Oh yes, just like the cell carriers work! Perfect!
That is a good example of a market failure. A limited public resources (spectrum) is tightly coupled to exploitable human rights (speech, expression, association, security in papers) and there's a healthy pinch of economic network effect in there as well. The existence of such market failures is precisely why the closest approximation of the theoretical free market that can be achieved by man is a well-regulated market.
Believing in free market theory as a valid analytical tool does not preclude believing in market regulation. It is only fools and extremists -- who ignore all empirical economic data -- who believe that the ideal practical Free Market is the Laissez Faire market.
Usually? Like, when? Tuesday through Friday and alternate Sundays? It's a theory, it doesn't change from one pass to the next. I'm guessing that what you are saying is that practical implementations usually suck. That, of course, would be the reason for the term theoretical that I used to qualify "free market."
leaving aside what constitutes a free market (a totally free market would be dominated by whoever had the biggest gun).
Have you even read Wealth of Nations? By "totally free market" I'm guessing you're talking about laissez faire, which is not the system that Adam Smith advocated. As for "whoever had the biggest gun", even laissez faire includes property rights and police. The system in which the person with the biggest gun wins is called "pure anarchy" -- and even most anarchists don't believe in pure anarchy.
Assuming that everyone is acting in rational self-interest. Once you leave the "rational" part out - as the larger players inevitably do - then you have the situation above, where any new competitors are effectively locked out.
Yes, very true. That is the reason that I believe that the closest possible approximation of the theoretical free market is a regulated market with extreme openness and performance analysis, and the explicit goal of maximizing the long run GDP growth rate(*). We must constantly measure the performance of the actual market to see how closely it is approximating the theoretical free market. Whenever we find distortions that we believe we can balance, we should begin testing the proposed means for doing so by running them as actual economic policy. And we should very carefully monitor those offsetting regulations to ensure that they are, in fact, increasing the accuracy of the actual market's approximation of the theoretical free market.
* Maximization of the long run GDP growth rate is the pro-social upside of the theoretical free market(**), and the only objectively just cause for adopting it as the target economic system(***).
** Note that for the math in the theoretical free market to work, you have to assume "self" means "temporal meta-self" -- that each actor acts in the rational interest of every identical proxy of itself anywhere in time. Otherwise the math succumbs to short-run oriented failures.
>> New competitors enter the market, undercut the would-be oligarchs, and the process starts all over again.
> Except this isn't guaranteed to happen. And should someone try it, the oligarchs are established players in the market, with access to far greater amounts of resources than the startup. Hell, most of the time one of the oligarchs just buys the startup.
Completely agreed. I would put these sorts of shenanigans by oligarchs under 'barriers to entry,' which I identified as the cost of entering the market -- and which ultimately translates to markup on consumer goods. Barriers to entry are a bad thing in general(*), and are particularly despicable when they reward the corrupt.
Consider this line from Thinking in Systems: "According to the competitive exclusion principle, if a reinforcing feedback loop rewards the winner of a competition with the means to win further competitions, the result will be the elimination of all but a few competitors." Thinking in Systems comes across as a bit lefty to me -- I'd prefer a more neutral narrative -- but the system theory stuff is really good.
* There are some barriers that we create intentionally, by fiat of government, like copyright, patents, FFA, HAM operator licenses, etc. These things we should constantly measure to ensure that we are getting good value out of the barrier. Some would say the barrier of copyright, for example, has become more costly to society than the value it generates.
Because everyone automatically undercutting their competitors by a few cents over and over until everyone is selling at cost and all but a couple players eventually have to shut down because they can't afford to run a profitless business forever, whereupon the few remaining players can finally raise prices... isn't effectively collusion or a market distortion.
Your comment is exactly correct, but I get the feeling you are trying to be snarky. You also fail to mention the next step after the remaining players raise prices: New competitors enter the market, undercut the would-be oligarchs, and the process starts all over again. The lower the barriers to entry (and with Amazon, they are very low (except that Amazon is the sole supplier (but I digress))), the lower the cost for the new competitors to jump in.
