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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."
About paying for open, unfettered access, and having some bean counter with an agenda decide what you can ACTUALLY see?
And Marxism fails because it view labor as something nobody really wants to do, and ignores transportation, distribution and associated concerns as necessary evils.
Here, the last-mile providers are acting like Marxists. They see only this big customer base of theirs as having any intrinsic worth.
Never mind that if they don't provide unfettered access, and don't manage to stifle all competition, they won't continue to HAVE that kind of customer base.
Net neutrality is about being able to use the internet connection you pay for, for any purpose that suits you (with nods towards the concept of "legal activity" of course) without having your traffic interfered with.
Net neutrality is about preventing illegal censorship.
Net neutrality is about protecting you from unscrupulous business practices by major (and minor) providers of both the transport and last-mile variety.
So screw the Koch Brothers and their idiot shilling.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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...
Have you Americans *still* not gotten over this whole Marxist/Communist/Socialist = EVIL thing yet? Your government really did a good job with the propaganda during the Cold War it seems.
Net Neutrality Is 'Marxist,' According To a Koch-Backed Astroturf Group
No, net neutrality is not Marxist. Net neutrality is very much a capitalist policy, as distinct from being a corporatist policy.
Unless they're tollways. And apparently the Koch brothers would prefer if all roads were tollways.
What would be so bad about changing American capitalism? As if moderating part of it would automatically send the American society deep into communism.
But staying on topic, net neutrality IS a good idea, and I do hope that so-called Marxist as well as anyone else believes so. Saying it would be bad because group X or Y think so, is the stupidest thing ever. These sort of argumentation can get so fast out of control...
Implying marxism is a bad thing.
In the USA the Koch brothers sure do get criticized a lot. What, the 39 groups above them support Democrats and expanding government? Well we can't have anybody using their money to attack Democrats and expanding government. These demons must be made an example of in case others decide to speak out.
Wow, in your entire post, literally the ONLY thing that isn't a complete falsehood is "This is the same entity that gave us the Broadcast Flag".
You have no idea what net neutrality is about, you have no idea what it means, and you clearly haven't got the foggiest IDEA what Marxism means.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Marxists think net neutrality is good, therefore net neutrality is bad.
You know what... Marxists think breathing is good, therefore breathing is bad also?
Such arguments are never valid.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
... he should have invented "the Goldstein brothers", not just Emmanuel Goldstein.
There's just something more sinister sounding about brothers, isn't there?
(This comment has nothing to do with the merits or lack thereof of "net neutrality", BTW.)
Kochs aren't worried about capitalism which is a system of exchange. They are worried about not being able to their own profits in the short term. As extractive industries they want to buy protection from other advocates with environmental views by starving them out of the discussion! Here's the problem. Capitalism (market economies) only works if there is a fair balance of power among the buyers and the sellers. That other thing that the Kochs are protecting is oligarchy--rule by the wealthy.
It is a bad thing i think
Citation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
You know nothing about Marxism. First learn what it ACTUALLY says, THEN you can try to critique it.
Net Neutrality bears no RESEMBLENCE to what you are describing in your post: it is simply an injunction that customers should get what they are PAYING for - which is unfettered access to the ENTIRE internet. Painting it as anything else is a lie.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
"Net neutrality (also network neutrality or Internet neutrality) is the principle that Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, and modes of communication."
That's what Net Neutrality is, as opposed to whatever it is you're describing in your post.
Eat the rich.
Oh -and the idea that you are obligated to sell a customer that which he actually paid for and keep the promises you made is the very foundation of Capitalism, attempts to do otherwise is known as fraud.
Even the most libertarian systems of thought still hold that one of the government's LEGITIMATE jobs is the prevention of fraudulent trade.
The entire concept has literally nothing to do with Marxism, which is NOT by the way the opposite of Capitalism, both are just two theories out of a gigantic spectrum of economic philosophies that exist, some of which have been tried over the years with varying degrees of success.
Ultimately the current success of capitalism is much more a political victory than a statement about it's success - it's no more successful than many of the abandoned ones and in some ways, much worse. It certainly is NOT any better than Marxism was - it fails equally spectacularly and in almost identical ways.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
That's what I said; I gave the technical definition. Go and look up how TCP negotiates connection speeds: By dropping packets.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
Kochs aren't worried about capitalism which is a system of exchange.
No it isn't. As so many do, you are confusing Capitalism with Free Market Economies. They occasionally run side by side but are quite independent. What you describe is a free market economy where goods and services can be traded without unnecessary interference. Capitalism is all about ownership of the rewards, and that is what the Kochs worry about. You can and often do find Capitalism allied with very restricted markets, because it is easier to assert ownership and make sure you take all the profit, not the workers, not the customers nor any competitors.
Karl or Groucho? If they mean the latter, I might even believe them.
Will
Do you think that Netflix, Google, Yahoo and the rest are paying for "net neutrality" lobbyists out of the goodness of their heart? Nope. They don't want to share squat with the folks who build the wires.
With about 2 decades worth of decreasing living standards in America and a ongoing recession, and a sense that the political system is broken, does the American Capitalism argument even work outside the mind of a narrow minority anymore.
All of the neo-mercantilist economist promoting what Koch labels "american capitalism" have been disproven empirically, sure they can push the logic utopians always do but nobody who have tried to practice it have ended up with anything but disaster. And America ceased being a small goverment country around the same time slavery were outlawed, since the it remained a regulated society. The real question is not if regulation should be introduced as regulation is already a big part of the decision process by market actors but what path the regulations should push market actors into.
Net neutrality is pushing the infrastructure owners away from creating walled gardens and cartels with the content providers and onto to a more pure competitive model where they focus mostly on running the infrastructure as cheap an effective as they can. Where as the content discrimination models pushes the infrastrucure owners to seek synergy(the politically correct term for the cartel effect) with content producers, and neglecting the actual infrastructure.
