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The Chiefs of Facebook, Google and Other Tech Giants Aren't Committing To Testify To the US Congress On Net Neutrality (recode.net)
Amazon, Facebook, Google and Netflix -- along with their telecom industry foes -- have not committed to sending their chief executives to testify before the U.S. Congress in September on the future of net neutrality. From a report: Not a single one of those companies told the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, which is convening the hearing, that they would send their leaders to Washington, D.C., in the coming weeks, even at a time when the Trump administration is preparing to kill the open internet rules currently on the government's books. The panel initially asked those four tech giants, as well as AT&T, Charter, Comcast and Verizon, to indicate their plans for attendance by July 31. Now, the committee is pushing back its deadline indefinitely, as it continues its quest to engage the country's tech and telecom business leaders on net neutrality. "The committee has been engaging in productive conversations with all parties and will extend the deadline for response in order to allow for those discussions to continue," a spokesman said.
It's already plainly obvious that Idjit Patel is going to kill off those rules come hell or high water.
So what's the point of having a discussion? I doubt any of the 'tech leaders' want to waste their time with political theatre, having a bunch of politicians pat their heads and go "There there, it'll be ok."
Shouldn't they be inviting the people to attend?
Let's make like a bird... and get the flock outta here.
Why would they testify? All the big internet companies either peer directly with ISP's or they pay for CDN access. aka fast lanes. In the case of Netflix they literally pay the consumer ISP's to be their ISP by peering with them.
you're going to have to put the sorts of politicians in office that support it. And that means people who believe government (and government regulation, which NN is) can work. Right now the folks in charge of the government don't think government works. They want to tear it all down and NN is just one more regulation on their chopping block.
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Corporations have more power and rights than humans. You're just riggers, get over it.
They want to enable further "bigly MAGA" from foreigners on social media, and to dilute organic discussion. You don't think The Zuck wants to exploit his social media empire to make a run at politics?
That's racist!
Telecoms and cable companies didn't invent anything you tied to innovation (although, to be fair Bell Labs did quite a bit back in the day) after their deregulation. All they really do halfway decently is build infrastructure, which isn't innovative, and isn't something private for-profit companies tend to be comparatively good at.
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You're conflating the breakup of AT&T with telecoms deregulation. Which actually happened in different decades, and neither had the effects you're ascribing to them.
But hey, you go on bleating. It won't change reality, but I imagine it'll make you feel better. So there's that.
â(TM)... How about MAKING THIS WEBSITE HUMAN READABLE? It is the 21st century.
I didn't vote for the SOB either, but seriously...
What's likely to get a better result?
Discussing issues with the current administration, trying to convince them, maybe get a little of what you want?
Or spend the next 3.5 years running around hair on fire frothing at the mouth shrieking "NOT MY PRESIDENT NAZI NAZI HITLER RESIST RESIST NAZI HITLER HITLER HITLER RUSSIA HITLER!"
I submit that the first option makes you look reasonable and maybe gets at least some fraction of what you want.
The second option gets none of what you want, and makes it more likely that you're going to have to be doing it for the next 7.5 years.
I have for years been pointing out that:
- The problems with network non-neutrality are mainly due to anticompetitive behavior by monopolistic, duopolistic, or cartel-forming ISPs, or vertical integration between the ISP transport operations and the operations that provide "content" and/or services (beyond commodity bandwidth) transported on their nets.
- Technical solutions tend to push for treating all packets the same, which blocks traffic management (particularly between TCP data transport and media streaming, which do NOT play well together), rather than just anticompetitive favoritism.
- The FCC is oriented around technical solutions and gets into trouble (and censorship) when it tries to deal with content.
- But the FTC is exactly the kind of consumer-protection organization that can attack the meat of the matter with big guns.
- IF, of course, the law was tweaked to LET IT DO THAT, transferring this aspect of regulation to it from the FCC.
I had high hopes for the Trump administration on this. After the way Trump was treated by the media/ISP conglomerates (and the lefties of hi-tech) he has no love for them (and would LOVE to shaft the media moguls who have been flaming him non-stop with what he perceives as fake news).
There was some talk from the administration about putting the FTC on the job, as the other half of killing the FCC's N.N. regs. But I haven't heard anything about it lately.
Of course it's not something the news departments of the media conglomerates who own the ISPs are likely to talk about, is it? B-b
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These companies are not threatened by the lack of Net Neutrality. They are large, established companies who can get by well regardless of the rules.
Congress should be able to figure this one out for themselves, but rather likely sees this as an opportunity to increase the amount of donations to their campaigns from companies like this. They are not looking out for the health of the economy, but rather their own war chests.
It's not large businesses that will be affected, it's small, up and coming ones.
You're conflating the breakup of AT&T with telecoms deregulation.
No, he did not.
He pointed out that in 100 years phone technology progressed at a glacial rate because government enabled restricted markets through regulations, Acts, and laws which allowed those huge telecoms to dictate the rate of innovation and change to suit themselves. It's called 'regulatory capture'. Once some of those restrictions (which were not all tied to the breakup of the Bells) were loosened, advances started coming at blinding speed relative to the pace set by the telecoms.
It's one of the effects of regulatory capture. Regulations become a means to maintain the status quo and raise the bars for entry to markets for new competition and technologies. We saw regulatory capture in effect with the Deep Horizon disaster.
The internet grew to what it is today without these new FCC regulations, it isn't broken right now, why do we need government to step in where it hadn't been before to 'fix' it?
I don't want to 'Deep Horizon' the internet, thanks all the same.
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Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.