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'We Are Disappointed': Tech Companies Speak Up Against the FCC's Plan To Kill Net Neutrality (businessinsider.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report from Business Insider: The FCC is planning to kill net neutrality -- and some tech companies are starting to speak out. Pro-net neutrality activists, who argue the principle creates a level playing-field online, are up in arms about the plan. And some tech companies are now speaking out in support of net neutrality as well, from Facebook to Netflix. Business Insider reached out to some of the biggest tech firms in America today to ask for their reaction to the FCC's plan. Their initial responses are below, and we will continue to update this post as more come in.
Facebook's vice-president of U.S. public policy, Erin Egan, said: "We are disappointed that the proposal announced today by the FCC fails to maintain the strong net neutrality protections that will ensure the internet remains open for everyone. We will work with all stakeholders committed to this principle."
Google spokesperson: "The FCC's net neutrality rules are working well for consumers and we're disappointed in the proposal announced today."
Netflix via a tweet: "Netflix supports strong #NetNeutrality. We oppose the FCC's proposal to roll back these core protections." [...] "We've been supporting for years thru IA and Day to Save Net Neutrality with a banner on Netflix homepage for all users. More info in Q4 2016 earnings letter, as well. This current draft order hasn't been officially voted, so we're lodging our opposition publicly and loudly now."
Reddit spokesperson: "Reddit is actively monitoring the FCC's proposed rule changes that could dismantle net neutrality as we know it. From farmers in South Dakota to musicians in Kentucky to small business owners in Utah, net neutrality is just as important to redditors as it is to Reddit and we will continue to advocate for and work constructively to maintain a free and open Internet. It is crucial to innovation and the health of our economy that small businesses have equal access to the internet, with winners and losers chosen by consumers, not ISPs."
The Internet Association, an industry body whose members include Amazon, Dropbox, Ebay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Spotify, Uber, and others: "Chairman Pai's proposal, if implemented, represents the end of net neutrality as we know it and defies the will of millions of Americans who support the 2015 Open Internet Order. This proposal undoes nearly two decades of bipartisan agreement on baseline net neutrality principles that protect Americans' ability to access the entire internet. The 2015 Order created bright-line, enforceable net neutrality protections that guarantee consumers access to the entire internet and preserve competition online. This proposal fails to achieve any of these objectives. Consumers have little choice in their ISP, and service providers should not be allowed to use this gatekeeper position at the point of connection to discriminate against websites and apps. Internet Association and our members will continue our work to ensure net neutrality protections remain the law of the land."
Facebook's vice-president of U.S. public policy, Erin Egan, said: "We are disappointed that the proposal announced today by the FCC fails to maintain the strong net neutrality protections that will ensure the internet remains open for everyone. We will work with all stakeholders committed to this principle."
Google spokesperson: "The FCC's net neutrality rules are working well for consumers and we're disappointed in the proposal announced today."
Netflix via a tweet: "Netflix supports strong #NetNeutrality. We oppose the FCC's proposal to roll back these core protections." [...] "We've been supporting for years thru IA and Day to Save Net Neutrality with a banner on Netflix homepage for all users. More info in Q4 2016 earnings letter, as well. This current draft order hasn't been officially voted, so we're lodging our opposition publicly and loudly now."
Reddit spokesperson: "Reddit is actively monitoring the FCC's proposed rule changes that could dismantle net neutrality as we know it. From farmers in South Dakota to musicians in Kentucky to small business owners in Utah, net neutrality is just as important to redditors as it is to Reddit and we will continue to advocate for and work constructively to maintain a free and open Internet. It is crucial to innovation and the health of our economy that small businesses have equal access to the internet, with winners and losers chosen by consumers, not ISPs."
The Internet Association, an industry body whose members include Amazon, Dropbox, Ebay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Spotify, Uber, and others: "Chairman Pai's proposal, if implemented, represents the end of net neutrality as we know it and defies the will of millions of Americans who support the 2015 Open Internet Order. This proposal undoes nearly two decades of bipartisan agreement on baseline net neutrality principles that protect Americans' ability to access the entire internet. The 2015 Order created bright-line, enforceable net neutrality protections that guarantee consumers access to the entire internet and preserve competition online. This proposal fails to achieve any of these objectives. Consumers have little choice in their ISP, and service providers should not be allowed to use this gatekeeper position at the point of connection to discriminate against websites and apps. Internet Association and our members will continue our work to ensure net neutrality protections remain the law of the land."
Pro-net neutrality activists, who argue the principle creates a level playing-field online, are up in arms about the plan. And some tech companies are now speaking out in support of net neutrality
Donald Trump -- the guy who gets to appoint the FCC commissioners -- said he was opposed to Net Neutrality when he first started running for president. The third-world goat-herder who is now the head of the FCC openly opposed Net Neutrality when the rules were instituted two years ago.
