Conservative Crony Capitalism. Janet Rino Threating Banks
I'm not going to claim to speak for conservatives, but I would expect a *real* conservative model to also attempt to create a true free market where ISPs are not guaranteed a monopoly by the government. It is this exploitation of monopoly powers that is the source of the problem. Net neutrality only fixes the symptoms.
I would rather see municipalities owning the communications lines in their cities rather than telecom companies. These could either be purchased, seized using eminent domain, or the local governments could build their own. Once the local government (i.e. the people) own their own lines, they can contract whatever telecom companies they want to actually administer the operation of their network. This includes imposing whatever restrictions (like net neutrality) through contract law rather than the FCC. Also if the telecom falls short of it's obligations, it would be much easier to fire them and hire a new telecom company to replace them.
I am not confident in voters enthusiasm to vote for boring things like redistricting or zoning laws. I do think they will come out to vote en masse if it means they will have faster internet.
A traditional conservative might not support socializing the network infrastructure of a city, but they should provide some way to break the monopoly that existing telecoms have if they truly believe in a free market.
I don;t see this as a failure of conservatism (read free market proponents) in general, but a failure of our current crop of conservatives. And I think that's because conservatives today don't actually believe in the free market. They believe in not paying taxes.
Google a bit more and see whose signature is on the legislation making those commodities legal (Hint: the President's name starts with a "C"). It couldn't have happened if he hadn't rolled back the laws that were put in place back in the 1930's to prevent exactly this from happening.
The excuse was that everyone knew that relaxing the rules on who qualified for those mortgages would result in more foreclosures. The commodities were a way of spreading the losses from foreclosures around. Bad idea all around
(oh, and a raspberry to whoever modded me down because you disagreed with what I said)
Many of those items on the list are indeed bad, so why are you pushing for yet ANOTHER example of the government trying to screw with our internet to add to the list?
You're misunderstanding the argument. Your reasoning appears to be:
1. If Net Neutrality is implemented, the government can control the Internet.
2. If the government can control the Internet, it can (unnamed sinister action).
My argument is this:
1. The government can control the Internet without Net Neutrality.
2. If the government can control the Internet, it can (unnamed sinister action).
3. Therefor, whether or not Net Neutrality is implemented has no bearing on whether the government can (unnamed sinister action).
My guess, based on the rest of your post, is that you are a libertarian, and thus you oppose any rule the government makes on the theory that any rule the government makes benefits the government rather than accomplishing its stated purpose. My view is that sometimes government action serves the government, sometimes it actually accomplishes its stated purpose, and it's worth figuring out the difference because often that stated purpose is worth doing.
I am officially gone from
Understand this:
There is NO SUCH THING as a free market, the whole idea is a theoretical construct for academic purposes. The closest thing is Somalia, and oops you need to pay the protection tax to the warlord, not a "free" market anymore.
Just drop the phrase, its meaningless except to Econ professors, propagandists, polemicists, and rubes.
Oh those poor multinational banks taken to the cleaners by those wily low income shysters.
It seems that the source of the problem is lack of choices. Trying to pass regulations to force the companies with existing monopolies to behave a certain way is one option, but probably not a good one.
I think the goal of net neutrality was good. I just think it was not well thought out. Several technologists including people who actually invented the protocols that form the basis of the internet have said that net neutrality would prevent further evolution of technology by forcing companies to comply with laws that refer to existing technology. Congress nor the FCC can predict what new protocols might be invented and how net neutrality would adversely affect them.
For example it might be a violation of net neutrality to implement "fair queuing" because this discriminates against large packets. Did the FCC think of that? Do they care? No they don't, but as a supporter of improvements to network technology I care.
Nobody wants the ISPs to get away with charging netflix for bandwidth, but surely there is a better way to do it than allowing the FCC to decide how packets get routed.
Please, can you dispose of all the Nazis living there currently and try to disrupts their plans to work with the Aliens?
No You don't understand the root cause of the financial crisis, you obviously ate the whole right wing disinformation campaign hook line and sinker.
Here it's not too complicated:
A. The financial industry made bad loans (sub prime loans)
B. bad loans were bundled into packages containing many good / bad loans
C. bundles were sold to investors as high quality AAA investments.
D. when the scam blew up, they pointed the finger at the people they made the bad loans to, people they knew were bad risks.