Eventually, equilibrium is reached at the point where the cost of entering the market plus the time value of the startup money is just covered by the profit over the average lifespan of a new entrant. It is a naturally self-regulating system that seeks the optimal market price of consumer goods and constantly adjusts for the changing time value of money. Pretty cool stuff, right?
In general, the leverage that the European citizens have over the EC is significantly smaller than the leverage the Americans have over their federal government.
Hey, now, them's fightin' words. Our democracy is way less responsive to the people than your democracy!
I'd put a smiley so you know I'm joking, but I don't feel like smiling just now.
...they responded to a daunting 1.3 million demands for subscriber data...' One stinging statistic: AT&T gets 230 requests for data per hour, and turns down only 18 per week.
The summary is mistaken. From the article:
AT&T alone now responds to an average of more than 700 requests a day, with about 230 of them regarded as emergencies that do not require the normal court orders and subpoena.
they'll be able to recreate the 'feeling of recognition you get in a favourite restaurant,'
I think they're a little more likely to create the feeling of recognition that you get when the creepy, slightly desperate receptionist asks about your dog by name, despite the fact that you haven't told anyone at the office that you have a dog.
They are allowed to monitor speech on the telephone, and they're also required by law to do so since the Patriot Act.
The telcos have intercept rooms run by the government that some believe are being used to do warrantless surveillance, but most believe that at worst the government is making transient recordings (as you say) that they only read if they can get probable cause and are doing warrantless surveillance / analysis only on the endpoints and timestamps. And regardless, the telcos are not the ones doing the surveillance, they're just making it possible.
Also, it was not the Patriot Act that made that possible. It was big juicy contracts. The government agreed to give the telcos "compensation" for the trouble of supporting the intercepts. The "compensation" was so much more than the cost to the telcos that one CEO (T-Mobile, I think) actually got accused of failing his fiduciary responsibility for refusing. D.C. also had to pass a retroactive immunity law around 2006 or so -- long after the Patriot Act -- to keep the telcos from getting sued for their part in it.
Which, if you think about it, is really far more nefarious. The government is using public money to convince private corporations that have deep access into your life (by nature of the services they provide) to betray your interests. The corporations are less constrained by the Bill of Rights, and the government can simply grant them immunity retroactively if anyone starts thinking about petitioning for redress. It is a rather dirty bit of abusing public resources to circumvent the intent of The Constitution.
But do be careful to note that this implies collusion between the corporations and the government. The siren song of oligarchy draws both sides into abusive behavior. Trusting either side to be looking out for your interests -- whether by the silent hand or representation -- is a fools road.
John Adams said, "The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty." It would behoove us to realize that anyone with the power to endanger the public liberty is a threat -- regardless of whether their power derives from executive authority or from control over our communications.
However, on your second point, the only reasons ISPs have to "buy" access to the spectrum, rather than simply begin using it, is because the government has imposed itself into the mix here, by force,
Multiple transmitters operating on the same frequency interfere with each other. You should be able to work out the rest on your own.
What if they wanted to censor some child pornography? Or some legitimate terrorism related communications that threatened lives?
I don't think they have the right or privilege to do any more than Ma Bell. The telephone companies are not allowed to monitor and censor speech on the telephone, even if it is about terrorism or child pornography. No more than the postal service is allowed to inspect postal mail and censor child pornography or terrorist communications.
If you have a legitimate link showing that Verizon has or even wants to censor people's political opinions
Free speech is not limited to political speech. See "The People Versus Larry Flynt" for an in-depth analysis.
Let me play the devil's advocate with you about access to rights of way.
Always a healthy thing. Thanks.
The way I understand it, the municipality owns the rights of way, and anyone who has a cable they want to run must get their permission and follow their rules.
That sounds pretty close to me, though I think some rights of way have federal involvement? Not sure, but I'm thinking interstate highways, interstate pipelines, etc. Not important in our discussion, though.
Public roadways work the same: the municipality controls them, but anyone can use them provided they get permission (in the form of licenses, inspections, etc.) and follow the rules.