What they dont tell you in political inductrination 101 is that Smith and Marx aren't opposite poles on a spectrum, as Marx were borrowing most of his economics from Smith(they are seperated in time by about a century) but applied it in a different context.
I came here for abuse.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It's not just dropping packages. ISPs can come up with all sorts of ways to distort traffic to extract more revenue, which can be far more subtle (and evil) than selectively dropping packages. For example, when customers try to go to Google, the ISP could send them to Bing (for a kickback), or rewrite Amazon affiliate tags so all Amazon purchases pay a percentage of the ISP. These aren't hypothetical - look at what wireless cell phone companies do to their customers and to content providers - it's a nightmare - and ask yourself why they haven't done the same thing to the internet? And if there aren't any rules enforcing good behavior, ask yourself how long those companies good behavior will last in the face of the opportunity for increased profits?
And do those arguing that they don't want the FCC "regulating" the internet, ask yourself what happens to the internet if there aren't any rules, but all participants start breaking everything possible in order to extract fees?
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
You declared that Marxist would love net neutrality which proves a complete lack of understanding of both.
A Marxist would have no opinion on net neutrality at all. A Leninist would - and the Leninist would OPPOSE net neutrality on the basis that it still has private ISPs, to the Leninist the entire internet infrastructure would be run by the state only.
To an anarcho-socialist it would be ideally run by a consensus system with specialists appointed to manage things who are instantly recallable and can be replaced at any second if they no longer have the support of the vast majority of the people relying on it.
To a Stalinist the internet would be something to destroy as it's too hard to control what would be said.
And Marxism - the way a Marxist internet would work would entirely preclude the very idea of net neutrality. The internet would be a public commons (which is VERY different from a utility) managed more like a public park or a public library than an infrastructure in which private enterprise sells access, with no ISPs there would be no neutrality or lack thereoff to debate.
Now you can argue whether running the internet that way would work well, what sort of quality and innovation could or could not happen and there are valid debates to be had - but that changes nothing about the fact that Marxists CANNOT as you claim "love" net neutrality since to them - the idea is EQUALLY as anathema as it's absence.
They would oppose BOTH sides of the argument.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Net Neutrality is a rule that can apply to any node that routes packets; meaning pretty much all of them.
I appreciate the energy you're putting into Marxism vs. other labels, but that's really not the important point I'm making.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
As long as you're not (willfully or otherwise) specifically dropping 50% more Wikipedia packets than Facebook packets, you're not violating net neutrality.
The whole point is to treat all data equally, no matter which device, OS, application, source or destination is involved. It is the ONLY way to ensure an open and innovative Internet.
Eat the rich.
(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.
Net Neutrality bears no RESEMBLENCE to what you are describing in your post: it is simply an injunction that customers should get what they are PAYING for - which is unfettered access to the ENTIRE internet. Painting it as anything else is a lie.
The GP phrased it oddly (note that by his description it's clear he missed a "not" before "dropping" in the first sentence), and placed the numbers out of order, but that's exactly what he said: packets should not be dropped due to source or destination. Sometimes packets have to be dropped, but that should be done randomly to allow access to the entire internet for all (truly unfettered being impossible without infinite bandwidth).
Acting as if they invented the Internet; they've been trying to take it over since the 70's.
The Koch brothers get criticized a lot because they're secretive billionaires with a political agenda, who pump their fortune into the US political system through sneaky means on a massive scale, funneling their money through hundreds of "anonymous" groups so that it's difficult to trace, writing legislation to promote their agenda and businesses, and trying to get it passed when nobody is looking, and generally doing their best to subvert the democratic process. Oddly enough, the vast majority of Americans don't approve of their methods, and don't agree with their agenda, so their behavior generates criticism when it's discovered.
And don't think for a minute that Republicans don't expand government - when they're in charge, they expand the government, and run up spending and debt, faster than Democrats. They just like spending money on different things than Democrats - wars and tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations, for example, rather than education and infrastructure. That and they like to regulate people's private lives a lot more than Democrats, while Democrats prefer personal liberties and regulating businesses.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Forged RST packets, captive portals, and injecting into webpages are wrong, they are fraud (i.e. slap them with a class-action lawsuit), but it's not a violation of Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality involves routing rules, period. (Use the respective terms: Forged packets and captive portals.)
The FCC might be proposing regulations around Net Neutrality; but the point of the article doesn't concern that, it's that FCC shouldn't be the packet police.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
I'm not sure how Marxism as an economic theory would have much of an opinion of net neutrality considering Marxism's primary economic calculus is based around the labor theory of value. Passing packets is, for all intents and purposes, totally automated and involves no labor and no surplus value.
Really the debate seems to be more around monopoly capitalism. Most broadband providers are monopolists and want use their monopoly power to enhance profits. They want to constrain data consumption to limit their capital outlay on network infrastructure. This creates scarcity that allows them to charge higher prices.
The FCC's regulation on this has been ham-handed and seems to head in the wrong direction as it wants to "fine tune" Internet access through minutia.
I think classifying the Internet is a public utility isn't really what's been advocated -- it's more along the lines of a municipal fiber network that generally eliminates the local monopoly enjoyed by most broadband providers and the artificial scarcity it creates.
The purpose of the municipal network is more akin to roads; the local network isn't designed to provide anything other than layer 2 connectivity, The city may provide roads but they don't provide actual transportation, and the better municipal broadband concepts seem to be built around open access to the network by providers who then provide services like Internet access.
The Kochs would probably argue that these systems would ultimately end up providing basic Internet access as part of the connection fee, in effect putting the government in competition with private industry. This in itself isn't an unreasonable argument but it's easily dealt with by simply prohibiting a municipal network from providing services beyond local connectivity. Koch capitalists don't have an easy solution to the monopoly problem of existing broadband delivery.
