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Internal FCC Report Shows Republican Net Neutrality Narrative Is False (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A core Republican talking point during the net neutrality battle was that, in 2015, President Obama led a government takeover of the internet, and Obama illegally bullied the independent Federal Communications Commission into adopting the rules. In this version of the story, Ajit Pai's rollback of those rules Thursday is a return to the good old days, before the FCC was forced to adopt rules it never wanted in the first place. But internal FCC documents obtained by Motherboard using a Freedom of Information Act request show that the independent, nonpartisan FCC Office of Inspector General -- acting on orders from Congressional Republicans -- investigated the claim that Obama interfered with the FCC's net neutrality process and found it was nonsense. This Republican narrative of net neutrality as an Obama-led takeover of the internet, then, was wholly refuted by an independent investigation and its findings were not made public prior to Thursday's vote.
Using a Freedom of Information Act request, Motherboard obtained a summary of the Inspector General's report, which has not been released publicly and is marked "Official Use Only, Law Enforcement Sensitive Information." After reviewing more than 600,000 emails, the independent office found that there was no collusion between the White House and the FCC: "We found no evidence of secret deals, promises, or threats from anyone outside the Commission, nor any evidence of any other improper use of power to influence the FCC decision-making process." [...] Since 2014, Republicans have pointed to net neutrality as an idea primarily promoted by President Obama, and have made it another in a long line of regulations and laws that they have sought to repeal now that Donald Trump is president. Prior to this false narrative, though, net neutrality was a bipartisan issue; the first net neutrality rules were put in place under President George W. Bush, and many Republicans worked on the 2015 rules that were just dismantled. What happened, then, is that Republicans sold the public a narrative that wasn't true, then used that narrative to repeal the regulations that protect the internet.
Using a Freedom of Information Act request, Motherboard obtained a summary of the Inspector General's report, which has not been released publicly and is marked "Official Use Only, Law Enforcement Sensitive Information." After reviewing more than 600,000 emails, the independent office found that there was no collusion between the White House and the FCC: "We found no evidence of secret deals, promises, or threats from anyone outside the Commission, nor any evidence of any other improper use of power to influence the FCC decision-making process." [...] Since 2014, Republicans have pointed to net neutrality as an idea primarily promoted by President Obama, and have made it another in a long line of regulations and laws that they have sought to repeal now that Donald Trump is president. Prior to this false narrative, though, net neutrality was a bipartisan issue; the first net neutrality rules were put in place under President George W. Bush, and many Republicans worked on the 2015 rules that were just dismantled. What happened, then, is that Republicans sold the public a narrative that wasn't true, then used that narrative to repeal the regulations that protect the internet.
You must be joking! That is unpossible!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Repubs playbook in the tl;dr edition.
I am unsure what rattles me more... that a politician would lie or that a republican would lie about the Obama administration...
That's like saying an inspector general looked at the official communications between Nixon and his watergate team and determined that the Watergate team just acted on their own.
A politically motivated move, driven by the political party and hailed by the President at the time by his self-appointed leader of the FCC along with a full on political campaign was NOT politically motivated?! That's bullshit on its face.
But then I'm sure this same inspector general will find the same about repealing it, right?
No, you're not going to find evidence of "collusion" between the White House and the FCC, and no, that does not contradict the claim that the Obama administration got the FCC to pass net neutrality. Net neutrality was a huge goal of the Obama administration and a very big political win for them. It IS possible, you know, for like-minded people to work independently towards a common goal. I've heard that happens from time to time.
And, by the way, can we save everyone a huge amount of time and wasted expense and just assume that we won't find any evidence of "collusion" between this White House and the hacking of the DNC email servers or the purchase of Facebook advertisements? And, can we also just admit that like-minded people can be working independently towards a common goal in THIS instance, too?
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Both major US parties use the same siren song. On the right: "That's what Obama wanted!" On the left: That's what Trump is doing!"
The power brokers now have the ability to galvanize a large portion of the population with a few key buzzwords. It's a lot more work to remain undecided.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
A more common point that I see is that we didn't have net neutrality until 2015. Not only was the net effectively neutral (most of the time) prior to that, the dial-up internet of the dotcom era was regulated similarly, and even had leasing requirements that meant multiple options and some real semblance of competition. The change from that regime happened with cable and DSL, which were less regulated, but still neutral, until the actions from ISPs that prompted the 2015 rules out of necessity.