Not exactly the same -- cars are more like packets. Roads are more like cables. It isn't necessary to make the distinction at the broad level we are discussing (see next section), but an extra factor with roads, cables, and spectrum is that there's only enough room for a very small number of them (at least relative to packets or cars). This means there is usually a small-order n-opoly in communications, for cost efficiency's sake. Likewise in roadways (see Manhattan bridges and tunnels). In some cases there is even an extra artificial monopoly granted to the network provider, regardless of whether space is available for more cabling.
No one, however, expects that automobile drivers have to act in the public interest because they use public roadways.
They pay society cash for their licenses, and must act in the public interest in a number of ways: They must not drive while intoxicated, they must keep their emissions system properly maintained, they must give way to emergency vehicles, and they must obey traffic laws which are designed in the public interest of maximizing the safe flow of traffic.
The thing is, net neutrality bills are a potentially effective solution to a problem that hasn't really manifested its self yet, and quite possibly never will.
You're saying the problem is illusory.
While there has been some niche cases of ISPs trying to throttle torrents and things like that
Except that it has already been happening. And an article earlier today quoted Verizon saying that they believe they have the right and intend to restrict speech.
for the most part, there's no reason for me to believe that the stuff that I personally do on the Internet will be restricted
Yet you still don't believe that what you personally do will be restricted, and apparently you disdain the notion that others, who may have more controversial things to say, also deserve the right to speak freely.
If anything, the bills will probably result in ISPs having to do more paperwork and such and then deciding that to cover the costs, they're going to make me start paying for my bandwidth after I go above a 5GiB/month limit.
So you present your own phantasm problem. A problem which, unlike net bias, has not yet happened. A problem which, unlike net bias, none of the major players are saying they intend to bring about.
But hey, the answer to all of our problems (whether they exist or not) is to just put the government's hand in every single aspect of every single corporation until they no longer exist, right?
Your idea of "freedom" is expropriating others' private property for your own freedoms, just because those others are large business entities, right?
Nope, I'm actually a pretty hard-core free market guy.
My idea of freedom for network providers is this:
1. You want immunity from liability for what you carry? Fine, you have to be agnostic to what you carry. If you want discretion, you are liable.
2. You want exclusive rights to spectrum and access to rights of way? Cool, but you have to act in the public interest -- which includes supporting the most important freedom we have; free speech.
You don't have to do those things, but you can't use our spectrum, our rights-of-way, and be granted immunity if you do not give some quid-pro-quo to society for the privilege. It's like the free market, you have to pay for what you get -- but since the goods and services you are getting are public resources and civil liability privileges, your payment is to society and the transaction is managed by our government.
Ron and Rand Paul are shifting the central focus of their family's libertarian crusade to a new cause: Internet Freedom.
Depends what you mean by freedom. According to this Ars Technica Article, he means the freedom of corporations to decide who gets to speak and what they get to say on the Internet.
This seems like welcome news to me.
I'd say that depends pretty heavily on whether you want citizens to be free to speak, or network providers to be free to generate revenue by restricting speech.
I know that you aren't saying that corporations don't have free speech, because they do as ruled by the supreme court.
I question the intelligence of anyone who takes "corporate personhood" too seriously, and doesn't understand that it's a legal fiction. The supreme court doesn't actually consider corporations to be people, nor do they have all the rights of citizens, since they aren't people.
I agree that corporations are not people and the SCOTUS has never consistently applied the principle that they are. And yet there are people who keep arguing that corporations have rights. Like the old version of you from the original post. I am happy to see that I am getting through your thick skull as evidenced by your revised perception of corporate rights, but your continued belligerence tires me.
Newspapers certainly are not 'equal representation,' and we don't limit their speech.
Of course we do. For example, newspapers have fairly strict decency standards, they are held more strictly to libel standards than private citizens, and there are equal time standards for campaigning politicians. News media also have strong self-regulatory bodies, focused on standards and practices with a strong bias toward verifiable fact, which exist largely to avoid further government regulation (a more well-known example of this is the MPAA's motion picture rating system and the game content industry's similar rating system).
