I didn't find a thing to support it in the summary or a skim of the rather ponderous article. Perhaps "real moviegoers" is Scorsese's shorthand for the rapidly diminishing population who will continue to just show up at the theater and pay for whatever slop is served up that particular week?
I've not seen any proposals for sequestration that are more effective then just laying out lumber somewhere it won't decompose.
Just laying lumber out would take a lot of surface area, though. For more efficiency, maybe we could put some of the pieces vertically and invent some kind of metal fasteners to hold them together and keep them from falling down. Then we'd probably have to put some sort of a slanted cover on the top to keep the rain from soaking into the lumber and rotting it. Heck, if we went crazy and used some of the lumber to build a surface on the inside, maybe homeless people could spend the night there or something.
At the risk of disturbing what is clearly an exceptionally robust echo chamber on this topic, here's my take:
If the FCC is fixing prices at an artificially low level because there's only one provider in an area, there's zero incentive for a second provider to engage in the capital expenditure to start to service that area. The fiat prices make it impossible for a newcomer to recoup the cost of buildout. Nobody is going to sign up for that, and the monopoly will continue.
Removing the price caps may be temporarily painful, but in the long haul someone is going to spin out that last half mile when there's a proper incentive to do so. (And the higher the incumbent jacks prices, the richer that incentive gets, so getting too greedy just slits their throat faster.) You then have multiple providers that will naturally compete on price to get more market share and pay down their capex faster. And if the incumbent lowers prices enough to disincentivize the other provider from laying that last piece of wire, the customers win that way as well. If you were talking about one provider in the entire city, that might be concerning. But having at least one other provider within half a mile completely changes the calculus in my view.
Very happy to have a thoughtful discussion about this. Flamethowers can save their keystrokes.
we start seeing meteoric rises in global temperatures, the kind which match exactly the predictive models that simulate 100 years of pumping billions of tons of pollutants into the atmosphere
Absolutely correct for sufficiently loose definitions of "exactly."
Back in the real world, the models don't even accurately reflect the actual historic temperature record we have. Even the apologists don't seem to deny this. See, e.g., the error bars in the first chart after the heading "Comparing models and observations" here, which shows the models don't even purport to track actual historic performance by much better than 1 degree C.
Seriously, when you can't even build a model that can correctly spit back out the past data already available to the modeler, it seems a bit much to crow about its precision.
I'll leave the parallel analysis of "every single climatologist on the planet" as an exercise for the reader.
That's certainly possible, but it just reinforces my point. If they had the Gmail logs, they wouldn't need anything from PureVPN but the IP address association for the customer's session (which PureVPN's privacy policy by my read doesn't explicitly exclude from logging). Activity logs showing that particular session accessed Gmail, without actual account information, might perhaps reinforce what the Gmail logs already showed, but wouldn't independently show anything.
And if it wasn't necessary for PureVPN to have logged activity for the feds to connect these dots, Occam would strongly suggest that PureVPN indeed follows its published privacy practices and doesn't log activity, and this article suggesting otherwise was at best poorly researched/written and at worst simply FUD.
That would be a fine explanation if there were three different services used by three different URLs. But here we're talking about two different Gmail accounts. What information would the VPN service have about what specific Gmail account the customer was accessing through that IP address?
Something doesn't sound quite right about this. From TFA:
The logs showed how within the span of minutes the same VPN IP address had logged into Lin's real Gmail address, another Gmail address used for some of the threats, and a Rover.com account Lin created to discover Smith's real phone number.
Gmail has forced HTTPS since 2014. What are we being asked to believe here?
Where I live in Europe now, I can click on the search for providers button, and can't swing a dead cat around my head without getting at least five
Actual network operators, or virtual network operators reselling bandwidth on one of the actual networks? Unless this list is way wrong, there are only 3-4 actual network operators in most European countries, essentially the same as the U.S.
And the US has just TWO?
The U.S. currently has four network operators of any significance: AT&T (huge), Verizon (huge), Sprint (medium), and T-Mobile (medium) -- this proposed merger would reduce that to three networks of comparable size. Then there are dozens of mobile virtual network operators that essentially resell bandwidth on one of those four networks (often with limitations on speed, call quality, or what have you).
You don't see Democrats saying "that was a great Republican idea, let's keep working on that" very often either.
Generally they reserve that language for ideas that weren't really Republicans', where they're trying to cast a Democratic-centric proposal as bipartisan so they can try to shame/intimidate Republicans into getting on board. One of the most extreme examples is the truly laughable proposition that Obamacare was a "Republican idea," a meme someone quite predictably has already thrown into this thread.
Power companies do the same thing. Mine calls it "demand response." Instead of increasing supply to meet demand, they can decrease demand to meet supply in order to keep the lights on.
