Especially considering all the context of SCO's dishonest poaching of Novell's frequent "naivete" (corporate competitive incompetence, which is not a crime, though exploiting it can be).
If I took this article seriously at all (like if the writer had bothered writing it as "news" instead of waiting over a quarter-year "vacation" before writing it, before taking a long Winter's nap), I'd look into whether he has a history of writing fluff for Gates or Microsoft, or maybe just hating on IBM. There's little chance he has any actual sympathy for SCO itself, unless he fights for the right of corporations to lie to each other and abuse the court system as life support for their dead corporation's stock.
How is that "accused's right to a jury of their peers" supposed to work when a corporation like SCO is accused? Is it supposed to be composed of CEOs, or board members, or representatives of other corporations whose execs and directors vote on the testimony?
That one flaw shows what a farce it is to treat corporations as "persons" with the same rights as humans. As if there were any shortage of reasons. Like this corporate flackery from _Fortune_'s Parloff, which is whining that a judge didn't waste even more years, time of people in juries and elsewhere in the legal system already overworked subsidizing corporate warfare like SCO's desperate, doomed extortion of IBM.
I wrote that response with a tone that defended my argument, which was based on the Constitution, from your criticism of it, which was based on a technological change. I don't think I was harsh. But it is clear that we agree.
However, it's now clear that you don't understand my original point. I used "CDs" as my example, because that's what we're all familiar with, and the "it's digital, it's different" argument is disproven by it. But I could have said "records", including vinyl, or "books", or "videotapes", or anything else that fair use protects. Fair use isn't "fair" because of any technology. And it's not an exception to copyright: it's an explicit itemization of rights to free speech that copyright does not infringe.
So we're in violent agreement. It's not that complicated, only moderately - because the copyright exception is presented as the basic rule, not as an exception, and the fair use limits on copyright are presented as exceptions. Because the only ones presenting these facts are the publishers. So yes, I do proudly reject any attempt to sell me a package that includes suspension of my rights, right in the face of whoever's peddling it to me. But I also talk in public (like on Slashdot) in simple terms, like "I could share my CDs, why can't I share my MP3s?", which anyone can understand. If they get the answer wrong, by making it more complicated, I explain why there was no legitimate power to stop sharing CDs, which hasn't changed. Over the past few years, as others have also done so, I've seen consciousness gradually change. That's my way of helping.
"Intent" of whom? Who can prove "intent", anyway? In reality, we deal with actions, like what it says on the parchment Constitution that people signed and that Americans are obligated to obey.
The Constitution says only that Congress can secure for limited times exclusive rights to copy content, when that promotes science and the useful arts. That power of the government is created as a compromise between the freedom of speech (and other expression) which the Constitution does not otherwise give the government the power to restrict (except in case of actual immediate threats of violence), and the needs of commerce (in 1789, and however long afterward it's still been true) to protect the investment in that content from competition at advantage from the lesser investment of merely copying it.
Sure, publishers probably always wanted to control content to the utmost, like paying per letter read every time. But the rest of the people, the vaster majority, probably always wanted to get it all for free. So what? The balance struck by the Constitution to protect the publishers minority specified the degree of free speech by everyone else that could be infringed: only that necessary to protect science and the useful arts. Protecting enough potential return on investment that people would produce and publish content. But there's no evidence that unlimited profits for unlimited times, the reverse of the balance - flipped towards the dreams of the publishers, not the rights of the public - are provided for in the Constitution. To the contrary, the copyright exception to free speech is specifically proscribed. And then the absolute right to free speech is made explicit in the 1st Amendment, if there were any doubt about whether the copyright provision might indicate more power to infringe our free speech. If you're going to bring up intent, those two sentences in the Constitution, which is all that gives any power to the government, make clear the intent: the smallest exception to free speech, justified only by promoting science and the useful arts.
The Constitution specifies how we create a government to protect our rights, and, when welfare beyond that is at stake, it's "the general" welfare, not the specific privileges of any few, like publishers, except where those privileges are essential to everyone's welfare. It's a timeless document about rights. Now, it was written by people, so it could be wrong, so it provides for amendment. The only amendment on this subject has been to state an even more aggressive protection of our free speech from any government control, despite the copyright provision. But it doesn't explicitly state that the copyright provision is superseded. So there is still a compromise at work, which must be tested as the society changes, including changes from technology. However, it's clear that the copyright extensions through the 20th Century were justified solely by the influence of publishers for greater advantage, not any greater necessity to protect the potential return on investing in producing and publishing content. The proof is in the vast residual profits, well beyond that any investor would need anticipate to justify investing, which would still have been adequate in practically all those cases were the copyright term (to name just one abuse) just the original 14 years, not the effective perpetuity that now blatantly violates the Constitutions "limited times" instructions.
The change that technology has brought has been to increase the profitability of producing content when it's less restricted. So arguing about tech of 2007 vs 1789 means that the laws should indeed be changed: less protection is necessary, because technology and its common use has now radically eliminated costs of distribution and barriers to entry, while increasing the reachable market to an instantaneous, worldwide audience, and putting some of the highest quality production techniques into the hands of vastly more people who need invest the tiniest amo
If I buy a CD, I can burn a copy and put my original in my closet for safekeeping. Then I can loan you the copy, as long as I don't use the original.
Why can't I loan my MP3 that I bought? If I loan you a copy, but don't play my own copy, until after you delete yours ("returning" it to me), I'm doing exactly what I did with the CD.
The CD was a piece of plastic I bought that had the bits burned in a pattern. The MP3 was just a series of electrons or photons I bought zapped into its pattern of energy levels. If the loaning rights are only to the physical medium I bought, which happens to have the pattern I like etched into its physical particles, then how come I can loan you the copied CD?
I can also take that CD to a party at your house, and play it for some friends. Even some friends of yours who I don't know - and friends of theirs who they brought who you don't even know. I can even leave the room while it plays across the house. And then, while I leave it behind as a loan for a week, you can have another party without me, as long as I don't play the copy. Why can't I do that with an MP3?
I know that the person to whom I loaned it might copy it themself, without the right to do so. But that's their criminal act, not mine. I know that MP3s are even easier to copy than are CDs, but that's an artifact of the technology, not a change in the law.
Why can't I loan my MP3s, except that the music business that sold it to me could make even more money if I didn't. Except that loaning CDs, like loaning vinyl and tape before it, is one of the main ways music has always been marketed. It's always been easy to record radio broadcasts, but (even though that's illegal, like copying a CD - or MP3 - a friend loaned you) the practice just increased sales, and even more profitable ones when the marketing was done free among the fans.
Why can't I loan my MP3s? Is Hollywood still intent on suicide?
I think your expectations are probably accurate. But the problem for it is that open devices could "cheat" these carriers of "roaming", if a single device can have an account on multiple networks, and do the handoff itself. LTE is an all-IP network tech. There will be ways for a phone to transparently close a connection to a network on which it's losing signal, open a connection to another subscribed network, and continue the call to the remote party on the new network, without an audible hiccup - much as phones currently handoff between cells. That kind of feature will eventually let middlemen brand MVNO that subscribes to multiple networks, in bulk, passing savings to subscribers to their "unified" service.
Of course, I can hardly wait for that to arrive. But it does mean that there will be ways to access the network that deliver less revenue than the current roaming schemes that amount to extortion enforced by the limited and balkanized technology. So the incumbent carriers are probably less enthusiastic about it than I am.