The recent touchstone case in this regard is Fox News. Over the past decade, their bias has been the subject of some pretty serious criticism for putting self-regulation at risk, and was even briefly the subject of a bill in Congress to tighten government regulation of news media.
Did you even think through your argument before posting.
We needn't lower ourselves to browbeating -- we are obviously both intelligent enough to discuss this matter on its merit.
No decisions are made by equal representation of the people.
Lots of decisions are intended to be made by equal representation of the people (those who have the vote anyway). We have elections every year to do so.
But that is irrelevant. The subject of equal opportunity in "Corporate speech decisions" from my post is the speech part, not the decisions.
So what good argument is there for limiting free speech of corporations?
Free speech is a right with which each natural person is equally endowed. Corporate speech decisions are not made by equal representation of The People.
If you think the government will just ignore the law and do whatever it wants anyway, then any discussion of the law is moot.
Actually, that is when it is most important to discuss the law; to document the non-compliance as a part of the cultural record and to bring it to raise it as an issue to those in government who are supposed to act as the correcting force.
It is the natural course of governments to seek to do what they think is in the best interests of the citizenry. It is also the nature of the people who embody government to realize that they could do more good for the people if they were uninhibited by law. Finally, it is the nature of government on our scale to have some secrets in order to operate effectively.
Given that humans are fallible and subject to distorted perception, it is the nature of such a system for abuses to occur. Each time such an abuse occurs, it either leads to correction or reinforcement of the behavior. Correction if they are punished, reinforcement if they are not.
In the United States, The People are the ultimate sovereigns. We are the ones who have to ensure that the government acts in the interest of the nation. We do that by correcting the government when its internal mechanisms fail to do the job. When the government ignores the law and its internal mechanisms fail to correct it, it is our most important patriotic duty to discuss it, to vote them out if they do not listen, to formally demand redress if we elect those who promise correction and they fail to do so, and to remove them by force if they deny the authority of petition for redress. Each subsequent step is significantly more costly than the one before. The least costly one is discussion.
Discussing lawlessness in government is not frivolous. On the contrary, discussion is the first and least costly means to avoiding the bloody mess of revolution. Denial of such lawlessness or inhibiting the discussion thereof is a path to escalation.
In my belief the concept of learning must be met before one can call anything AI.
They learn by reading documents and observing events from the real world -- just the way humans do it.
Does your software actually allow the computer to understand anything.
No more than your wetware allows you to "understand" anything (abstraction, identity, association).
Can it do anything with that information except what you explicitly tell it, no?
Not no, yes! I put zero explicit knowledge into my AIs (cuz the computer knows better than me). As for doing things: The advertising software was used to increase people's purchasing behavior to the tune of a few hundred thousand dollars in a single month (random A/B test against traditionally targeted ads). The music software should do the same for music purchasing once it goes live. The text software was just for fun.
That said, you can jump in the other direction (Asimovian robots : First Law:: your software : ???) and then consider whether the result is still reasonable in its new context.
I'll go with "First Law" as the replacement for the three question marks.
Suppose text analysis software being used to design ideally persuasive policy rhetoric. Now consider using that software in a propaganda astroturfing campaign. I know a guy who is researching it at a big national government-funded lab. Cool stuff if you can get past the Strangelovian overtones. In the corporate world, such tools have extraordinary power to choose words and phrases for PR campaigns that alter our consumption behavior based on emotional reactions instead of rational self-interest.
Information is a whole lot more powerful than money. Suasion of information can distort perception, just as manipulation of investments can distort markets. Need an example? Check out The Smoking Suffragettes of Edward Bernays.
Now imagine automating that. Think of the power at stake. Think of the staggering amount of money, power, and influence on the table. That is a great big pile of the 'R' in ROI, and the technology exists.
Slashdot Mirror
you shouldn't believe every leak you see
You know, that wouldn't be a problem if you would show the citizens the treaties you are considering subjecting them to.
Oh yes, just like the cell carriers work! Perfect!