E. useful idiots parroting part D on the internet hoping everyone else is as gullible and uninformed as they are.
but I would expect a *real* conservative model to also attempt to create a true free market where ISPs are not guaranteed a monopoly by the government.
A libertarian model wouldnt need to "attempt to create a true free market" because the local government wouldnt have the right to restrict your choice of ISP's.
That is in fact the problem with the current model. Your local government has the power to restrict access to you and they go ahead and do it.
Now, some may claim that nobody would want to move into your area and offer a competing broadband. The current state of affairs in the country says differently, as companies like Google and Verizon are quite willing to lay down fiber in areas already covered by the copper and coax of both competing phone and cable ISP's.
br. The facts are that there is big money in subscription services, more than enough for venture capitalists to raise the money needed to compete in your area. Just remove government from the equation and they will be knocking on your door offering more choices.
"His name was James Damore."
So, because no ISP was violating the net neutrality rules, the net neutrality rules aren't needed.
Uh-huh.
Actually, Net Neutrality is cheaper for ISPs. They have to treat every packet the same way. That takes less hardware, software (and thus money) than inspecting each packet, determining who it is from and who it is going to, looking up the server and the customer in their "tiered Internet" database and then either delaying or blocking the packet.
While your government conspiracy theories are vaguely entertaining, you should be aware you have utterly no clue about the subject at hand.
There are no 'leftists' in US politics. You only have extreme right and moderate right, and there are very few of the latter.
We knew this day was coming.
Nobody made the US the center of the Internet.
Pull the plug.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
There are no 'leftists' in US politics. You only have extreme right and moderate right, and there are very few of the latter.
True. What passes for left here is regarded as right of center in most countries.
What passes for far left is what most countries call "moderate".
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You mean like Obama giving Apple a free pass on patent infringement while they sue everybody else?
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Only if you have absolutely no clue about what is left and what is right.
Everywhere outside the US
Left|right
US
no1|dems|-repub|teapartyers
When you cant win, ad hominem.
A libertarian model wouldnt need to "attempt to create a true free market" because the local government wouldnt have the right to restrict your choice of ISP's.
The fact that installing new cables usually requires digging up a lot of roads (i.e. public property), means that any ISP is going to need some kind of government sanction. Even wireless internet requires exclusive access to certain frequencies to function properly.
I don't think a strictly libertarian/private approach would work well for broadband internet. But I think it is important to follow the spirit of this approach (e.g. competition, customer choice, etc) where possible.
There were also no problems while the FCC introduced the rule. So what is your point?
Do you know what the ISP's want to do? They want to make teirs for services like cable and have you pay extra for say streaming netflix services. They could block access to youtube unless you pay the bill.
So? That's how markets work you pay tolls to go places and you pay for goods and services.
What this ends up doing is hurting the openess of the internet. You are so worried about having gov. influence in your service that you didn't even consider corp. influence? Your ISP has a streaming service that they want you to buy into. It's not as good as netflix or amazon prime so they can't compete. So instead they mark up the price of being able to connect to those services instead of subsidizing their own. It closes pathways on the internet and even if you do work around it can cause lag time.
It's not to say that it would happen but it has been suggested by the gentlemen at AT&T and Time Warner.
Now having the net neutrality laws in place what did that do? Maybe it jacked up the price that some ISP's offer their services at, though I highly doubt that. But what it did was keep all of those channels open and not filter things out. They couldn't prevent access to competing systems for a toll.
The reason there wasn't a problem before is because they were doing something crazy, like future proofing the internet from ISPs trying to muck up the openess of the internet. Streaming, gaming, facebook and so much more is now a part of our lives that an open internet for all is very important. It would be like having the great wall of china but instead it's instituted by the Corp. and they block or limit content they don't want you to have.
So I might not be Einstein but the implications of removing net neutrality could be very consequential to everyone.
I can't say it enough.
Line sharing, line sharing, line sharing.
From a 2009 Ars Technica article:
"...mandating "open access" to broadband networks works really, really well as a way to boost speeds and lower costs."
Link
If ISPs want to experiment with data-caps and pay-to-play systems, let them. If there's 10 ISPs in town they can all offer different packages. Competition and market-forces will do the rest.
