Coming from someone who usually votes Democrat, I wish you luck. I really want there to be a second party that has a chance to sway my vote. There is plenty wrong with the Democrat party that I'd love to see fixed, but right now voting for a Republican candidate is a non-starter. If the GOP would ditch the anti-science and pro-Christianity views, it could turn into a party that I might actually support. That would ensure actual competition in the political parties in the races (as in "here are two different but viable plans for improving our future") and might also result in cooperation between the two parties after elections.
Here's hoping the crazy wing of the GOP gets spun off into oblivion before the "sane Republicans" go extinct.
Which is why safe harbor rules were made. This doesn't just affect CloudFlare, but any site that takes user content. Even Slashdot. Suppose I were to type a few dozen pages of text into my comment that happened to be from a copyrighted book. That could be a copyright violation and Slashdot might be sued. However, maybe the text comes from my own book which I own the copyright to. Or maybe the author placed the book in the public domain so anyone can post it online. How would Slashdot be able to identify that the text is copyrighted and whether the poster is able to upload said text. For a very large organization, this might be difficult but doable. For smaller companies (or hobbyist websites), it would be impossible and they'd find themselves one lawsuit away from being shut down - even if the lawsuit was groundless.
This is why we have safe harbor (possibly the only good part of the DMCA). If the RIAA/MPAA spot a pirate site using CloudFlare's service, they send a DMCA notice to CloudFlare. CloudFlare turns off the service and sends the notice to the site. If the site challenges the DMCA notice, CloudFlare turns their access back on. Then, it's a legal battle between the RIAA/MPAA and the site accused of piracy. CloudFlare is completely out of it (unless the court orders them to turn off access for good).
The MPAA/RIAA wants websites to be the piracy police so that they don't have to do any work. They want the benefits of the DMCA without any of the "costs" (needing to seek out copyright violations). It's pure laziness coupled with greed.
I haven't had time to read any books since I've been spending my free time writing my second book.
I'd recommend my first book - Defenders of Shadow and Light: Ghost Thief. Then again, I'll admit I'm biased. You can download the first three chapters for free from my website.
That was what did it for me. I wrote an application to let people see who followed you so you could decide whether or not you wanted to follow you back. It was a decent application and, if I put some work into it, might have been something many people used. Shortly after launching it, Twitter changed their API rules, vastly limiting the amount of times a developer could hit their API and how much data they could pull. My application, given it's tiny audience, wouldn't have hit that amount, but had it grown in popularity it easily could have.
I decided not to put my effort into the application if Twitter was going to give me a hard ceiling for how much my application could grow before they cut me off. If I'm going to put my efforts into something, I'd rather it not be in an area where someone tells me from the start that I only go so far.
Maybe, but if Cassini crashes on Enceladus and later probes find water bears, there will be doubt if they were there before Cassini crashed. If Cassini smashes into Saturn and later probes find water bears on Enceladus, then that will be historic news.
Wireless carriers, like Verizon/AT&T/Sprint, typically have either low caps or - in the case of the newer "unlimited" plans - a threshold after which your speeds are reduced. This is a good service to use for checking Facebook on the go, but not good for streaming Netflix from home. My Verizon Wireless plan has a 10GB data cap. I'd hit that in under 4 hours of HD. I recently checked and they have a "data only" plan that one could use to give a device Internet access without needing cell phone/SMS service. This would cost $710 for 100GB. (I typically use around 500GB a month, mostly in streaming video.)
Satellite tends to be extremely expensive and has low caps. DSL is slower, costs as much as if not more than my cable ISP does, and is an older technology that the phone companies want to get rid of ASAP.
Using your barbershop analogy, it's more like there are five barbershops in town. One will cut your hair for a reasonable price and the others will charge you $200 for a haircut and don't guarantee that they won't stop halfway through cutting your hair unless you pay them more. I don't call those options actual competition.
Not to mention that mobile providers typically have caps. Right now, I can use 10GB of data per month on my Verizon Wireless plan. If I streamed Netflix videos at only Standard Definition and did nothing else, that would give me just over 14 hours of streaming. At High Definition, I'd have just over 3 hours of viewing.
Yes, newer plans are "unlimited", but that's usually with an asterisk and fine print that states you get throttled to slower speeds if you exceed a certain "definitely not a cap" amount. Either way, mobile providers aren't a suitable replacement for a wired broadband connection.