Of course, all this uniformity and integration eventually leads to a mobile network that's as open as the Internet. But since all these telcos are fighting the certainty that the Internet remains as open access, especially when there's any possible threat to any bundled service from any kind of ISP in the chain, I don't think they've changed their minds about that degree of control. Compared to actual openness, rather than bundling, lockin, locked phones, roaming windfalls, switching from CDMA to GSM looks easy to them.
Does Verizon's plans to deploy a full LTE network mean that CDMA will be gone in a few years from the US? Sprint says it's going to upgrade from CDMA to WiMAX, but has also indicated it might go LTE anyway. Verizon will probably eventually upgrade its CDMA to LTE instead of a CDMA successor, especially if the LTE network succeeds well, even if it's because of the new open devices rather than any intrinsic network advantage. Current GSM operators like T-Mobile will have to upgrade by then, and probably to LTE too. AT&T looks like it's going LTE instead of WiMAX.
Regardless of the technical advantages of LTE, WiMAX or an alternative, just getting a single network tech for all mobile telcos would be a huge benefit. The same phone to connect to any of multiple overlapping networks means redundancy and competition that improve quality and prices, while unifying the market for apps at either end of the network. Which could also be a worldwide state of affairs, as foreign GSM upgrades most likely to GSM.
Is the US really going to finally get into a completely GSM environment along with the rest of the world? And what about Japan, the mobile phone wonderland, which would be the only CDMA left (apart from the US abortion in making Iraq CDMA)?
I worked in the hospital system in NY. I saw that VA and other government hospitals had plenty of waste and kafkaesque bureaucracy. But I saw that the private ones had a lot more. And, since they were turning a profit (including government subsidies), the private ones didn't have their governing bodies (execs, corporate boards, shareholder orgs) breathing down their necks to clean up their act. Since their "paying customer" was the insurance corps, who were profiting from the inefficient care (justifying premium increases by marked up waste payouts), the actual capitalist remedy of customers going elsewhere wasn't correcting them, either. Alice in Wonderland style excess, illogic, waste and corruption.
Hospitals aren't efficient, especially big ones, especially when waste is profitable, and when people are grateful for the "miracle lottery" to which there's no alternative. But the public ones also have extra oversight by government, and the expectation of the public that they will deliver the best service, especially since they serve veterans to whom we're all grateful, which is enforceable by government systems. Accountability based on quality, not the profit that is all that governs private healthcare.
The supply/demand of doctors more competent in treatment than in managing their wealth and limiting their liabilities is also screwing us. Especially the replacement of treatment by doctors with instead insurance corps absorbing liability for drug corp prescriptions, and the entire marketing system that lubricates that replacement, and the cutthroat educational system that produces doctors who want to be (legally, if not medically) safe drug pushers rather than actually working to heal people - that's integral to the private health care and finance system. Hell, the Republicans even prohibited the government from negotiating with drug corps for better prices, so the whole system is largely a way to guarantee unrestricted public expense on poorly-tailored prescriptions by doctors first produced on an assembly line, then running the most patients on their own assembly like as possible. So, like the Republican abuse of FEMA that mismanages government systems for both immediate profit and eventual destruction of the government competition to lesser private service providers, government health care and finance can be done wrong to make private systems look good. But when done right, it's better than private systems. While the same could be said about private systems done right, given the opportunity the past several generations, it doesn't get done right. Perhaps as government does more of the care and finance, private systems will compete by offering better service, and a balance will finally be struck with the government supplying the competition to keep the private corps straight, before the transformation to public is complete. The transformation isn't ideological, but rather driven by now obvious results from both systems, in the US and abroad. If the results change as government competition really has effects on a private industry seeing its guaranteed profits no longer safe, then we can keep the balance. But we have to leave the discredited ideology in favor of practical results if we want to keep our money or or health - or, preferably, both.
Americans have had all kinds of choice as delivered by public healthcare and its finance, and it's gotten us misery. We have domestic and foreign proof that government alternatives offer better care for less expense. This isn't the kind of theoretical argument that insurance and healthcare corporate PR flacks would like it to be. We have enough to decide we have to change, and in which direction. If we don't, "your money or your life" won't even be a choice available any more - the answer will be "neither".
That's the debate honesty I expect from "libertarians" these days: ask a question, then turn out the lights.
Though its no fun wading through your facile model of the world, for the benefit of readers who might be distracted, I'll point out that you are perfectly libertarian in your ruthless ideology while leaving the boundary between your opportunistic version of libertarianism and just anarchy. Which demands ignoring practically all of the world around you, in all its complexity, in favor of the top-down toy politics you're privileged to indulge at your keyboard, because actual governments and societies have made your life so easy you don't even notice the rough edges that intrude in reality.
The kind of person who will build a radio from scratch, and not realize that another radio 100x the power competing on the same frequency will drown out their little toy.
You want "research" showing US employer health insurance makes us less competitive? Why don't you just read some news about US car corps choking on their healthcare costs, while foreign competitors benefit from the more economical nationalized healthcare? Since you didn't even notice that your favorite experiment in peoples lives and privatized economics is failing in our core industry, I don't expect you'll understand that the US income tax is low because we're $10 TRILLION IN DEBT, and the global enemies we depend on to buy it are now stopping the free ride we depend on. Or that the reduced taxes come at the expense of worse healthcare and higher prices when the private insurance premiums are tacked on. Here it is simplified for you: The same scale economies that make group premiums cheaper than individual premiums also make national premiums even cheaper at even larger scales. Eliminating the waste and profit proven for generations in private health insurance more than compensates for the typical government waste. Which is proven by any number of studies comparing government-financed healthcare to private healthcare, either globally or in the US. Simplified: the average product delivered to private insurance consumers is worse per dollar than that delivered to consumers of government health insurance, like Medicaid, Medicare, and various veterans programs.
The same is true overall for the actual healthcare delivered by government hospitals, like the VA and our many public centers, compared to the average incompetence delivered by private hospitals. You haven't dealt fairly with this thread, and you made me return to it after I'd prefer to drop it, so I'm not going to dig up the specific research. I saw it consistently through my pre-med college career, including working at hospitals in NYC and California, and also post-grad in the medical insurance billing industry I helped take online starting in California, and again at the big insurance corps I brought online in NYC. All you have to do is wait for the headlines, as this issue is going to grind against America until we're either smart enough to take our lives back from the wasters and crooks like everyone else we're competing with has, or we just die broke.
To bring this back to the original point of this story, we're supposed to be discussing the FCC doing the perfectly libertarian job of standing aside while a handful of giant corporations take even more monopoly control of the media for their cartel. Which, like increasingly privatized and failing healthcare, has demonstrated just how bad it gets when the people abandon the government as our way of protecting ourselves from powerful people with abusive organizations, whether nobility or corporations. Everywhere you look, libertarianism is a tragedy. Except when two libertarians get together to sing its praises, say at a public library, or a publicly funded university, or some tax-subsidized think tank, or on public television...
I just hope that the current libertarianism parlor game doesn't leave us so deluded about history,
Well, that book review is by the FFF, which also wants the government to stay out of the education business.
I expect the FFF would also prefer that the police not arrest people invading your house for criminal trespass, but rather just civil liability for any damage. Or, even more likely, you should just shoot anyone you see on your property, including that annoying neighbor kid cutting across your lawn on his way to play basketball.