That is a good example of a market failure. A limited public resources (spectrum) is tightly coupled to exploitable human rights (speech, expression, association, security in papers) and there's a healthy pinch of economic network effect in there as well. The existence of such market failures is precisely why the closest approximation of the theoretical free market that can be achieved by man is a well-regulated market.
Believing in free market theory as a valid analytical tool does not preclude believing in market regulation. It is only fools and extremists -- who ignore all empirical economic data -- who believe that the ideal practical Free Market is the Laissez Faire market.
The theoretical free market sucks hard usually
Usually? Like, when? Tuesday through Friday and alternate Sundays? It's a theory, it doesn't change from one pass to the next. I'm guessing that what you are saying is that practical implementations usually suck. That, of course, would be the reason for the term theoretical that I used to qualify "free market."
leaving aside what constitutes a free market (a totally free market would be dominated by whoever had the biggest gun).
Have you even read Wealth of Nations? By "totally free market" I'm guessing you're talking about laissez faire, which is not the system that Adam Smith advocated. As for "whoever had the biggest gun", even laissez faire includes property rights and police. The system in which the person with the biggest gun wins is called "pure anarchy" -- and even most anarchists don't believe in pure anarchy.
Assuming that everyone is acting in rational self-interest. Once you leave the "rational" part out - as the larger players inevitably do - then you have the situation above, where any new competitors are effectively locked out.
Yes, very true. That is the reason that I believe that the closest possible approximation of the theoretical free market is a regulated market with extreme openness and performance analysis, and the explicit goal of maximizing the long run GDP growth rate(*). We must constantly measure the performance of the actual market to see how closely it is approximating the theoretical free market. Whenever we find distortions that we believe we can balance, we should begin testing the proposed means for doing so by running them as actual economic policy. And we should very carefully monitor those offsetting regulations to ensure that they are, in fact, increasing the accuracy of the actual market's approximation of the theoretical free market.
* Maximization of the long run GDP growth rate is the pro-social upside of the theoretical free market(**), and the only objectively just cause for adopting it as the target economic system(***).
** Note that for the math in the theoretical free market to work, you have to assume "self" means "temporal meta-self" -- that each actor acts in the rational interest of every identical proxy of itself anywhere in time. Otherwise the math succumbs to short-run oriented failures.
*** Assuming all people are created equal.
patents, FFA, HAM
Note: by FFA I was referring to firearms dealers, not the Future Farmers of America.
>> New competitors enter the market, undercut the would-be oligarchs, and the process starts all over again.
> Except this isn't guaranteed to happen. And should someone try it, the oligarchs are established players in the market, with access to far greater amounts of resources than the startup. Hell, most of the time one of the oligarchs just buys the startup.
Completely agreed. I would put these sorts of shenanigans by oligarchs under 'barriers to entry,' which I identified as the cost of entering the market -- and which ultimately translates to markup on consumer goods. Barriers to entry are a bad thing in general(*), and are particularly despicable when they reward the corrupt.
Consider this line from Thinking in Systems: "According to the competitive exclusion principle, if a reinforcing feedback loop rewards the winner of a competition with the means to win further competitions, the result will be the elimination of all but a few competitors." Thinking in Systems comes across as a bit lefty to me -- I'd prefer a more neutral narrative -- but the system theory stuff is really good.
* There are some barriers that we create intentionally, by fiat of government, like copyright, patents, FFA, HAM operator licenses, etc. These things we should constantly measure to ensure that we are getting good value out of the barrier. Some would say the barrier of copyright, for example, has become more costly to society than the value it generates.
Because everyone automatically undercutting their competitors by a few cents over and over until everyone is selling at cost and all but a couple players eventually have to shut down because they can't afford to run a profitless business forever, whereupon the few remaining players can finally raise prices ... isn't effectively collusion or a market distortion.
Your comment is exactly correct, but I get the feeling you are trying to be snarky. You also fail to mention the next step after the remaining players raise prices: New competitors enter the market, undercut the would-be oligarchs, and the process starts all over again. The lower the barriers to entry (and with Amazon, they are very low (except that Amazon is the sole supplier (but I digress))), the lower the cost for the new competitors to jump in.