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
The fact that installing new cables usually requires digging up a lot of roads
Digging up roads to run cables... happen in cities. Cities should already have easy access to underground infrastructure such as cables set up, else they are doing it wrong.
In the rest of America, cables are run on what are called telephone poles, which naturally offer easy access.
"His name was James Damore."
been nice knowin ya.
i betcha the fcc didn't put much, if any, effort into defending themselves here, given that their current boss used to (still does?.. hush hush! under the table, plox) lobby for the cable companies.
That is bullshit. Right and left are not relative concepts only how extreme you are within one of them. Both ideologies are based on clear sets of beliefs. If you want to make comparisons about how strong are those ideologies you may say that the leftists in US are less extreme than in other countries (which is not true either, by the way) but you can't say there is no left in US.
Bullshit
there is no left in US
there is no left in US
there is no left in US
there is no left in US
there is no left in US
there is no left in US
there is no left in US
there is no left in US
there is no left in US
there is no left in US
there is no left in US
there is no left in US
there is no left in US
there is no left in US
there is no left in US
there is no left in US
there is no left in US
See? I *can* say "there is no left in US". And believe it or not, it's actually true. there is no left in US...
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The "conservatives" believe in letting powerful people do whatever they want even if---especially if---it results in a less free market.
Free market requires pricing transparency and low-friction competitive substitutability.
At its core, the ideology is simple: they believe in wielding government power for the benefit of the powerful and against wielding government power for the benefit of the less powerful.
So, if you are correct, locally cached Youtube, etc. content (Akmai caches and the like) should only count against the cap of the very first person who brings that into the cache. That is obviously not true.
You are missing what they are actually saying. If I have a cap of 250Gb of traffic per month, viewing something from Netflix/HBO counts toward the cap. Viewing something from a service run by your provider does not count towards that cap. This essentially means that you have limited Netflix/HBO but unlimited 'Warner' or 'Comcast' or whatever. Also, bandwidth is bandwidth: if Netflix can push 1080p out to me, why should I have to accept 720p from them while still able to get 1080p from the local cache?
Additionally, you would think that Netflix/HBO stuff would be locally cached due to the likelihood that a bunch of people would want to watch the same show/movie around the same time.
Let me rephrase that: you can't say that there is no left in US without showing you are a complete ignorant. And, if I might add, you can't do what you just did without showing how childish you are.
There were also no problems while the FCC introduced the rule. So what is your point?
There were problems, it cost the ISP's extra to comply with. Furthermore it provided a path for the government over time to impose more and more restrictions on how the ISP's managed networks. The real problems came later.
Leave your car unlocked today, there might not be a problem. Do it every day and over the years there will be problems.
If something is useless, then why do it? Why spend the money to do it? Why make others spend money to deal with the pointless thing?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And never will be able to.
From official statement from House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) and Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR) this ruling is a "victory for jobs and innovation." See http://energycommerce.house.gov/press-release/upton-walden-applaud-court-decision-favor-internet-free-government-control.
How are you going to string the network wires without government interference in privately owned property?
Without government interference there could not exist telephones systems. Without government interference there could not exist a broadcast industry. Etc.
And I'm not even talking about subsidies, I'm talking about standards setting, eminent domain, etc. You can't get the right-of-way to run a large network without govenment intervention. Someone will refuse. Or someone will set up another station broadcasting on the same frequency that you were going to use. (And no, spread-spectrum won't let you get around that.)
Given that you've got to have government interference, how do you make it beneficial to society, rather than just to a few friends of the king? (Or do you? The traditional answer is that the friends of the king get their way, and we hope that it also benefits the rest of society. Standards setting, at least, often does.)
Over time this "friends of the king" becomes traditional, and terms like "land lord" are used to describe them. The king said that they had control over that piece of land, so the "own" it, unless the king changes his mind. Their heirs consider it their right, and it becomes more and more difficult for the king to change his mind. Eventually the king is replaced by the government, but there's not other change.
You don't understand what a radical piece of legislation the homestead act was. And also how profoundly the US changed when the homesteadable land was filled, and the act was revoked. Ever since then the government has become much more, what the grandparent called "crony capitalism", because there was, essentially, no longer any way to escape from the landlords (i.e. the descendants in interest of the king's friends).