So, the actual timeline was: Neutral internet->Deregulated broadband->Dickish ISP behavior->Fixing dickish ISP behavior by re-regulating->Re-deregulating broadband.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
In 298 days, President Trump has made 1,628 false and misleading claims
While I would actually agree with you, this would probably just drive these companies out of the US. With nothing accomplished aside of jobs in the US being lost.
The main difference is that I cannot choose to use an ISP in, say, Norway, where there are rather cheap and fast internet connections available. On the other hand, it's trivial for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to shut down their US business and move to any country offering them to do business as they please because on the internet it simply does not matter where your server is located.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is dumb and you should feel dumb.
"Old man yells at systemd"
In the comments section of his FCC blog post about giving thanks.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
The corporations that run these major companies that are busy buying out the government are run largely by Democrats. There are no good guys
When you consider that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, this simplistic worldview isn't so easy to justify.
please correct
So what, 99% of what we do today is very un-American. Why is it suddenly a problem but it was none when state-sponsored monopolies for ISPs were installed? When governments deliberately and forcefully kept others from entering the market? When corporations buy laws that enshrine their market position and ensure they can keep gouging customers because no competition may emerge? That's not un-American?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If you are called an ISP then you should only be responsible for the level 1-3. The hire levels 4-7 are outside of the domain, and in general do not require the same level of infrastructure support. Slashdot can moderate down or even delete my comment so it isn't read, even if my comment was legal. Because I am able to post my view in an other forum, or in general being able make my own site relatively inexpensively.
Today for the ISP we are limited in choices, hence why Net Neutrality is important. In my area I have 3 options, Cable (Spectrum) and Cell Wireless (AT&T and Verizon). In my home Cell coverage is spotty so I only have one real option. All three of these ISP sources have interests in additional services that compete against other services which do not own the infrastructure to be an ISP, and many of the ones who can may not be able to get past the local monopolies to implement.
If I don't like Facebook, Google or Slashdot. I can use an other service. If I don't like my ISP well I am kinda stuck, if my ISP says I shouldn't use a service then I may not be able to do so.
That is the real danger. At the moment the ISP are saying they are not planning on blocking anything, or throttling down anything. But they put in a lot of political capital to get this removed... Which make me wonder why the effort if they are not planning to do something.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Technically trivial perhaps.
However, there -are- alternatives to the major social media services these guys don't want evolving into real threats. Usually these are reactionary to the objectionable actions (privacy ignoring, arbitrary and capricious, politically biased, news manipulation, blah blah) of the Facebooks and Twitters.
Shutting down US operations to relocate elsewhere would be a Godsend to those niche alternative platforms (even if they aren't US centric themselves.)
--- Mercutio was right.
Yep, she won the popular vote. And Trump is President. What's your point exactly for justification?
Shutting down US operations doesn't change anything. Do you really think Joe Randomsurfer cares whether Facebook has its servers in the US, Russia, China or Generistan?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Except that neither Facebook nor Twitter are owned by the U.S. government. If they were, then absolutely, you couldn't ban a U.S. citizen from using them.
But they're not. They're publicly traded. And they have Terms of Service. If you violate the Terms of Service, then they can ban your account. Now, the question should be, are they applying those Terms of Service equally and in an unbiased manner?
I'll admit, I have a Twitter account. I mostly use it to troll politicians, and I use the word 'fuck' like it's punctuation. I won't be a bit surprised if my account gets banned. I've certainly gotten a few 'timeouts' on Twitter.
That being said, I don't want people banned just because I disagree with them. If someone is posting conservative stuff (I consider myself fairly liberal), I'm not going to report it just because it's conservative. That's silly. But I have reported people on Twitter for posting death threats, attacks on religions, etc. Because that is a violation of Twitter's ToS.
Twitter is not required to give people a platform for such things.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Couple of things: .
- If just having your "real name" online means your identify will get stolen then nobody should use Linkedin, right (or better yet, whitepages.com)?
- If someone values their Internet freedoms enough to risk identity theft, that does not make them suckers or vermin. That makes them true patriots. .
