That works when you're young. And basically never again. That extra $50 goes a lot further for a single guy in his late teens (especially if you're still living at home) than it does for a mid-40s guy having to support a wife and 2 or 3 teenagers of his own.
Young people are also more resilient when dealing with excessive strain (whether physical or mental.) By the time you're in your late 30s or 40s, those 14 hour workdays aren't just a strain on your family life but for most people, their bodies just aren't up to the task anymore. Sure we can still pull a double shift or two once in a while when we have to, but its not something we can do continuously any more.
And finally, at 18 years old you don't yet know the value of your work. You tend to see "some money" as better than "no money." This kind of gets back to the issue of expenses -- if you have basically $0 fixed costs and all of your income is essentially disposable, it can be difficult to realize what an actual life costs, and therefore how valuable yours should be (not even counting any additional skills or experience you bring to the table above simple grunt work.)
a party who's central plank is laissez faire capitalism
Sadly, its worse than that. They want the government out of the picture as long as profits are rolling in, but as soon as shit goes south they're quite happy to beg for giant bailouts on the back of the taxpayer rather than simply letting failed companies fail as should happen in a laissez faire system.
If we look at ISPs (with all the recent flutter over net neutrality..) Their main argument against NN is that regulations are bad competition will fix it. Yet those same ISPs are continuallytrying toblock competition, frequently by lobbying for you guessed it.. regulations.. that impede if not outright block new competitors.
We already do that, by choosing our sexual partner(s).
I'm assuming you mean direct genetic editing though, but I'd equally suggest that the article is working on the assumption of our current genetic make up (and really, if we start mucking with our genes could the results still be considered "human"? Perhaps not, at least in the taxonomy sense..)
So what I'm reading is that he failed to see the rise of streaming video and therefore failed to both improve his network over time, and raise prices over time and when it slapped him in the face he was stuck deciding between keeping an underperforming service or a massive instantaneous price increase to compensate for improving the service.
I'm sorry to say but every industry faces the issue of how to handle changes they can't control. Those who adapt succeed. Those who can't adapt die. That's straight out of the theory of capitalist economics that your type likes to tout.
Here's some especially fun quotes:
Then along comes some new and innovative service.
Yes, that happens. Hell in the USA, we consider "innovation" to be a pretty important concept in general. Though by the time Netflix came on the scene, p2p traffic had already been around for a few years and streaming video had already been started. Missing those facts either meant the guy was woefully blind to his own industry, or somehow missed the fact that people like movies. And missed the fact that computer usage has historically always increased to use up available resources. I can only assume that this guy is an MBA with little or no prior knowledge of technology before taking on a role leading a technology company.
swear that I run a terrible ISP and more.
As they should. By your logic we should all be living in a world of AM radio and black and white TV. I mean the providers of those services had to make investments in their infrastructure as new technology arose. Adapt or die.
attempting to "over commit" a network by 100%.. Due to how TCP works.. will get very close to nothing at all
Right. That's why you don't do that and instead you invest in your infrastructure incrementally so that you don't break your cap and get slammed with a huge immediate cost to increase it all at once.
net neutrality" says.."
I cannot charge those who caused this expense more money
Yes you can. NN says you can't distinguish one bit from another. It doesn't say you have to supply more bits than you're being paid for.
nor can I "rate-shape"
Strictly speaking, no. But bandwidth-based traffic management is a widely accepted exception by more NN proponents. As long as its done fairly (ie: based purely on the number of bits and not the contents of the bits.)
or block the source
This is the definite no-no and the whole reason we want NN. If you can arbitrarily start blocking sources with no oversight, what's stopping you from blocking say, CNN and MSNBC but giving Fox a pass? Basically at that point you become an arbiter of what I (as your theoretical customer) gets to see and unless you want to enforce full transparency of the sites you've blocked and your reasons for doing so (which would be far, far worse for ISPs than NN) then allowing ISPs to pick and choose is a bad, bad idea for freedom and free speech (and yes I know you're not bound by the first amendment but free speech is a generally considered to be a good thing anyway.)
I have been forced to spend the $10 large by an outside firm I have no contract with or control over
No, you've been forced to spend the $10,000 by your own lack of foresight. If Netflix didn't do it, someone else would have. The fun thing about good ideas is that they tend to come out whether or not they benefit you personally. Even if you blocked Netflix, people would still call you a shitty ISP and change because people want Netflix.
The main problem with lack of NN is not when some two bit ISP in an area with actual competition fails to adapt. The problem is when Comcast and Verizon s
The Internet worked well for decades without net neutrality.
Which decades were those?
The internet worked well without having a debate about net neutrality because it was just the way things were by default until technologies like deep packet inspection came around, allowing ISPs to discriminate based on packet content.
Put it this way. If you're out in the desert driving your 4x4 wherever the hell you feel like, and then someone comes along and paves a road and starts fining you for not driving on it, even though the rest of the desert is still wide open. And its a toll road to boot. That's kind of the car analogy for net neutrality. Your freedom to drive anywhere vs the ISP's "freedom" to charge you through the teeth to do something you could previously do for free, just because they now can.
94% of US census blocks have more than one residential fixed provider
Which is why I included the word "meaningful." If there are two providers and they're both doing the exact same shit -- whether actively colluding or just because they can -- its effectively the same as no competition.