Demand response aren't intended to decrease net demand as much as to displace demand into lower-priced times of day (e.g., overnight). That doesn't buy you anything with solar. And a system where the higher and lower priced periods fluctuated from day to day and week to week would be largely ineffective because people wouldn't have the price signals they need to decide how to plan their consumption patterns.
So whenever people mention needing "backup" generation, it's bogus misdirection.
Nonsense. As you noted, the installed capacity of the current grid is greater than average demand (you say by 2.2 times -- we'll go with that) because the grid has to be able to instantaneously deliver peak demand. A watt of solar or wind capacity cannot be relied upon to deliver that watt when needed to meet peak demand, because the sun may not be shining or the wind may not be blowing at that time. So another watt of capacity has to be available -- on a completely sporadic timetable -- to stand in for that solar/wind unit. The only way to guarantee that to the degree needed to reliably be able to deliver peak demand is to pretty much have that extra conventional watt of capacity on standby in the event it's needed. So a solar grid would have to be roughly 2 times peak demand, not 2.2 times average demand.
That's not at all the same thing as having a bit more capacity to compensate for infrequent events like plants being taken down for maintenance, or the loss of ~5% capacity due to hydro having a slow year.
Hint: if you would build a 'back up power plant' for every solar plant, 50% of them would idle at night, probably more. Because: no one needs the power.
The nighttime reduction in demand is not nearly as extreme as you're making out. Take a look at a real-world example in California here.
The useful solar generation period ends around 5:30pm. Demand continues to increase (people going home after work), peaking around 8pm and not returning to mid-day levels until around 11pm. That first part of the night takes a big bite out of the period of reduced consumption from midnight-6am.
There will of course be more imbalance in summer, and less in winter. This time of year probably just about splits the difference.
Heavy footprint? Solar is installed where there are already roofs, usually.
Right now, occasionally and on a voluntary basis. Would you mandate it? I doubt that would sell in the real world. Also, the glare from discrete solar plants are already proving a problem for airline pilots when flying in the area. Your proposal would turn that into a nationwide problem.
In any event, all the roofs in the U.S. wouldn't come even close to providing enough surface area given that a typical house probably has in the neighborhood of 7-800 sq. ft. of usable roof area, which would support about 7-8kw of panels. Based on my math down-thread, reliably supporting a household consumption of ~2500kWh/month would require constant generation of about 3.5kW, which would take about 14kW of panels when factoring in solar cycles and a cloudy day allowance.
The math would be much worse for businesses, factories, skyscrapers, etc.
Thanks for the links. I'm all for having as concrete discussions as possible about this stuff -- I think people spend a lot of time talking across each other on this because they don't use actual numbers and/or look at the big picture.
Also, SoCal Edison has been bringing online some incredible advances in energy storage technology.
As I read your Edison link, it says they're buying a bunch of Tesla battery packs (400MW in total) and installing most of them as fairly small buffers at some of their conventional plants, and also tagging 125MW of those batteries as a renewable pilot. That's a statistically irrelevant amount of capacity.
Your first California ISO link shows a peak solar supply of about 9500MW, which looking at the area under the curve is probably available about 9 hours a day. Let's go with 10 and say that's about the average sunny-day yield year-round, which should be conservative. So you'd need about 13GW of battery capacity to be able to supply 9500MW around the clock.
Then you need additional generation capacity to be able to charge your batteries with 13GW over your 10-hour sunny period, or another 1.3GW for a total of 2.2GW. Statewide electricity consumption looks to average about 32GW, so now we're up to 66GW of solar generation capacity and 430GW of battery capacity.
And we still haven't touched the cloudy day problem. A margin for that which is both safe and feasible doesn't exist, but let's say we're willing to live with 3x (assuming some level of averaging across the system and with some sort of conventional last-ditch generation capacity for the weeks you're wrong). Now 200GW of solar generation capacity and 1.5TW of battery capacity.
You now need to multiply the above numbers by about 15 (back of the envelope -- national average consumption looks to run around 450GW). Even if we say a true national rollout would allow us to significantly decrease the cloudy day buffer, that's still approaching on the order of 7-800x Tesla's anticipated battery output over the next several years. And that's not even taking into account practical realities of availability of scarce resources to be able to build (and, eventually, rebuild) batteries on that scale. Nor does it consider the feasibility of securing the ~20 million acres the solar panels would require (which, remember, must be geographically distributed enough to average out weather patterns). Which, it must be said, is a relative bargain compared to the ~200 million acres it would take for a national wind farm (hand-waving that the average effective duty cycle of the wind is about that of the sun, which it probably isn't).
Systems like these will begin taking hold across the country over the course of the next decade, changing the dynamics of solar energy availability and reliability.
See above. I don't think people really comprehend what it would take for something like this to scale across the country.
Or you do what others do: you have a back up solar plant. Wow that was so simple again.
