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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!!!
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.
Except a lot of the Koch funded groups including the Heartland Group and others are taken quite seriously by the voting public.
Its a major issue.
>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."
Maybe it's because, mostly when liberal organisations fund something, it's something the majority of voters wanted anyway ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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?
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.
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 *
Karl or Groucho? If they mean the latter, I might even believe them.
Will
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.
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 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?
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?
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 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.
The Koch brothers, what a couple of douche bags.
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.
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.
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.
>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."
Maybe it's because, mostly when liberal organisations fund something, it's something the majority of voters wanted anyway ?
You're both wrong, actually.
For OP, the trick is in the source: Sure, HuffPo isn't going to post any articles that point out how Soros uses his riches to influence government in the exact same method as the Koch brothers, albeit tugging in the opposite direction, but FOX will sure make it "front page news." Vice-versa is also the case.
For you, well, that statement is just wishful thinking. Basically, if you have one or two super-rich guys bankrolling the whole she-bang, it's a safe bet that the majority in fact do not want whatever it is, because if we did then the effort wouldn't need the backing of a billionaire.
Also, tyranny of the majority ist verboten in the US, thanks to the design of our constitutional republic.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
You're a bit naive there.
I'm not the one claiming "voters want that" because the groups I choose to support bankroll the effort.
NOTHING happens in US politics without a billionaire backing it. Nothing at all. No matter how badly the public wants it.
Thus (further) negating your previous claim.
I merely posited that this is slightly more common on the left side of the spectrum because the interests of liberal billionaires are slightly closer to the public interest in the first place.
Because that's what you want to believe, not because it's a statement of empirical fact. Ergo, naivete.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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...
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.
Net neutrality is not about the end user paying the same amount regardless of bandwidth usage. It's about the ISPs not treating content providers differently based on their competition with the ISP, their content or charging them extra when it's the end user making the demand. I have no problem with the end user paying for their level of bandwidth usage.
Actually, quite the contrary. I'm arguing that you get what you paid for and who you paid is not entitled to not give you that or give you less depending on if a third party doesn't pony up in addition.
Consumer reports or whatever doesn't need to be involved at all. I purchase a 12 meg unlimited connection and the ISP simply is not delivering on the goods they sold if they purposely limit it because netflix doesn't purchase a fast lane.
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?
Toll and tax are distinct. Also, not all enterprises are efficient and not all governments are bureaucratic.
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.
That's just fine if I have my choice of ISP's to select from but I'm basically limited to two (Comcast or Quest). What I'd prefer is that the cable into my house is treated as a public utility that any ISP can avail themselves of. That would spur real competition between ISP's to get my business.
After reading this, please let me know what would be so awful about 100% toll roads.
This makes an easy comparison.
Currently, you pay a gas tax, per kilometer. No-body cares *what* you do with the gas at that point, or where you go. You can drive on freeways, you can commute to work, you can roadtrip across the country, you can just drive around the block for hours on end if you want. The only limit is the physical ability of the roads (expressed as a speed limit).
Conversely, a toll road will charge you for each segment of road. Suddenly, *where* this road is and what it connects to becomes a huge factor. If I own the major route, I can charge more (forcing you to pay or take a longer but cheaper detour) If I own the road that goes past the supermarket, I can charge more for that segment because it's popular (and the limit of what I can charge is "as long as it's cheaper than driving to the next furthest market"). If I own this movie theatre and the road in front of the competition's theatre? I can make it prohibitive for anyone to do business there. Just think how much fun you could have with speed limits. And how much is access to the road in front of your *house* worth?
And if you own a whole lot of roads, you can change speed limits to encourage traffic to go to stores you like/own, and away from competition.
This is the world the ISPs want to live in - they control all your roads, and they want to be able to adjust the toll road pricing so it's "cheaper" to go to their stores instead of their competition.