And you're just now "disappointed"? Where the fuck have you been for the last two years?
The regulations are only 400 pages long at this point, pretty sure that firing the entire thing into the sun and restarting from scratch is the best thing that can happen for US internet users at this point.
Might I suggest that you beat the corporations with tungsten bars, then bind them with silver to keep them away and fucking this all up again? Then take a page out of the playbook from the CRTC and create plain simple rules.
Om, nomnomnom...
Love him, hate him or don't give a damn about him, Weev made some great points against the policy, the best one of which is: Many of the companies screaming the loudest are the biggest advocates of censorship. (Then there is the fact that as he rightly points out no one is stopping state and local monopolistic practices)
Of course they don't call it that. They pretend that it's some balance to protect civility, feelings and ensure that cowards are not driven to silence by hearing disagreement, but that is precisely what it is. Censorship.
And one of the greatest ironies of the whole issue is that the sort of people who love to throw this XKCD comic out there are the ones shitting themselves the hardest at the idea that ISPs might take their platform away, but when it is GoogleFacebookTwitterYouTube doing it we are invited to a lecture on how we are not entitled to a soapbox.
If only there was a way these big tech companies could have warned millions of people about the plan and given information on how to help.
If only...
it is no longer "for the people by the people" its "for business by business" but i guess thats what we get when we care more about things over experiences.
Massive government regulation benefits big companies. They have the resources to hire lawyers and lobbyists and through regulatory capture write the laws to benefit themselves.
And screw everyone else.
Of course they want more regulations and laws.
Let's bring back regulation - where in a century telephones progressed all the way to touch-tone dialing.
The root of the problem is trust like behavior and pseudo collusion between the telecom providers fueled by the hyper expansion via mergers.
The real solution is not to regulate the pipes, but to regulate the companies that own the pipes and bust up the monopolies and unnatural oligopolies.
Net Neutrality is just another job kill'n regulation! How does it kill jobs you ask? I have no idea but I just parroting talking points I hear from Trump and Fox News!
Comca$t, Verizon and AT$T paid good money to lay all the cable down and used good taxpayer money too! They have a right to nickel and dime all of us in the future because in the US of A, corporations' profits Trump everything else - especially individual freedom!
And the corporations that get their way do so via the Free Market. See, the Free Market for politicians and regulators, whoever pays the most gets their way.
The Golden Rule: He who has the Gold, makes the rules!
So my fellow peasants, bend over, take it and like it because profits Rule and People drool!
Apparently their "bought and paid for representative" checks kept bouncing.
by refusing to approve this asswipe's new term on the commission (which passed earlier this year, and denying his new term would have ended is chairmanship as well), and refusing to approve the appointment of a replacement until trump himself is replaced.
This is simply more legislation that helps a few at the expense of the many.
Party line item issues like net neutrality are, and always have been, planks that political platforms are constructive of. Record voter turnout in 2012 (63.6% of eligible voters) was only slightly down in the 2016 election cycle (61.4%), so we can't blame voter malaise; perhaps the two-party system itself is becoming untenable. I suspect even the most ardent supporters of party line voting have some difficulty agreeing with every tenet proffered by an individual party line.
Perhaps it's time to cease defending your voting choice as the lesser of the two evils and demand more from our governors. Until there is a legitimate threat to the illusion of choice administered by the Big Two, these freedoms we too often take for granted will continue to find themselves at the whim of a pen stroke of the next administration.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I find it exceedingly comical and ironical that a federal agency charged with regulating communications is, in fact, deregulating communications! Someone has got an angle I tell ya! It will be interesting to watch how we get screwed over this time because that's the only thing this could be.
CAPCHA: routed
Companies that actually want this? Then they can be properly publicly flogged.
And don't Americans have guns? Why are you putting up with this shit?
"Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?"
-- King Henry II
So ISPs can now demand money from websites to permit those companies to have access to the ISPs customers. i.e. double selling, selling the connection to the customer AND selling the same connection to the website.
i.e. they can selectively censor websites in order to demand money from those website, aka tortuous interference in business dressed up as innovation in ISP pricing.
And you are pretending that the websites wanting access are the ones censoring the internet, aka the "accuse the accuser of the same thing" approach. Well at least you accuse Google of being one, but this applies to every website with money.
When exactly did the Republicans become anti-business, anti-free trade, Putin apparatchiks? Their position seems very fluid.
This is oil, coal, gasoline, cable-tv, landline telephone era money triumphing, yet again the old money won. Respecting the 'democratic process' and then being 'disappointed' when you get walked over by people who just went and bought the right politicians won't get you anywhere. Maybe the new money should learn from the old money, take the gloves off and start fighting back? I'm not saying that they should go the way of citizens united and bribe people left right and centre but how about putting some money into political campaigns to boost reform minded candidates out to clean up congress. Personally I would not even care what the party affiliations of reform candidates are as long as they want to put an end to the corruption.