As to this supposed "industry analysis", who did the analysis, Comcast? Of course they would say there is plenty of competition.
I'd be willing to bet that they're including mobile operators in the "competition" space. Yes, if you include Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and the dozen other resellers and tiny carriers, you have a lot of "ISPs" to choose from. However, if you actually want to USE your mobile connection for something data-heavy like streaming, you'll quickly generate a huge bill.
But that "option" is "available" so into the Competition Bucket it goes!
I think it's going to depend on how they handle upgrading the Time Warner Cable network. TWC was in the midst of a "MAXX" upgrade cycle that would have bumped up the speeds without increasing the prices. (I'd have gotten a higher speed on my plan but would keep paying the same amount as before.) My area would have likely been upgraded this year, but all of those upgrades were put on hold with the merger.
Google could have 99.9% of the market, and there would still be more competition among search engines than among ISPs where I live, given that there's exactly one ISP offering broadband speeds at my address (a suburban home in an area with a population of about 250K, so, not out in the boonies). The fact that other ISPs exist somewhere does nothing to change my situation here in the real world. This sort of situation is exactly what regulation is supposed to prevent; that he doesn't acknowledge this simple truth is utterly infuriating.
I'm in the same situation. Changing my search engine would mean a minute of fiddling with browser settings. Changing my ISP would mean buying a new house in a new town, moving all of my stuff to the new house, selling my old house, uprooting my kids from their school, etc. And if that second ISP was a dud, I'd have to move AGAIN - possibly out of state. And yet Pai seems to think it's a snap to switch which ISP you're using.
I also recognize that 4, the most choices I've had anywhere is less than 12; apparently unlike the FCC.
The sad thing is, I'd be all for relaxing the regulations if everyone had 12 ISPs to choose from. It would be easy to tell ISP A that you're against some business practice of theirs, vote with your wallet, and go to another ISP. For most people in the country, though, They're lucky if they have one other ISP to go to. (I don't have the figures on hand at the moment to know whether most have only 1 ISP, but I remember that most had 2 or fewer.) The FCC chair claiming that the broadband market is "too competitive" is laughable.
Companies will run slave plantations unless somebody forces them not to. Capitalism is useful but it'll throw you under the bus if it means higher profit, it's nobody's friend just raw application of economic power. Once you're past the size where anyone feels personally responsible and they only answer to shareholders who want return on interest it has no conscience, ethics or morality. So I'm not sure what you think is new or different here, the only time they don't act like total psychos is exactly when there's consequences. Otherwise they'd make Soylent Green out of you.
I think a lot of people forget this when they cry out that all government regulations are bad and should be done away with. That was nearly the case in relatively-recent history. Children were forced to work 19 hour days in locked factories with only one way out. Employers treated them like little more than slaves and there was no protection for the worker. Got injured on the job due to your employer providing a dangerous work environment? Too bad, you're unemployed now since you can't do the job they hired you to do. Fire raging in the one spot where you can exit the factory? Jump from the tenth story window to your death. (See the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.)
Over time, outrage over these abuses led to the government making rules against them. You can't work kids 19 hours a day. You need to provide a safe working environment. Employees injured on the job deserve compensation. Products should be safe for people to use.
Are all regulations good? Of course not, but acting like they're all bad and companies would be job-creating angels if that big, bad government would just get off their back is far from the truth as well.
You are lucky. I have one wired, broadband ISP: Spectrum (previously Time Warner Cable). They recently announced that all TWC brokered deals will expire and they won't cut new deals. This could mean my Internet costs will go up by $50. I have no other options so it's either take what Spectrum will give me or go without Internet. (The latter is not an option.)
If Spectrum tomorrow announced that they were injecting a dozen ads into each page I viewed, I'd still have no options.
When consumers can't vote with their wallets because the company has a monopoly, it's the job of the government to either break up the monopoly or enforce rules to keep the monopoly on line.
This bit me hard years back. I had made a "minor change" and pushed it live on a Friday afternoon. (Do you hear the sirens blazing yet?) That weekend, my parents were visiting so I was looking forward to some family time. Instead, I had to go into work on Sunday and debug the application because my "minor change" brought the whole system down.
I learned two important lessons that day:
1) Always test everything no matter how minor it seems.
2) NEVER push something live on Friday - even if you've done all your testing. Wait until Monday to push it live so that your weekend isn't interrupted by support calls.
