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'Face Reality! We Need Net Neutrality!' Crowd Chants Across the Country (arstechnica.com)
ArsTechnica staff took to the streets in Washington DC, New York, and San Francisco to capture rallies in support for net neutrality, a week before the FCC is scheduled to take a historic vote rolling back network neutrality regulations. From their report: Protestors say those regulations, which were enacted by the Obama FCC in 2015, are crucial for protecting an open Internet. Organizers chose to hold most of the protests outside of Verizon cell phone stores. Ajit Pai, the FCC Chairman who is leading the agency's charge to repeal network neutrality, is a former Verizon lawyer, and Verizon has been a critic of the Obama network neutrality rules. The protest that got the most attention from FCC decision makers took place on Thursday evening in Washington DC. The FCC was holding a dinner event at the Hilton on Connecticut Avenue, just north of the city's Dupont Circle area. Protestors gathered on the street corner outside the hotel, waving pro-net neutrality posters to traffic, blaring chants, projecting pro-net neutrality messages on a building across the street, and telling personal stories about what net neutrality meant to them via a megaphone. The FCC's two Democratic commissioners also joined the demonstration, Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel. They both gave brief speeches to the protestors, rallying for the cause and discussing the importance of a neutral Internet.
Chanting does a lot of good. It really changes things, because the government really cares what you think.
If not, Ajit Pai doesn't care about what you have to say. Anti-net-neutrality bot comments are acceptable in any form however.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Improving the practical freedom of the average human has always involved adding laws to the books. Aimless minimization of laws only benefits the most powerful at the expense of the rest of society.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Politicians can safely ignore them. And they do.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
OK, so let's say the proposed change is crafted to increase competition, improve service, reduce prices, and put a chicken in every pot before 18 months are up. All these things are testable. All significant policy changes from any side should come with a test plan, a rollout plan, a success criteria and a backout plan for every stage of the rollout.
And if the effect of the policy change is too small to determine among all the other noise in the system take specific steps to address that by bundling policy changes or testing it in a smaller environment - I believe even the Chinese do that. For example, ask for state governors to volunteer their state as a testbed for policy that they believe is a great idea for the US as a whole.
Nullius in verba
No, obviously you don't understand what America is about. It isn't supposed to be government granted monopolies running free without any oversight or restrictions. In the real world (as opposed to your suburbanite middle class faux Libertarian bubble), there needs to be some oversight on these artificial monopolies.
That didn't vote for Trump are protesting. Folks, you do realize this doesn't matter, right? Steve Bannon might be an unrepentant asshole but he said something brilliant. I'm paraphrasing here but the gist is: if the other side keeps banging on about issue the working class doesn't care about and we're sticking to a message of economic popularism we're going to be in power for the next 1000 years. I know a bunch of liberals who were upset that the 1000 year part was a thinly veiled reference to the Third Reich, again, missing the point entirely...
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Look at any labor law or environmental law, just off the top of my head. In the absence of any such laws, any labor arrangement at least down to indentured servitude, if not slavery, of adults and children, would be enforceable as a private contract between individuals, and corporations would save money by heavily polluting the environment. These things did happen in the past in the absence of such laws.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Very often, both sides in a conflict can shout "freedom" and claim the moral high ground. Remember the Confederate monuments? Those brave Southern heroes were fighting for their freedom -- their freedom to own other people. Freedom and tyranny are in the eye of the beholder.
I agree, saying "freedom from regulation" sounds a lot better than saying "corporations' right to prey on their own customers is more important than the customers' right to choose what information they can access." When you put that way, it's hard to get behind.
For my part, I care a lot more about my own freedom than I do about Verizon's.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
The problems with that are twofold: 1. Nobody wants a hundred companies digging up their yard. 2. Even if they did, most areas are not dense enough to viably support more than one infrastructure provider.
So the "market-based" approach basically translates to, "Screw poor areas. You don't get fast Internet. Screw rural areas. You don't get fast Internet. Screw everybody in suburbia. You don't get fast Internet. But if you live in dense housing in one of about twenty or thirty major cities, you'll get three or four choices." You cannot create competition in a natural monopoly market. It can't be done no matter how much you deregulate, because the incumbent will always be able to cut costs to nothing until the newcomer goes out of business, then raise rates to make up that money and more. I've watched this happen in smaller markets.
The only viable semi-market-based approach is one in which the government builds the infrastructure and leases access to ISPs in a nondiscriminatory fashion. But the Republicans don't like that approach because it doesn't produce monopolies for their cronies, so appealing to their desire for competition won't help.
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This assertion relies on what I call "The Unabomber option." In order to participate in society, you will have to "opt into" certain agreements - usually for utility services, housing, and some form of employment. The only alternative is to live alone in a shack deep in the woods, like the Unabomber. This incredibly undesirable alternative is presented as a perfectly good and reasonable option for the purpose of making an unfair agreement seem more consensual than it really is.
In the case of labor laws, the choice would've been to sign up for, or compete with, the aforementioned exploitative labor practices; or take the Unabomber option.
Coming back to housing, we have housing regulations for the same reason. Without them, landlords and homebuilders would minimize the safety and privacy of the housing they offer to maximize their own profit (at least on the low end of the market). The alternative was to construct your Unabomber shack on a squatted plot of land and hope you wouldn't be found out.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Slavery and indentured servitude are constructs of the government and only exist and are enforced through government force.
How is slavery a construct of the government when slavery is illegal? Does it "exist and [is] enforced through government force" when criminal gangs force people into slavery in countries where it is illegal?
Environmental law amounts to a license to pollute; traditional English common law property rights are far more effective at protecting the environment.
History disagrees with your delusions.
Fanatically anti-fanatical