It's not just about ISPs getting too rich, although they are, and for little value added considering their monopolies compared to other countries and what is technically feasible for them to deliver on an honest basis. Pai's plan a horrible thing for democracy, consumers. But it is also likely to cause massive damage to American competitiveness in the future. Why?
Two reasons: Killing STEM / open education, and 2) Killing open innovation. And I believe this is something that could cost the U.S. the $500 billion dollars in cash that its biggest tech titans have amassed, as outlined below.
1) Killing open education, STEM, innovative software and media developers and entrepreneurs before they hatch.
It is going to be more difficult if not impossible for individual experts to share their knowledge by creating videos free for access to all. How do they pay for the bandwidth? Currently there are a very small number of altruistic organizations and then most like YouTube which for the moment are free because they make money from advertising to offset storage and delivery costs. Will a university be able to pay for hosting a huge number of streaming 4K videos by themselves? No. If high quality, free open courseware could be developed on a serious ongoing basis it would require net neutrality to reach a maximum of viewers, let alone making it economically viable to even contemplate starting such a service. In reality a publically funded educational institution ought to be able to deliver its knowledge freely over the Internet and take advantage of the latest technology. Public education could be changed from a backwater to a leading world-class disseminator of the highest quality educational materials and it doesn't require a Harvard-sized endowment. At least, it wouldn't now but without net neutrality it might not be possible at all. The goals of STEM are also going to be recalculated when students and their advisors become sophisticated enough to consider how the cost-benefit equation concerning the massive investment needed for education in the sciences at present will change for the worse when they are forced to pay extra for communications fees and can expect more difficulty repaying without becoming beholden to a major corporation.
Also Internet based technologies with open APIs, open manuals, open source code and freely deployable are typically learned by study online, and are deployable by low cost hosting companies at the present. This freewheeling opportunity is like a petri dish that has all the nutrients needed for an organism - a startup or just a couple of guys in a garage - to land in and take off exponentially. This ability to freely self educate and continue learning and deploying new technologies as they appear is part of the innovation engine and this experience is also likely to be weakened when net neutrality means all sites hosting the technology and the blogs about it are not going to be on an equal footing. So Pai's plan is anti-STEM and damages the potential for education, self-teaching, and growing up our home-grown inventors and investors most of whom started out young and insolvent once upon a time.
2) Killing the innovation engine that allowed post-cold war Silicon Valley to enter the modern age, and later caused a small network to spark and explode into the public Internet.
Because successful brands and innovation has up to now been coming from individuals and small ventures. Some from larger companies but my perception is that after making their core money they are unable to grow fast enough to use it all by investing in themselves, instead they grow by gobbling up smaller innovative ones and even then have huge cash positions. They have too much cash and are not able to invest fast enough in high enough quality ventures. In addition, advertising and media delivery need to be affordable to startups in order to enable digital distribution in this attention-driven economy that has grown ascendant. When the playing field is not level, there will be fewer players a
From /r/askaconservative:
Alternative Right.
The third-world goat-herder who is now the head of the FCC
Wow, brazen racism and elitism. Of course, it's ok because it's targetted at someone who disagrees with your "right-think" ? This is part of the reason Trump got elected in the first place.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
In reality they're quick to make deals with ISPs.
In the UK, mobile network 3 lets you stream Netflix without it coming out of your data allowance (albeit only at 720p) and have a similar deal for music streaming (think it might be Deezer and Soundcloud). Clearly that encourages users to subscribe to those services at the expense of others.
Vodafone I think have a deal with Facebook, whereby Facebook use does not count against your allowance.
Both examples of big companies happy to violate net neutrality if it suits them.
Pro-net neutrality activists, who argue the principle creates a level playing-field online, are up in arms about the plan. And some tech companies are now speaking out in support of net neutrality
Donald Trump -- the guy who gets to appoint the FCC commissioners -- said he was opposed to Net Neutrality when he first started running for president. The third-world goat-herder who is now the head of the FCC openly opposed Net Neutrality when the rules were instituted two years ago.
And you're just now "disappointed"? Where the fuck have you been for the last two years?
Wow. The people who modded you up must be pretty fucking racist.
Of course, it's OK for a "progressive" to be racist to some "person of color" who has dared to venture off the thought plantation of received "progressive wisdom".
The same "wisdom" that has driven Venezuela to deadly bankruptcy in the midst of the world's largest oil reserves....
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/timothy-karr/net-blocking-a-problem-in_b_5695997.html
MADISON RIVER: In 2005, North Carolina ISP Madison River Communications blocked the voice-over-Internet protocol (VOIP) service Vonage.