Yes, the history was a lot more complex, and this is just following one particular thread of it. But it's one of the pieces of how we got here.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Only if you have absolutely no clue about what is left and what is right.
I was basing that statement on the commonly held definitions as summed up in this wikipedia article. To better understand why you are confused about this from living in the US, the section 'Contemporary usage in the United States' describes the usage you are used to in context.
It is also recommended that you read the rest of the article, which describes what the terms actually mean to the majority of the world. These are subjective terms however so you are not categorically wrong, just informationally challenged.
will someone please take a big huge shit in this judge's mouth while someone else wires his mouth open?
You're using the term "network neutrality" in the future tense. You're a present tense bloody idiot. The network is currently neutral. It doesn't care if you're from Iran, Korea, Iowa, New York, or old York. It doesn't care if you're downloading Gutenburg novels or if you're looking at cats. It "shouldn't" care if you're using ftp or bittorrent, but it does in some places. It's also not supposed to care if you go to ESPN360.com vs 4chan.org. But it does because ESPN is trying to systematically break NN and bypass actual people when selling their wares.
Is it perfectly neutral? Was it ever? No, packets really do take more time to travel from 3-wireless-802.11b-hop bumblefuck backwater Iowa than from fiber connected Japan. And UDP simply behaves differently than TCP. Does anyone care? No. Because those aren't causing sociological issues and leading to abuse of power by the gatekeepers.
Get it through your fucking head that the wonderful system that is the Internet will be broken and damaged if the ISPs are allowed to whittle away the neutral nature of current Internet just to make an extra buck.
Nobody wants the ISPs to get away with charging netflix for bandwidth, but surely there is a better way to do it than allowing the FCC to decide how packets get routed.
Maybe. But until that is found an implemented, I sure as shit want the FCC to rattle the fuck out of that saber over the heads of the cable providers. Because there is no-one else keeping them in check: The customers sure aren't because there is no competition between them. Fiber isn't to my town yet. DSL is a serious downgrade. And wireless options are worse.
It seems that the source of the problem is lack of choices.
Holy shit dude, Yeah, maybe if Standard Oil just had a little bit of competition then things would have been better. Gee. Maybe. Congradufuckinglations for identifying the problem at hand. Here's a medal and the keys to the kingdom. You're obviously well read on the subject, lead us to the promised land.
Then you are interpreting the article you link VERY wrongly.
- when the NSA coopted Google and AT&T and Verizon and a bunch of other major corporations to spy on everybody..
FTFY... When some goon with a gun (even if it is a gun shaped like a law) points it at you and says "hand over the goods", you've only got two choices: obey or not. Your prospects for an immediate future are severely limited with one of those choices.
And if you obey often enough, it becomes habit.
Sure, but the conservative's "free market" approach would also leave it up to companies to decide if they want to pollute, allow car dealers to lock out Tesla (because they don't want competition), absolve Monsanto from liability, further deregulate the financial industry to allow Wall Street to rob us like they were doing before the '08 meltdown, and further extending copyright.
In other words, more crony-capitalism where the rich are free to make backroom deals which benefit them, and which harm the rest of us, and the 'freedom' of the market mostly restricted to big players who paid off the politicians.
crony-capitalism is not a free market.... crony-capitalism is the opposite of a free market.
With these rules struck down, it opens the door for people to pay extra to prioritize content that needs a faster connection, while overall saving money on service.
For example, I could theoretically pay extra to make sure all of the streaming video sites I use would not get choppy, or could deliver higher quality feeds - but for the rest of the service I could just pay a fee for a much slower connection.
For Slashdot users that would not work, but for most people you could do with a medicare browsing speed as long as video still looked good. For most people that would be cheaper rather than having to pay for a really fast connection just so streaming video speed was acceptable.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
AOL didn't have Comcast's market penetration; they depended on other people's wire.
Digging up roads to run cables... happen in cities. Cities should already have easy access to underground infrastructure such as cables set up, else they are doing it wrong.
Yes a lot of cities in America were not designed with the intention of easy access for installing new network infrastructure a century after being built. I used to live in L.A. and just installing coaxial cable was a huge undertaking that spanned like 6 years just for the area I lived in.
In the rest of America, cables are run on what are called telephone poles, which naturally offer easy access.