As I've delineated, the government should not prohibit content, especially now that it's easy to filter content on the receiver. But registering frequencies for noninterference is sensible. Or would you rather the government stay out of the business of enforcing the double yellow line down the middle of 2-way streets, until you (or your estate) sue the head-on collider for their civil liability in breaking your back?
We're talking about competing with telcos in controlling backbone access. Google is failing to enter the competition, despite having $billions, lots of its own fiber, and a decade of tremendous success in the Internet business that is still open to competition (though good luck competing with Google now). That's why Net Neutrality is a primary policy goal for Google's lobbyists, but Google hasn't gotten much traction, despite the issue's surprising popularity with the public. It's not a question of "Washington graciously allowing Google to join the market", because you're claiming Google's success in the Web search/ads market is somehow delivering success in governing the backbone market, which it is decidedly not - and which proves government intervention is necessary to keep even Google from being squeezed by telcos.
If you mean law enforcement, which can end in cops with guns coming to your house, by "bayonet-style coercion", then demonstrating that the earlier, persuasive style of court orders (before they send the cops) is not enough to stop illegal acts like market abuses exhausts the options that don't call for "bayonets". Ignoring persuasion doesn't let nonviolent criminals avoid the violent coercion to stop their lawbreaking.
It's precisely because you didn't mention it that I brought it up. Without the FCC ensuring you didn't overpower a competing signal, you could do just that. And steal their listeners. If your signal were strong enough, you would certainly be heard while the competition would be just so much noise - which could also be removed by inverting their signal and mixing it into yours before broadcasting, until they were just a whisper.
What laws do you think your lawyer would invoke if you sued them without the FCC? Do you think that we should just wait for the legal system to grind through those disputes, rather than the preemptive registration process we currently have?
OK, now you've demonstrated you don't understand even the basics behind radio, the legal system, and elsewhere in these threads about healthcare, government or even basic logic. I'm done pretending this is a debate, when it's just typical Web SimLibertarianism. You want to run your gerbil tank as libertarian, knock yourself out. Don't waste the time of people who actually understand administration and debate just because you've got a submit button.
I didn't say that health care or insurance was created by libertarians (or the Libertarian Party). I said the health care and insurance corps have produced a hoax that looks "libertarian", but is just a reversal of the actual condition.
The condition is that insurance companies don't compete - they're a cartel, with their product mandated in many ways. The New Deal that offered capitalist employers the economic niche of offering healthcare, contrary to the socialist systems established by our global competition, first had to be fixed after a generation by another Democrat, Johnson, who cleaned up the postwar mess made by capitalizing social insurance like retirement and health. But even that lessened degree of capitalism eventually let employers offer artificial switching costs through illiquid accumulated insurance equity, and the cartel that currently extracts massive profits by providing the worst quality service (claims payments), which makes the healthcare it controls worse per dollar than our competitors get from their evolving government insurance and delivery systems. Individuals each paying their own health insurance is more expensive than the broader base of statistical risk and per-capita cost of sales of policies by employers, but also much more expensive than if that aggregation were replaced by the government which also takes no profits on the operation. As is proven around the world by our competition, which didn't waste time on employer insurance the way we have.
The hoax is that the very exploitave corporations that feed on the regulation they've paid for decades to skew to their advantage now claim that it's the small remaining regulation that does limit them that's at fault. Or they say that the laws that hold doctors liable for the poor quality work they often do while trying to maximize their own profit with too few doctors are to blame. Their solution: the "libertarian" hoax that further deregulation will somehow solve the problems that have been permitted by the large deregulation (and favorable reregulation) to date.
I know there's all kinds of people around the US right now, especially ones active on the Internet, who are jumping for any chance to argue the merits of libertarianism. That cause isn't served by creating a straw man to argue about from what I did really say. Nor is healthcare a good argument for libertarianism, when every decrease in government service has resulted in both worse care and higher costs that have made the US much less competitive with foreigners who do less work for better health, because their governments ensure they're protected in that way. Next you'll be arguing for a return to the private fire departments that let America burn until the late 1800s, and then maybe private gangs to replace our police with competitive security - for the warlords on top, anyway. Oh, competitive certifications for doctors and lawyers, based solely on customer satisfaction surveys - of the ones who survive anyway.
Largely, though quite a soft implementation (with some defining exceptions). Though it's largely through the mediated acceptance of that condition by the voters, and perhaps more by the nonvoters.
You're going to have to explain how the market is served by your buying a transmitter to drown out the signal of your incumbent competition, broadcasting their format to their old listeners, but with your own ads inserted.
You make it easier for competition to form by protecting the market from domination by a cartel (among other cultivation). That requires regulation - proper regulation. We have living proof of how deregulation, except for regulations that enforce a billionaire's club barrier to entry, creates monopolistic conditions. Since you can't even recognize the basic necessary function of the FCC regulating signal noninterference, you're not going to get anywhere making equally naive pronouncements about government role in mediating an economy.
Seattle is very much unusual in media independence, as you should know from living there. And of course 99.9% is rounded, because there's more than just 3 dailys with local competition. But it's not much of an exaggeration, especially in the places that usually vote Republican, as I know from visiting a lot of it (though of course local readers wouldn't know).
Michael Kopps seems to be a decent choice to run the FCC when the current administration is over. Whether he gets it, or who instead, will be a good barometer for the fate of the country.
Although I do agree with what you said strictly in (1), I don't quite agree with what I think you really mean. I don't think there should be any restriction on, say, how many websites, or its share of the audience (traffic by headcount) any one entity (like eg. MSN or AOL) can have. But I do think that if smaller competitors can demonstrate market conditions that force competition with them to be unfair in a way that consumers don't have equal opportunity to choose the smaller competitors instead (and grow them), then consumers have legitimate market protection available from the government we create for those protections. Primarily in finding ways to encourage the disadvantaged competitors, rather than discourage the market controllers, but that kind of discouragement is certainly a legitimate option for the people to use by the government to protect ourselves.
The government should indeed abide by the 1st Amendment and keep out of the content restriction business. Instead its legitimate job of protecting the vulnerable (including children with irresponsible parents, who grow up to cause lots of damage to their neighbors) can be satisfied by education, including public service messages, and promotion of screening software, if the public isn't using them enough. Perhaps even drastic interventions like requiring some percentage of "home media terminals" (eg. TVs, Windows/Mac PCs, etc) include at least some screening software meeting some minimum standards, and pointing to upgrade choices, if the people turn out to need it. But not make any content choices itself, which it does not have power to do as the 1st Amendment explains.
To be specific about Net Neutrality, there is no way for an "upstart" to compete with a cartel of the incumbent telcos (including cable and the other few backbone operators) collaborating to disadvantage access to messages and content outside the preferred corporate offerings. Even Google, which owns a fair amount of nationwide (and perhaps global) fiber, lots of datacenter operations, plenty of content, a beloved brand, soon some radio spectrum, and lots and lots of money, is threatened by AT&T and Verizon (and their cartel) working to extort from them. Real upstarts don't stand a chance.
Especially since the Internet was produced by public investment through the government (despite protests from telcos at every step, even after it became popular), then largely handed to private corporations as an incredibly valuable giveaway that underwrites much of their profits, the people have a real right to keep it in public service, protecting it from subversion to primarily corporate interest in conflict with the public interest. Just because too much government control is bad, doesn't mean too little is good.