COMCAST: In 2005, the nation’s largest Internet provider, Comcast, began secretly blocking peer-to-peer technologies
TELUS: In 2005, Canada’s second largest telecommunications company, Telus, began blocking access to a server that hosted a website supporting a labor strike against the company
AT&T: From 2007-2009, AT&T forced Apple to block Skype and other competing VOIP phone services
T&T, SPRINT & VERIZON: From 2011-2013, AT&T, Sprint and Verizon blocked Google Wallet, a mobile payment system that competed with a similar service called Isis,
VERIZON: In 2012, the FCC caught Verizon Wireless blocking people from using tethering
These are just the things they did WHEN FCC regulated net neutrality in one way or another. Now its a free for all.
I think back several years ago and...
1. Google still paid lip service to "don't be evil" (including manipulating search results for political reasons).
2. Twitter was much more diverse in opinion.
3. No one except truly dangerous people were getting banned from Facebook nor were posts known to disappear if they disagreed with Facebook's corporate culture.
As Weev pointed out, this about getting preferential treatment to push high volumes of data. Only Comcast is both evil and stupid enough to impose preferential treatment on http traffic.
The third-world goat-herder who is now the head of the FCC
I bet the people here who say tell you not to listen to Weev because he's a racist won't have a problem with this. Even though Ajit Pai was actually born in the USA and neither he nor his parents were 'goat herders'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The son of Konkani immigrants from India, Pai was born on January 10, 1973, in Buffalo, New York. He grew up in rural Parsons, Kansas. Both of his parents were doctors at the county hospital.
Pai attended Harvard University where he participated in the Harvard Speech & Parliamentary Debate Society. He earned a B.A. with honors in Social Studies from Harvard in 1994 and a J.D. from the University of Chicago in 1997, where he was an editor of the University of Chicago Law Review and won the Thomas J. Mulroy Prize.
Which shows that racism is not actually a bad thing to them, they just use accusations of it as an ad hominem argument to attack people they disagree with rather than addressing the arguments those people make.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
For a moment there, I thought you were accusing Trump of being a third-world goat herder. Please, think of the goats!
Please, think of the goats!
I'm sure the goats prefer those with smaller hands.
Q: Why do shepherds wear flowing robes?
A: Because sheep can hear a zipper from a mile away.
Back when most people used dial up, we had lots of choices. If we had that now, we wouldn't need regulations. I just want a dumb pipe. If the market is broken, like it is now, then we need help.
Internet access used to cost $20 a month. Now it's $60. This is the only technology that's going up in price, and it's doing so at twice the rate of inflation.
We need a free market like we used to, or we need regulations, now we have neither that work.
That's true, he was elected by racists.
Can Trump use the new rules to punish web sites that do not support him? I know he'd love to sock it to CNN.
Talk is cheap
The FCC has managed to minimize their public comment system so that other forms of comm are necessary to yank their chain. Perhaps a bit of Twitter time out for the Whitehouse?
The FCC thinks they rule the world. So if the US is dumb enough to do this, then will it push the next big thing overseas? Seems like they are trying hard to do this.
Even if VZ etal. get their way, they loose because the resulting closed system will be much less valuable than an open system would be. They will be the big fish in a small pond. Look at how the revenue and market caps of the phone system changed after the breakup.
Funny that the narrative is being pushed by companies like google, facebook, reddit that the repeal of net neutrality will cause wide-spread censorship, considering all these sites have a huge track record of being giant censors themselves.
...more competition, which is always thwarted by government regulation.
If this were true, a pure free market would be the ideal competitive one. But a pure free market is in fact only ideal for big incumbents, who will crush any potential competition by any means at their disposal, and their means will be abundant in an utterly unregulated market.
This is completely confused. Net neutrality helps make more competition on the other end, the websites and other similar organizations. The idea that a lack of government regulation will necessarily lead to fewer monopolies is also wrong in general; often government intervention is needed to prevent the rise of monopolies. That's the whole point of anti-trust regulations. The canonical example used by economists is the steel mill; making new steel mills takes a massive amount of investment so if there's a steel mill monopoly, it is extremely hard for it to be disrupted by any new entries. Conservatives a decade ago understood this fine, and supported net neutrality. So often the left demonstrates a poor understanding of economics, but on this case, the "conservative" answer is doing a pretty good job at demonstrating that sort of lack of understanding.
Wow, that's what mainstream conservatives believe?
I can sort of understand how they want more competition to appear out of thin fucking air when the USA is dominated by regional monopolies or duopolies for ISPs who will crush any upstarts with an iron fist. I mean of course it's not realistic or feasible, but it's a nice sentiment.