- Your "warning" seems more like a threat? Are you a paid astro-turfer or simply a coward who is trying to reduce their coward guilt?
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
More Democrats voted than Republicans. Trump lost the popular vote by millions of votes.
The fact that your country has an electoral system skewed to give advantage to right wing scam artists and liars is unfortunate, but your self-righteous "you should have voted" nonsense is both foolish and inaccurate.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
We need to start again, but this time we need 100% net neutrality across all layers of the network stack. It does us no good to force the physical telecom service providers to be neutral with packets, while at the same time not enforcing neutral handling of the content within those packets by the higher-level communication service providers.
Communication service providers like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Slashdot, Stack Overflow, and Hacker News should be neutral about the submissions, comments and users on their system, just as providers of the physical telecom infrastructure should be neutral about the data they're transmitting.
What's the matter? Did you get kicked off a message board for being an asshole? Did the SJW's say mean things to you?
So I've read the gp's comment, which presents some interesting ideas in a civilized and intelligent manner. I've also read your comment, which is nothing more than a petty, childish insult that's completely void of any real substance. The gp's argument is far more convincing than yours is. The pure hostility you show toward a very reasonable set of ideas additionally makes me think that the gp is correct.
I would advise you to not to base your opinion of an idea on the attitude and tone of its detractors. It is possible for two sides of an argument to both be wrong.
That said, the problem with the GP's reasoning is that he is conflating the transmission of content from one node to another with the display of that content on a node. It's like saying that if we allow all trucks to drive on a road, we must require all businesses to sell whatever the trucks deliver. They are separate issues, but the GP does not seem to get that.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
What are you talking about? Layers 4-7 are implemented by the communication endpoints and simply turn the raw data stream into something useful - 4-6 are typically implemented at the network card driver or operating system level, and I've not heard *any* claims about anything non-neutral about them. If you can successfully establish a communications link with a server, then Layers 1-7 have all done their job.
Even layer 7, the Application layer, has nothing to do with the applications themselves - it's simply the services the client and server can establish between them. HTTP, FTP, SNMP, etc. You can access the Facebook website? Then layer 7 is doing its unbiased job and establishing an HTTP connection between you and the server, allowing the sending and receiving web pages
You seem to be thinking of censorship and content-shaping, which have nothing whatsoever to do with the OSI Network model. And you're getting onto dangerous constitutional grounds as soon as you start telling private entities what they must (or must not) say. I'm all for encouraging social media networks to be less evil about how they censor and shape content, but I don't see a clear way to do so without imbuing that same potential for evil into the government itself - which is frankly a LOT more disturbing. I can choose not to use Facebook. About the safest approach I could see is to declare any service designed to facilitate communication between third parties to be a de-facto public utility, and regulate it as such, just as the FCC had done with ISPs.
A quick review of the upper levels of OSI - about the only way to interfere with them is for the server to refuse your connection (in which case, that should be their right, should it not?) Or for the operating system/driers to disrupt the connection before it reaches the server software (in which case yeah, lets go after the %$#!ers making such malignant software)
Layer 7: The application layer. This is the layer at which communication partners are identified (Is there someone to talk to?), network capacity is assessed (Will the network let me talk to them right now?), and that creates a thing to send or opens the thing received. (This layer is not the application itself, it is the set of services an application should be able to make use of directly, although some applications may perform application layer functions.)
Layer 6: The presentation layer. This layer is usually part of an operating system (OS) and converts incoming and outgoing data from one presentation format to another (for example, from clear text to encrypted text at one end and back to clear text at the other).
Layer 5: The session layer. This layer sets up, coordinates and terminates conversations. Services include authentication and reconnection after an interruption. On the Internet, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP) provide these services for most applications.
Layer 4: The transport layer. This layer manages packetization of data, then the delivery of the packets, including checking for errors in the data once it arrives. On the Internet, TCP and UDP provide these services for most applications as well.
Layer 3: The network layer. This layer handles the addressing and routing of the data (sending it in the right direction to the right destination on outgoing transmissions and receiving incoming transmissions at the packet level). IP is the network layer for the Internet.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Well this is rich, now conservatives are backing a Fairness Doctrine for the Internet as a form of net neutrality!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
As long as the moronic majority votes for them, they in a sense are doing what the public wants. Not saying this is good, but a majority of the voters is inflicting Republicans on themselves without good reason.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
because the issue at hand is only with the physical connection providers, not the content providers like Facebook/Twitter/Reddit...