Eventually, equilibrium is reached at the point where the cost of entering the market plus the time value of the startup money is just covered by the profit over the average lifespan of a new entrant. It is a naturally self-regulating system that seeks the optimal market price of consumer goods and constantly adjusts for the changing time value of money. Pretty cool stuff, right?
In general, the leverage that the European citizens have over the EC is significantly smaller than the leverage the Americans have over their federal government.
Hey, now, them's fightin' words. Our democracy is way less responsive to the people than your democracy!
I'd put a smiley so you know I'm joking, but I don't feel like smiling just now.
...they responded to a daunting 1.3 million demands for subscriber data...' One stinging statistic: AT&T gets 230 requests for data per hour, and turns down only 18 per week.
The summary is mistaken. From the article:
AT&T alone now responds to an average of more than 700 requests a day, with about 230 of them regarded as emergencies that do not require the normal court orders and subpoena.
they'll be able to recreate the 'feeling of recognition you get in a favourite restaurant,'
I think they're a little more likely to create the feeling of recognition that you get when the creepy, slightly desperate receptionist asks about your dog by name, despite the fact that you haven't told anyone at the office that you have a dog.
They are allowed to monitor speech on the telephone, and they're also required by law to do so since the Patriot Act.
The telcos have intercept rooms run by the government that some believe are being used to do warrantless surveillance, but most believe that at worst the government is making transient recordings (as you say) that they only read if they can get probable cause and are doing warrantless surveillance / analysis only on the endpoints and timestamps. And regardless, the telcos are not the ones doing the surveillance, they're just making it possible.
Also, it was not the Patriot Act that made that possible. It was big juicy contracts. The government agreed to give the telcos "compensation" for the trouble of supporting the intercepts. The "compensation" was so much more than the cost to the telcos that one CEO (T-Mobile, I think) actually got accused of failing his fiduciary responsibility for refusing. D.C. also had to pass a retroactive immunity law around 2006 or so -- long after the Patriot Act -- to keep the telcos from getting sued for their part in it.
Which, if you think about it, is really far more nefarious. The government is using public money to convince private corporations that have deep access into your life (by nature of the services they provide) to betray your interests. The corporations are less constrained by the Bill of Rights, and the government can simply grant them immunity retroactively if anyone starts thinking about petitioning for redress. It is a rather dirty bit of abusing public resources to circumvent the intent of The Constitution.
But do be careful to note that this implies collusion between the corporations and the government. The siren song of oligarchy draws both sides into abusive behavior. Trusting either side to be looking out for your interests -- whether by the silent hand or representation -- is a fools road.
John Adams said, "The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty." It would behoove us to realize that anyone with the power to endanger the public liberty is a threat -- regardless of whether their power derives from executive authority or from control over our communications.
However, on your second point, the only reasons ISPs have to "buy" access to the spectrum, rather than simply begin using it, is because the government has imposed itself into the mix here, by force,
Multiple transmitters operating on the same frequency interfere with each other. You should be able to work out the rest on your own.
What if they wanted to censor some child pornography? Or some legitimate terrorism related communications that threatened lives?
I don't think they have the right or privilege to do any more than Ma Bell. The telephone companies are not allowed to monitor and censor speech on the telephone, even if it is about terrorism or child pornography. No more than the postal service is allowed to inspect postal mail and censor child pornography or terrorist communications.
If you have a legitimate link showing that Verizon has or even wants to censor people's political opinions
Free speech is not limited to political speech. See "The People Versus Larry Flynt" for an in-depth analysis.
Let me play the devil's advocate with you about access to rights of way.
Always a healthy thing. Thanks.
The way I understand it, the municipality owns the rights of way, and anyone who has a cable they want to run must get their permission and follow their rules.
That sounds pretty close to me, though I think some rights of way have federal involvement? Not sure, but I'm thinking interstate highways, interstate pipelines, etc. Not important in our discussion, though.