I actively laughed when Blockbuster tried to launch the DIVX discs - "DVD-like" discs that you'd rent but would never have to return because they'd time out. This was, at least in part, a response from an upcoming service called Netflix which let you rent/return discs by mail and thus didn't have to drive to the store. Of course, you needed special DIVX players to play Blockbuster's DIVX discs and nobody owned those (but you could buy them from partner Circuit City). It flopped hard since people didn't want to pay more just to make more waste on a format even more proprietary than DVD.
Then Blockbuster had a chance to buy out Netflix in 2000 for $50 million. Blockbuster declined the offer. Two years later, Netflix IPOed, selling 5.5 million shares for $15 a share.
The only tears I shed for Blockbuster came from laughing so hard at them.
You're joking, but I've often said that Netflix is Hollywood's best tool against piracy. Say you were thinking of pirating BIG BLOCKBUSTER MOVIE. If it was on Netflix, what would be the likelihood that you'd pirate versus just streaming? Now, I'm sure some would pirate anyway, but many people would watch it 100% legally via Netflix versus pirating. If Hollywood would realize this and cooperate WITH Netflix, they could both profit. Instead, they brand Netflix as the enemy in one breath and in the other rail about how bad piracy is.
I've run into this before as well with Walmart. We don't buy from there often, but this one time something we needed showed on their website. When we got into the store, though, it was more. We could select "pick up at store" and get it an hour later at the online price or they would match another store's price, but they wouldn't match their own online price. The customer service lady at the store empathized with us. She had hit into this often herself. Unfortunately, corporate runs the web site and the physical stores as if they are separate companies and refuses to allow honoring or matching online prices in the store. My guess is B&N does the same thing. Idiotic from a customer perspective, but I guess some MBA thinks that this is genius.
do you know how many TV appliances like AppleTV existed? Just AppleTV. That was it; there was no Roku, there was not Amazon Stick. There was no Chromecast.
In fact, Roku began life as a Netflix streaming box idea that a group within Netflix had. Netflix eventually decided not to pursue the project and it was spun off as a separate company, albeit one with Netflix as the primary application draw. IIRC, early on Roku was boasting that they'd have 10 channels by the end of the year. They hit that number and then rocketed up in popularity soon after.
Daredevil's first season (haven't seen the second season yet) was a perfect example of this. Each episode moved the story line forward without any real "filler episodes." When the previous episode left off at a point, there was a really good chance that the next episode would pick up right there, No, they might not have as many episodes as a "regular TV" show would, but they also don't need to rely on the Bad Guy Of The Week formula to distract viewers from the fact that the main story line hasn't progressed in three episodes.
Slashdot Mirror
Coming from someone who usually votes Democrat, I wish you luck. I really want there to be a second party that has a chance to sway my vote. There is plenty wrong with the Democrat party that I'd love to see fixed, but right now voting for a Republican candidate is a non-starter. If the GOP would ditch the anti-science and pro-Christianity views, it could turn into a party that I might actually support. That would ensure actual competition in the political parties in the races (as in "here are two different but viable plans for improving our future") and might also result in cooperation between the two parties after elections.
Here's hoping the crazy wing of the GOP gets spun off into oblivion before the "sane Republicans" go extinct.
Which is why safe harbor rules were made. This doesn't just affect CloudFlare, but any site that takes user content. Even Slashdot. Suppose I were to type a few dozen pages of text into my comment that happened to be from a copyrighted book. That could be a copyright violation and Slashdot might be sued. However, maybe the text comes from my own book which I own the copyright to. Or maybe the author placed the book in the public domain so anyone can post it online. How would Slashdot be able to identify that the text is copyrighted and whether the poster is able to upload said text. For a very large organization, this might be difficult but doable. For smaller companies (or hobbyist websites), it would be impossible and they'd find themselves one lawsuit away from being shut down - even if the lawsuit was groundless.
This is why we have safe harbor (possibly the only good part of the DMCA). If the RIAA/MPAA spot a pirate site using CloudFlare's service, they send a DMCA notice to CloudFlare. CloudFlare turns off the service and sends the notice to the site. If the site challenges the DMCA notice, CloudFlare turns their access back on. Then, it's a legal battle between the RIAA/MPAA and the site accused of piracy. CloudFlare is completely out of it (unless the court orders them to turn off access for good).
The MPAA/RIAA wants websites to be the piracy police so that they don't have to do any work. They want the benefits of the DMCA without any of the "costs" (needing to seek out copyright violations). It's pure laziness coupled with greed.