I'm not sure what you're getting at; I think you mean to qualify "considering only Wikipedia/Facebook traffic, each being used equally, each should account for about 50% of packet drops", but that's not necessarily correct either, Facebook has much more streaming media than Wikipedia and would likely show considerably more packet loss.
I'm also not sure we want to go all-out on the "treat all data equally" idea militantly; what does that mean? If I pay for a dedicated pipe at a data center, I'm paying per Mbps, i.e. the rate above which they'll start dropping packets. What if I also want to pay for low latency because my company does low-latency telecommunications (i.e. please don't ever drop my packets, so long as I don't send too many of them), and I don't want to lay down the capital necessary to dig my own fiber darknet? Obviously this is okay, but your literal rule suggests otherwise.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
Net neutrality is a bad name let's call it what it is: fraudulent or honest trading.
There is nothing Marxist, about honest trading - indeed it's anticapitalist to support fraudulent trading. Net Neutrality is simply an attempt to legally enforce honest trading- which is the single most important purpose of government in a capitalist state.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I really wasn't trying to get into Marxism, but as an armchair university professor, I would guess that a computer network is necessarily built of capital (i.e. nodes of routers and computers), and the alternative to prevent suppression of the working class would be collective ownership of the routers; with some arbitrary "equitable" and/or "fair" routing scheme, which I guess would look like Net Neutrality (and it is, so far as I can tell, a good routing principle).
Aside, Adam Smith also casually used Labor Theory of Value (lacking a better alternative to explain the relationship of costs to prices), the settlement on Marginal Theory of Value didn't come about until Carl Menger.
There's examples of rent-seeking and legal barriers to entry too numerous to list, but municipal networks would be an example of the latter. If I wanted to install a high-capacity line to houses, I'd have to compete with the taxpayer-funded installed lines - an artificial increase in costs (cost being the value of the next-best alternative).
Wonder what the public key field is for?
I didn't insert the "not" like you did - have you considered that perhaps he really DOES have it completely backwards ?
That having to insert a "not" to make his description resemble reality could mean that he is just ignorant, as I read it.
I guess you're more charitable than I - but in our conversation thus far the GP has not at any time suggested that his original wording contained a typo - or given any reason to presume he didn't mean the backwards statement he wrote.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Calling something "Marxist" seems like an attempt to make further discussion unnecessary, comparable when in more civilised countries something is called "fascist". And calling someone who pleads for unbrideled capitalism as |leading to American situations" is also supposed to cut off further discussion, as no sane person wants that to happen.
It certainly is NOT any better than Marxism was
Except for that whole western civilisation thing, yanno...
It is amazing that Marx became an insult. Marx just told us that the wealthier want to get even more rich, which in the end makes labor unable to purchase the goods produced, and hence capitalism destroys itself.
I guess they confuse Marx and Stalin.
Again, Net Neutrality is a routing rule. Your router is either neutral or it isn't (and when it isn't, maybe in various degrees). It has nothing to do with the law per se. If I build my own router in my intranet that routes to i.e. give priority to my computer, then all other nodes, my router is no longer neutral; but that does not mean that it is "fraudulent" (I own the thing! It's obviously impossible to defraud myself).
Now when I sign up with my ISP, I expect that, absent other agreements, they won't care about where my packets are address to or from, just if I'm exceeding their bandwidth limit I agreed to - the only terms they mention that would result in packet loss.
If they end up dropping packets on some other mean, I'd call that fraud. But fraud is not for the FCC to enforce, and it has little to do with one ideology vs. another.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
A myth- Western civilization embraced and was built on literally dozens of different economic systems, capitalism didn't take over until the industrial revolution.
Try reading up on it a bit. Hell anarcho-socialism was still a major political force as late as the 1920s in Europe and the 1960s in the USA !
The May Day New York riots of 1895 was effectively the oppression of anarcho-communists who, at that stage, were the majority of New Yorkers !
Capitalism had nothing to do with the growth of Western civilization, which in any event, is no more civilized or advanced than Eastern civilization or Balcan civilization.
Remember - those commie Russians got to space BEFORE the USA did, and it was only by adopting THEIR tactics that the USA beat them to the moon.
Not with capitalism but with 10 years of the most massively communist project in United States history.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Server Guy: I only want to give my information to the people who lead to ad revenue or sales, everyone else is a waste of my server.
User: I want access to all of Internet, not just some of it.
We're going to have a problem here....
With 25-odd years of public internet as precedent on what "Internet Service" means -if your router is NOT neutral then you are NOT selling what the public thinks you're selling, which makes you guilty of outright fraud.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
The Koch brothers, what a couple of douche bags.
Most ISPs exist because they negotiated monopolies with local governments. Get rid of these monopolies and let the market work. It's illogical to complain about publicly financed ISPs when the current ones exist because of another form of public subsidy.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Actually, there is not an official definition of "net neutrality", and there are certainly differing visions on what it means. That is actually a problem for those promoting net neutrality (me included), not being able to present a consistent vision. Recognizing the different contexts in how it is used is important.
Simply designating ISPs as utilities does nothing to ensure net neutrality of any kind, although it can be path to enforce net neutrality requirements. On the other hand, it could also enable its own brand of net restriction. If the government controls the ISPs, then politics might eventually begin to guide content, which IMO would be much worse than commercial influences.
I would prefer to see net neutrality goals achieved without "utility" designation if possible, and keep the door open for as much competition as possible.
This is the equivalent of UPS charging an online retailer additional fees for delivering too many packages thereby placing an undue burden on UPS's existing their distribution network, even though all of their buyers already paid for shipping. Common sense should already deem this silly.
I inserted the "not" because his second part of the statement made it obvious that was his intent. You can't just read one sentence then dismiss the entire paragraph. Typos happen, apparently a lot with him (note the transposed 2 and 3).
A myth- Western civilization embraced and was built on literally dozens of different economic systems, capitalism didn't take over until the industrial revolution.
And have you noticed any particular changes in western civilisation since then?