How it will help big players just flies in the face of all logic and history. The lack of net neutrality, tiered internet, would help big players. This isn't news. We can see examples of this from before net neutrality was enacted, in the present day US on cellular Internet to which neutrality doesn't apply, and in other countries that don't have net neutrality, so seek them out if you like, don't be intellectually lazy or intentionally obtuse.
The idea that it will help censorship by giving the government another weapon against businesses is batshit insane tinfoil hattery. Killing an ISP to censor a message would be like nuking a state to destroy a subversive flyer. If the government were brazen and despotic enough to do such a thing, there are already many ways it could be done.
"Ask a conservative?" More like "Ask a right-wing looney-toon dingbat." At least I hope so.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
That's true, he was elected by racists.
Not all of them were racists.
And remember we're not allowed to call them idiots (even if they are) because presumably (/ironically?) that'd be "right-think" too.
These days we're supposed to look down on the pesky elites with their "knowledge" & "good judgement".
We're living in a post-truth society,
It would probably make a Republican's soul shiver in horror... but I think perhaps that (excepting new products and services for the first decade or so) monopolies need to be made illegal in a more effective way.
Perhaps legislation that exponentially increases the corporate tax rate for every percentage of market share over 50% (or 33% or 25% depending on what you believe the minimum required number of pie slices is for healthy competition). Force them to price themselves upwards until it's economically possible for competition to arise.
For a moment there, I thought you were accusing Trump of being a third-world goat herder. Please, think of the goats!
In an ironic twist of fate, despite not really being qualified or trustworthy enough to herd goats, he's managed to herd a s**tload of sheep.
It'd be funny if it weren't so sad.
Trump got elected because people hate name calling. I find that hard to believe.
"We Are Disappointed"
Yes, I'm sure this tepid statement will convince the international mega-conglomerates to cancel their plans for world domination in order to avoid hurting the feelings of these tech companies.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Maybe now is the time to cut down on the bribes?
Those idiots were drinking the Fox "News" cool aid. It is not a surprise. Put billionaires and industry shills into power and those are the results you get. No surprise that the only companies complaining are those who would be impacted the most. Google will lose a lot of revenue when folks have to pay up to watch cat videos on YouTube or when using Google office apps becomes cost prohibitive. Also, all those companies that boom due to cable cutters signing up for their service will havea tough time.
The only hope here is that the states follow through and start building their own Internet infrastructure. Not that state governments are any less subject to bribes and kickbacks, but it is much harder to dish out money to 50 entities than just one.
In all fairness, ISPs do have a point. They have to invest into their infrastructure in a market where asking for higher access fees is a no go. The only beneficiaries of those investments are other companies. Google, Amazon, Netflix and others would be significantly smaller and less powerful if they had to pay up for the bigger pipes that support their at times even free services. Some traffic shaping needs to be allowed, not all Internet traffic needs to be traveling with the same priority. That traffic shaping has to be consistent across the board and be specific to type of traffic regardless of source and destination. But why compromise when you have reckless filthy rich folks calling the shots with a spineless Congress more interested in keeping sex scandals under the covers.
I don't think the choice of words is appropriate, BUT this kind of talk is EXACTLY what Trump uses on a daily basis. You think Trump is fair and balanced when it comes to opinions that do not match his 1:1? Sheesh, how delusional can one be?
And remember we're not allowed to call them idiots (even if they are) because presumably (/ironically?) that'd be "right-think" too.
Oh look, the tolerant left that screams discrimination and "protected classes!" wanting to discriminate an entire set of individual based on politics.
How about you stick to calling people idiots based on their individual idiocy, instead of lumping everyone into some "basket of deplorables" based on who they voted for. There were legitimate reasons to vote for Donald Trump, one of them being deregulation, and moving power from the Federal government back to states, which he is doing. It was not an "idiotic" choice in and of itself.
And this screeching you're doing is one of the reasons he was elected. This contempt for "the masses of uneducated idiots" you're showing. That very arrogance of a few journalists and politicans on the left and yes, some of their militants too. You guys need to prop up your tolerant and reasonable voices, instead of constantly shoving your hysterics in the media.
How 'bout this for a 2020 slogan : Make Liberalism Great Again.
We're living in a post-truth society,
Yes, and the push towards it is coming from the Left wing and Academia. Trump is a push back against it.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
Perhaps legislation that exponentially increases the corporate tax rate for every percentage of market share over 50% (or 33% or 25% depending on what you believe the minimum required number of pie slices is for healthy competition). Force them to price themselves upwards until it's economically possible for competition to arise.