Now you could claim that implies that unfettered internet access is simply worth more than we're currently paying for it. And maybe that's fair (though I doubt it given the continual record profits these companies are bringing in.. but lets assume its fair.) But that brings up the whole point of the conversation -- is the internet important enough to people and to society as a whole that we should ensure everyone has access at a reasonable price, even if that price is under market value? I would definitely say yes myself but if you want to argue that record profits aren't enough for the ISPs then fine but try to include that in your argument rather than some vague notion of corporate "freedom" or whining about competition that obviously wasn't solving the problem. If it did, we wouldn't have to talk about this issue in the first place! Remember that Tom Wheeler also started as a corporate shill, and he still thought it was worthwhile to implement NN regulations.
are you going to legislate access to sewage treatment next?
Sewage treatment usually is legislated. Its extremely unlikely that you'll get a permit for a septic tank if you have public sewer access in most places.
And even if we ignore that, you would need to tell me how to set up a fully functional internet in my back yard that's not connected to a commercial ISP as easily as I can install a septic tank. Then I'll agree with you that NN regulations are no longer necessary.
a lot of the local monopolies are due to government regulations in the first place
Yes.
the way to fix that is to eliminate those regulations.
Agreed. What does that have to do with federal net neutrality rules?
if residents of Hicksville want more Internet competition, it's for them to change their laws restricting it.
Which many have tried to do, and the incumbents take them to court, and frequently the incumbents win based on the "we can afford more lawyers than you" argument. And even when they win, the have to allocate even more right-of-ways for their new lines, try to find and hire people that know what they're doing to set it up (and you can be sure the incumbent will conveniently be going on a hiring spree for technical people in that area at exactly the same time. I'm not saying it can't be done, but the incumbents have so far been as much of a roadblock as they possibly can in pretty much every town that's tried to setup municipal broadband.
it leaves price as the only differentiating factor, and that's winner-take-all.
Price, bandwidth availability, customer service, service areas.. probably others. Even if you ignore all of those, I would still prefer competition to be base
I agree that it would be better for the internet to be regulated by an organization that understands the internet.
But I don't think an unregulated internet is going to go very well. Verizon and other ISPs don't have any incentive to provide a free and open internet. Quite the opposite, they have every incentive to lock that shit down as tightly as possible and then charge you through the teeth for each per-service key.
There's no competition in many areas, and in the majority of jurisdictions where there is "competition," its not meaningful. So the only checks on the power of the ISPs is a regulatory body.
Oh and of course Pai's suggestion that the internet should be regulated by the FTC instead.. what a joke. If you don't think the FCC (who is at least tasked with regulating general communications) isn't up to the task, the FTC (who doesn't have much of anything to do with any technology) isn't exactly a step up in that regard.
And now AOL is.. where? Exactly. Because the telcos and cable companies started offering direct, ungated internet access and people swarmed to it (and away from AOL) in droves.
Now those same telcos and cable companies want to essentially turn themselves into the new AOLs. Except this time they're also in control of the underlying pipes so there's not really anyone who can swoop in and cut the rug out from under them as they themselves did to AOL 15ish years ago.
It was what.. 2 or 3 years ago when the whole "Facebook internet" in India idea was going around and everyone here universally panned it because FB would control everything the Indian people saw. I actually argued that FB was doing a good thing because some internet is better than no internet, and it would basically bring India's internet to around the stage of when AOL dominated the US -- a catalyst to get things going but not an end goal in itself.
Its sad that all the people who were worried about India's internet freedom are now trying to drive America's internet back into that kind of corporate control because apparently in the US, corporate "freedom" is more important than peoples' freedom. Definitely not surprising if you've paid attention to US politics for well.. basically at all since the mid/late 80s.. but sad nonetheless.
I'd be shocked if Pai didn't know what he was doing, and I'd be really shocked if the FCC didn't know how the internet worked.
In fact Pai probably knows how it works better than most (or at least has close advisers that can tell him) -- how else would he know exactly where to prod in order to best fuck things up in favor of his Verizon buddies?
charge the streaming service for the performance it demands from their network
They do. Do you think Netflix doesn't pay for their internet connection and the massive amounts of bandwidth they use?
beyond that which was reasonably foreseen
If they haven't managed to "foresee" streaming video by 2017, there might be a problem that no amount of legislation (or lack thereof) will fix.
charge the customer directly for the burst traffic like electricity
No, instead they'll charge the customer directly for access to Youtube, Slashdot, Facebook, New York Times, or any other site you wish to enjoy. Video sites are $5/mo each. Social media sites are $4/mo each. Other lesser-known sites are $2/mo each. On a site-by-site basis or perhaps even with TV-style "packages" that are intentionally constructed such that sites featuring similar interests are spread across multiple packages to ensure everyone has to purchase as many packages as possible.
Of course they wouldn't actually block the sites you don't pay for. But your bandwidth to them will be capped at 1mb/sec down and 128kb/sec up. You will no longer get to choose whether you need 20mb/s or 100mb/s. You get whatever Comcast thinks is good enough for each "package" you choose.
Of course you can always buy their business package and get a flat bandwidth rate starting at $250/mo for a 20mb/s connection and jumping to $1000/mo for a 50mb/s connection. With overages if you exceed your 10gb/mo data.
charge EVERYONE regardless of whether they use the streaming service or not
Almost everyone uses some high-bandwidth service or other. Whether you use Netflix or Youtube or listen to streaming music or torrent things or watch porn (or someone else in your household does any of these things.) Your argument is like walkers complaining that they have to pay for public roads. They're not necessarily wrong but they're so few in number that its still an overall benefit to have road construction centrally organized and funded in order to prevent 6 different people building basically the same road side by side while having no roads at all half a mile away.