Who owns the telephone poles, and who gets to decide which companies have permission to use the telephone poles? Can anybody put their cables on the telephone poles? Obviously the telephone poles themselves are a limited public resource (along with the land below to access them), and their use needs to be managed/regulated by the government.
But you can't be bothered helping me in my ignorance by explaining the facts, or linking another source.
Where they knew those commodities were toxic, so they insured themselves against the eventual meltdown- netting them another few billion for a self inflicted minor wound.
Sorry, but I have to add one more vote for this "cause" of the crisis being right-wing propaganda.
The requirement to make loans to low-income people had little to do with how the sub-prime crisis went down. Instead it was mostly caused by greed in just about every sector. Here are a couple of links with a lot more details:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/355/the-giant-pool-of-money - a great radio documentary, including first hand accounts of what was happening on the ground (i.e. people making money tons of money) when the whole bubble exploded.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis - all the details you could want.
I can use Comcast, or I can use Xfinity.
Or I can use a wireless point-to-point that will give me an incredible 64kb/sec! If I had the money for the hardware, I might consider it. Gotta be better than the suck-ass bandwidth Comcast gives out here.
7 competitors in a major metro would be nice.
7 competitors in a rural small town would be 7 companies starving to death.
methinks you have not checked the markets very well.
Eggar: "you can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands."
bug: "I find your proposal acceptable."
netflix lost a lot of content to license holders who wanted more money. they were making money where none had existed before- but got greedy and demanded profit-breaking amounts when contract renewal came up. Now they make none again and I have to watch them from torrents instead of paying for them like I was.
But the ISPs are saying that the last mile is congested. You're claiming that the issue is the trunk, not the last mile. The cheaper part of being an ISP is the trunk, it is cheaper than the last mile. To say "local content" is cheaper, is false in many situations. Once you get to a certain size, it is cheaper to pay for transit for Netflix traffic than it is to use one of their local CDNs. It's easy to scale bandwidth, it's much harder to scale a datacenter.
Time to re-enable "dialup" and wrap torrents in the unlimited voice band of my package.
A little more patience is needed, but something is better than nothing.
Sort of. The real deal is we have two "sides", who are both right (from the perspective of someone outside the US). The way they truly differ, significantly, is in which industries they're beholden to. The "right" is in bed with the oil & gas industries and defense industries, while the "left" is in bed with the media and telecom industries. They're both in bed with the finance industry.
So, if you want legislation which doesn't favor the MPAA and RIAA, you need to vote for the Party which wants to ban contraception. Great choice we have here....
That's how it was in Canada at least back before broadband was the necessary choice. Even in the "little" towns there were dozens of Dial-Up providers. All of those were bought-out or went tits-up as we headed into the early/mid 2000's. I imagine it was similiar in the States in the 90's, whereas in the mid/late 80's you pretty much needed to have a university account to access outside of the BBS-scene.
Where I live, a business usually needs an easement from the municipality to run wires in a public ROW (i.e., the telephone pole is across the street from your house so a wire has to cross over). However, the poles themselves are usually owned by either the electric or telephone company, and I believe they collect rent for the space from the Cable TV or other providers who need to be on them.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
Or probably closer to the truth, you think that you are a moderate but are really a leftist. That would make anyone to the right look extreme to you. Most people, including myself, see themselves as center moderates regardless of what they actually are.
An ideal free market favours the party with the most wealth. Ideal freedom and ideal equality are contradictory.
If I hadn't finally found this comment, I was going to say something very similar to this.
GOP is big business in general, mostly your war profiteering. The Democrats are into Big Media. Biden is a prime example of that. They are all fighting over their own little cut and no one, not one person at all really gives two squirts about the guy without money.
Place something witty here
Tortious interference of contract and tortious interference of business lawsuits from Netflix and related companies should knock the shit out of the ISPs.
No big deal. Lawsuits will work this one out.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
- when Admiral Poindexter started the Total Information Awareness project in 2001
It's always hard to remember this isn't sarcasm—that's his actual name: Admiral John Poindexter.
Maybe it's just my generation.
According to the Wikipedia article you linked to, no country has a firm meaning of what right or left is: "The terms left-wing and right-wing are widely used in the United States but, as on the global level, there is no firm consensus about their meaning. "
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Have you become acquainted with the new head of the FCC. 'nuff said.
it's a chance to fix the glitch and reclassify them as common carriers
Since that cannot happen, it's a false choice. AOL tried and was destroyed because of it.