Oooh that is very clever! Only problems I can think of are that it could either unfairly harm niche product monopolies, or allow them through a loophole, depending on how you look at it. There are companies which have a monopoly in small niche markets and aren't doing anything abusive. Just off the top of my head, there's only one company in the US (and the Americas, AFAIK) that re-stitches seatbelts in a way that meets original safety standards, for example.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
>Only problems I can think of are that it could either unfairly harm niche product monopolies, or allow them through a loophole, depending on how you look at it
You might have to put in exemptions based on the percentage of GDP or something (I prefer relative measurements because it reduces the need to update the legislation periodically). If some company has a complete monopoly on making a widget but only has ten customers... nobody's going to care. And you'd have to have language that handles regional monopolies - either allowing them because there's no local economic case for competition or denying them because the company is using a federal-level 49% to justify regional 100% market share.
Nothing's easy once you get people involved who are all very much motivated to find loopholes to exploit.
I find it interesting that the non-technical proponents of net neutrality, that would be people who have no technical understanding of the issue, are the same people who cheer Senator Elizabeth Warren when she spouts off about companies using the roads that "the rest of us pay for."
Companies like Facebook -will- use such a new situation, but in the end it is about ISPs and telcos charging them for it. They rather not pay, it's not like it isn't working for them right now or that Facebook is afraid of small-time competion.
The third-world goat-herder who is now the head of the FCC
Wow, brazen racism and elitism. Of course, it's ok because it's targetted at someone who disagrees with your "right-think" ? This is part of the reason Trump got elected in the first place.
I am a Bernie primary voter who held his nose and voted for DJT. You're right on the money. I cannot stand the faux morality of the Democrats in recent years. I, personally, deemed it a far bigger threat to our country than 4 years of a moron in the White House.
That's right! Brazen racism and elitism is only OK if it is targeted at someone who disagrees with alt-right think! If you think Trump got elected because he is a big fan of foreigners and hates racists you have to be the most stupid motherfucker on the planet ... besides Trump I mean. As stupid as you are, I don't believe you could possibly be as stupid as you seem.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
what is needed is more competition, which is always thwarted by government regulation.
That obviously incorrect assumption brings your whole house of cards down.
There are lots of things that are heavily regulated which promote competition. The road network. The phone network. Commerce between states.
In fact, we can see that a lack of regulation is leading to decreased competition in some areas. For example, many people are served by exactly one ISP, so there is exactly zero competition. Yet they have a choice of TV channels because the airwaves are heavily regulated, even to the point where infrastructure must be shared.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Yes, and the push towards it is coming from the Left wing and Academia. Trump is a push back against it.
You have to explain this to progressives. Trump was elected for two things: Gutting the piss out of the republican party(aka neocons and RINO's out), by people on the left, center and right. And pushing back against the bullshit they've been pushing for 35 years, which has grown far worse in the last 20 years. Democrats on the other hand just voted in a new leader who's pushing more of the same(Obama/Clinton) identity politics rationals. I'll also remind democrats/progressives that during the lead-up for the race, you had open racists proclaiming that their job was to "shut white people down" as part of their reasoning to be elected for leadership.
And if you are a progressive and think that you guys aren't causing problems in society or academia? You only need to look to Canada, where a TA was put through circus because she dared to show neutrality and both sides of an argument in class. That's the bullshit academia is pushing and it's that same post-modernist garbage that's used to label someone a "nazi" or "literally hitler" for wrong-think. You can listen to the entire circus here if you want. It's very much worth the listen to.
Om, nomnomnom...
1.5 Billion Indians, but they're all the same, right?
The end result here is likely you're going to see all that dark fiber Google has starting to light up.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I guess you weren't on Verizon in 2014. Verizon was still throttling Netflix even after Netflix paid their ransom fee. Many people in the US only have 1 option for Internet. Actually Verizon is still throttling Netflix and YouTube on mobile.
Net Nutrality didn't come about because of fear of what could happen, but because of what Verizon, AT&T and Bell were doing.
You may not have been affected, but many were. Don't worry, you most likely will be affected without even realizing it. Netflix might start costing more. YouTube may need to start using more annoying forms of advertising.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
But it was ok when you were saying those things about Obama.
Meanwhile, our experience of the internet is increasingly controlled by a handful of firms, most especially Google and Facebook. The argument for regulating these companies as public utilities is arguably at least as strong as the argument for thus regulating ISPs, and very possibly much stronger; while cable monopolies may have local dominance, none of them has the ability that Google and Facebook have to unilaterally shape what Americans see, hear, and read.
In other words, we already live in the walled garden that activists worry about, and the walls are getting higher every day.
More to the point, net neutrality puts regulations on companies that are, by their nature, regulated monopolies (the ISPs) to promote competition among companies that are not monopolies (tech companies, companies that provide services over the Internet). It specifically prevents those monopolies from taking actions that would be detrimental to competition in other areas. How anyone could honestly believe that removing those regulations would do anything other than reduce competition is absolutely beyond my comprehension, because it pretty much requires those people to have no concept of how the Internet actually works.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
> That traffic shaping has to be consistent across the board and be specific to type of traffic regardless of source and destination.Â
Google, Slashdot, FCC website, and my website all use http to transfer html, css, js, and images.