Remember that its in the ISP's best interest to supply you with the least service possible at the highest price they can manage without you completely cutting off your internet and going back to living like its 1992. And you can't blame them.. their mandate is to make a profit no matter what, just like any other business. The difference is that in most other businesses, competition is an opposing force preventing the companies from completely screwing you -- they can only screw you as much as their competition will allow. But ISPs have little to no (meaningful) competition in most jurisdictions, so the only opposing force to them screwing you is legislation. Its why we must legislate things like "don't break the internet." Otherwise they will break the internet. Its not a question of "if," its a question of "when."
The point is that they don't charge people up front. It doesn't do much against folk who actually pay attention and do research, but there's a lot of people out there who will go for the lowest advertised price and by the time they realize they were swindled, they've already signed the contract (and often been using the service for a month because they don't discover this until their first bill rolls in at 3x or more what they expected.)
Not advertising prices also lets these companies do even more unscrupulous things like price targeting -- oh you're young, or black, or look like you have lots of money but not enough to potentially be our "friend?" Why your rates are magically 3x what your next door neighbor pays because reasons. Again the people who do their research would be up in arms about this but that's not most people and even for the ones this does apply to.. they have no other options anyway.
Basically it gives them the "freedom" to bend you over even further and you don't even get the lube up as a warning.
And what's wrong with that? If you're perfectly fine spending all day playing in the street and affording only the bare minimum for food and housing, that should be your prerogative (well, depending on how many people you annoy on said street.. but that's a different issue!) If you want to improve yourself, get more than the bare minimum out of life or otherwise be a useful member of society, UBI guarantees that you've got foundation to work from as you try to build yourself up.
And who knows.. maybe all you need is practice. Or you're style is something interesting that gets taken up by better artists and improves the industry as a whole even though you yourself aren't ever great. And even if you amount to nothing, the guy 3 blocks away who makes the same choices you do may have much more talent that would otherwise be lost to the world.
There's all sorts of possibilities when people are free to do what they want rather than having to work 80 hours a week and still barely scraping by. UBI isn't about making anyone rich.. its not even really about shrinking the gap between rich and poor. Its simply about ensuring that everyone has a shot at doing better than they otherwise could have -- a real shot not some fantasy bootstraps crap that's mostly spouted by people who inherited a good chunk of what they've got and don't even know what a bootstrap actually is.
A language developer building a dedicated string type into the language with all supporting APIs/libraries is probably going to do a better job of it than everyone rolling their own Pascal-style string implementation.
C is good when you program is small enough that you can keep it pretty much entirely in your head (at least at an abstract level) and constrained enough that you need fine-grain control over every instruction and optimization.. but that's a tiny, tiny fraction of the programming industry. For everyone else, the cost of programmer time is far more important than saving a few (million) clock cycles or half a gig of RAM.
Google (and Amazon and similar) are a bit of a strange beast in that they're way too complex for any one programmer to fully comprehend (so you want the derp protection of proper strings and arrays, garbage collection, etc) but at the same time their high performance also requires a level of the fine-grained control (and then throw concurrency issues on top of that, which is a small disaster in pretty much all common languages.) I guess they didn't find one they liked so they invented one.
Nothing happened because a right fuckload of programmers spent months upon months fixing everything.
If there was a magical set of environment programmers who could fix climate change before it caused serious problems, we'd be all over that shit.
But there isn't. There's a bunch of big companies with a vested interest in not changing the status quo for any reason at all, and a bunch of politicians in their pocket. And a bunch of scientists who are continually ringing the bell until it falls out of the fucking tower and have been for at least 5 decades now, but are mostly powerless to influence the first two groups and are thus mostly ignored since logic and reason are far subservient to money in our world, especially for a problem that's far beyond the next quarterly report or election cycle.
1970s: Its fine no problem nothing to see here scientists are just being alarmist! 2000s: Its fine no problem nothing to see here scientists are just being alarmist! 2020s: Its fine no problem nothing to see here scientists are just being alarmist! 2050s: OMG God's punishing us because of teh gays!
The government issues you a document recognizing your ownership of your car.
Not that I've ever seen. The government requires you to tell them about your car, and even then only if you want to drive it on public roads. If you just buy a car from an ad and park it on your lot for eternity, the government doesn't "recognize" squat all.
The government issues a document declaring your ownership of your house.
Again, the government is requiring you to tell them about it so that they can tax you. If you just build a house in the middle of the forest you don't get any recognition at all.. at least until the IRS discovers it and comes for their money.
And in both those cases, even if the government did issue the documents you're suggesting (and what do I know, maybe some jurisdiction does that for some reason).. I would still expect them to correct their mistake if for example they marked you down as the owner of my house purely because your claim was vaguely worded as "its got four walls.. and the internet!"
Telephone companies have never wanted to expand beyond certain high-value markets, and cable hasn't been much better. The government subsidized most of the original copper rollout in rural areas and has continually had to push (when not outright subsidizing) broadband rollout as well. And not just at the federal level -- lots of smaller towns have had to trade off land, tax breaks, local monopoly agreements and their first born children to the broadband companies in order to get rollout (which is a big issue whenever the issue of local ISP creation is brought up.)