So you're talking about having to navigate land purchase, permits, regulations, NIMBY lawsuits, etc. etc., to build plants in (at least -- see below) two geographically diverse locations just to (maybe) get the capacity of one? That's a different use of the word "simple" than I think most people are accustomed to.
And on top of that, you're now chewing up (at least) twice the real estate for what is already a very heavy-footprint technology.
When was the last time that whole Africa was under clouds? Or whole USA?
The whole USA doesn't have to be under clouds -- just the two particular locations you selected for your primary and backup plants.
I really can't think of anything wrong with solar, other than the obvious... it only works a part of the day.
There's nothing at all wrong with solar as a way to generate electricity.
The problem comes when people suggest that solar is a way to reliably generate electricity. As you note, it isn't.
Since we like the lights to come on whenever we flip the switch, that means that even if the power companies come up with reasonably low-loss storage technologies to even out the part of a day problem, that still doesn't solve the cloudy/rainy day problem. And thus, installed solar capacity can't be counted on to be there at any particular point in time and requires fossil fuel capacity as a backup.
So at the end of the day, the conventional plants still get built, have to be maintained, staffed, etc., and also have to be spun up and down when needed, which decreases their overall net efficiency. And that means the top-line numbers of installed solar capacity don't have much bearing on how much conventional capacity they're actually displacing in operation.
(I'd be interested to know whether the graph in TFA includes backup capacity, or whether the coal/natural gas installations are solely for standalone capacity. If the former, it seems like there'd be a little something there for everyone.)
For an injunction to apply to a non-party (i.e., someone who did not get their proverbial day in court), that non-party has to be in "active concert or participation" with the defendant. There's a fairly accessible overview of the issue here.
Given the unlikelihood that ISPs and search engines are actively colluding with SciHub (or indeed treating them any differently than any other site out there), it would greatly surprise me if a court would find them to satisfy the above standard and hold them in contempt for not complying with the injunction.
Now, might they simply decide to comply with the injunction anyway to avoid the hassle of having to go to court to prove they shouldn't be subject to it? Absolutely. But that's more of a business decision than a legal one.
They're an ad company that places paid favored links towards the top of their searches, so yes they are a gatekeeper.
Particularly after ending its FCF program, every single one of the websites Google returns in a search can be freely accessed without leave from Google.
Simply installing a huge neon sign pointing to a particular gate does not make one a gatekeeper.
How much can states override the FCC's proclamations?
It's funny how lefties have suddenly rediscovered the allure of federalism now that they're temporarily out of power. I'm sure it will go back in the dustbin after the next election cycle or two.
Tell me -- how would you have reacted had individual states simply refused to comply with the Net Neut regulations Wheeler put in place?
Well, the USB key has been available for well over two years now -- for less than $20.
And what makes you think you wouldn't be able to buy the rest of the new security package if you wanted to (a) pay the going rate, just like above, and (b) live with the restrictions re third-party app access? TFA (which is basically somewhat educated rumor-mongering anyway) simply says it would be marketed to high-profile users, not that it would be restricted to them.
Remember: the Internet operated over telephone lines for most of its existence
This is a gross oversimplification that elides the entire point of the Net Neut debate: Yes, the user's connection to the ISP was over a telephone line and was regulated by Title II. But so what? There was zero regulation of (1) the rate at which the ISP decided to send any particular piece of data over that telephone line; and (2) the rate at which the ISP decided to allow its customers access to the Internet at large. All that was handled by big scary market forces.
Net Neut regulations truly paralleling Title II would mean that the ISP (e.g., CableCo) has to send all data between itself and its customers down at the same rates, but that's not what anyone really cares about. As I've said before, this entire battle is generally a proxy for "stream as much as I want to without paying more," which involves not just data flow from the ISP to the customer but data flow to the ISP from the outside world. This puts ISPs in a position of having to set all-you-can-eat prices without any reasonable expectation of what a given customer can and will actually "eat." That's an unsustainable business model. Just because the FCC temporarily pretended there was a free lunch doesn't mean that there really is one.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't find a thing to support it in the summary or a skim of the rather ponderous article. Perhaps "real moviegoers" is Scorsese's shorthand for the rapidly diminishing population who will continue to just show up at the theater and pay for whatever slop is served up that particular week?
I've not seen any proposals for sequestration that are more effective then just laying out lumber somewhere it won't decompose.
Just laying lumber out would take a lot of surface area, though. For more efficiency, maybe we could put some of the pieces vertically and invent some kind of metal fasteners to hold them together and keep them from falling down. Then we'd probably have to put some sort of a slanted cover on the top to keep the rain from soaking into the lumber and rotting it. Heck, if we went crazy and used some of the lumber to build a surface on the inside, maybe homeless people could spend the night there or something.
on some splashy initiatives that are easy to feel good about, and all of a sudden Google isn't evil anymore.