I've mentioned this earlier. the Net Neutrality situation is only affecting the physical connection aspect by design. since the physical connection is something that is a natural monopoly and should be regulated like a public utility (water, electricity). the rest of it is content.
That's a lot of words for saying "scientists want to have truth, everyone else just wants to be right".
You forgot the air quotes around "right".
Moore was not convicted of anything
That is true but then neither was Hillary Clinton but that has not stopped conservative pundits from dragging her into every conversation about the incompetence, hypocrisy and corruption of their leaders and confidently asserting that she is guilty of a long list of crimes as established fact. So you can think of Roy Moore as the liberal's Hillary Clinton, except while Hillary is merely corrupt Roy Moore is also way, way, way more creepy than she could ever hope to be.
I didn't vote for trump, I voted for Clinton, who had actual foreign policy experience from her time as Secretary of State.
At the moment the ISP are saying they are not planning on blocking anything, or throttling down anything. But they put in a lot of political capital to get this removed... Which make me wonder why the effort if they are not planning to do something.
All they really spent was some money. Political capital doesn't mean as much as it used to. Used to politicians at least had to pass the "what have you done for me lately" test to stay in office, but in today's hyper partisan climate the only test that matters is what letter comes after your last name. To merge an old analogy with a Douglas Adams quote: the foxes have gotten the chickens to elect a fox to guard the henhouse because they don't want to pick the wrong fox and at least he is their fox.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
There are such things as natural monopolies - and the last mile of internet connectivity is a pretty good candidate. Getting those wires to homes involves digging up streets and/or stringing wires. Cable TV providers were coaxed into wiring whole cities with the promise of that monopoly, and with those cables already in place, they became a natural candidate for providing broadband internet.
Even in a city as big as New York (where I have my choice among 3 cable companies - because I live in a building with 250 units - i.e. worth it to wire up), most people don't have a choice among broadband providers. All the FCC apologists I've heard interviewed lately do an immediate pivot to "wireless is the future - and there's plenty of competition there". Well, yeah, competition for severely capped data plans that noone watches TV on, etc. My phone spends most of its time connected to WiFi - and I sure wouldn't use T-Mobile's offerings for my home internet access.
All of which argues for regulating wired home broadband as the natural telecommunications monopoly that it essentially is.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
These women did not produce evidence.
You have perhaps heard of the innocent until proven guilty idea. Eight accusations are not proof of guilt, regardless of the gender of the accusers.
This has nothing to do with whether women are more believable than men. This does not explain about our culture what you are implying it explains. What it does explain is that our culture is full of people like you, who think that justice is served when accusations alone lead to conviction, without evidence.
They are not a majority. Trump got millions of votes fewer than Clinton. Congressional House Republicans got 6 million fewer votes than Congressional Democrats. Republican senators got millions of fewer votes than Democratic senators.
In the United States we are not governed by the party that gets the most votes. In fact, we are governed entirely by the party that got fewer votes.
https://www.usatoday.com/story...
You are welcome on my lawn.
What I acknowledge is what I can see, that is every time someone tries to create competition for the entrenched ISPs you can see them go to their government hos and buy some new laws to ensure that competition does not see the light of day.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
But absence of proof is not proof of absence.
The OIG report didn't debunk the suspicion that Obama had undue influence on the FCC's processes. They simply didn't come across any proof of it in the email records kept by the FCC. They did, though, restate that Wheeler and the president had had conversations about topics like this.
So it still leaves unexplained the FCC's decision to make such a sudden break with longstanding, bipartisan, and legal consensus that the Internet shouldn't be regulated like this.
Fortunately it ain't THAT bad for Europe where there are actually uncapped mobile plans... but not the bandwidth required to make this feasible because even though NGMS promises data rates of 100mbit and more, the bandwidth simply isn't there. In other words, yes, you can transmit 100mbit... if you're the only one. On a cellphone network, you probably usually aren't. And certainly not in New York.
There also is a limit to how many transmitters you can put into a certain area, at some point they start to interfere with each other. So in the end, mobile data, even uncapped, is not a silver bullet.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There are such things as natural monopolies - and the last mile of internet connectivity is a pretty good candidate.
For now it is, sure, since you need fiber or cable for decent broadband connection that isn't metered. I won't be the case at all in a few years, when 5G rolls out...
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Al Franken is STILL in the Senate. they didn't drum him out of anything.
and Trump's knowledge about foreign policy was better?
Since you are already modded up to 5, I'll reply in verbal support. The OSI stack is more of an abstraction after the first 3.5 layers -- the top three layers are all about the software that uses the network, not the network per se, and honestly I think that the idea of applying "net neutrality" to the application, presentation, and session layers is an absurdity as they have never really been a "networking" issue but more a matter of choice of software design at the two ends of the connection. For example, one way of interpreting "neutrality" would be a requirement that the designers of internet-based games write their games to be playable on any top level windowing system in all operating systems -- something like under Steam on steroids. If I wrote a simple game intended to run only under Linux and function only using one particular graphics stack and library set AND wrote it to run over an ISP-run network, I personally could be held in violation of a 7 layer net neutrality law. Imagine Apple, Microsoft, Linux, BSD, OS/2 all being forced by "net neutrality" to make their presentation layers interoperable. A nightmare, impossible to enforce, and stupid -- it would actually inhibit competition, not support it.
What the poster INTENDED, I think, is that the ISP (which is really the NN rules are all about, because they ARE granted a de facto near-monopoly over network connection in many if not most locales -- very few places have a choice of (say) four or five ISPs all with their own wires, and even those places are forced to move packets over common backbones belonging to many different companies (do a traceroute to a dozen distant places or services that you might use if you don't believe me) -- not differentiate their treatment of the bottom 3-4 layers on the basis of the toplevel application being run, but applying NN rules to the application layers themselves is IMO clearly inappropriate at the level of an FCC action and an open invitation to enforce a "universal standard" for all of these layers that believe me, you Would Not Like if you had it because OBVIOUSLY that "standard" would be set by Micro$oft and/or Apple or maybe Google and guess who would control it and regulate it and manipulate it to literally squash all competition that didn't PAY them for complying with the top layer "standards" they set...
I personally do agree that including TCP/UDP in the NN rules makes some sense, but that is primarily because the application layer INTERFACE and the transport layer ROUTING are heavily intertwined -- TCP is designed to make a network connection "reliable" by handling out of order deliver, transmission timeouts, and so on, and an ISP who wanted to MIGHT be able to screw around with this within some set or rules applied "strictly" only to the first three layers. Hence a need for "3.5" layers -- basically requiring ISPs to remain in the business of selling connections that provide their clients with an IP address, some level of bandwidth, some guarantee of QoS that is not modulated by the particular use the client makes of the network within the bounds of some Acceptable Use Agreement. In other words, holding them responsible as a public utility like a power company not to constantly turn off the power to, say, a predominantly black neighborhood in order to keep the power on in the white neighborhood next door, or worse, not to keep the power reliably on unless you buy all of your light bulbs and electrical appliances from the power company itself.
At the same time, I am sensitive to the practical realities of networking (I've written network applications and managed networks all the way back to twisted pair networks without any surviving name). If you are running a network, even in a single building, with your very own routers and DHCP server(s) and so on, that network is GOING to have a finite bandwidth. If you have power users in your organization, one of the IS going to be perfectly capable of saturating your network and degrading the QoS to all of your other users -- the sort of
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
To put this in perspective, I'm libertarian leaning conservative. The Republicans are full of carp on this issue. Very specifically, "taking over the internet" and "net neutrality" really don't belong in the same sentence. That's like saying, "taking over the the marketplace" and "free trade" in the same sentence. It doesn't scan.
I strongly suspect that most congress critters don't understand what the term "net neutrality" means, they just know, dimly, which side their party is on. Ron Wyden does understand the real issue. I think Chuck Schumer is engaged only because prominent Republicans are on the other side of the issue.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
If you're not a shill please prove it with a slashdot account not from last week. I have requested this from 10 shills now and not a single one has complied. I guess you must really value your temporary karma rating. Look at dns-and-bind. Insane right winger with positive karma. Who would have thought!
But you don't have a slashdot account because someone paid you to come here and shit the place up.
The majority of American's didn't buy their bullshit and wanted to keep Net Neutrality.
They have a weird way of showing it, with a voting record that says quite the opposite. The subject is hardly on their minds unless some reporter gets in their face.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Yes, yes.
The problem is, bandwidth needs obey Parkinson's law, i.e. the amount of data expands to fill the available bandwidth. According to that law, wireless connections will always be too slow to be a user's primary connection, because it will always be slower than wired.
Also, wireless is too inconsistent. You can have great speed one minute, and then a bird sits on one side of the tower and shifts the antenna by a few microns, and it causes enough of an increase in multipath interference to make you lose packets for five seconds. Things go badly wrong at that point. (On the plus side, if you're lucky, you can drive past the tower afterwards and get a pre-cooked meal, but I digress.)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
TFA confuses the concepts of "absence of proof" and "proof of absence". The claim the "Republican narrative is refuted", while their citations show merely absence of proof (emphasis mine): "We found no evidence of secret deals, promises, or threats from anyone outside the Commission".
These people aren't dumb — which means, their mixing up the two concepts is deliberate. In other words, they are lying.
Now, as to the original claim — by the evil RethugliKKKans — what evidence could they present to back up their accusation? The President doesn't need to explicitly instruct his appointees to the FCC (or any other Executive-branch agency) to adopt this or that regulation. It is enough for him to simply appoint the people who already sincerely agree with him in the first place.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Which one? There are plenty. Google+, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Tencent Weibo, Sina Weibo, email, SMS, IM.... And if you don't like Facebook, you can convince your friends to move to one of those alternatives, and then you can say whatever you want. And if you can't convince your friends to move, the problem might be that what you're saying isn't anything your friends care about hearing. Just saying.
The key difference is that you have choices. You can choose to use Facebook or some other social network. Other than getting your friends to join so you can talk to them, there is essentially zero effort required and exactly zero expense on your part to switch to another social network. By contrast, if you want to change ISPs, you have to pack up all your stuff, find somebody willing to buy your house, find a new house in a new city to buy, move to that new city, and find a new job in that new city, potentially losing significant amounts of money in the process. That's why ISPs need to be highly regulated, and social networks don't.
Look, I get it. You want to be able to say whatever you want, wherever you want. But your desire does not translate into a legal right. What makes it a legal issue for ISPs is that they are a true natural monopoly for which choosing an alternative is completely infeasible. That distinction matters, and no matter how much you might desire your rights to trump the rights of the companies that are running those services, that's just not the way freedom works.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
2007: It won't be the case in a few years, when 3G is deployed broadly enough. 2011: It won't be the case in a few years, when LTE is deployed broadly enough. 2017: It won't be the case in a few years, when 5G rolls out.
You are clearly uneducated about 5G. It's not like the old protocols and some incremental improvement. Most people do everything in their residence with wireless (Wi-Fi) anyway, including streaming video and stuff.
here is a quick primer on the services going into trial, and Verizon is planning something similar.
You can look at some more detail to whet your appetite right here. 5G might be a mobile broadband service in the distant future, but the real promise is for fixed wireless, providing lots more competition and options for last-mile Internet access. You have to license the spectrum from the FCC, and this may be where the FCC can really enable a lot more competitiveness in the market.
Could it fizzle? Sure. But your out-of-hand dismissal is pure ignorance.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
If you're still dependent on fiber to within a short distance from the premises, that's not going to solve much. You'll still be dependent on a single, for-profit regional fiber provider that can crank up prices on commercial fiber and crank down the price on residential fiber until it drives that competition out of business.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
"Someone on the internet didn't do what I requested! Even though it was only literally impossible!"
Not to say those 10 shills weren't shills, but even if they aren't, expecting them to give a crap what you request.. never mind expecting them to somehow go back in time to create an older account that suits your desires.. is kind of a pointless endeavor.
Yep. That's what they call "deregulation" these days. "Remove things we don't like, and add things that stifle competition." Of course "we" referring to "companies with lots of money to buy off politicians."
Not really the definition most of us have in mind when we hear Trump stumbling through his rhetoric yet again.
So what you're saying is that a spambot should have equal posting rights on all message boards as you and I? Do you really want an internet like that?
And that's not even getting into the necessary distinction between "simply moving packets around" vs "doing something useful with the data in those packets." Never mind the distinction between a (relatively fixed) set of physical cables that are difficult and expensive to duplicate vs software that anyone with enough time and intelligence can create in their basement. The latter being much more open to real competition and therefore less in need of government protection.
Fuck you. I'm non-partisan, although I lean liberal, and I did turn out to vote. I damned sure didn't vote for a fucking reality TV star.
I get to complain with or without your approval.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
You are clearly uneducated in elementary grammar. The post you are replying to is in the present tense. You are replying to it with something in future.
What will be in future does not justify what is in the present. Even if it will be exactly like you dream.
Prediction is difficult, especially of the future - Neils Bohr
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
You are clearly uneducated in elementary grammar. The post you are replying to is in the present tense. You are replying to it with something in future.
What will be in future does not justify what is in the present. Even if it will be exactly like you dream.
Prediction is difficult, especially of the future - Neils Bohr
No, it was not. Besides, the big selling point for NN regulation is that it's needed because "ISPs might do something bad in the future if we don't make a rule against it now."
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
If you're still dependent on fiber to within a short distance from the premises, that's not going to solve much. You'll still be dependent on a single, for-profit regional fiber provider that can crank up prices on commercial fiber and crank down the price on residential fiber until it drives that competition out of business.
Sure, that's possible. But it hasn't happened with mobile. You can pay higher prices for Verizon or AT&T, or you can get much cheaper plans from T-Mobile and Sprint, which use the same exact towers.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
What tense in this in : https://slashdot.org/comments.... ?
And the party you quoted from it in reply ?
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Humor aside, that's a very reductionist argument. The problem isn't with voting or not voting, it's that the people voted into office these days will invariably become a member of one of two tribes that are locked in mortal opposition to one another. They will let the country burn without a second thought if it means they can score political points against the other tribe.
The problem seems to be, in fact, that only one of the two parties will let the country burn to get their way. From an outside perspective, it certainly seems like the Democrats can be counted on to do the right thing (most of the time), and the Republicans can be counted on to take advantage of that fact.
Voting in new people doesn't really help, because unless there's a clean sweep nationwide, they will just become corrupted by the same system.
The system is definitely corrupting. I saw an article a while that explained why politicians actually tend to listen to donors more than average citizens, and the article claimed it was because they spend so much time talking to donors to raise donations. According to that article, the average member of the house, who faces election every 2 years, tends to spend at least 3-4 hours every day on the phone with potential donors. That's half of an average work day spent on just raising money for the next election. Understanding bills, committee work, listening to constituents, meetings, attending the house and everything else they need to do comes out of the other half of their day. Is it any wonder they pay attention to the people with the money, when they spend at least half of their time begging them for money?
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Look, it does sound like a lie, in that Obama might not have been messing with the FCC to get there. However, you can't ignore articles like this One about an internet kill switch that showed there is a desire within government to have some level of control of the internet. (the justification was 'for emergencies', but I say this is ridiculous where is the first people will go in an emergency if they need important information: hint: google, although radio in some areas might still be the go to place.)
So did Republicans lie? No, but it certainly might be a mischaracterization of the how, if not the motives. The Right has long seen attempts to silence them by people on the left. That's not tin foil hattery, (btw, liberals were worried about trump doing the same thing recently also.)
The point is that right now the board is infested with shills who don't normally post here and don't have accounts. They'll argue that soros is a lizard for 5 hours and dismiss the russian shill story as nonsense, if thats who they are then they would jump on a chance to blow up my liberal conspiracy theories.
Yes, if your actual real-life friends switch with you.
Snapchat is actually pretty popular among the younger generation, in part because it isn't Facebook. It's in a pretty good position to challenge Facebook going forward. Social networking isn't any more different than IM was before it. All disruptive innovators have to overcome inertia, and a large social graph is just another form of inertia.
You can't have one without the other—your right to swing your fist, and all. According to the law, you have a right to speech, but you don't have a right to make others listen, nor do you have a right to make others pay for it. What you propose involves forcing others (Facebook) to pay for it and forcing a second group of others (Facebook's users) to listen to types of speech that, by not leaving Facebook for another platform that allows that speech, those users have effectively said that they don't want to hear. That sort of policy would be highly problematic and contrary to a number of existing laws.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.