Capitalism had nothing to do with the growth of Western civilization, which in any event, is no more civilized or advanced than Eastern civilization or Balcan civilization.
Eh "civilised" is a moving target, some people think that the only civilised societies are hunter gatherers living in grass huts, but by any rational measure western civilisation is the most advanced set of countries on the planet. Advances which incidentally spurred major social changes - science and engineering for example produced washing machine, fridges, cookers, all of the white goods, then capitalism made these goods both profitable to produce and distribute as well as affordable.
This in turn led to women having a great deal of free time on their hands and provided an incentive for them to enter the workforce in far greater numbers than before, which we can all agree is a very positive thing - note they were always part of the workforce to one degree or another. I mean that computer you're typing on is another excellent example of capitalism in action.
So yes I'd say that capitalism had and has a great deal to do with the growth of western civilisation.
Remember - those commie Russians got to space BEFORE the USA did, and it was only by adopting THEIR tactics that the USA beat them to the moon.
Not with capitalism but with 10 years of the most massively communist project in United States history.
So, the US had atomic bombs first. The ongoing economic and associated technological stagnation leading to the ultimate collapse of the soviet union were a direct result of neomarxist policies. China has more or less embraced capitalism and has advanced in leaps and bounds as a result.
One problem I think is that the left, aka marxists and derivatives, tend to lay claim to anything remotely collective in nature as if they had invented it. This turns off rational people and turns them against quite rational ideas. Social safety nets for example are an eminently sensible idea, but your marxist views them as a step in the direction towards their utopia, not as an end unto themselves, which is a major mistake and gets people angry with anyone proposing social safety nets, purely by association. Again it's an ideology that does more harm than good.
Here is how you translate it into capitalist terms. Because this is a communication problem.
1. End all state backed communication monopolies because they make a free ISP market impossible. Anyone arguing this on capitalist terms will agree with this point. This would include AT&T, Verizon, TWC, Comcast, etc. They all enjoy regional monopolies that are backed by local governments and it is ILLEGAL to compete with them in many cases. This is the situation that allows abusive ISP policy in most cases.
2. Ask for clarity and brevity in contracts so that the consumer knows the terms of the contract they're signing. Capitalists shouldn't have a problem with this since informed consent is a central tenet of capitalism. And once those contracts are in place the ISPs will have a hard time claiming they have a right to throttle connections when that right wasn't stipulated in the contract.
3. Make it a stipulated portion of the ISP contract that it includes OR DOES NOT include access to all other networks on the internet.
4. Ask for a simplification of the regulations required for an ISP start up. Capitalists should like small business and understand that a healthy market requires them. As such, they should make it easier for small ISPs to get going and transition to medium sized ISPs should they prove successful.
Etc.
Look, a major problem of the net neutrality argument is that it IS couched in communist lingo. I'm not saying it is right or wrong or even criticizing communism. But we have to be honest about that point and keep in mind that many will reflexively oppose it simply for smelling of communism.
So if you care about net neutrality... consider what I said above because it could work as easily as anything.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
This would be a more persuasive argument if free markets had spontaneously created the internet - but they didn't. Markets gave us AOL and "The Microsoft Network" - incompatible, proprietary hulls of content - not an open global network.
US had the atomic bomb first because USSR was busy fighting the Germans so nuclear physics had a very low priority.
Women entering the workforce had also nothing to do with the additional free time. It was just that many men were on the front and this had to be compensated for. This is, by the way, the reason why the gender equality was much more pronounced in the USSR.
And social safety nets were caused by the socialists - albeit indirectly. Von Bismarck introduced them because he was afraid of socialists and wanted to lessen the socialist parties appeal.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
In capitalist America, network owns YOU!
>And have you noticed any particular changes in western civilisation since then?
Nothing that wouldn't have happened either way. Except of course for the child mortality rate in the 19th century being the highest it was at any point in human history either before or since - and that was BECAUSE of said revolution.
>but by any rational measure western civilisation is the most advanced set of countries on the planet.
Flat out bullshit.
>science
An inherently socialist and defiantly anti-capitalist concept - and far more important than capitalism in the advances made by society over the past hundred-odd years.
> I mean that computer you're typing on is another excellent example of capitalism in action.
Except of course that plenty of great strides in computer progress were made outside capitalism and under completely different economic systems.
>So yes I'd say that capitalism had and has a great deal to do with the growth of western civilisation.
But that's because you're cherry-picking data and ignoring everything else that contributed, and worse, when you are unable to exclude something pretending that it WAS capitalism regardless of whether this statement holds true.
>So, the US had atomic bombs first.
Only because it happened to be where Einstein fled from the Nazi's - in a world without Hitler, Germany or Austria had them first.
The history of the Soviet Union could not be LESS relevant to this discussion. This is not a discussion on whether Capitalism is better than Communism - it's a discussion on whether it's better than ALL other systems ever devised, and THAT's what I said it's not.
There are also MANY forms of Marxism that could avoid (at least in theory) the problems that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union - you haven't proven that the problems were in the idea rather than the implementation of the idea.
A great idea, badly implemented will fail but this doesn't mean the idea is bad.
There are REAL problems I have with Marxism but they have NOTHING to do with economics and everything to do with political freedom.
And there we have it in your final paragraph - I made a statement about the grand multitude of economic philosophies and how we should be more open to ideas from ALL of them and a MORON on the right goes and tries to split into a capitalism versus socialism thing AND then it just HAD to be one of the REALLY stupid ones who think American style leftism has ANY RESEMBLENCE WHATSOEVER with Marxism.
Hint: Marxism is fundamentally incompatible with democracy, while there are HUNDREDS of economic philosophies which are compatible with democracy and are NOT Marxism even if some of them may include elements of it.
Here I am saying we should be pragmatic and be open to good ideas regardless of where they come from - and YOU make it about left versus right - EXACTLY the false dichotomy I was arguing we should not fall into !