Verizon, Comcast and all the other telephone companies want to provide minimum service, to only the most profitable areas, for the maximum fees possible. Because they're companies and that's what they're supposed to do. In a normal industry, those goals are counteracted by competition but for all the lobbyist ranting and raving in the world, there just isn't any (significant) competition in the broadband internet market. By any metric you can devise. A duopoly in a high-barrier-to-entry market is simply not a competitive scenario in the minds of anyone who doesn't have a vested interest in boosting the profits of one (or both) of the incumbents.
And what exactly do you think "the algorithm" is? Its a tool for ranking sites and prioritizing the sites they think people want to see. If its prioritizing sex with kids for a large percentage of searchers, then the algorithm is absolutely not working "fine."
Unless you want to claim that a large percentage of the population really wants to have sex with their kids enough to be Googling for it, but I'd definitely need to see your citation on that one.
Really though, this is standard operating procedure for Google. Sure its rare that it happens to suggest a topic as sensitive as child molestation and that's why it made news this time, but Google is continuously tweaking their algorithm and tomorrow they might be running into the same problem with "how to" suggesting "how to bake a fruitcake" and realizing few people really want to do that so downgrade those results a bit and promote "how to cook a turkey" instead or whatever they do (we can assume its more complicated and generalized than my example of course!)
you could use Bitcoin alone to get by in the world.
For the most part, I don't see why you couldn't. I mean you'd be severely restricting yourself to places that accept bitcoin payments but there's plenty of those out there. Not the majority by any stretch of the imagination of course, but you only really need one grocery store, maybe a gas station if you drive, and a few other such things that are within your ability (and willingness) to commute.
every speculation bubble in history has had more people lose than win trying to time that.
But the ones who win, win big. Of course they tend to also be the ones who are already rich since they've got the resources to monitor and track market conditions and therefore have the highest chance of picking the right moment to bail. Its still a bit of a gamble of course, but its the difference between a normal person playing a solid game of blackjack vs a person able to count cards. In the former case sure you can win, but its still stacked in the house' favor. In the latter case you can of course still lose if you run into an unlucky deck shuffle, but your odds are much much better for winning.
I'm pretty sure it bears lots of resemblance to reality. But keep in mind that the black market primarily using bitcoin is not the same as bitcoin being primarily used by the black market.
Well, and of course I mean specifically the online black market. Of course for physical in-person meetings of any sort, a stack of cash is likely still the main transaction currency.
By what metric? "Freedom" as we currently know it is only a couple hundred years old. There are many civilizations that have survived that long all the way up and down the spectrum, mostly on the end of less free. And a few that have lasted 1000+.
The US is already looking a little frail as people continually trade off their freedoms for short-term profit (not even their own short-term profit in a lot of cases) or the illusion of security against threats that are flashy but have a tiny probability of occurring while ignoring threats that are much more dangerous but don't happen to make good headlines.
I'm not expecting the end of the US any time soon of course, but when comparing against some of the ancient empires (Roman empire especially,) the US is still practically a baby.
Of course I'm interchanging the term "civilization" and "society." If your definition of "society" is something along the lines of "whatever I happen to prefer" or worse "the one I grew up in therefore best," then of course my arguments will be a bit meaningless.
Any plan that starts with "we all" with respect to the entire nation may as well stop right there. "We" probably didn't read your article to in the first place, and most of the "we" who did will stop caring as soon as they realize it takes more than one or two clicks worth of effort, never mind when it costs money.
Its the same reason why you'll never prevent climate change by suggesting people drive less.. even if they agree with you, they simply won't do it. They'll excuse themselves for one reason or another or they'll decide that their personal contribution isn't enough to matter or so on.
If you want a significant number of people to follow your plan, you have to make it worth their immediate while. Or alternately, enforce an immediate punishment when they fail to follow the plan. Being immediate is the big thing though -- people are just way too good at finding excuses if the pros and cons are too vague or too far in the future.
That wouldn't be what most people consider a "troll" though.
If your Intellectual Ventures example company was wanting to act like a troll, they would wait around until you go broke, buy up your patents at firesale prices after you've declared bankruptcy.. then sit on them for 5 years until somebody else has created and started selling a similar product, and after the new product has built up plenty of sales and profit, they'll file a lawsuit not only for infringing on the patent but also for "damages" due to lost sales (of the product they never even developed never mind sold.)
Basically if you exercise your patent, or (fairly) license it to people who will, you aren't acting as a trll. Its only trolish when you start doing shady things with your patent (of course someone who's exercising their patent can still do trolish things like telling everyone its a defensive patent and they won't enforce it.. and then change their mind 5 years later. But its still not as bad as a pure trll..)
(Sorry for the intentional misspellings.. lameness filter attack..)
Do you pay more for filing a patent and having it accepted than you do for filing and having it rejected? If the fees are the same for both cases, then the fees are not the price of the patent and the just compensation should be $0.
There's still a bit of a difference though -- unlike real property, the patent is granted by the government. Its not something they built, found or bought themselves.
That is, the government isn't so much taking something away as correcting a mistake they previously made in issuing the patent originally.