I haven't had time to read any books since I've been spending my free time writing my second book.
I'd recommend my first book - Defenders of Shadow and Light: Ghost Thief. Then again, I'll admit I'm biased. You can download the first three chapters for free from my website.
That was what did it for me. I wrote an application to let people see who followed you so you could decide whether or not you wanted to follow you back. It was a decent application and, if I put some work into it, might have been something many people used. Shortly after launching it, Twitter changed their API rules, vastly limiting the amount of times a developer could hit their API and how much data they could pull. My application, given it's tiny audience, wouldn't have hit that amount, but had it grown in popularity it easily could have.
I decided not to put my effort into the application if Twitter was going to give me a hard ceiling for how much my application could grow before they cut me off. If I'm going to put my efforts into something, I'd rather it not be in an area where someone tells me from the start that I only go so far.
Maybe, but if Cassini crashes on Enceladus and later probes find water bears, there will be doubt if they were there before Cassini crashed. If Cassini smashes into Saturn and later probes find water bears on Enceladus, then that will be historic news.
Wireless carriers, like Verizon/AT&T/Sprint, typically have either low caps or - in the case of the newer "unlimited" plans - a threshold after which your speeds are reduced. This is a good service to use for checking Facebook on the go, but not good for streaming Netflix from home. My Verizon Wireless plan has a 10GB data cap. I'd hit that in under 4 hours of HD. I recently checked and they have a "data only" plan that one could use to give a device Internet access without needing cell phone/SMS service. This would cost $710 for 100GB. (I typically use around 500GB a month, mostly in streaming video.)
Satellite tends to be extremely expensive and has low caps. DSL is slower, costs as much as if not more than my cable ISP does, and is an older technology that the phone companies want to get rid of ASAP.
Using your barbershop analogy, it's more like there are five barbershops in town. One will cut your hair for a reasonable price and the others will charge you $200 for a haircut and don't guarantee that they won't stop halfway through cutting your hair unless you pay them more. I don't call those options actual competition.
Not to mention that mobile providers typically have caps. Right now, I can use 10GB of data per month on my Verizon Wireless plan. If I streamed Netflix videos at only Standard Definition and did nothing else, that would give me just over 14 hours of streaming. At High Definition, I'd have just over 3 hours of viewing.
Yes, newer plans are "unlimited", but that's usually with an asterisk and fine print that states you get throttled to slower speeds if you exceed a certain "definitely not a cap" amount. Either way, mobile providers aren't a suitable replacement for a wired broadband connection.
I'd be willing to bet that they're including mobile operators in the "competition" space. Yes, if you include Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and the dozen other resellers and tiny carriers, you have a lot of "ISPs" to choose from. However, if you actually want to USE your mobile connection for something data-heavy like streaming, you'll quickly generate a huge bill.
But that "option" is "available" so into the Competition Bucket it goes!
I think it's going to depend on how they handle upgrading the Time Warner Cable network. TWC was in the midst of a "MAXX" upgrade cycle that would have bumped up the speeds without increasing the prices. (I'd have gotten a higher speed on my plan but would keep paying the same amount as before.) My area would have likely been upgraded this year, but all of those upgrades were put on hold with the merger.
I'm in the same situation. Changing my search engine would mean a minute of fiddling with browser settings. Changing my ISP would mean buying a new house in a new town, moving all of my stuff to the new house, selling my old house, uprooting my kids from their school, etc. And if that second ISP was a dud, I'd have to move AGAIN - possibly out of state. And yet Pai seems to think it's a snap to switch which ISP you're using.
The sad thing is, I'd be all for relaxing the regulations if everyone had 12 ISPs to choose from. It would be easy to tell ISP A that you're against some business practice of theirs, vote with your wallet, and go to another ISP. For most people in the country, though, They're lucky if they have one other ISP to go to. (I don't have the figures on hand at the moment to know whether most have only 1 ISP, but I remember that most had 2 or fewer.) The FCC chair claiming that the broadband market is "too competitive" is laughable.
I think a lot of people forget this when they cry out that all government regulations are bad and should be done away with. That was nearly the case in relatively-recent history. Children were forced to work 19 hour days in locked factories with only one way out. Employers treated them like little more than slaves and there was no protection for the worker. Got injured on the job due to your employer providing a dangerous work environment? Too bad, you're unemployed now since you can't do the job they hired you to do. Fire raging in the one spot where you can exit the factory? Jump from the tenth story window to your death. (See the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.)