You ignore the fact that the danger you fear is utterly unrealistic.
Local ISP monopolies throw a wrench into that, though. Many cities have a monopoly, many more a cable/DSL duopoly. That's not a free market. I am lucky, lucky where I live to have access to an alternate DSL carrier, and I took my business there. That at least is possible over the phone networks in some jurisdictions; that's not an option for cable. They have a lock. And don't even mention wireless or satellite -- those are jokes, not broadband.
I don't think you can have a real free market as long as the line owners are also the ISPs.
And lets point that the small consensus that exists put both European and US leftists in the same boat. Leftists believe in big states, in redistribution of income, in welfare programs, and above all that inequality is a problem and the state should solve it or at least attenuate it. Those ideas, which in my opinion are the core of the the leftist doctrine everywhere, are exactly the same for Europeans leftists and US leftists.
Thanks for the correction. I am assuming the the cost of the actual pole is not significant compared with the cost of actually buying all the easements or procuring them through eminent domain.
The idea I was trying to convey is that we don't want any random telecom to be able to put their own telephone poles wherever they want, or to use existing telephone poles without restriction, and I don't think they would be capable of setting up sensible infrastructure without eminent domain (i.e. buying easements from individual property owners).
I am sure producing the giant piece of wood and installing it do cost something, but I guess I should have been more clear that this is not the part I think we need the government to be in charge of.
just Far Right, and Far Far Right
Common carriers were created because it's a valuable enabler. Jesus. Does it need to be explained that giving up on the idea of a "commonwealth" will ultimately degrade your civilization.
Canada's looking pretty good.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
The whole point is that the FCC has no power over the "broadcast" companies... cable providers are like T.V. stations not Telecoms, at least as far as the current classification stands.
First, stop mixing up Republicans with conservatives - they are not synonymous. Most Reps are in fact not conservative - just "slightly less liberal" than Democrats.
Second, crony capitalism is NOT capitalism. Period. It's a mafioso/socialist style relationship between big business donors and the government that has the effect of shaking down small businesses. That's nearly the opposite of capitalism. It's also rampant in both parties - the only difference is the donor (big hollywood vs. big oil for example). Crony capitalism is not a conservative concept - never was.
But people do and believe as media says, so this is what you get.
I think you don't understand what "everywhere" means.
The problem is that there are laws that restrict this in the case of common carriers. Ie, railroads can't be picky and only allow some people to use their service or to change prices depending upon who the customer is. In the interests of the greater public good (which trumps free market) the shared resource of the rail lines has to be used fairly. This also applies to the use of the airwaves, so broadcast radio and television are treated as common carriers.
The snag however is that the FCC did not classify or treat broadband companies as common carriers. And so according to the courts it can not regulate them as if they were common carriers. Sounds like the FCC shot itself in the foot. Doubtful that Supreme court would override this and expand the FCCs authority.
Apparently you aren't from Illinois (or apparently New Jersey either). Illinois' two previous Governors went to prison for bribery, one a Republican and one a Democrat.
A pox on both their houses. My guess is that neither party wants net neutrality, which would be OK if we had some real competition in ISPs. If you think we actually have "right" and "left" here you're crazy. Today's USA is yesterday's USSR; a one party (with two factions) police state.
The only difference between the two factions is whose campaign contributions and other bribes they're taking.
Free Martian Whores!
The last mile is essentially a one off cost if you are using your own infrastructure. There is the occasional repairs due to failed equipment and backhoe / tree branch fade. These costs are essentially bandwidth independent. As technology changes you have the occasional replacement of head end equipment to support new line protocols over the existing cabling. The costs of upgrading head end equipment can often be absorbed into the maintenance budget by replacing failed components with components that have newer functionality.
The trunks are a recurrent which continually need to be upgraded to meet the increasing aggregate usage of all the customers either by replacing the optics or lighting more fibres which may involve trenching. For trunks there are also transit costs.
Data centres are a bit like both. The bandwidth is essentially free but there are huge costs when you exceed the physical capacity.
That's how it was in the US back in the late 90's and early '00s. I remember seeing billboards everywhere when I was traveling, such as: DSL 6/1 for $9/mo, or 10/512 Cable for $19.95/mo from *dozens* of companies. What happened? Well those companies went tits up because back in '05ish the government scrapped regulation on selling the last mile. Similar to what we didn't have in Canada for a long time. You could only get broadband through the major players--or through local telcos who invested heavily in broadband like North Norwich Telecom(NNT)-now called execulink after NNT bought them out, Now that we have this up in Canada, with more or less open last mile. we see dozens of new companies selling broadband on the last mile from DSL to Cable, making money and selling it for less than the incumbents.
And down in the US at my place in Florida, I'm paying $69/mo for 10/1 service and in Canada I'm paying $45/mo for 25/1(I could get 25/10 for $3 more, but I haven't switched off my locked grandfathered plan) from one of those companies that buy last mile access.
Om, nomnomnom...
Well that's a dream. Very few people get a choice of broadband ISPs, it's usually a large selection of very slow dialup, a moderate selection of lower speed DSL, and then one option only (if any) for high speed broadband, usually from the local cable monopoly.
Let's completely ignore that the three main proponents (including the two authors) of the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 were Republicans and that, while passage of the bill was mainly bipartisan and Clinton did support it, Republicans had majorities in the House and Senate. Over 80% of the no votes in the House and Senates were Democratic Party members.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Well in some sense if they kept it to that it would be ok. Ie the local cable company should be able to provide cable television style services to their local customer base more efficiently than someone else who just wants to piggy back on the wires the cable company paid for. Now the problems come if instead of just passing on cheaper local services to the customer due to efficiency they go and make competing services run slower or add a surcharge or treat two independent entities differently.
Except that practically speaking, the big name ISPs were the content providers even before they were ISPs. Ie, cable companies control much of the content, but because they also built out a large chunk of cable infrastructure they ended up being the first broadband ISPs. The original infrastructure was not build to allow internet but to deliver content.
Better make sure you stick to that one point, because you'll have a hard time refuting a single other thing he said.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
at this time, it is plain that the 'left' of US politics favors Net Neutrality.
why do people blame Obama or the 'left' for a decision like this? i understand it was a conservative-appointed court, but that's what **conservative** courts **do**...they rule against 'left' or liberal policies
the false equivalence comes in when the response to a dumb criticism is to say, "Oh, ah well, there all a bunch of crooks"...it's bullshit...there are votes on policies we can track. the 'left' or 'liberal' party, especially the progressive part of that party have consistently favored Net Neutrality. That is a fact.
Republicans have consistently opposed Net Neutrality. That is a fact.
second, I've traveled through Europe and Asia before and after 9/11 and while of course the US 'conservatives' would freak out at what their Continental counterparts, especially UK 'conservatives', consider good policy...yes this is true. however in the 21st Century globalism really has taken hold, and those distinctions are fading. Conservatism in the US (and Canada!) is as abusive and evil as Apartheid Africa. They mathmatically work out how abusive can be to maximize profits.
If you favor Net Neutrality, in the US Democrats are the only choice. The progressives of the Democratic party are the only organized group of politicians advocating pro Net Neutrality policies. This is a legislative fact.
Thank you Dave Raggett
What on earth is wrong with you people. You're usually so rational.
Don't you realize that the only power the government has is force? Don't you realize that everytime you grant them power they sell it to the highest bidder and fuck you with it? You are the 'target' and 'adversary'. YOU.
Don't you realize that there is no such thing as a 'government'? It's an abstract, fictional entity that masks the foul psychopaths that rule over you.
Liberty.
Developers, with the help of utilities, are putting data/power wires in all the time. It only requires government intervention if your area is so old they had to retrofit it.
All these people judging everyone's political views with a 1 demensional measure. You would be much better ranking political ideology as progressive vs conservative and libertarian vs statist. I see so many misguided people fighting over left-vs-right when they're all trying to push the same point of statist politicians making a wreck of most everything.
However, not to be misunderstood, when you give a company special access to resources (e.g. an ISP), you have a duty to see that they behave responsibly, as there cannot be much of a free market. In terms of the US Constitution, I view the Internet as a modern incarnation of postal roads.
Left has NOTHING to do with "big states, in redistribution of income, in welfare programs". The "big state" and "redisctribution of income" is a shibboleth of merkins who have been propogandised by the cold war rhetoric of those evil reds under the bed.