You're an idiot for thinking that ISPs will be "neutral" about source and destination, that's the rule Ajit Pai is killing. They are definitely going to discriminate based on source and destination because that's how they are going to increase revenues.
Donald Trump
Who?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I don't think the choice of words is appropriate, BUT this kind of talk is EXACTLY what Trump uses on a daily basis. You think Trump is fair and balanced when it comes to opinions that do not match his 1:1? Sheesh, how delusional can one be?
You should have stopped at "BUT." You're defending racism for political reasons, just like all the people who upvoted the OP.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Trump may hate foreigners and hate racists, and yeah, some people on the more racist spectrum voted for trump for perceiving him as racist. What you fail to realize is that for the vast majority racism is not a relevant issue, don't care about it and even might be fed up of it want it out of the daily agenda.
By polarizing everybody as racist / not racist, a lot of people was pushed to the Trump wagon.
In order to turn agencies like the FCC around we need to kill off the monsters in the swamp. Trump and all that supported him must be purged and entirely different leadership applied to all agencies.
So, you do know that Trump didn't win the election and that well over half the country is praying that he chokes to death on a chicken bone this evening, right ivan?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Wow, brazen racism and elitism. Of course, it's ok because it's targetted at someone who disagrees with your "right-think" ? This is part of the reason Trump got elected in the first place.
Yeah, millions of Trumpflakes (God, I wish I came up with that) got their precious little feelings hurt so badly, it motivated them to go to the polls in droves and propelled good ol' orange-face to victory.
Trump won because he's a good salesman and enough Americans were stupid enough to buy his bullshit. His pitch sounded good if you had an entirely broken bullshit detector. Bring back well-paying blue collar jobs, undo the ACA clusterfuck, keep those nasty terrorists/mexicans out, drain the swamp, and something to do with "Merry Christmas". But if you believed a billionaire, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, is going to do anything to help out anyone except his rich amigos, have I got a bridge to sell you.
Truth is, whether you vote for the right or the left, you're just picking which set of rich assholes get to have you underfoot. The right have just done a better job of convincing the average American that their boots hurt less.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
The whole only racists voted for Trump is played out as is the whole attempt at sexual harassment against Republicans which has turned around to democrats being the main instigators. But don't let reality get in the way of your beautiful world. I think it's rather humorous that everyone is blaming Trump and company when President Obama and staff where in control for 8 years and could have handled net neutrality better not to mention crap like daca. But don't look in the mirror just keep blaming everyone else.
Feel free to mod me down because I don't follow the socialist party
If the net neutrality goes away the following happens:
The internet service providers start selling "packages" which define what websites and services people can use. This in turn ENSURES global censorship. This is the wet dream of all the totalitarian/fascist powermongers in the history.
What is one of the first things to go when powermongers start gripping their power? Books/information/literature/etc. starts getting destroyed/censored/hidden. This is exactly the main thing that happens when net neutrality is gone.
Imagine that you want to let people know about horrible things your government is doing. With net neutrality gone, you can only reach your neighbours by meeting them in the front yard, but that's about it...
You mistook what the parent was saying. That wasn't a defense of anything, that was calling out the grandparent for obvious deceit. The grandparent was attempting to preemptively deflect away from Trump and Co's elitism and racism by calling his opposition elitist and racist first.
Sprint, AT&T, Comcast, Verizon: As a Netflix, Hulu customer, you must pay an additional $25 per month.
CORRECT RESPONSE
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, iCloud: As a Sprint, AT&T, Comcast, Verizon employee, you must pay an additional $25 per month subscription.
Cisco, Netgear, Netis, D-link, Samsung, HTE: We have released upgrades that enable our products to form a mesh network.
Municipal government: We are building a MAN for our community to use for local data services, such as SIP and SMTP.
US voters: In federal elections, we will all vote for third-party candidates.
There were legitimate reasons to vote for Donald Trump, one of them being deregulation, and moving power from the Federal government back to states, which he is doing.
Not going to deal with your whole post but only the part where you claim power is being handed back to the states: FCC will stop states from choosing to have network neutrality within their state.
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
That person does not represent the left. I'm not sure what planet they're living on...
Sorry, but shit-face Pai deserves all the scorn thrown his way. His despicable stance on the prison phone call rates shows how a callous ideologue he is, unusual traits among children of poor immigrants.
Swing states voter turnout was around 70%, the total turnout was 60%. Trump won the presidential election.
You want to change the electoral college for direct election. That's ok, but it's a completely different game and you can't know who'd have won it. it.