Slashdot Mirror
That works when you're young. And basically never again. That extra $50 goes a lot further for a single guy in his late teens (especially if you're still living at home) than it does for a mid-40s guy having to support a wife and 2 or 3 teenagers of his own.
Young people are also more resilient when dealing with excessive strain (whether physical or mental.) By the time you're in your late 30s or 40s, those 14 hour workdays aren't just a strain on your family life but for most people, their bodies just aren't up to the task anymore. Sure we can still pull a double shift or two once in a while when we have to, but its not something we can do continuously any more.
And finally, at 18 years old you don't yet know the value of your work. You tend to see "some money" as better than "no money." This kind of gets back to the issue of expenses -- if you have basically $0 fixed costs and all of your income is essentially disposable, it can be difficult to realize what an actual life costs, and therefore how valuable yours should be (not even counting any additional skills or experience you bring to the table above simple grunt work.)
a party who's central plank is laissez faire capitalism
Sadly, its worse than that. They want the government out of the picture as long as profits are rolling in, but as soon as shit goes south they're quite happy to beg for giant bailouts on the back of the taxpayer rather than simply letting failed companies fail as should happen in a laissez faire system.
If we look at ISPs (with all the recent flutter over net neutrality..) Their main argument against NN is that regulations are bad competition will fix it. Yet those same ISPs are continually trying to block competition, frequently by lobbying for you guessed it .. regulations .. that impede if not outright block new competitors.
We already do that, by choosing our sexual partner(s).
I'm assuming you mean direct genetic editing though, but I'd equally suggest that the article is working on the assumption of our current genetic make up (and really, if we start mucking with our genes could the results still be considered "human"? Perhaps not, at least in the taxonomy sense..)
take a look here
So what I'm reading is that he failed to see the rise of streaming video and therefore failed to both improve his network over time, and raise prices over time and when it slapped him in the face he was stuck deciding between keeping an underperforming service or a massive instantaneous price increase to compensate for improving the service.
I'm sorry to say but every industry faces the issue of how to handle changes they can't control. Those who adapt succeed. Those who can't adapt die. That's straight out of the theory of capitalist economics that your type likes to tout.
Here's some especially fun quotes:
Then along comes some new and innovative service.
Yes, that happens. Hell in the USA, we consider "innovation" to be a pretty important concept in general. Though by the time Netflix came on the scene, p2p traffic had already been around for a few years and streaming video had already been started. Missing those facts either meant the guy was woefully blind to his own industry, or somehow missed the fact that people like movies. And missed the fact that computer usage has historically always increased to use up available resources. I can only assume that this guy is an MBA with little or no prior knowledge of technology before taking on a role leading a technology company.
swear that I run a terrible ISP and more.
As they should. By your logic we should all be living in a world of AM radio and black and white TV. I mean the providers of those services had to make investments in their infrastructure as new technology arose. Adapt or die.
attempting to "over commit" a network by 100% .. Due to how TCP works .. will get very close to nothing at all
Right. That's why you don't do that and instead you invest in your infrastructure incrementally so that you don't break your cap and get slammed with a huge immediate cost to increase it all at once.
net neutrality" says .."
I cannot charge those who caused this expense more money
Yes you can. NN says you can't distinguish one bit from another. It doesn't say you have to supply more bits than you're being paid for.
nor can I "rate-shape"
Strictly speaking, no. But bandwidth-based traffic management is a widely accepted exception by more NN proponents. As long as its done fairly (ie: based purely on the number of bits and not the contents of the bits.)
or block the source
This is the definite no-no and the whole reason we want NN. If you can arbitrarily start blocking sources with no oversight, what's stopping you from blocking say, CNN and MSNBC but giving Fox a pass? Basically at that point you become an arbiter of what I (as your theoretical customer) gets to see and unless you want to enforce full transparency of the sites you've blocked and your reasons for doing so (which would be far, far worse for ISPs than NN) then allowing ISPs to pick and choose is a bad, bad idea for freedom and free speech (and yes I know you're not bound by the first amendment but free speech is a generally considered to be a good thing anyway.)
I have been forced to spend the $10 large by an outside firm I have no contract with or control over
No, you've been forced to spend the $10,000 by your own lack of foresight. If Netflix didn't do it, someone else would have. The fun thing about good ideas is that they tend to come out whether or not they benefit you personally. Even if you blocked Netflix, people would still call you a shitty ISP and change because people want Netflix.
The main problem with lack of NN is not when some two bit ISP in an area with actual competition fails to adapt. The problem is when Comcast and Verizon s
The Internet worked well for decades without net neutrality.
Which decades were those?
The internet worked well without having a debate about net neutrality because it was just the way things were by default until technologies like deep packet inspection came around, allowing ISPs to discriminate based on packet content.
Put it this way. If you're out in the desert driving your 4x4 wherever the hell you feel like, and then someone comes along and paves a road and starts fining you for not driving on it, even though the rest of the desert is still wide open. And its a toll road to boot. That's kind of the car analogy for net neutrality. Your freedom to drive anywhere vs the ISP's "freedom" to charge you through the teeth to do something you could previously do for free, just because they now can.
94% of US census blocks have more than one residential fixed provider
Which is why I included the word "meaningful." If there are two providers and they're both doing the exact same shit -- whether actively colluding or just because they can -- its effectively the same as no competition.
Now you could claim that implies that unfettered internet access is simply worth more than we're currently paying for it. And maybe that's fair (though I doubt it given the continual record profits these companies are bringing in.. but lets assume its fair.) But that brings up the whole point of the conversation -- is the internet important enough to people and to society as a whole that we should ensure everyone has access at a reasonable price, even if that price is under market value? I would definitely say yes myself but if you want to argue that record profits aren't enough for the ISPs then fine but try to include that in your argument rather than some vague notion of corporate "freedom" or whining about competition that obviously wasn't solving the problem. If it did, we wouldn't have to talk about this issue in the first place! Remember that Tom Wheeler also started as a corporate shill, and he still thought it was worthwhile to implement NN regulations.
are you going to legislate access to sewage treatment next?
Sewage treatment usually is legislated. Its extremely unlikely that you'll get a permit for a septic tank if you have public sewer access in most places.
And even if we ignore that, you would need to tell me how to set up a fully functional internet in my back yard that's not connected to a commercial ISP as easily as I can install a septic tank. Then I'll agree with you that NN regulations are no longer necessary.
a lot of the local monopolies are due to government regulations in the first place
Yes.
the way to fix that is to eliminate those regulations.
Agreed. What does that have to do with federal net neutrality rules?
if residents of Hicksville want more Internet competition, it's for them to change their laws restricting it.
Which many have tried to do, and the incumbents take them to court, and frequently the incumbents win based on the "we can afford more lawyers than you" argument. And even when they win, the have to allocate even more right-of-ways for their new lines, try to find and hire people that know what they're doing to set it up (and you can be sure the incumbent will conveniently be going on a hiring spree for technical people in that area at exactly the same time. I'm not saying it can't be done, but the incumbents have so far been as much of a roadblock as they possibly can in pretty much every town that's tried to setup municipal broadband.
it leaves price as the only differentiating factor, and that's winner-take-all.
Price, bandwidth availability, customer service, service areas.. probably others. Even if you ignore all of those, I would still prefer competition to be base
I agree that it would be better for the internet to be regulated by an organization that understands the internet.
But I don't think an unregulated internet is going to go very well. Verizon and other ISPs don't have any incentive to provide a free and open internet. Quite the opposite, they have every incentive to lock that shit down as tightly as possible and then charge you through the teeth for each per-service key.
There's no competition in many areas, and in the majority of jurisdictions where there is "competition," its not meaningful. So the only checks on the power of the ISPs is a regulatory body.
Oh and of course Pai's suggestion that the internet should be regulated by the FTC instead.. what a joke. If you don't think the FCC (who is at least tasked with regulating general communications) isn't up to the task, the FTC (who doesn't have much of anything to do with any technology) isn't exactly a step up in that regard.
And now AOL is.. where? Exactly. Because the telcos and cable companies started offering direct, ungated internet access and people swarmed to it (and away from AOL) in droves.
Now those same telcos and cable companies want to essentially turn themselves into the new AOLs. Except this time they're also in control of the underlying pipes so there's not really anyone who can swoop in and cut the rug out from under them as they themselves did to AOL 15ish years ago.
It was what.. 2 or 3 years ago when the whole "Facebook internet" in India idea was going around and everyone here universally panned it because FB would control everything the Indian people saw. I actually argued that FB was doing a good thing because some internet is better than no internet, and it would basically bring India's internet to around the stage of when AOL dominated the US -- a catalyst to get things going but not an end goal in itself.
Its sad that all the people who were worried about India's internet freedom are now trying to drive America's internet back into that kind of corporate control because apparently in the US, corporate "freedom" is more important than peoples' freedom. Definitely not surprising if you've paid attention to US politics for well.. basically at all since the mid/late 80s.. but sad nonetheless.
reducing their carbon footprints to zero
Are you kidding? Both the people and the gasoline they're using have plenty of carbon that you're suggesting they spew into the atmosphere!
I'd be shocked if Pai didn't know what he was doing, and I'd be really shocked if the FCC didn't know how the internet worked.
In fact Pai probably knows how it works better than most (or at least has close advisers that can tell him) -- how else would he know exactly where to prod in order to best fuck things up in favor of his Verizon buddies?
charge the streaming service for the performance it demands from their network
They do. Do you think Netflix doesn't pay for their internet connection and the massive amounts of bandwidth they use?
beyond that which was reasonably foreseen
If they haven't managed to "foresee" streaming video by 2017, there might be a problem that no amount of legislation (or lack thereof) will fix.
charge the customer directly for the burst traffic like electricity
No, instead they'll charge the customer directly for access to Youtube, Slashdot, Facebook, New York Times, or any other site you wish to enjoy. Video sites are $5/mo each. Social media sites are $4/mo each. Other lesser-known sites are $2/mo each. On a site-by-site basis or perhaps even with TV-style "packages" that are intentionally constructed such that sites featuring similar interests are spread across multiple packages to ensure everyone has to purchase as many packages as possible.
Of course they wouldn't actually block the sites you don't pay for. But your bandwidth to them will be capped at 1mb/sec down and 128kb/sec up. You will no longer get to choose whether you need 20mb/s or 100mb/s. You get whatever Comcast thinks is good enough for each "package" you choose.