Public roadways work the same: the municipality controls them, but anyone can use them provided they get permission (in the form of licenses, inspections, etc.) and follow the rules.
Not exactly the same -- cars are more like packets. Roads are more like cables. It isn't necessary to make the distinction at the broad level we are discussing (see next section), but an extra factor with roads, cables, and spectrum is that there's only enough room for a very small number of them (at least relative to packets or cars). This means there is usually a small-order n-opoly in communications, for cost efficiency's sake. Likewise in roadways (see Manhattan bridges and tunnels). In some cases there is even an extra artificial monopoly granted to the network provider, regardless of whether space is available for more cabling.
No one, however, expects that automobile drivers have to act in the public interest because they use public roadways.
They pay society cash for their licenses, and must act in the public interest in a number of ways: They must not drive while intoxicated, they must keep their emissions system properly maintained, they must give way to emergency vehicles, and they must obey traffic laws which are designed in the public interest of maximizing the safe flow of traffic.
The thing is, net neutrality bills are a potentially effective solution to a problem that hasn't really manifested its self yet, and quite possibly never will.
You're saying the problem is illusory.
While there has been some niche cases of ISPs trying to throttle torrents and things like that
Except that it has already been happening. And an article earlier today quoted Verizon saying that they believe they have the right and intend to restrict speech.
for the most part, there's no reason for me to believe that the stuff that I personally do on the Internet will be restricted
Yet you still don't believe that what you personally do will be restricted, and apparently you disdain the notion that others, who may have more controversial things to say, also deserve the right to speak freely.
If anything, the bills will probably result in ISPs having to do more paperwork and such and then deciding that to cover the costs, they're going to make me start paying for my bandwidth after I go above a 5GiB/month limit.
So you present your own phantasm problem. A problem which, unlike net bias, has not yet happened. A problem which, unlike net bias, none of the major players are saying they intend to bring about.
But hey, the answer to all of our problems (whether they exist or not) is to just put the government's hand in every single aspect of every single corporation until they no longer exist, right?
And you close with a straw man.
I am not impressed.
Your idea of "freedom" is expropriating others' private property for your own freedoms, just because those others are large business entities, right?
Nope, I'm actually a pretty hard-core free market guy.
My idea of freedom for network providers is this:
1. You want immunity from liability for what you carry? Fine, you have to be agnostic to what you carry. If you want discretion, you are liable.
2. You want exclusive rights to spectrum and access to rights of way? Cool, but you have to act in the public interest -- which includes supporting the most important freedom we have; free speech.
You don't have to do those things, but you can't use our spectrum, our rights-of-way, and be granted immunity if you do not give some quid-pro-quo to society for the privilege. It's like the free market, you have to pay for what you get -- but since the goods and services you are getting are public resources and civil liability privileges, your payment is to society and the transaction is managed by our government.
Ron and Rand Paul are shifting the central focus of their family's libertarian crusade to a new cause: Internet Freedom.
Depends what you mean by freedom. According to this Ars Technica Article, he means the freedom of corporations to decide who gets to speak and what they get to say on the Internet.
This seems like welcome news to me.
I'd say that depends pretty heavily on whether you want citizens to be free to speak, or network providers to be free to generate revenue by restricting speech.
I know that you aren't saying that corporations don't have free speech, because they do as ruled by the supreme court.
I question the intelligence of anyone who takes "corporate personhood" too seriously, and doesn't understand that it's a legal fiction. The supreme court doesn't actually consider corporations to be people, nor do they have all the rights of citizens, since they aren't people.
I agree that corporations are not people and the SCOTUS has never consistently applied the principle that they are. And yet there are people who keep arguing that corporations have rights. Like the old version of you from the original post. I am happy to see that I am getting through your thick skull as evidenced by your revised perception of corporate rights, but your continued belligerence tires me.
Newspapers certainly are not 'equal representation,' and we don't limit their speech.