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
How stupid do you have to be to read this sort of thing and say "oh yeah, good point". I mean, if you see "public utility" and "Marxist" being joined together, do you think "hmm... yes, I see what you mean", or do you think "hang on, but aren't the electrical grid, water, gas, roads and other things public utilities? We're not in a marxist state, so what's one more utility to worry about?".
They certainly are — thanks to the monopoly-power once given to them by the government.
The solution to this, however, is not creating more rules for them to follow (with more boards and commissions to — ineffectively — ensure compliance) — these only make it harder for a would-be newcomers to appear — but to make this market properly competitive.
While the public anger is (somewhat clumsily, but still effectively) once again redirected against the Koch Brothers, "Big Cable" donates to the ruling party en masse, CEOs play golf with the President and otherwise do the ruling party's bidding. Is it likely, that further monopolization will be blocked?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Flat out bullshit.
Oho, if that's the level of discourse I believe you intend to preach rather than discuss, in which case get fucked and good day sir.
This is why people hate ideologues.
Kochs have a long history of seeing communists around every corner. I believe this comes from their father's business dealings with the Soviets. Too bad they can't let that paranoid shit go. It's making them look like dopes.
US had the atomic bomb first because USSR was busy fighting the Germans so nuclear physics had a very low priority
And all the other stuff the US had first, that was just coincidence was it?
Women entering the workforce had also nothing to do with the additional free time.
Hoo my sides. Really though what the left like to call the traditional or nuclear family is nothing of the sort. It's an artifical creation put in place to give returning soldiers a place to go. The result of this farcical social engineering was housewives self medicating on a variety of narcotics through boredom and men working themselves into an early grave. You should go study the actual historical or natural structure of the family, or even go examine one in the developing country of your choice. Hint: it's not a patriarchal prison.
It was just that many men were on the front and this had to be compensated for.
You know your Rosie the Riveter quit her job after two weeks, right?
This is, by the way, the reason why the gender equality was much more pronounced in the USSR.
Read up on the events immediately following the 1917 revolution. They don't agree with your narrative.
And social safety nets were caused by the socialists - albeit indirectly. Von Bismarck introduced them because he was afraid of socialists and wanted to lessen the socialist parties appeal.
As I said, social safety nets are good ideas. When you start viewing them through a left wing lens however they become a stepping stone rather than a simple component of a developed country's society, and therein lies the problem. "Always more to do", eh.
Let's be honest; they're actually right... in the sense that TCP/IP is also Marxist!! ;)
You realize that the ideologue here was you ?
I was the one arguing for pragmatism and an open-minded solution-seeking approach to economics that doesn't approve or reject something by the label it falls under by it's unique and specific attributes and success-rate for the specific problem.
It is therefore flat out bullshit in my mind to give exclusive credit to any particular ideology when it comes to social progress. Frankly, that was the NICE way of putting it.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Without net neutrality, the internet as it was built dies. PERIOD.
Net Neutrality means - packets come in, packets move on - nobody fucks with them in any way shape or form.
No packet inspection. No tracing. No sniffing. No shaping. No re-routing (except as determined by the TCP/IP routing standards to re-route around damaged network nodes / segments).
Now, that of course is all well and good, aside from the fact that it also allows things like DDoS attacks to wend their way through, as well as port probing, etc..
So to that, having last mile providers deploy firewalls that defend against DDoS attacks and port sniffers would be allowed, but only as defense against those attacks.
At the end of the day there are some markets in need of regulation and it seems pretty obvious that residential internet access is one of those markets that tends toward a monopoly due to the cost and size of the delivery network.
The monopolists who control it will use it to maximize their profit, as we have seen. They have a disincentive to invest in infrastructure.
What that regulation looks like is what's important. The FCC's current path is too focused on minutiae without focusing on the structural problem behind the need for regulation.
I think municipal high speed fiber is a great way to address this and is very similar to the municipal road network. High investment cost, low marginal return over time. It's not a market anyone wants to enter; while UPS would love to own the roadways, it's only profitable if they can use them to exclude competition and charge high prices.
A municipal fiber network eliminates the structural monopoly and done right (IMHO, anyway) it doesn't provide ANY service anymore than having a street in front of my house provides me with transportation services.
A municipal network would be basically a data center operation and the local fiber network. Service from the network would require content providers operating on this network, whether they be bare-bones IP connectivity or some kind of full-suite provider like Comcast who could provide video and IP.
I think "unfair competition" would come from a municipal network that also provided IP connectivity or services on this, and I don't doubt there would be some people who would claim this is a legitimate government function, needed to close some rich/poor gap by providing a consumer subsidy. I think that would be a mistake because it would really hinder innovation.
As extractive industries they want to buy protection from other advocates with environmental views by starving them out of the discussion!
Even if we supposed that all it took to "starve" someone out of a public debate was to spend enough money, the Koch brothers aren't even remotely close to spending the kind of money that would take. They're just relatively wealthy billionaires, not god-emperors with an iron-bound oil monopoly to fund their every whim.
I think a silly aspect of this discussion is the attribution of so much mythical power to money. It misses an obvious problem. If you spend money to steer the discussion and your wealth decreases as a result, then you've lost money and hence, lost that power. There are other forms of power that don't diminish in their use, such as military power or political power.
The ISPs have a defacto monopoly. Net neutrality is them trying to exercise their monopoly. We shouldn't be going after net neutrality, instead we need to break up the monopoly that is behind it.
Anti-neutrality laws are marxist in the same way that anti-monopoly laws are marxist. But thinking people recognise that you have to restrain rampant capitalism sometimes in order to maintain correct competition and market relationships.
You're so funny. Literally 5 seconds of Google proves you wrong, but I'm just not interested in formatting it to run your mouse wheel.
https://www.google.com/#q=groups+financed+by+democratic+billionaires
Just saying 'Camelot' around older Democrats is a riot after they spout stuff like above.