I don't know where you're coming from with the healthcare example, except that healthcare/insurance corps have produced a "libertarian" hoax that is precisely wrong. Government healthcare and insurance is among the best performing parts of the US healthcare system, just like in the other countries with which we compete globally. The problems lie mainly in the private insurance corps extracting profit by making care worse and scarcer, and the scarcity of doctors protected by the doctor industry making it artifically hard for new doctors to get educations, certifications and practice. I don't think you're going to try to say that healthcare would be better if, say, the government no longer invested in medical educations or infrastructure, or got out of the business of deciding which medical "content" is legitimate for selling in the market. This analogy is a dead end for your argument.
Coercion is bad both because of the effects of the means to its ends, the violence or threats itself, as well as its ends in forcing actions despite the target's preference. Just because the modern world often avoids blatant coercion in favor of merely restricting choices doesn't mean the coercive effect of forcing decisions is gone. Market abuses aren't as bad as armed invasion, bu
Like I said, you're describing a corporate anarchy. It is precisely the deregulation that the story we're discussing documents that has allowed the media consolidation I just detailed.
The early US had lots of media competition, but it had no corporations. Corporate personhood, which offered legal protections to corporations, wasn't invented until 1886, when a railroad monopoly faked a legal ruling in the newspaper monopoly it owned, on which the entire corporate scam is based. Within a generation, monopoly corporations had so abused America that they were finally regulated a little with "antitrust" laws, but they've steadily crawled back to unprecedented power and consolidation.
Early America also had no "truth in advertising" or other consumer protection, and frequent ripoffs and unchallenged political abuses. It was also a relatively small country (0.3% in 1776 as in 2007), though the ability to independently publish was very widespread. But as conditions for publishing improved, that power fell into increasingly monopolistic hands. As is the case with all power when the people don't organize to protect ourselves from it - which is exactly what we started America for.
You're right about tech making the FCC's mission irrelevant, if noninterference is part of the tech. I impatiently await phased arrays freeing spectrum myself. Though we'll still need our government to prohibit unhealthy radiation emissions from telecom products, but that should be part of the FDA, the Health agency, or a product safety agency. But you're confusing the FCC's role in controlling content, which is already irrelevant with media client filter tech, widespread tagging activities and busybody ratings orgs, with the FCC's role in controlling the market itself. The media is a unique industry for control by government, because it is so integrated with our government structure that it's still referred to as the Fourth Estate, even though the first (clergy) is (officially) gone, the second and third merged. When spectrum management is unnecessary or minimized, the FCC should be replaced by a "Telecom and Media Agency" which oversees media, prioritizing market protections, consumer protections, primarily discouraging monopolies and cartels.
A bottom line example: without decreasing government protection, this media cartel is threatening the Network Neutrality that makes the Internet the most accessible, diverse - and therefore essential - info source in our society. Markets don't protect themselves. We establish governments to protect ourselves from predators, like the corporations that control most of the media. When we beat them back with better regulation, we'll have a freer society and better media, through increased competition among all of them. Rather than the cozy relationship where the media and government mutually exploit each other to their mutual benefit, entirely at the public's expense.
In 1983, there were 50 companies that owned nearly all of the major US media sources. Today, only five corporations, "The Big Five," absorb the lion's share of the 37,000 different media outlets (daily newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations, book publishers, and movie companies) in the United States. According to Bagdikian, the number of media companies dropped drastically due to many recent mergers and acquisitions. In 1983, the biggest media merger in history was a $340 million deal involving the Gannett Company, a newspaper chain, which bought Combined Communications Corporation, whose assets included billboards, newspapers, and broadcast stations. Then, during the 1990s a small number of America's largest corporations purchased more public communications power than ever before. In 1996, Disney's acquisition of ABC/Capital Cities was a $19 billion deal -- 56 times larger than the 1983 deal. In 2001, AOL's acquisition of Time Warner dwarfed even this deal at $182 billion, ten times the price of the 1996 Disney deal and 537 times the price of the Gannett merger.
[...]
99.9% of the 1,468 daily newspapers in the United States are the only daily in their cities. As Bagdikian explains:
That 99.9 percent of morning papers are monopolies in their own cities understates the problem. Owners exchange papers with each other or buy and sell papers so each can have as many newspapers as possible in a geographic cluster. This permits individual owners to have something close to a monopoly for daily printed advertising in that region and in many cases to use one regional newsroom to serve all their papers in that cluster.
These media monopolies present our entire society through their filter of corporate priorities:
(1) ensure that the parent company is never cast in a negative light, and (2) find ways to plant positive news items about the parent company. Bagdikian details several examples in which journalists were fired and stories killed simply because the subject was in some way injurious or potentially injurious to the parent company. For instance, a survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors found that 33% of all editors working for newspaper chains said they would not feel free to run a news story that was damaging to their parent firm.
And of course that "info monoculture" dictates politics that can be rigged most easily by a single political party, so long as it is thoroughly corporatist. Which is why the US government is getting rid of the rules that protect a free market of consumers and diverse startups, in favor of corporate anarchy.
I think there will be some changes in the environment. Lots of arbitrary data that used to be input by keyboard will be replaced by pointers to content already online, which will make that content less likely (though not 100%) to have security threats in the data. However, lots of new arbitrary data in multimedia will be routinely sampled, like audio, image and video. Lots more untrusted (though not necessarily untrustworthy) people will have online status, including their own servers, from which to distribute untrusted data. And many many more different people will be sources of untrusted data, and even untrusted code that will be easier to generate and attach to networked services. The ubiquity of these devices will mean that even less sophisticated users, therefore even more diverse "wild" security risks, will rise, even as the systems get locked down with more reuse of more modern software, including patches and safer languages like Java. While the bad guys will get more expertise, too, and the prizes will become greater and more common as more value is moved online.
But overall, the main threats and defenses will be the same, from security programming standpoint. Mostly because most orgs that need to be secure will not have absorbed the main lessons about security. That's predictable because there's no good reason that today's orgs haven't learned from the past 10 years, which offered plentiful cost:benefit*risk incentive to learn them. That's not going to change in the next 10 years, either. The changes occurred in the 10 years prior to that, but didn't sink in.
There's probably two changes that will reach critical mass. One is the scale of security crime finally outgrowing national police ability to fight even a losing battle, which is mainly a function of the gradual undermining of citizens' reliance on their police. If that change overwhelms business' ability to rely on insurance as "protection", then there might be a real change in who's enforcing security: like the shift from sheriffs to "Pinkertons" in the Wild West. The other is, as you imply, the reliance on social networking to establish trust networks for practically every communication. Which has already started, hasn't reached critical mass, but already offers cheap technology and protection appropriately complex to the actual humans it protects. Of course, distributed private trust might just balance reduced institutional, centralized public ("government") trust mechanisms.
So maybe the next 10 years will indeed see some substantial changes, beyond "lots more of the same". But I still won't be surprised to see it basically balance out, and still look like just more of the same, especially to people practicing it on the inside.
Why not? The problems and our sometimes-adequate responses to them are the same now as they were 10 years ago. Why not keep the party going for another 10 years?
"It just defies logic that such a remarkable specimen could preserve." [...] They do not know whether the internal organs are there, nor have they determined the creature's sex, although they refer to it as a male.
Even the head of the expedition declares this find defies logic. And they admit that they're talking about conclusions without even determining them first. It's therefore obvious that god created the world in 7 days about seven thousand years ago, including stunts like this to trick faithless scientists into going to hell.