Over time, outrage over these abuses led to the government making rules against them. You can't work kids 19 hours a day. You need to provide a safe working environment. Employees injured on the job deserve compensation. Products should be safe for people to use.
Are all regulations good? Of course not, but acting like they're all bad and companies would be job-creating angels if that big, bad government would just get off their back is far from the truth as well.
You are lucky. I have one wired, broadband ISP: Spectrum (previously Time Warner Cable). They recently announced that all TWC brokered deals will expire and they won't cut new deals. This could mean my Internet costs will go up by $50. I have no other options so it's either take what Spectrum will give me or go without Internet. (The latter is not an option.)
If Spectrum tomorrow announced that they were injecting a dozen ads into each page I viewed, I'd still have no options.
When consumers can't vote with their wallets because the company has a monopoly, it's the job of the government to either break up the monopoly or enforce rules to keep the monopoly on line.
I'm the best there is at what I do, but what I do occupies a narrow niche.
This bit me hard years back. I had made a "minor change" and pushed it live on a Friday afternoon. (Do you hear the sirens blazing yet?) That weekend, my parents were visiting so I was looking forward to some family time. Instead, I had to go into work on Sunday and debug the application because my "minor change" brought the whole system down.
I learned two important lessons that day:
1) Always test everything no matter how minor it seems.
2) NEVER push something live on Friday - even if you've done all your testing. Wait until Monday to push it live so that your weekend isn't interrupted by support calls.
Luckily, if you play music, they'll calm down and just follow you along.
You're a Tech Wizard, Harry!
That would still be a long list. Might be easier to just list the things he told the truth about. It'd save time.
I actively laughed when Blockbuster tried to launch the DIVX discs - "DVD-like" discs that you'd rent but would never have to return because they'd time out. This was, at least in part, a response from an upcoming service called Netflix which let you rent/return discs by mail and thus didn't have to drive to the store. Of course, you needed special DIVX players to play Blockbuster's DIVX discs and nobody owned those (but you could buy them from partner Circuit City). It flopped hard since people didn't want to pay more just to make more waste on a format even more proprietary than DVD.
Then Blockbuster had a chance to buy out Netflix in 2000 for $50 million. Blockbuster declined the offer. Two years later, Netflix IPOed, selling 5.5 million shares for $15 a share.
The only tears I shed for Blockbuster came from laughing so hard at them.
Hollywood tried to strike Netflix down, but it became more powerful than they could have ever imagined.
You're joking, but I've often said that Netflix is Hollywood's best tool against piracy. Say you were thinking of pirating BIG BLOCKBUSTER MOVIE. If it was on Netflix, what would be the likelihood that you'd pirate versus just streaming? Now, I'm sure some would pirate anyway, but many people would watch it 100% legally via Netflix versus pirating. If Hollywood would realize this and cooperate WITH Netflix, they could both profit. Instead, they brand Netflix as the enemy in one breath and in the other rail about how bad piracy is.
And often the blame for that rests on the content owners who don't want their shows/movies on Netflix lest they "hurt DVD sales."
I've run into this before as well with Walmart. We don't buy from there often, but this one time something we needed showed on their website. When we got into the store, though, it was more. We could select "pick up at store" and get it an hour later at the online price or they would match another store's price, but they wouldn't match their own online price. The customer service lady at the store empathized with us. She had hit into this often herself. Unfortunately, corporate runs the web site and the physical stores as if they are separate companies and refuses to allow honoring or matching online prices in the store. My guess is B&N does the same thing. Idiotic from a customer perspective, but I guess some MBA thinks that this is genius.
In fact, Roku began life as a Netflix streaming box idea that a group within Netflix had. Netflix eventually decided not to pursue the project and it was spun off as a separate company, albeit one with Netflix as the primary application draw. IIRC, early on Roku was boasting that they'd have 10 channels by the end of the year. They hit that number and then rocketed up in popularity soon after.
Daredevil's first season (haven't seen the second season yet) was a perfect example of this. Each episode moved the story line forward without any real "filler episodes." When the previous episode left off at a point, there was a really good chance that the next episode would pick up right there, No, they might not have as many episodes as a "regular TV" show would, but they also don't need to rely on the Bad Guy Of The Week formula to distract viewers from the fact that the main story line hasn't progressed in three episodes.