No bias here. Move along citizen.
The only surprise I saw was that they didn't find some way to insinuate that "net neutrality will KILL YOUR GRANDMOTHER!"
That's the only square missing to complete Libertarian-bingo on this issue.
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Why doesn't the Koch group advocate for anti-trust action against the telcos? That's a thing they could also be doing.
Any time you have business trying to control regulation it's a bad thing. Because, let's face it, business doesn't give a shit about your rights, civil or otherwise. Or your health, or your children's health, or your well being in any way. All business cares about is profit. And if you get in the way of profit, business will stomp you like a cockroach.
Fuck the Kochs and their ilk.
I understand the user community's desire to have all content be treated the same. But let's assume for a moment that tomorrow, net neutrality is passed and ISPs are no longer able to charge some customers (provider or consumer) more for priority routing/transmission. What incentive do they have to continue to invest in the infrastructure when they have a near-monopoly over the end-users? Consider television distribution. Pretty much everyone has a choice between one cable provider and two satellite providers whose feature set is virtually identical these days. Those companies have little incentive to do things that end-users want e.g. a la carte channel lineups. Maybe eventually it will happen but it might take years and the possible threat from internet content distribution to get them to do anything. So back to the ISPs. End users have a choice between their local cable company and their local phone company. Net neutrality takes away a potential revenue stream. Why then would they continue to either invest in upgrading their technology or continue to keep everyone's rates low or both? Why wouldn't they jack up the prices of the service level necessary to serve up Netflix or whatever for everyone regardless of whether or not the customer uses those types of services?
I think my ISP is blocking email from American Commitment's domain.
Of course, that should be OK with Koch. After all, its capitalism, and ISPs can decide who gets to use their facilities unilaterally.
Have gnu, will travel.
Now when I sign up with my ISP, I expect that, absent other agreements, they won't care about where my packets are address to or from, just if I'm exceeding their bandwidth limit I agreed to - the only terms they mention that would result in packet loss.
If they end up dropping packets on some other mean, I'd call that fraud. But fraud is not for the FCC to enforce, and it has little to do with one ideology vs. another.
What if they're throttling packets from another service you pay for? Is it really okay with you if you pay for Hulu and for your connection to Hulu, but your ISP purposely slows down your connection to Hulu? Why would that be acceptable?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
No, what I'm getting at is that every packet should be treated the same, and not receive preferential handling in relation to other packets based on which subnet it originated from, and how much cash the content provider put in the pocket of the ISP.
Eat the rich.
Reading TFA, even if I take TFA at its word, TFA's headline claims the group is Koch-backed, but TFA itself only says that the head of the organization previously worked at a Koch-backed organization. The idea that there's any Koch connection, financial or otherwise, to his current organization is complete speculation.
TFA further obscures this by containing a link for the phrase "strong ties to the Koch brothers", presented in a way which looks like it should be about the current organization, but which when you follow it, turns out to be about the previous one.
"Koch" has become such a left-wing bugaboo that any reference to it should make the reader automatically skeptical.
Furthermore, TFA quotes the email, although using an image (why, I don't know--to make it harder to search?) The claim that "he thinks net neutrality is Marxist" is a distortion of that email. It claims that
1) It is like things done by China and Russia (astute readers may remember that Russia gave up being Marxist decades ago; summarizing this as "he thinks it's Marxist" is another left-wing scare tactic meant to bring to mind McCarthyism) and
2) a reference saying that one *specific* group led by one specific Marxist individual supports it.
Rather than say Net Neutrality, which is ambiguous and a bit high high minded, call it what it really is. It is protecting from ISP double dipping. As an industry (in the USA and Canada), it is already a bloated spider feasting parasitically on society, as seen by the overwhelming consumer hatred of those companies, which somehow manage to stay in business... (I am saying rhetorically, I know how).
What they want to do, is have the ability to not only charge the consumer of media, but also the producer. It is like a perfect fucking storm of profit! As the middle man just skimming money off everyone involved. The problem is, I as the consumer have already paid for my damn service. If I plan on using it to only access simple webpages or if I plan on streaming Netflix all day everyday, that is my right, and I pay for the privilege of doing so. We have all moved to the damn CAP system already, so if I consume more than Granny Twinkles, I PAY for it. However now they want to take my service, which I already pay for, and say well since so much is going to Netflix, we want to change them more money, and if they refuse, slow the connection.... to the consumer, who has already damn well paid for the service in the first place. Or conversely if the company pays the extortion, they will simply pass the cost onto the consumer, so either way, the consumer is going to pay or get less service no matter what happens.
Anyway it is rapacious greed pure and simple, it is double dipping, it is wrong. These companies already have too many advantages, and constantly abuse both the system and their customers every chance they get for more profits. The reason the folks like Koch and the rest like it is they have money to gain, and the vast population has money to lose. This is not ideological (all this crap about Marxism etc...), but some idiots will think it is, and support idea, even though it is by far not in their best interests to do so. The republicans/conservatives have been playing the same shell game for years, where a large chunk of their support comes from these uninformed ideological idiots who are voting against themselves over and over again based on some fictional ideal, that doesn't even apply or even make sense given a situation. However using whatever media (and if your name is Koch, and in the USA) you have plenty of media to abuse, to convince the people to accept whatever snake oil you are selling...
Yes. Same goes for the things that USSR had first.
I disagree. One of the major failings of marxist-derived ideological systems is that they ignore the incentivisation that capitalism brings to the table. Marxists do the whole "one for all and to the gulags with anyone who disagrees" thing while capitalism harnesses the desire to better one's own station in life, which is why the US and other western countries enjoyed a steady increase in the quality of life, while the USSR suffered a lengthy decline. Of course I wouldn't advocate for pure capitalism but I do recognise its strengths.
You forget the soldiers that return dead. This is the missing workforce women were set to replace.