And isn't that bullshit about "trickle down economics" and "job creators" you nurbar rightwingers keep bleating on about ENTIRELY about "redistribution of income"?
Presidential candidates are not the only ones that get money from big corporations to finance their campaings. Judges are worse cause they do it just to become rich. Corruption in the U.S. is Taboo and until we recognize it does exist here as much as in other countries, we will be kept in the dark thinking that what politicians and judges in this country decide, is for the good of the people when in reality if for the good of their own pockets and economic status.
Communication corporations like AT&T and Verizon know thast the future of communications is the Internet, so they want to have total control of it now so that in the future they have a new form of monopoly, which will be impossible to destroy. Governments will be able to shutdown any website they want just by asking those same communication companies to do it on their behalfs using a simple excuse as "the owner of the website did not pay his bills" or stupid excuses as that one
See, this is how you really shill: divert conversation away from the actual issue, and toward pointless bickering. Good job, AC.
A free market doesn't mean anarchy. A free market requires laws to work, basic protection from theft and coersion, and the ability to have contracts enforced. Somalia doesn't have that to a large degree. Free market means that there is no manipulation of it by the government through things like subsidies and burdensome regulation (but remember, regulations against fraud support the free market).
Of course we don't have an absolute free market. At the present we have crony capitalism with government-granted monopolies. What we would like to get to is as free a market as is possible. Probably the biggest obstacle though is that a working free market requires an informed public making decisions to its advantage (they are part of the market), but much of the public is dumb or doesn't care, or expects the government to take care of that hard thinking stuff for them.
You know, how the public needs the government to force conspicuous display of the calorie count on a two-pound quadruple mega monster bacon cheesburger. If you don't already know it's extremely loaded with fat, calories, salt and cholesterol from the name, you are damn idiot who deserves whatever short end of the stick the free market gives you.
are putting data/power wires in all the time
There is only two types of property, private and public. The government manages public property, which places a logical constraint that it must involve government intervention. Then there's private property, which is mostly groups of islands interconnected via public property. It is illogical to have no government intervention or regulation for something like infrastructure because infrastructure spans public and private property.
No, you don't understand the cause. You want to sit there and blame Clinton (and some even Carter). You're not asking the important question: where did they get the money to lend out?
Restore Net Neutrality By Directing the FCC to Classify Internet Providers as "Common Carriers".
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/restore-net-neutrality-directing-fcc-classify-internet-providers-common-carriers/5CWS1M4P
There's no such thing as "illegal download"
Just fired up my old BBS system in the basement. I should have hundreds of users within a few months posting messages and trading information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system
I thought, like gingers, lefties have no soul?
No, no. Left-handedness is just sinister. Intellegis?
I do not like your one-sided view, sir. You are doing truth a great disservice by not mentioning the "pro oil industry fascists", "pro weapon industry fascists", "pro telecom industry fascists" and the "pro health insurance industry fascists". If any sector makes enough money to buy politicians and adverts, you'll find them represented on capitol hill and in the media. The people, on the other hand...
Sorry there, dumbass, but politicians of all stripes are douchebags.
Yes, but the politicians on the right are douchebags when they fail to live up to their mandate (ie, they are corrupted). The politicians on the left are douchebags when they do live up to their mandate.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
there is no left in US
How come we allowed a Communist to get re-elected despite destroying our healthcare system and imposing tyrannical surveillance rules? Both are staples of a leftist society? How come everyone is now forced to watch what they say in the fear of being "insensitive"? You remember what brought down the Communist Empire, right? Free speech was a crucial component. So why are we dismantling it here?Oh, yeah, so as NOT to move further to the left.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
"The conservative's "free market" approach would be to let ISPs decide if they want to charge on a per-site basis and let consumers go to other ISPs who will simply do the same thing."
That'd be fine IF there was a free market. There are a lot of areas in the USA where there are still legislated or de-facto local monopolies, making it impossible for consumers to go to another supplier.
The different companies have the same motives and act the same way. They tend to collude with each other when they have a common interest.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
That is not a lot of payback for what they put their customers through.
Why not? Most customers if they had anything happened, just called and got a new number. The customers didn't have much exposure, almost all card carriers do not charge you for a new card nor for fraudulent charges. 2% of sales for a company like Target is still a pretty massive number.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley