I totally agree with you that it should be law, however the citizens of the US as a whole are not able to form an educated opinion on this yet. We on/. are not even able to discuss this without misinformation about net neutrality popping up and muddying up the discussion. If this went to congress now the special interests would start a campaign convince the public of the dangers of "the government takeover of the internet". They already have a head start by being large contributors to just about every member of congress.
The FCC is doing what they can to try to protect the internet while the issue evolves. One day I think we should take it to congress but doing that too early would only make things worse.
While this would be fine for a household, satellite internet has such limited download/upload bandwidth it would be next to worthless for business or school applications that are the focus of this money.
Plus, the latency makes gaming a real challenge!
That's a little naive don't you think? I agree this is mostly politics but during a recession there are programs that would cause extreme amounts of chaos if they are cut or would cause more of a setback than is responsible.
Here's a couple; say that during a recession we cut NASA down to nothing, saying we can't afford "science, discovery, and development" right now but soon as the economy improves they are back in business. The amount of time it would take to get them ramped back to a productive level would be more expensive than just borrowing during the downtime. So it is fiscally responsible to use deficit spending for that because its cheaper than the alternative. Or how about health care, if every time we hit a recession we let people get sick and die how would that help our workforce work out of the recession? So it would make sense to borrow money for that as well.
The flip side to this is that when things improve we don't instantly cut taxes because the government is pulling in more taxes than it uses. When Clinton left office there was a surplus and Bush's first action was to cut taxes, it happens over and over again, when things are good we want low taxes but when things are bad we need the governments help to get through it. We have to break out of that mindset.
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I totally agree with you that it should be law, however the citizens of the US as a whole are not able to form an educated opinion on this yet. We on /. are not even able to discuss this without misinformation about net neutrality popping up and muddying up the discussion. If this went to congress now the special interests would start a campaign convince the public of the dangers of "the government takeover of the internet". They already have a head start by being large contributors to just about every member of congress.
The FCC is doing what they can to try to protect the internet while the issue evolves. One day I think we should take it to congress but doing that too early would only make things worse.
While this would be fine for a household, satellite internet has such limited download/upload bandwidth it would be next to worthless for business or school applications that are the focus of this money. Plus, the latency makes gaming a real challenge!
That's a little naive don't you think? I agree this is mostly politics but during a recession there are programs that would cause extreme amounts of chaos if they are cut or would cause more of a setback than is responsible. Here's a couple; say that during a recession we cut NASA down to nothing, saying we can't afford "science, discovery, and development" right now but soon as the economy improves they are back in business. The amount of time it would take to get them ramped back to a productive level would be more expensive than just borrowing during the downtime. So it is fiscally responsible to use deficit spending for that because its cheaper than the alternative. Or how about health care, if every time we hit a recession we let people get sick and die how would that help our workforce work out of the recession? So it would make sense to borrow money for that as well. The flip side to this is that when things improve we don't instantly cut taxes because the government is pulling in more taxes than it uses. When Clinton left office there was a surplus and Bush's first action was to cut taxes, it happens over and over again, when things are good we want low taxes but when things are bad we need the governments help to get through it. We have to break out of that mindset.