And even if you equate Trump's current disapproval rates with wanting him choking on a chicken bone, a good chunk of them couldn't care less when it really did matter. BTW, the main reason for that disapproval is personality and not policy based. http://news.gallup.com/poll/21...
...or in Sweden
http://www.breitbart.com/londo...
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
You put his shit to bed.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
The swing vote, those without broken bullshit detectors, decided the election as it always does. They were tired of broken government and chose to try to sabotage it rather than letting it sputter on in status quo secret failure. Trump was not elected because he was really expected to fix anything. Wake up fart brain.
Whatever this thing is we call "The Left" is in the US is a disease and "The Right" got everything it deserved. Trump is way more liberal than he is a conservative... he saw the Republicans were on the ropes and took advantage of them. They probably hate him more than the left but its hard to tell these days.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
what would make you think that business grade internet plans would be impacted by throttling. It will be the first aspect of differentiation among providers to kill that shit for businesses.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
The people you have hated for years elected him.
They were tired of broken government and chose to try to sabotage it rather than letting it sputter on in status quo secret failure. Trump was not elected because he was really expected to fix anything.
Some people believe the scripted rivalries in professional wrestling are real, too. If the Republicans truly believed Trump was going to sabotage anything, they would've have let him run with an (R) next to his name in the primaries. See: Ross Perot
If Trump wants his businesses to keep humming along, he'll play ball just like every politician before him. He has absolutely no incentive to upend any part of the system which has enabled him (and his family) to remain incredibly wealthy.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Literally all that would have been necessary for Trump to lose is for the intelligent people in the country to be aware of how many unbelievably stupid people there are in the country. We underestimated that number and assumed there was no way such a moron would actually win. And again, you aren't getting this. He didn't win the votes, he got installed by the electoral college. Yes, that makes him President. No, it doesn't mean he won the election. He lost the election. The people did NOT vote him in to the presidency.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
You actually believe that, because you are a complete fucking moron. Don't ever forget what a worthless piece of anti-American Shit you are loser boy.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
If you're going to diss Pai, at least be accurate and paint him simply as the corporate shill who gets to regulate his once and future employer.
you are a fucking retard
Tech companies upset - that ought to tell you everything you need to know about this issue. Companies like when the government makes rules that enhance their monopoly.
right ivan?
Jesus. You're the very example of unhinged and sucking at a conspiracy theory. Anyone who disagrees with you is *obviously* a ruskie. Keep digging that hole buddy.
Om, nomnomnom...
Look at his user name Mr. Miagi
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Look at his user name Mr. Miagi
Not really doing anything but showing that you are unhinged. You do realize that more 'educated people' voted for Trump don't you? No you probably don't. Trump isn't what's wrong here, the people who voted for him aren't what's wrong here. What's wrong here are people like yourself that live in social bubbles and really don't understand why large swaths of the public are pissed off. And when someone points this out to you, your only response is to claim they're a russian.
Om, nomnomnom...
you are a fucking retard
Facts, make someone "fucking retarded." You see it here first, at the finest example of an unhinged voting age person that believes "they're always right" and those plebs should just vote the way we tell them because "we know best."
I hope you enjoy digging the neocons, racists, bigots, an identitarians out of the democrats. I'm going to enjoy watching the party collapse under it's own corruption, especially since they just voted for "more of the same."
Om, nomnomnom...
Bullshit. You can't possibly say with a straight face that a bunch of people fooled by a sociopathic moron into voting for him and won't now admit that they screwed the pooch isn't the problem.
I never claimed anyone was Russian. You obviously aren't very bright. Again, look at his user name. It isn't ivan, but it's close. Maybe he is Russian and maybe he isn't. That is immaterial. He is a dumbfuck douchebag. Anyone, including you, who thinks that Trump isn't the problem and then goes on to say people are pissed off (No shit? You mean like Trump goes out of his way to make them?) is a moron. For the record, I also don't think you are Pat Morita's character in the Karate Kid just because I called you Mr. Miagi.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
When something sounds like a good idea, and it has the support of big business, it's probably a good idea to be skeptical.
Oh, my. The recursion may get a bit deep today. Wear boots.
Or instead of relying on the usual heuristics, one might examine the best arguments you can find on each position, and if those arguments seem thin or seem to miss some key issues, perhaps even do some original thinking of your own.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
I can't wait to see your next freakout when you discover he's gonna be elected for a 2nd term.
Om, nomnomnom...
That is possibly one of the most stupid things I've seen someone write on Slashdot. There were a lot of people who didn't know what Trump is or thought "it can't be worse than it has been." Those people don't exist anymore. Trump has literally zero chance of a second presidency, but an excellent chance of spending the rest of his pathetic loser life in prison
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun