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Net Neutrality Is 'Marxist,' According To a Koch-Backed Astroturf Group
Jason Koebler (3528235) writes American Commitment, a conservative group with strong ties to the Koch brothers has been bombarding inboxes with emails filled with disinformation and fearmongering in an attempt to start a "grassroots" campaign to kill net neutrality — at one point suggesting that "Marxists" think that preserving net neutrality is a good idea. American Commitment president Phil Kerpen suggests that reclassifying the internet as a public utility is the "first step in the fight to destroy American capitalism altogether" and says that the FCC is plotting a "federal Internet takeover," a move that "sounds more like a story coming out of China or Russia."
I can find plenty of astroturfing groups that are soros backed and do the same thing, but that doesn't make it "front page news."
Om, nomnomnom...
Wow, it sounds like someone woke up a little butthurt this morning. "Koch-backed astroturf group." So?
Let's examine this:
(1) Marxists do think Net Neutrality is a good idea. (This, of course, doesn't mean Net Neutrality is right or wrong by itself, it is a statement of fact. Marxists tend to agree with civil libertarians on quite a lot, if the intention is to portray the policy badly by negative association.)
(3) Net Neutrality means: Dropping packets (thereby manipulating congestion control and bandwidth negotiation) based on the source or destination of the packet. If you dropped a Wikipedia packet instead of a Facebook packet due to a policy configuration and nothing else (randomly due to too much load), that's a violation of Net Neutrality.
(2) The issue is not over Net Neutrality, but over classifying the Internet as a "public utility". I'm not sure what that's supposed to accomplish - by any standard, it's a common service that gets hooked up to houses, residences, similarly to electricity. But if the intention is to legislate how people are supposed to connect their computers to each other - I have a problem with that.
I'm all for fair routing and engineering solutions to problems, but do we really want the FCC being the packet police? This is the same entity that gave us the Broadcast Flag. Their only job is supposed to be to regulate and assign airwave space, not meddle in the affairs of private, voluntary connections between nodes in a computer network, Internet or otherwise.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
Possibly because marxism and its derivatives were responsible for the murders of over 100 million innocent people in the 20th century. And don't give me any bullshit about capitalism being responsible for more, people have been killing other people to take their stuff long, long before there were any "isms" worth mentioning.
What makes marxism et al special is that you don't even need greed to go on a mass murdering spree, all you need are some airy justifications and a handwave towards some utopian future in order to create the othering effect that enables murderous behaviour. "We could live in paradise, comrades, if only these bourgeoise/jews/intellectuals/patriarchal men weren't standing in our way!"
And this is without even thinking about the structural and logical failings of marxism. Talk about starting with the answers and going looking for the questions.
Funny, I didn't take him sticking up for the Koch brothers. I took him laughing at you idiots that watch people manipulate the markets under the color of X Party and people, like you, with your silly biases perform like the perfect little puppets.
I can't believe the only non-sheep post here was modded as a troll. Good grief, people! Wake up! The FCC and FEC are going to make it illegal to criticize incumbent politicians on the internet and most of the Slashdotters will cheer them on every step of the way. "Give government full control of the internet! We'll protect you from slow speeds! (And free speech, and porn, and satire, etc.)"
If your ISP is giving you bad service, grow a pair of f***ing balls and drop the service! Stop running to your mommy!