Of course we do. For example, newspapers have fairly strict decency standards, they are held more strictly to libel standards than private citizens, and there are equal time standards for campaigning politicians. News media also have strong self-regulatory bodies, focused on standards and practices with a strong bias toward verifiable fact, which exist largely to avoid further government regulation (a more well-known example of this is the MPAA's motion picture rating system and the game content industry's similar rating system).
The recent touchstone case in this regard is Fox News. Over the past decade, their bias has been the subject of some pretty serious criticism for putting self-regulation at risk, and was even briefly the subject of a bill in Congress to tighten government regulation of news media.
Did you even think through your argument before posting.
We needn't lower ourselves to browbeating -- we are obviously both intelligent enough to discuss this matter on its merit.
No decisions are made by equal representation of the people.
Lots of decisions are intended to be made by equal representation of the people (those who have the vote anyway). We have elections every year to do so.
But that is irrelevant. The subject of equal opportunity in "Corporate speech decisions" from my post is the speech part, not the decisions.
So what good argument is there for limiting free speech of corporations?
Free speech is a right with which each natural person is equally endowed. Corporate speech decisions are not made by equal representation of The People.
Very good post. Well written and clearly identifies the implicit internal inconsistency. Thank you.
If you think the government will just ignore the law and do whatever it wants anyway, then any discussion of the law is moot.
Actually, that is when it is most important to discuss the law; to document the non-compliance as a part of the cultural record and to bring it to raise it as an issue to those in government who are supposed to act as the correcting force.
It is the natural course of governments to seek to do what they think is in the best interests of the citizenry. It is also the nature of the people who embody government to realize that they could do more good for the people if they were uninhibited by law. Finally, it is the nature of government on our scale to have some secrets in order to operate effectively.
Given that humans are fallible and subject to distorted perception, it is the nature of such a system for abuses to occur. Each time such an abuse occurs, it either leads to correction or reinforcement of the behavior. Correction if they are punished, reinforcement if they are not.
In the United States, The People are the ultimate sovereigns. We are the ones who have to ensure that the government acts in the interest of the nation. We do that by correcting the government when its internal mechanisms fail to do the job. When the government ignores the law and its internal mechanisms fail to correct it, it is our most important patriotic duty to discuss it, to vote them out if they do not listen, to formally demand redress if we elect those who promise correction and they fail to do so, and to remove them by force if they deny the authority of petition for redress. Each subsequent step is significantly more costly than the one before. The least costly one is discussion.
Discussing lawlessness in government is not frivolous. On the contrary, discussion is the first and least costly means to avoiding the bloody mess of revolution. Denial of such lawlessness or inhibiting the discussion thereof is a path to escalation.
In my belief the concept of learning must be met before one can call anything AI.
They learn by reading documents and observing events from the real world -- just the way humans do it.
Does your software actually allow the computer to understand anything.
No more than your wetware allows you to "understand" anything (abstraction, identity, association).
Can it do anything with that information except what you explicitly tell it, no?
Not no, yes! I put zero explicit knowledge into my AIs (cuz the computer knows better than me). As for doing things: The advertising software was used to increase people's purchasing behavior to the tune of a few hundred thousand dollars in a single month (random A/B test against traditionally targeted ads). The music software should do the same for music purchasing once it goes live. The text software was just for fun.
That said, you can jump in the other direction (Asimovian robots : First Law :: your software : ???) and then consider whether the result is still reasonable in its new context.
I'll go with "First Law" as the replacement for the three question marks.
Suppose text analysis software being used to design ideally persuasive policy rhetoric. Now consider using that software in a propaganda astroturfing campaign. I know a guy who is researching it at a big national government-funded lab. Cool stuff if you can get past the Strangelovian overtones. In the corporate world, such tools have extraordinary power to choose words and phrases for PR campaigns that alter our consumption behavior based on emotional reactions instead of rational self-interest.
Information is a whole lot more powerful than money. Suasion of information can distort perception, just as manipulation of investments can distort markets. Need an example? Check out The Smoking Suffragettes of Edward Bernays.
Now imagine automating that. Think of the power at stake. Think of the staggering amount of money, power, and influence on the table. That is a great big pile of the 'R' in ROI, and the technology exists.