Really. The US lost half a million in total during world war two, out of a 1939 population of over 131 million people. That's about a third of a percent of the total population, and about 1% of the labour force. Your narrative is missing a few facts.
Who cares about one specific woman? It is only an anecdote, not data.
All things considered I find it entertainingly ironic, and in all likelihood representative.
But if you really want to know about things that happened immediately following 1917 revolution: USSR was the first country to legalise abortions. USSR had equal rights and women's suffrage starting with the first constitution of soviet Russia - in 1918..
Yes, that was my point. That does not resemble events in the US or much of Western Europe however.
It's unbelievable in this day and age that people can actually sit there with a straight face and argue in favour of neomarxist ideologies. You go ahead and talk to anyone from Eastern Europe who remembers those days and they won't be long setting you straight. But oh right that wasn't real marxism. Your version will be the one that gets it right, and if a few hundred million people have to die to prove you wrong again, que sera sera.
I always thought Marxism was bad but if net neutrality is Marxist then maybe it's time to rethink my political philosophy. Thanks for the tip, Koch Brothers!
PS Fuck you, Koch Brothers
They care nothing about America or capitalism, except as a tool to increase their wealth.
RTFA - there's no association with the Koch boogeymen other than that the president of the "astroturf group" used to work for a group which did have Koch ties.
The author of the article expressly states that he doesn't know who funds the group. Its title is inaccurate and irresponsible.
Another reason why the US won that race was that the extreme antisemitism in both the USSR and the Nazi regimes caused them to experience a major brain drain as a lot of scientists emigrated to the US, or were killed/imprisoned/repressed at home. Add to that the fact that US had the only industrial base that wasn't damaged by fighting and bombing, thus making it pretty close to inevitable that it would be first.
Litmus tests are very important, and infallible, because far right conservatives use them all the time, and they are inherently right, right? So let me drag out one og my own......
So being that under net neutrality, all data is to be treated equally, it means that anyone supporting any sort of equality is a Marxist.
As noted in the Constitution, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal", means that if you support anything that doesn't treat my internet traffic as equal to everyone else's, you are not a Marxist.
Therefore, in an astounding and true litmus test, it appears that the founding fathers were Marxists, because they supported the idea that all men are created equal, and that is contrary to the truth as outlined by the Koch brothers.
Who knew?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Under Capitalism, Man exploits Man.
Under Communism, it's the other way around.
-kgj
Unfortunately you have to have an agreed upon definition of what net neutrality IS before you can have a reasonable discussion about what needs fixing. Unfortunately the issue has devolved into knee jerking reactions where each side's idea of what it means and when the government should or should not regulate mixed in with their own biases.
Take settlement free peering for example? When is it unfair when one side or the other has to accommodate a lopsided ratio of data transfer? When is it fair to say that that the disadvantaged peer should buy a dedicated line and move off of settlement free?
"I wantz my packets to go through no matter what"
does not address issues like above.
It is classic crony capitalism and never had anything to do with public health. Just look into the history of it, the industry didn't want to pay to trash the toxic waste so they found a way to get payed to chuck it without any real studies to back up the move (just stuff about teeth which didn't include diluted ingestion. Which later studies proved didn't help teeth but the system here is so broken it continues anyway.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Without it you get toll roads everywhere, and you constantly have to pay by the mile, or bit the MB
We've been paying for roads by the mile for decades, via gas taxes -- an effective way of making people who drive more, pay more.
Do you feel that all electricity users should pay the same cost, regardless of whether they wastefully use many kilowatt-hours, or frugally use few kilowatt-hours? I'm guessing no. So why impose a completely different price structure for bandwidth (which is a finite resource, just like electricity)? Why penalize grandma for her thrifty usage pattern (she receives a few emails per week and never surfs the web), by charging her as much as someone who downloads movies several times per week?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
After reading this, please let me know what would be so awful about 100% toll roads.
All roads are already toll roads, in that their maintenance is paid for by gas taxes. What would be so awful about that money going to an efficient enterprise, as opposed to an inefficient bureaucracy?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Do you think those that pay for the supersonic speed should be shuttled to the Grayhound station for certain destinations
How about allowing consumers to choose, instead of imposing regulations that may not benefit me in any way?
Simplified hypothetical example:
Mega-ISP offers three tiers of service:
1. 7 Mbps to all destinations - $30 per month
2. 40 Mbps to all destinations web services, with some exceptions: you get 7 Mpbs when visiting foo.com, foo2.com, and foo4.com - $50 per month
3. 40 Mbps to all destinations, period -- $60 per month
If a fast connection to foo2.com is important to me, I'd probably choose Tier 3. If not, I'd choose Tier 2 and save $120 per year. Let ME have that choice.
I can see how this will go down... "No matter how we reform the 'net, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your internet plan, you will be able to keep your internet plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Should netflix pay premium for every mb because they're a "high bandwidth user"
In every other industry, heavy users get a bulk discount for commodities: The Sara Lee bakery pays a lot less per pound for flour than I do. The bauxite-smelting plant pays a lot less per kilowatt-hour for electricity than I do.
Why are you so worried that bandwidth providers will go against their own self-interest and set up a pricing structure that's completely different from every other industry? Why aren't you also fighting for "flour neutrality" and "electricity neutrality"?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
When economists don't even read Marx, we have fallen into a idiotic debate where even the experts don't know shit. Nobody knows what Marx did or what his work was about, but that doesn't stop people (especially Americans) from bringing it up.
Godwin's harmful excuse to ignore history for the sake of sane discussion should be applied to discussions with Marx because unlike the Nazi, people don't know anything about Marx or Marxism but they do grow up learning enough about the Nazi to realize overstatements (well, most the time they can.)
