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"Net Neutrality" Coiner Tim Wu Is Running For Lt. Governor of New York
speedplane (552872) writes Tim Wu, the popular Columbia Law Professor, author of The Master Switch, and the guy who coined the term Net Neutrality, is running for Lieutenant Governor of the great state of New York. He "has waged a shoestring anti-establishment campaign," that is well underway, and has even begun receiving attacks from the incumbent: "It has not always been smooth for Mr. Wu .... Surrogates for Mr. Cuomo have pounced on his admitted lack of 'message discipline' for comments he made comparing net neutrality to the suffragist movement (which he says were taken out of context) and sympathizing with Airbnb (which he says is 'fair game' because he has a 'wait-and-see approach' to regulating start-ups)."
i'll get the popcorn.
Suffrage not suffragist
Net Neutrality is another name for "Give me the Internet, not a subset." and is a key part of what a legitimate ISP does, as opposed to a censored ISP like sometimes exists in the USA and often exists overseas.
It is about time we got some tea party democrats.
I know, tea party is a bad word, but anti-establishment is almost synonymous with it. It finally sound like we might see a democrat who is still actively supporting the working man instead of riding the coat tails of the real democrats who went before him.
There already are a bunch of Democrats in the TEA Party - NOT at the top, but at the grass-roots and they tend to be blue-collar working types who've voted "D" their entire lives (because that's the way all their friends and families voted and that party las long pretended to be "for the working man"). Some of those more-conservative rank-and-file Democrats who, like many conservative base voters, have "caught-on" to the game the leaders of both parties are playing and the destruction that is resulting have joined the TEA Party. The TEA Party is generally associated with the GOP though because you cannot reduce taxes without reducing government and modern Democrats tend to be the party that proposes fixing every problem with the application of more government. While the GOP establishment has never actually supported lower taxes or smaller government, they have long lied to their base voters and claimed to support those things (because that's what the base voters in the GOP want), so this makes the GOP a better place to start for the TEA Party. (3rd party in the US only ever, at best, becomes a "spoiler" that splits a political majority and lets a minority squeak through, thus backfiring on the majority of voters)
An interesting development was the New York Times not endorsing any candidate for governor, but did endorse Wu for Lt. Governor over incumbent Cuomo's choice. The editors liked Wu's desire to transform the position of Lt. Governor into a public advocate, where he can proclaim the messages for fairness not only in Internet governance, but in governance in general.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/28/opinion/timothy-wu-for-lieutenant-governor.html
Democracy Now! recently had an interview with running mates Teachout and Wu as well as gubernatorial candidate Randy Credico, whose quest against inequality includes fighting Rockefeller drug laws.
http://www.democracynow.org/2014/9/4/new_york_candidates_zephyr_teachout_randy
And I think that incumbents have things way too easy for re-election.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Yeah, Tea Party is too specific to an existing dogma. But, there are quite a few liberals who skew closer to Noam Chomsky's brand. I think a number of liberals take anti-establishment seriously and believe that libertarianism has some insightful observations on how things work ( e.g. regulatory capture). But a number of liberals have different solutions. Very different from Chomsky's "Anarchist Social Libertarianism" (or whatever he calls it). And especially different from the pro big business of "libertarian" politicians.
There is room to agree on populism.
There is room to agree on that things are broken.
There is room to agree things need to change.
But what we need is to stop fighting on abstract idealistic polarized solutions.
It's time to start thinking beyond these extreme dogmatic and impractical abstract ideas of how to run things. We dont want oppressive big brother government, and we dont want out-of-control, laissez-faire, libertarian capitalism.
meep
>> great state of New York
Citation needed.
What about third party candidates? Seriously. It doesn't need to be about Democrats and Republicans.
The GOP Estavlishment DESPISES the TEA Party
When the TEA Party first got going, the GOP establishment thought they were just another energetic little speciel interest group that they could fool into contributing cash and boots-on-the-ground during elections ... but once they found out that the "TEA People" wanted actual changes (including lots of anti-corruption reforms) they went nuts. Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey actually showed-up at a TEA Party office brandishing a gun and trying to take the place over. Why do you think the GOP in Washington are having endless hearings into the IRS abuse of the TEA Party (good for the GOP anti-IRS voters) but are not actually doing ANYTHING to punish the IRS or prevent the IRS from continuing to hunt the TEA Party????? (Hint: being anti-IRS is good for Republicans, but they are not going to lift a finger to actually help the TEA Partiers, who the extablishment hate)
Oh, and that "keep the government out of my medicare" is a funny Democrat joke, but like the faux Palin quote about seeing Russia from her house, it's a phony bit of comedy that liberals who get their news from late-night comics stupidly believe is true.
Humanity lived just fine without it before the 1990's and we could do it again. In the end it's these large monopolistic ISP's that are going to lose if they continue to charge the customer $$$ for streaming services and limit their bandwidth at the same time.
Shit, reality is I don't really need the internet. Banking? I will just drive or walk to my fucking bank like I always do. Shopping? drive or walk to my nearest retail store even if I pay 34% markup. Entertainment? DVD's, BluRays, console gaming, which are still nice to watch and play I guess people to lazy to put their disc's into the dvd/bluray.
But if you read a lot of articles off of the internet or emails you don't need fios or cable you can do it using cheap dsl or your phone's 3g/4g connection even if it's capped. Look at netzero or metropcs.
All those Eastern European Countries that are labeled third-world have faster internet access at a very very low price compared to the u.s. Why is it that these first world countries like the U.S, UK, Canada, Australia have such shitty fucking internet? Monopoly.
Can't stand the other guy. He's a crook.
While Wu is a smart, well-meaning guy, his coining the phrase "net neutrality" set back the public debate by a couple of decades. Introducing a new term for an old concept was, at best, dumb. If he had stuck with "common carrier" - a centuries old legal term - which is well understood, we'd probably have "net neutrality" today.
The US made telegraphs common carriers in the 1840s and later, telephones. The term also applies to railroads - whose bad behavior outraged farmers in the 1800s -and trucking companies. Telco lobbyists would have a much tougher case to make against common carrier than they do against the new-fangled "net neutrality."
You mean, recumbents.
"New York is well called the Empire State ... not only because of the vastness of its resources, but because it so conspicuously illustrates the imperial power of law-abiding liberty among the people." Alexander Flick, 1902.
Now it refers to entrenched political cronyism, Cuomo's promises notwithstanding.