Do they really give a dump of every nucleotide in the genome, with an index? Is that enough data to actually read a new gene discovery and look at how you fared in the genetic lottery?
How about sending them some amniotic fluid, to see firsthand what a fetus' score is, to prepare for their life after their born with some important genetic conditions (diseases, gender, extra limbs...)?
That scenario isn't a "Cold War". It's just the normal state of international relations, which has always been based on political and economic espionage, as well as "sustainable sabotage", for thousands of years among all nations. Even during every "hot war" (shooting involved), this is the norm. Even among allies, looking for advantage and testing for weakness that makes the entire alliance vulnerable.
People really ought to go check into one of these actual wars once in a while. The ones where states work to destroy each other, where lots of people are killed, where entire ideologies, religions, cities, landscapes get trashed and owned. People who think this kind of thing is a "war" really have it soft, and lose the proper respect for real war.
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Especially considering all the context of SCO's dishonest poaching of Novell's frequent "naivete" (corporate competitive incompetence, which is not a crime, though exploiting it can be).
If I took this article seriously at all (like if the writer had bothered writing it as "news" instead of waiting over a quarter-year "vacation" before writing it, before taking a long Winter's nap), I'd look into whether he has a history of writing fluff for Gates or Microsoft, or maybe just hating on IBM. There's little chance he has any actual sympathy for SCO itself, unless he fights for the right of corporations to lie to each other and abuse the court system as life support for their dead corporation's stock.
How is that "accused's right to a jury of their peers" supposed to work when a corporation like SCO is accused? Is it supposed to be composed of CEOs, or board members, or representatives of other corporations whose execs and directors vote on the testimony?
That one flaw shows what a farce it is to treat corporations as "persons" with the same rights as humans. As if there were any shortage of reasons. Like this corporate flackery from _Fortune_'s Parloff, which is whining that a judge didn't waste even more years, time of people in juries and elsewhere in the legal system already overworked subsidizing corporate warfare like SCO's desperate, doomed extortion of IBM.
I wrote that response with a tone that defended my argument, which was based on the Constitution, from your criticism of it, which was based on a technological change. I don't think I was harsh. But it is clear that we agree.
However, it's now clear that you don't understand my original point. I used "CDs" as my example, because that's what we're all familiar with, and the "it's digital, it's different" argument is disproven by it. But I could have said "records", including vinyl, or "books", or "videotapes", or anything else that fair use protects. Fair use isn't "fair" because of any technology. And it's not an exception to copyright: it's an explicit itemization of rights to free speech that copyright does not infringe.
So we're in violent agreement. It's not that complicated, only moderately - because the copyright exception is presented as the basic rule, not as an exception, and the fair use limits on copyright are presented as exceptions. Because the only ones presenting these facts are the publishers. So yes, I do proudly reject any attempt to sell me a package that includes suspension of my rights, right in the face of whoever's peddling it to me. But I also talk in public (like on Slashdot) in simple terms, like "I could share my CDs, why can't I share my MP3s?", which anyone can understand. If they get the answer wrong, by making it more complicated, I explain why there was no legitimate power to stop sharing CDs, which hasn't changed. Over the past few years, as others have also done so, I've seen consciousness gradually change. That's my way of helping.
"Intent" of whom? Who can prove "intent", anyway? In reality, we deal with actions, like what it says on the parchment Constitution that people signed and that Americans are obligated to obey.
The Constitution says only that Congress can secure for limited times exclusive rights to copy content, when that promotes science and the useful arts. That power of the government is created as a compromise between the freedom of speech (and other expression) which the Constitution does not otherwise give the government the power to restrict (except in case of actual immediate threats of violence), and the needs of commerce (in 1789, and however long afterward it's still been true) to protect the investment in that content from competition at advantage from the lesser investment of merely copying it.
Sure, publishers probably always wanted to control content to the utmost, like paying per letter read every time. But the rest of the people, the vaster majority, probably always wanted to get it all for free. So what? The balance struck by the Constitution to protect the publishers minority specified the degree of free speech by everyone else that could be infringed: only that necessary to protect science and the useful arts. Protecting enough potential return on investment that people would produce and publish content. But there's no evidence that unlimited profits for unlimited times, the reverse of the balance - flipped towards the dreams of the publishers, not the rights of the public - are provided for in the Constitution. To the contrary, the copyright exception to free speech is specifically proscribed. And then the absolute right to free speech is made explicit in the 1st Amendment, if there were any doubt about whether the copyright provision might indicate more power to infringe our free speech. If you're going to bring up intent, those two sentences in the Constitution, which is all that gives any power to the government, make clear the intent: the smallest exception to free speech, justified only by promoting science and the useful arts.
The Constitution specifies how we create a government to protect our rights, and, when welfare beyond that is at stake, it's "the general" welfare, not the specific privileges of any few, like publishers, except where those privileges are essential to everyone's welfare. It's a timeless document about rights. Now, it was written by people, so it could be wrong, so it provides for amendment. The only amendment on this subject has been to state an even more aggressive protection of our free speech from any government control, despite the copyright provision. But it doesn't explicitly state that the copyright provision is superseded. So there is still a compromise at work, which must be tested as the society changes, including changes from technology. However, it's clear that the copyright extensions through the 20th Century were justified solely by the influence of publishers for greater advantage, not any greater necessity to protect the potential return on investing in producing and publishing content. The proof is in the vast residual profits, well beyond that any investor would need anticipate to justify investing, which would still have been adequate in practically all those cases were the copyright term (to name just one abuse) just the original 14 years, not the effective perpetuity that now blatantly violates the Constitutions "limited times" instructions.
The change that technology has brought has been to increase the profitability of producing content when it's less restricted. So arguing about tech of 2007 vs 1789 means that the laws should indeed be changed: less protection is necessary, because technology and its common use has now radically eliminated costs of distribution and barriers to entry, while increasing the reachable market to an instantaneous, worldwide audience, and putting some of the highest quality production techniques into the hands of vastly more people who need invest the tiniest amo
If I buy a CD, I can burn a copy and put my original in my closet for safekeeping. Then I can loan you the copy, as long as I don't use the original.
Why can't I loan my MP3 that I bought? If I loan you a copy, but don't play my own copy, until after you delete yours ("returning" it to me), I'm doing exactly what I did with the CD.
The CD was a piece of plastic I bought that had the bits burned in a pattern. The MP3 was just a series of electrons or photons I bought zapped into its pattern of energy levels. If the loaning rights are only to the physical medium I bought, which happens to have the pattern I like etched into its physical particles, then how come I can loan you the copied CD?
I can also take that CD to a party at your house, and play it for some friends. Even some friends of yours who I don't know - and friends of theirs who they brought who you don't even know. I can even leave the room while it plays across the house. And then, while I leave it behind as a loan for a week, you can have another party without me, as long as I don't play the copy. Why can't I do that with an MP3?
I know that the person to whom I loaned it might copy it themself, without the right to do so. But that's their criminal act, not mine. I know that MP3s are even easier to copy than are CDs, but that's an artifact of the technology, not a change in the law.
Why can't I loan my MP3s, except that the music business that sold it to me could make even more money if I didn't. Except that loaning CDs, like loaning vinyl and tape before it, is one of the main ways music has always been marketed. It's always been easy to record radio broadcasts, but (even though that's illegal, like copying a CD - or MP3 - a friend loaned you) the practice just increased sales, and even more profitable ones when the marketing was done free among the fans.