Of course you can always buy their business package and get a flat bandwidth rate starting at $250/mo for a 20mb/s connection and jumping to $1000/mo for a 50mb/s connection. With overages if you exceed your 10gb/mo data.
charge EVERYONE regardless of whether they use the streaming service or not
Almost everyone uses some high-bandwidth service or other. Whether you use Netflix or Youtube or listen to streaming music or torrent things or watch porn (or someone else in your household does any of these things.) Your argument is like walkers complaining that they have to pay for public roads. They're not necessarily wrong but they're so few in number that its still an overall benefit to have road construction centrally organized and funded in order to prevent 6 different people building basically the same road side by side while having no roads at all half a mile away.
Remember that its in the ISP's best interest to supply you with the least service possible at the highest price they can manage without you completely cutting off your internet and going back to living like its 1992. And you can't blame them.. their mandate is to make a profit no matter what, just like any other business. The difference is that in most other businesses, competition is an opposing force preventing the companies from completely screwing you -- they can only screw you as much as their competition will allow. But ISPs have little to no (meaningful) competition in most jurisdictions, so the only opposing force to them screwing you is legislation. Its why we must legislate things like "don't break the internet." Otherwise they will break the internet. Its not a question of "if," its a question of "when."
The point is that they don't charge people up front. It doesn't do much against folk who actually pay attention and do research, but there's a lot of people out there who will go for the lowest advertised price and by the time they realize they were swindled, they've already signed the contract (and often been using the service for a month because they don't discover this until their first bill rolls in at 3x or more what they expected.)
Not advertising prices also lets these companies do even more unscrupulous things like price targeting -- oh you're young, or black, or look like you have lots of money but not enough to potentially be our "friend?" Why your rates are magically 3x what your next door neighbor pays because reasons. Again the people who do their research would be up in arms about this but that's not most people and even for the ones this does apply to.. they have no other options anyway.
Basically it gives them the "freedom" to bend you over even further and you don't even get the lube up as a warning.
And what's wrong with that? If you're perfectly fine spending all day playing in the street and affording only the bare minimum for food and housing, that should be your prerogative (well, depending on how many people you annoy on said street.. but that's a different issue!) If you want to improve yourself, get more than the bare minimum out of life or otherwise be a useful member of society, UBI guarantees that you've got foundation to work from as you try to build yourself up.
And who knows.. maybe all you need is practice. Or you're style is something interesting that gets taken up by better artists and improves the industry as a whole even though you yourself aren't ever great. And even if you amount to nothing, the guy 3 blocks away who makes the same choices you do may have much more talent that would otherwise be lost to the world.
There's all sorts of possibilities when people are free to do what they want rather than having to work 80 hours a week and still barely scraping by. UBI isn't about making anyone rich.. its not even really about shrinking the gap between rich and poor. Its simply about ensuring that everyone has a shot at doing better than they otherwise could have -- a real shot not some fantasy bootstraps crap that's mostly spouted by people who inherited a good chunk of what they've got and don't even know what a bootstrap actually is.
A language developer building a dedicated string type into the language with all supporting APIs/libraries is probably going to do a better job of it than everyone rolling their own Pascal-style string implementation.
C is good when you program is small enough that you can keep it pretty much entirely in your head (at least at an abstract level) and constrained enough that you need fine-grain control over every instruction and optimization.. but that's a tiny, tiny fraction of the programming industry. For everyone else, the cost of programmer time is far more important than saving a few (million) clock cycles or half a gig of RAM.
Google (and Amazon and similar) are a bit of a strange beast in that they're way too complex for any one programmer to fully comprehend (so you want the derp protection of proper strings and arrays, garbage collection, etc) but at the same time their high performance also requires a level of the fine-grained control (and then throw concurrency issues on top of that, which is a small disaster in pretty much all common languages.) I guess they didn't find one they liked so they invented one.
Nothing happened because a right fuckload of programmers spent months upon months fixing everything.
If there was a magical set of environment programmers who could fix climate change before it caused serious problems, we'd be all over that shit.
But there isn't. There's a bunch of big companies with a vested interest in not changing the status quo for any reason at all, and a bunch of politicians in their pocket. And a bunch of scientists who are continually ringing the bell until it falls out of the fucking tower and have been for at least 5 decades now, but are mostly powerless to influence the first two groups and are thus mostly ignored since logic and reason are far subservient to money in our world, especially for a problem that's far beyond the next quarterly report or election cycle.
1970s: Its fine no problem nothing to see here scientists are just being alarmist!
2000s: Its fine no problem nothing to see here scientists are just being alarmist!
2020s: Its fine no problem nothing to see here scientists are just being alarmist!
2050s: OMG God's punishing us because of teh gays!
Human logic at its finest.
The government issues you a document recognizing your ownership of your car.
Not that I've ever seen. The government requires you to tell them about your car, and even then only if you want to drive it on public roads. If you just buy a car from an ad and park it on your lot for eternity, the government doesn't "recognize" squat all.
The government issues a document declaring your ownership of your house.
Again, the government is requiring you to tell them about it so that they can tax you. If you just build a house in the middle of the forest you don't get any recognition at all.. at least until the IRS discovers it and comes for their money.
And in both those cases, even if the government did issue the documents you're suggesting (and what do I know, maybe some jurisdiction does that for some reason).. I would still expect them to correct their mistake if for example they marked you down as the owner of my house purely because your claim was vaguely worded as "its got four walls.. and the internet!"
