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Ajit Pai and the FCC Want It To Be Legal for Comcast To Block BitTorrent (theverge.com)
Nilay Patel, reporting for The Verge: FCC Chairman Ajit Pai released his proposal to kill net neutrality this week, and while there's a lot to be unhappy with, it's hard not to be taken with the brazenness of his argument. Pai thinks it was a mistake for the FCC to try and stop Comcast from blocking BitTorrent in 2008, thinks all of the regulatory actions the FCC took after that to give itself the authority to prevent blocking were wrong, and wants to go back to the legal framework that allowed Comcast to block BitTorrent.
Are ports really necessary, because this sounds like it will just result in all sessions being routed over port 80 and a cat and mouse game of avoiding deep packet inspection.
Serious question here. What's the difference between these arguments?
1. You shouldn't ban BitTorrent. It's just a protocol. Just because some people use it to steal digital content doesn't mean BitTorrent is inherently bad.
2. You shouldn't ban guns. It's just a device. Just because some people use it to kill innocents doesn't mean guns are inherently bad.
You know, not all content shared by bittorrent is illegal.
Every quarter, I get an update email on a software package that I use which is actually distributed via bittorrent, because it lightens the load on the main server when everybody is trying to get the file at about the same time.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It's actually a good question. Bittorrent and guns are both tools that are enablers for crime. Banning the tool instead of the crime affects legitimate use of the tool by law-abiding citizens.
Here's the difference:
The law is supposed to allow as much freedom as is possible, up to a certain extent. It then puts up a wall even for legitimate uses once the chance of damage has gone high enough. You can legalize hand grenades for recreational use too, or how about selling plutonium for educational purposes. Plutonium doesn't kill people, people kill people. But at that point the chance of damage is so high, basically screw it all and ban it, even for legitimate uses.
This balance was moved with flights where sharp objects and liquids are banned.
On the flip side, a baseball bat can kill a person, and so can riding a bicycle without a helmet. But at this stage, damage potential is relatively small and personal freedoms are important. Instead of trying to put in a sliding scale for everything (bats of certain sizes, faster bicycles, similar to liquid amounts for flights), it's just better to leave personal freedoms be, because a cyclist falling or an angry person with a bat cannot kill dozens of people.
This is why knives are legal to own, hand grenades are not, and guns of different sizes/capacities is where that threshold lies. With this argument, I believe assault/automatic rifles, high capacity magazines have been proven to cause excessive damage compared to the rights and personal freedoms of wanting such firearms. This is in contrast to say bolt action hunting rifles with 5 rounds. And certainly illegally downloading movies and music which you most likely would not be paying for anyway (and impact the financial earnings of artists by a small amount), is far far away from this threshold.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Before bittorrent, downloading linux distributions could take days, and it cost the distro money for the server load. With torrents I can download a whole distro in a few minutes! And it doesn't add to the costs of publishing the distro.
There is so much wrong with this I don't know where to begin, but your argument basically boils down to "the free market will fix it".
And there is more than ample evidence that that flat out will not happen.
There are still plenty of areas where there is only one provider, sometimes none. Cities that tried to start their own ISPs were sued and forced to abandon their efforts. There are more than enough dirty tactics employed by the encumbant ISPs to make it incredibly difficult for small ISPs to get off the ground, and eliminating net neutrality will just give the existing ISPs that much more power to crush emerging competition.
It's just an arms race, the moment you block BitTorrent someone makes a new protocol. You block that protocol too and they make a 3rd protocol that disguises itself as normal traffic.
Soon Comcast is gives up entirely, or gets in an arms race with the protocol authors trying to detect P2P traffic with legitimate traffic getting caught in the crossfire.
I stole this Sig
As a copyright holder, I've been very happy with Agit Pai so far.
On behalf of all of the internet, fuck you and the horse you rode in on. Your assault against the internet and the platform which you should see as an enabler in the name of a few bad apples should be met in kind. I hope you get what you want.
I hope your precious Agit Pai enables mega corporations to stamp on your little copyright. May you be screwed over in more ways than you're proposing to screw the common man. God speed.
You really do not get it, this is all about mass corporate censorship, not blocking applications, blocking you, putting you off line, silencing you. How bad will be the outcome, face not that bad at all because the fury of millions of geeks is going to scare the crap out of the entirely corrupt US government. Net Neutrality will be back pretty quick, once the Republicans realise they will go from dominating the US government to being an also ran for many years to come. Geeks and nerds are an unforgiving lot being subject to many harassments in the youth has often not left them in the best temperament and in adult life, they know their intellect puts them well ahead of others in the game of political discourse. Grind the fuckers until the beg for mercy, be brutal, be mean, let them really know how pissed off you are and forget about the idea of not voting them, what a pathetic message to send, you are going to campaign against them, actively for shits and giggles to put them on the unemployment line (no revolving doors for them when they can no longer win elections and have no public relations value, out on the collective assess). Put the fucking fear of the political wilderness into them, let it keep them awake at night. Don't forget to send that email, with a note of who you will be actively campaigning for, let them know who will be replacing them.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I have watched the news religiously. It is mostly covering Republican pedophilia and barely ever mentions a Democrat for more than a quick bit then moves on.
It's because the Democrats like Franken admit wrongdoing, apologize and take steps to make good. So the news story goes away. In Franken's case, his accuser accepted his apology. So there's no story any more.
Republicans like Trump and Moore just shout FAKE NEWS NEVER HAPPENED LIARS SLUTS THE LOT OF THEM!!! so the story continues and continues...