Why can't I loan my MP3s? Is Hollywood still intent on suicide?
I think your expectations are probably accurate. But the problem for it is that open devices could "cheat" these carriers of "roaming", if a single device can have an account on multiple networks, and do the handoff itself. LTE is an all-IP network tech. There will be ways for a phone to transparently close a connection to a network on which it's losing signal, open a connection to another subscribed network, and continue the call to the remote party on the new network, without an audible hiccup - much as phones currently handoff between cells. That kind of feature will eventually let middlemen brand MVNO that subscribes to multiple networks, in bulk, passing savings to subscribers to their "unified" service.
Of course, I can hardly wait for that to arrive. But it does mean that there will be ways to access the network that deliver less revenue than the current roaming schemes that amount to extortion enforced by the limited and balkanized technology. So the incumbent carriers are probably less enthusiastic about it than I am.
Of course, all this uniformity and integration eventually leads to a mobile network that's as open as the Internet. But since all these telcos are fighting the certainty that the Internet remains as open access, especially when there's any possible threat to any bundled service from any kind of ISP in the chain, I don't think they've changed their minds about that degree of control. Compared to actual openness, rather than bundling, lockin, locked phones, roaming windfalls, switching from CDMA to GSM looks easy to them.
Does Verizon's plans to deploy a full LTE network mean that CDMA will be gone in a few years from the US? Sprint says it's going to upgrade from CDMA to WiMAX, but has also indicated it might go LTE anyway. Verizon will probably eventually upgrade its CDMA to LTE instead of a CDMA successor, especially if the LTE network succeeds well, even if it's because of the new open devices rather than any intrinsic network advantage. Current GSM operators like T-Mobile will have to upgrade by then, and probably to LTE too. AT&T looks like it's going LTE instead of WiMAX.
Regardless of the technical advantages of LTE, WiMAX or an alternative, just getting a single network tech for all mobile telcos would be a huge benefit. The same phone to connect to any of multiple overlapping networks means redundancy and competition that improve quality and prices, while unifying the market for apps at either end of the network. Which could also be a worldwide state of affairs, as foreign GSM upgrades most likely to GSM.
Is the US really going to finally get into a completely GSM environment along with the rest of the world? And what about Japan, the mobile phone wonderland, which would be the only CDMA left (apart from the US abortion in making Iraq CDMA)?
I worked in the hospital system in NY. I saw that VA and other government hospitals had plenty of waste and kafkaesque bureaucracy. But I saw that the private ones had a lot more. And, since they were turning a profit (including government subsidies), the private ones didn't have their governing bodies (execs, corporate boards, shareholder orgs) breathing down their necks to clean up their act. Since their "paying customer" was the insurance corps, who were profiting from the inefficient care (justifying premium increases by marked up waste payouts), the actual capitalist remedy of customers going elsewhere wasn't correcting them, either. Alice in Wonderland style excess, illogic, waste and corruption.
Hospitals aren't efficient, especially big ones, especially when waste is profitable, and when people are grateful for the "miracle lottery" to which there's no alternative. But the public ones also have extra oversight by government, and the expectation of the public that they will deliver the best service, especially since they serve veterans to whom we're all grateful, which is enforceable by government systems. Accountability based on quality, not the profit that is all that governs private healthcare.
The supply/demand of doctors more competent in treatment than in managing their wealth and limiting their liabilities is also screwing us. Especially the replacement of treatment by doctors with instead insurance corps absorbing liability for drug corp prescriptions, and the entire marketing system that lubricates that replacement, and the cutthroat educational system that produces doctors who want to be (legally, if not medically) safe drug pushers rather than actually working to heal people - that's integral to the private health care and finance system. Hell, the Republicans even prohibited the government from negotiating with drug corps for better prices, so the whole system is largely a way to guarantee unrestricted public expense on poorly-tailored prescriptions by doctors first produced on an assembly line, then running the most patients on their own assembly like as possible. So, like the Republican abuse of FEMA that mismanages government systems for both immediate profit and eventual destruction of the government competition to lesser private service providers, government health care and finance can be done wrong to make private systems look good. But when done right, it's better than private systems. While the same could be said about private systems done right, given the opportunity the past several generations, it doesn't get done right. Perhaps as government does more of the care and finance, private systems will compete by offering better service, and a balance will finally be struck with the government supplying the competition to keep the private corps straight, before the transformation to public is complete. The transformation isn't ideological, but rather driven by now obvious results from both systems, in the US and abroad. If the results change as government competition really has effects on a private industry seeing its guaranteed profits no longer safe, then we can keep the balance. But we have to leave the discredited ideology in favor of practical results if we want to keep our money or or health - or, preferably, both.
Americans have had all kinds of choice as delivered by public healthcare and its finance, and it's gotten us misery. We have domestic and foreign proof that government alternatives offer better care for less expense. This isn't the kind of theoretical argument that insurance and healthcare corporate PR flacks would like it to be. We have enough to decide we have to change, and in which direction. If we don't, "your money or your life" won't even be a choice available any more - the answer will be "neither".
That's the debate honesty I expect from "libertarians" these days: ask a question, then turn out the lights.
Though its no fun wading through your facile model of the world, for the benefit of readers who might be distracted, I'll point out that you are perfectly libertarian in your ruthless ideology while leaving the boundary between your opportunistic version of libertarianism and just anarchy. Which demands ignoring practically all of the world around you, in all its complexity, in favor of the top-down toy politics you're privileged to indulge at your keyboard, because actual governments and societies have made your life so easy you don't even notice the rough edges that intrude in reality.
The kind of person who will build a radio from scratch, and not realize that another radio 100x the power competing on the same frequency will drown out their little toy.
You want "research" showing US employer health insurance makes us less competitive? Why don't you just read some news about US car corps choking on their healthcare costs, while foreign competitors benefit from the more economical nationalized healthcare? Since you didn't even notice that your favorite experiment in peoples lives and privatized economics is failing in our core industry, I don't expect you'll understand that the US income tax is low because we're $10 TRILLION IN DEBT, and the global enemies we depend on to buy it are now stopping the free ride we depend on. Or that the reduced taxes come at the expense of worse healthcare and higher prices when the private insurance premiums are tacked on. Here it is simplified for you: The same scale economies that make group premiums cheaper than individual premiums also make national premiums even cheaper at even larger scales. Eliminating the waste and profit proven for generations in private health insurance more than compensates for the typical government waste. Which is proven by any number of studies comparing government-financed healthcare to private healthcare, either globally or in the US. Simplified: the average product delivered to private insurance consumers is worse per dollar than that delivered to consumers of government health insurance, like Medicaid, Medicare, and various veterans programs.
The same is true overall for the actual healthcare delivered by government hospitals, like the VA and our many public centers, compared to the average incompetence delivered by private hospitals. You haven't dealt fairly with this thread, and you made me return to it after I'd prefer to drop it, so I'm not going to dig up the specific research. I saw it consistently through my pre-med college career, including working at hospitals in NYC and California, and also post-grad in the medical insurance billing industry I helped take online starting in California, and again at the big insurance corps I brought online in NYC. All you have to do is wait for the headlines, as this issue is going to grind against America until we're either smart enough to take our lives back from the wasters and crooks like everyone else we're competing with has, or we just die broke.
To bring this back to the original point of this story, we're supposed to be discussing the FCC doing the perfectly libertarian job of standing aside while a handful of giant corporations take even more monopoly control of the media for their cartel. Which, like increasingly privatized and failing healthcare, has demonstrated just how bad it gets when the people abandon the government as our way of protecting ourselves from powerful people with abusive organizations, whether nobility or corporations. Everywhere you look, libertarianism is a tragedy. Except when two libertarians get together to sing its praises, say at a public library, or a publicly funded university, or some tax-subsidized think tank, or on public television...
I just hope that the current libertarianism parlor game doesn't leave us so deluded about history,
Well, that book review is by the FFF, which also wants the government to stay out of the education business.
I expect the FFF would also prefer that the police not arrest people invading your house for criminal trespass, but rather just civil liability for any damage. Or, even more likely, you should just shoot anyone you see on your property, including that annoying neighbor kid cutting across your lawn on his way to play basketball.
As I've delineated, the government should not prohibit content, especially now that it's easy to filter content on the receiver. But registering frequencies for noninterference is sensible. Or would you rather the government stay out of the business of enforcing the double yellow line down the middle of 2-way streets, until you (or your estate) sue the head-on collider for their civil liability in breaking your back?
We're talking about competing with telcos in controlling backbone access. Google is failing to enter the competition, despite having $billions, lots of its own fiber, and a decade of tremendous success in the Internet business that is still open to competition (though good luck competing with Google now). That's why Net Neutrality is a primary policy goal for Google's lobbyists, but Google hasn't gotten much traction, despite the issue's surprising popularity with the public. It's not a question of "Washington graciously allowing Google to join the market", because you're claiming Google's success in the Web search/ads market is somehow delivering success in governing the backbone market, which it is decidedly not - and which proves government intervention is necessary to keep even Google from being squeezed by telcos.
If you mean law enforcement, which can end in cops with guns coming to your house, by "bayonet-style coercion", then demonstrating that the earlier, persuasive style of court orders (before they send the cops) is not enough to stop illegal acts like market abuses exhausts the options that don't call for "bayonets". Ignoring persuasion doesn't let nonviolent criminals avoid the violent coercion to stop their lawbreaking.
It's precisely because you didn't mention it that I brought it up. Without the FCC ensuring you didn't overpower a competing signal, you could do just that. And steal their listeners. If your signal were strong enough, you would certainly be heard while the competition would be just so much noise - which could also be removed by inverting their signal and mixing it into yours before broadcasting, until they were just a whisper.
What laws do you think your lawyer would invoke if you sued them without the FCC? Do you think that we should just wait for the legal system to grind through those disputes, rather than the preemptive registration process we currently have?
OK, now you've demonstrated you don't understand even the basics behind radio, the legal system, and elsewhere in these threads about healthcare, government or even basic logic. I'm done pretending this is a debate, when it's just typical Web SimLibertarianism. You want to run your gerbil tank as libertarian, knock yourself out. Don't waste the time of people who actually understand administration and debate just because you've got a submit button.
I didn't say that health care or insurance was created by libertarians (or the Libertarian Party). I said the health care and insurance corps have produced a hoax that looks "libertarian", but is just a reversal of the actual condition.
The condition is that insurance companies don't compete - they're a cartel, with their product mandated in many ways. The New Deal that offered capitalist employers the economic niche of offering healthcare, contrary to the socialist systems established by our global competition, first had to be fixed after a generation by another Democrat, Johnson, who cleaned up the postwar mess made by capitalizing social insurance like retirement and health. But even that lessened degree of capitalism eventually let employers offer artificial switching costs through illiquid accumulated insurance equity, and the cartel that currently extracts massive profits by providing the worst quality service (claims payments), which makes the healthcare it controls worse per dollar than our competitors get from their evolving government insurance and delivery systems. Individuals each paying their own health insurance is more expensive than the broader base of statistical risk and per-capita cost of sales of policies by employers, but also much more expensive than if that aggregation were replaced by the government which also takes no profits on the operation. As is proven around the world by our competition, which didn't waste time on employer insurance the way we have.
The hoax is that the very exploitave corporations that feed on the regulation they've paid for decades to skew to their advantage now claim that it's the small remaining regulation that does limit them that's at fault. Or they say that the laws that hold doctors liable for the poor quality work they often do while trying to maximize their own profit with too few doctors are to blame. Their solution: the "libertarian" hoax that further deregulation will somehow solve the problems that have been permitted by the large deregulation (and favorable reregulation) to date.
I know there's all kinds of people around the US right now, especially ones active on the Internet, who are jumping for any chance to argue the merits of libertarianism. That cause isn't served by creating a straw man to argue about from what I did really say. Nor is healthcare a good argument for libertarianism, when every decrease in government service has resulted in both worse care and higher costs that have made the US much less competitive with foreigners who do less work for better health, because their governments ensure they're protected in that way. Next you'll be arguing for a return to the private fire departments that let America burn until the late 1800s, and then maybe private gangs to replace our police with competitive security - for the warlords on top, anyway. Oh, competitive certifications for doctors and lawyers, based solely on customer satisfaction surveys - of the ones who survive anyway.
Largely, though quite a soft implementation (with some defining exceptions). Though it's largely through the mediated acceptance of that condition by the voters, and perhaps more by the nonvoters.
You're going to have to explain how the market is served by your buying a transmitter to drown out the signal of your incumbent competition, broadcasting their format to their old listeners, but with your own ads inserted.
You make it easier for competition to form by protecting the market from domination by a cartel (among other cultivation). That requires regulation - proper regulation. We have living proof of how deregulation, except for regulations that enforce a billionaire's club barrier to entry, creates monopolistic conditions. Since you can't even recognize the basic necessary function of the FCC regulating signal noninterference, you're not going to get anywhere making equally naive pronouncements about government role in mediating an economy.
Seattle is very much unusual in media independence, as you should know from living there. And of course 99.9% is rounded, because there's more than just 3 dailys with local competition. But it's not much of an exaggeration, especially in the places that usually vote Republican, as I know from visiting a lot of it (though of course local readers wouldn't know).
Michael Kopps seems to be a decent choice to run the FCC when the current administration is over. Whether he gets it, or who instead, will be a good barometer for the fate of the country.
Although I do agree with what you said strictly in (1), I don't quite agree with what I think you really mean. I don't think there should be any restriction on, say, how many websites, or its share of the audience (traffic by headcount) any one entity (like eg. MSN or AOL) can have. But I do think that if smaller competitors can demonstrate market conditions that force competition with them to be unfair in a way that consumers don't have equal opportunity to choose the smaller competitors instead (and grow them), then consumers have legitimate market protection available from the government we create for those protections. Primarily in finding ways to encourage the disadvantaged competitors, rather than discourage the market controllers, but that kind of discouragement is certainly a legitimate option for the people to use by the government to protect ourselves.
The government should indeed abide by the 1st Amendment and keep out of the content restriction business. Instead its legitimate job of protecting the vulnerable (including children with irresponsible parents, who grow up to cause lots of damage to their neighbors) can be satisfied by education, including public service messages, and promotion of screening software, if the public isn't using them enough. Perhaps even drastic interventions like requiring some percentage of "home media terminals" (eg. TVs, Windows/Mac PCs, etc) include at least some screening software meeting some minimum standards, and pointing to upgrade choices, if the people turn out to need it. But not make any content choices itself, which it does not have power to do as the 1st Amendment explains.
To be specific about Net Neutrality, there is no way for an "upstart" to compete with a cartel of the incumbent telcos (including cable and the other few backbone operators) collaborating to disadvantage access to messages and content outside the preferred corporate offerings. Even Google, which owns a fair amount of nationwide (and perhaps global) fiber, lots of datacenter operations, plenty of content, a beloved brand, soon some radio spectrum, and lots and lots of money, is threatened by AT&T and Verizon (and their cartel) working to extort from them. Real upstarts don't stand a chance.
Especially since the Internet was produced by public investment through the government (despite protests from telcos at every step, even after it became popular), then largely handed to private corporations as an incredibly valuable giveaway that underwrites much of their profits, the people have a real right to keep it in public service, protecting it from subversion to primarily corporate interest in conflict with the public interest. Just because too much government control is bad, doesn't mean too little is good.
I don't know where you're coming from with the healthcare example, except that healthcare/insurance corps have produced a "libertarian" hoax that is precisely wrong. Government healthcare and insurance is among the best performing parts of the US healthcare system, just like in the other countries with which we compete globally. The problems lie mainly in the private insurance corps extracting profit by making care worse and scarcer, and the scarcity of doctors protected by the doctor industry making it artifically hard for new doctors to get educations, certifications and practice. I don't think you're going to try to say that healthcare would be better if, say, the government no longer invested in medical educations or infrastructure, or got out of the business of deciding which medical "content" is legitimate for selling in the market. This analogy is a dead end for your argument.
Coercion is bad both because of the effects of the means to its ends, the violence or threats itself, as well as its ends in forcing actions despite the target's preference. Just because the modern world often avoids blatant coercion in favor of merely restricting choices doesn't mean the coercive effect of forcing decisions is gone. Market abuses aren't as bad as armed invasion, bu
Like I said, you're describing a corporate anarchy. It is precisely the deregulation that the story we're discussing documents that has allowed the media consolidation I just detailed.
The early US had lots of media competition, but it had no corporations. Corporate personhood, which offered legal protections to corporations, wasn't invented until 1886, when a railroad monopoly faked a legal ruling in the newspaper monopoly it owned, on which the entire corporate scam is based. Within a generation, monopoly corporations had so abused America that they were finally regulated a little with "antitrust" laws, but they've steadily crawled back to unprecedented power and consolidation.
Early America also had no "truth in advertising" or other consumer protection, and frequent ripoffs and unchallenged political abuses. It was also a relatively small country (0.3% in 1776 as in 2007), though the ability to independently publish was very widespread. But as conditions for publishing improved, that power fell into increasingly monopolistic hands. As is the case with all power when the people don't organize to protect ourselves from it - which is exactly what we started America for.
You're right about tech making the FCC's mission irrelevant, if noninterference is part of the tech. I impatiently await phased arrays freeing spectrum myself. Though we'll still need our government to prohibit unhealthy radiation emissions from telecom products, but that should be part of the FDA, the Health agency, or a product safety agency. But you're confusing the FCC's role in controlling content, which is already irrelevant with media client filter tech, widespread tagging activities and busybody ratings orgs, with the FCC's role in controlling the market itself. The media is a unique industry for control by government, because it is so integrated with our government structure that it's still referred to as the Fourth Estate, even though the first (clergy) is (officially) gone, the second and third merged. When spectrum management is unnecessary or minimized, the FCC should be replaced by a "Telecom and Media Agency" which oversees media, prioritizing market protections, consumer protections, primarily discouraging monopolies and cartels.
A bottom line example: without decreasing government protection, this media cartel is threatening the Network Neutrality that makes the Internet the most accessible, diverse - and therefore essential - info source in our society. Markets don't protect themselves. We establish governments to protect ourselves from predators, like the corporations that control most of the media. When we beat them back with better regulation, we'll have a freer society and better media, through increased competition among all of them. Rather than the cozy relationship where the media and government mutually exploit each other to their mutual benefit, entirely at the public's expense.
These media monopolies present our entire society through their filter of corporate priorities:
And of course that "info monoculture" dictates politics that can be rigged most easily by a single political party, so long as it is thoroughly corporatist. Which is why the US government is getting rid of the rules that protect a free market of consumers and diverse startups, in favor of corporate anarchy.
I think there will be some changes in the environment. Lots of arbitrary data that used to be input by keyboard will be replaced by pointers to content already online, which will make that content less likely (though not 100%) to have security threats in the data. However, lots of new arbitrary data in multimedia will be routinely sampled, like audio, image and video. Lots more untrusted (though not necessarily untrustworthy) people will have online status, including their own servers, from which to distribute untrusted data. And many many more different people will be sources of untrusted data, and even untrusted code that will be easier to generate and attach to networked services. The ubiquity of these devices will mean that even less sophisticated users, therefore even more diverse "wild" security risks, will rise, even as the systems get locked down with more reuse of more modern software, including patches and safer languages like Java. While the bad guys will get more expertise, too, and the prizes will become greater and more common as more value is moved online.
But overall, the main threats and defenses will be the same, from security programming standpoint. Mostly because most orgs that need to be secure will not have absorbed the main lessons about security. That's predictable because there's no good reason that today's orgs haven't learned from the past 10 years, which offered plentiful cost:benefit*risk incentive to learn them. That's not going to change in the next 10 years, either. The changes occurred in the 10 years prior to that, but didn't sink in.
There's probably two changes that will reach critical mass. One is the scale of security crime finally outgrowing national police ability to fight even a losing battle, which is mainly a function of the gradual undermining of citizens' reliance on their police. If that change overwhelms business' ability to rely on insurance as "protection", then there might be a real change in who's enforcing security: like the shift from sheriffs to "Pinkertons" in the Wild West. The other is, as you imply, the reliance on social networking to establish trust networks for practically every communication. Which has already started, hasn't reached critical mass, but already offers cheap technology and protection appropriately complex to the actual humans it protects. Of course, distributed private trust might just balance reduced institutional, centralized public ("government") trust mechanisms.
So maybe the next 10 years will indeed see some substantial changes, beyond "lots more of the same". But I still won't be surprised to see it basically balance out, and still look like just more of the same, especially to people practicing it on the inside.
Why not? The problems and our sometimes-adequate responses to them are the same now as they were 10 years ago. Why not keep the party going for another 10 years?
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Gun fetish trollMods don't want to talk about laws, they just want to shoot you down.
Even the head of the expedition declares this find defies logic. And they admit that they're talking about conclusions without even determining them first. It's therefore obvious that god created the world in 7 days about seven thousand years ago, including stunts like this to trick faithless scientists into going to hell.
Do they really give a dump of every nucleotide in the genome, with an index? Is that enough data to actually read a new gene discovery and look at how you fared in the genetic lottery?
How about sending them some amniotic fluid, to see firsthand what a fetus' score is, to prepare for their life after their born with some important genetic conditions (diseases, gender, extra limbs...)?
That scenario isn't a "Cold War". It's just the normal state of international relations, which has always been based on political and economic espionage, as well as "sustainable sabotage", for thousands of years among all nations. Even during every "hot war" (shooting involved), this is the norm. Even among allies, looking for advantage and testing for weakness that makes the entire alliance vulnerable.
People really ought to go check into one of these actual wars once in a while. The ones where states work to destroy each other, where lots of people are killed, where entire ideologies, religions, cities, landscapes get trashed and owned. People who think this kind of thing is a "war" really have it soft, and lose the proper respect for real war.