Telephone companies have never wanted to expand beyond certain high-value markets, and cable hasn't been much better. The government subsidized most of the original copper rollout in rural areas and has continually had to push (when not outright subsidizing) broadband rollout as well. And not just at the federal level -- lots of smaller towns have had to trade off land, tax breaks, local monopoly agreements and their first born children to the broadband companies in order to get rollout (which is a big issue whenever the issue of local ISP creation is brought up.)
Verizon, Comcast and all the other telephone companies want to provide minimum service, to only the most profitable areas, for the maximum fees possible. Because they're companies and that's what they're supposed to do. In a normal industry, those goals are counteracted by competition but for all the lobbyist ranting and raving in the world, there just isn't any (significant) competition in the broadband internet market. By any metric you can devise. A duopoly in a high-barrier-to-entry market is simply not a competitive scenario in the minds of anyone who doesn't have a vested interest in boosting the profits of one (or both) of the incumbents.
And what exactly do you think "the algorithm" is? Its a tool for ranking sites and prioritizing the sites they think people want to see. If its prioritizing sex with kids for a large percentage of searchers, then the algorithm is absolutely not working "fine."
Unless you want to claim that a large percentage of the population really wants to have sex with their kids enough to be Googling for it, but I'd definitely need to see your citation on that one.
Really though, this is standard operating procedure for Google. Sure its rare that it happens to suggest a topic as sensitive as child molestation and that's why it made news this time, but Google is continuously tweaking their algorithm and tomorrow they might be running into the same problem with "how to" suggesting "how to bake a fruitcake" and realizing few people really want to do that so downgrade those results a bit and promote "how to cook a turkey" instead or whatever they do (we can assume its more complicated and generalized than my example of course!)
you could use Bitcoin alone to get by in the world.
For the most part, I don't see why you couldn't. I mean you'd be severely restricting yourself to places that accept bitcoin payments but there's plenty of those out there. Not the majority by any stretch of the imagination of course, but you only really need one grocery store, maybe a gas station if you drive, and a few other such things that are within your ability (and willingness) to commute.
every speculation bubble in history has had more people lose than win trying to time that.
But the ones who win, win big. Of course they tend to also be the ones who are already rich since they've got the resources to monitor and track market conditions and therefore have the highest chance of picking the right moment to bail. Its still a bit of a gamble of course, but its the difference between a normal person playing a solid game of blackjack vs a person able to count cards. In the former case sure you can win, but its still stacked in the house' favor. In the latter case you can of course still lose if you run into an unlucky deck shuffle, but your odds are much much better for winning.
I'm pretty sure it bears lots of resemblance to reality. But keep in mind that the black market primarily using bitcoin is not the same as bitcoin being primarily used by the black market.
Well, and of course I mean specifically the online black market. Of course for physical in-person meetings of any sort, a stack of cash is likely still the main transaction currency.
By what metric? "Freedom" as we currently know it is only a couple hundred years old. There are many civilizations that have survived that long all the way up and down the spectrum, mostly on the end of less free. And a few that have lasted 1000+.
The US is already looking a little frail as people continually trade off their freedoms for short-term profit (not even their own short-term profit in a lot of cases) or the illusion of security against threats that are flashy but have a tiny probability of occurring while ignoring threats that are much more dangerous but don't happen to make good headlines.
I'm not expecting the end of the US any time soon of course, but when comparing against some of the ancient empires (Roman empire especially,) the US is still practically a baby.
Of course I'm interchanging the term "civilization" and "society." If your definition of "society" is something along the lines of "whatever I happen to prefer" or worse "the one I grew up in therefore best," then of course my arguments will be a bit meaningless.
Any plan that starts with "we all" with respect to the entire nation may as well stop right there. "We" probably didn't read your article to in the first place, and most of the "we" who did will stop caring as soon as they realize it takes more than one or two clicks worth of effort, never mind when it costs money.
Its the same reason why you'll never prevent climate change by suggesting people drive less.. even if they agree with you, they simply won't do it. They'll excuse themselves for one reason or another or they'll decide that their personal contribution isn't enough to matter or so on.
If you want a significant number of people to follow your plan, you have to make it worth their immediate while. Or alternately, enforce an immediate punishment when they fail to follow the plan. Being immediate is the big thing though -- people are just way too good at finding excuses if the pros and cons are too vague or too far in the future.
That wouldn't be what most people consider a "troll" though.
If your Intellectual Ventures example company was wanting to act like a troll, they would wait around until you go broke, buy up your patents at firesale prices after you've declared bankruptcy.. then sit on them for 5 years until somebody else has created and started selling a similar product, and after the new product has built up plenty of sales and profit, they'll file a lawsuit not only for infringing on the patent but also for "damages" due to lost sales (of the product they never even developed never mind sold.)
Basically if you exercise your patent, or (fairly) license it to people who will, you aren't acting as a trll. Its only trolish when you start doing shady things with your patent (of course someone who's exercising their patent can still do trolish things like telling everyone its a defensive patent and they won't enforce it.. and then change their mind 5 years later. But its still not as bad as a pure trll..)
(Sorry for the intentional misspellings.. lameness filter attack..)
Do you pay more for filing a patent and having it accepted than you do for filing and having it rejected? If the fees are the same for both cases, then the fees are not the price of the patent and the just compensation should be $0.
There's still a bit of a difference though -- unlike real property, the patent is granted by the government. Its not something they built, found or bought themselves.
That is, the government isn't so much taking something away as correcting a mistake they previously made in issuing the patent originally.