We are in a place now where you can't point out real Fascism (which isn't Nazi but that is another issue) but can slander anything opposed to Fascism as Marxism.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
If we let the free market sort it out, no doubt Consumer Reports will print an article revealing which ISPs deliver Netflix content at good speeds, and which ISPs deliver Netflix content at lousy speeds. It's no different than when Consumer Reports prints an article revealing which detergents do a good job of getting grass stains out of your clothes, and which detergents do a lousy job.
Are you arguing for a "Detergent Neutrality Act" that would force all makers of laundry detergent to offer equally-effective products?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
because there are too many marxists on them who will run you down and kill you (and also it's just the principle of the thing. Have you ever noticed that stop signs and stop lights are RED?
They use private helicopters almost exclusively, and as an extra defense of their property rights, they never let their pilot inform the marxist totalitarian air traffic controllers about where they will be flying next.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
"destroy American capitalism altogether'"
I find it amusing that when people want to say a totally over-the-top lie but they don't put any effort into it, they end up saying something true about themselves.
Somewhere around the time google and facebook threw in with the democrat party, and ever since, all digital rights have been enemies of the republicans.
Its kinda funny, because most of the old school internet libertarians stood shoulder to shoulder with everyone else on the internet being pro-net neutrality.
Kotch is a fucking pig, and anyone who follows him proves however they label themselves is just a label, with no real meaning behind it.
I think it's more status signalling via a really expensive hobby. I doubt "OMG the Koch brothers are corrupting our emails!" is an investment.
Investment implies positive return - getting more out than you put in. All I see here is vague talk about how the Koch brothers are gaining "political power". That's not going to pay the bills especially when you have a better funded opposition playing the same game.
No, investment implies a CHANCE to positive return.
Not different enough to matter for this discussion.
What incentive? I find that, in my region, the power company is interested in building out capacity as needed. After all, if they can sell more electricity, they make more money. What's the difference here? Similarly, I'm currently paying for a net connection that's a little slow for my taste. If my connectivity provider offered higher bandwidth for more money, I'd sign up. Besides, monopolies need to be regulated.
Net access is conceptually simple. It isn't like supplying hundreds of video feeds, like cable and satellite TV companies.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
That definition would make VOIP very difficult. There's data that needs to be delivered with low latency, where a delay for a packet is the same thing as losing the packet altogether, and data that doesn't. If I'm torrenting a distro, I don't really care what happens to each little packet. They'll all arrive eventually. If latency goes up by ten seconds, other things being equal, it takes ten seconds longer to get my distro. That would completely ruin a phone call.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
IMHO, this isn't the same as residential electricity because you either have it or you don't. Okay, sure there are the few residential exceptions that might need three-phase or something like that. The watts used for one device will work just fine for another device. Most houses have a 200 amp service and that's all most people are ever going to need. That 200-amp service has been the same 200-amp service for 50 years. And if I use 10,000 watts all day, that doesn't mean my neighbors won't be able to run their fridge.
My point is that eventually, a few people will want to get full-blown 4k video through their connection to multiple TVs in their house and that's going to take major infrastructure upgrades. Most people aren't going to need all that so do you think they'd be willing to subsidize a few high-bandwidth users? Do you expect the ISPs to just eat the cost of keeping up with bandwidth demand? One thing is for sure, government regulation rarely precisely targets the entity in private sector it's intended to. Take a look at your utility bills and see how many regulatory fees are being passed on to you even when you don't use the service.
Is paying taxes 'Marxist'?
Casteism
There's nothing saying that ISPs can't charge more for different levels of bandwidth, so presumably if you want losslessly compressed 4K video separately for you, your wife, two kids, and the cat (seriously, cats either ignore the TV or are fine with regular resolution), and the ISP offers it, you're going to pay a lot for it. If not enough people want that bandwidth, it won't be offered. If enough people do to make that profitable, then the ISP will presumably offer it.
I assume you think that any transformer should be able to handle all the houses on it running a continuous 20 kilowatts? I'm not so sure about that. The things can burn out.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Perhaps you should have done more research than 5 seconds in Google.
Democrat donors are at the top of the list of reported donations because they are more likely to report their donations. The whole point of how the Koch brothers route their money, and money funneled through their network of PACs, "think tanks", etc., is to hide the fact that they are funding it, so that their organizations all sound like "independent" supports of the Koch agenda. So they route it through "non-profits" or by providing non-cash benefits (e.g. providing a free vacation / educational conference), and of course pumping a fortune into "independent" issue campaigns, which are unregulated and whose funding sources are largely unreported. And, of course, the un-reported money flow is much larger than the reported money flow.
And you really can't equate the two.
In terms of assets, the Koch Brothers have 20x as much as Soros. So that's not even close.
And in terms of tactics, the Soros' political donations are well documented and transparent - be is open about what he supports, and he lobbies and promotes it in an open fashion. The Koch Brothers' money flow is generally hidden, and goes to subversive organizations like ALEC that literally write legislation, give it to legislators, who they give free vacations and political donations to, and has them pass it, sometimes literally in the middle of the night behind locked doors so nobody can see what they're doing. So you can't equate their tactics.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
You do realize that most of the ethics rules for contributions were written in response to Armand Hammer's blatant purchase of Al Gore Sr? But you just keep believing which PACs are evil.
The Forbes 2014 Billionaires List disagrees with your assessment. Looking at the list:
#6 Charles Koch $41.9 B $0 78 diversified United States
#6 David Koch $41.9 B $0 74 diversified United States
#27 George Soros $23 B $0 84 hedge funds United States
Clearly nowhere near the '20x' mark you cite.
In terms of tactics, clearly the Kochs are amateurs compared to Soros. If I were the Kochs, I'd hire a team to emulate the buying patterns Soros has accomplished for influence. He's almost singularly purchased more media outlets than any other billionaire on Forbe's list, financed 527 organizations with the sole purpose of ousting Bush 43, financed revolutions, created his own personal brown shirts around the world, and had more access to the current President than any other figures of either party. The Kochs could learn a lot from him.