Sorta like how Escobar threw around money hand over fist building apartment buildings, soccer fields, etc., to keep public opinion on his side.
Thank you Google, for avoiding taxes, and for making the world a better place.
If that was satire, well played.
If not, I'm changing my name to Google.
"Broadband is an essential utility" is a debate in its own right, but has no relevance here in any event. FTFA:
The decision affects Business Data Services (BDS)
This isn't about home broadband. Reading the FCC's original Report and Order should remove any doubt about that.
At the risk of disturbing what is clearly an exceptionally robust echo chamber on this topic, here's my take:
If the FCC is fixing prices at an artificially low level because there's only one provider in an area, there's zero incentive for a second provider to engage in the capital expenditure to start to service that area. The fiat prices make it impossible for a newcomer to recoup the cost of buildout. Nobody is going to sign up for that, and the monopoly will continue.
Removing the price caps may be temporarily painful, but in the long haul someone is going to spin out that last half mile when there's a proper incentive to do so. (And the higher the incumbent jacks prices, the richer that incentive gets, so getting too greedy just slits their throat faster.) You then have multiple providers that will naturally compete on price to get more market share and pay down their capex faster. And if the incumbent lowers prices enough to disincentivize the other provider from laying that last piece of wire, the customers win that way as well. If you were talking about one provider in the entire city, that might be concerning. But having at least one other provider within half a mile completely changes the calculus in my view.
Very happy to have a thoughtful discussion about this. Flamethowers can save their keystrokes.
we start seeing meteoric rises in global temperatures, the kind which match exactly the predictive models that simulate 100 years of pumping billions of tons of pollutants into the atmosphere
Absolutely correct for sufficiently loose definitions of "exactly."
Back in the real world, the models don't even accurately reflect the actual historic temperature record we have . Even the apologists don't seem to deny this. See, e.g., the error bars in the first chart after the heading "Comparing models and observations" here, which shows the models don't even purport to track actual historic performance by much better than 1 degree C.
Seriously, when you can't even build a model that can correctly spit back out the past data already available to the modeler, it seems a bit much to crow about its precision.
I'll leave the parallel analysis of "every single climatologist on the planet" as an exercise for the reader.
That's certainly possible, but it just reinforces my point. If they had the Gmail logs, they wouldn't need anything from PureVPN but the IP address association for the customer's session (which PureVPN's privacy policy by my read doesn't explicitly exclude from logging). Activity logs showing that particular session accessed Gmail, without actual account information, might perhaps reinforce what the Gmail logs already showed, but wouldn't independently show anything.
And if it wasn't necessary for PureVPN to have logged activity for the feds to connect these dots, Occam would strongly suggest that PureVPN indeed follows its published privacy practices and doesn't log activity, and this article suggesting otherwise was at best poorly researched/written and at worst simply FUD.
That would be a fine explanation if there were three different services used by three different URLs. But here we're talking about two different Gmail accounts. What information would the VPN service have about what specific Gmail account the customer was accessing through that IP address?
Something doesn't sound quite right about this. From TFA:
The logs showed how within the span of minutes the same VPN IP address had logged into Lin's real Gmail address, another Gmail address used for some of the threats, and a Rover.com account Lin created to discover Smith's real phone number.
Gmail has forced HTTPS since 2014. What are we being asked to believe here?
Where I live in Europe now, I can click on the search for providers button, and can't swing a dead cat around my head without getting at least five
Actual network operators, or virtual network operators reselling bandwidth on one of the actual networks? Unless this list is way wrong, there are only 3-4 actual network operators in most European countries, essentially the same as the U.S.
And the US has just TWO?
The U.S. currently has four network operators of any significance: AT&T (huge), Verizon (huge), Sprint (medium), and T-Mobile (medium) -- this proposed merger would reduce that to three networks of comparable size. Then there are dozens of mobile virtual network operators that essentially resell bandwidth on one of those four networks (often with limitations on speed, call quality, or what have you).
You don't see Democrats saying "that was a great Republican idea, let's keep working on that" very often either.
Generally they reserve that language for ideas that weren't really Republicans', where they're trying to cast a Democratic-centric proposal as bipartisan so they can try to shame/intimidate Republicans into getting on board. One of the most extreme examples is the truly laughable proposition that Obamacare was a "Republican idea," a meme someone quite predictably has already thrown into this thread.
Power companies do the same thing. Mine calls it "demand response." Instead of increasing supply to meet demand, they can decrease demand to meet supply in order to keep the lights on.
Demand response aren't intended to decrease net demand as much as to displace demand into lower-priced times of day (e.g., overnight). That doesn't buy you anything with solar. And a system where the higher and lower priced periods fluctuated from day to day and week to week would be largely ineffective because people wouldn't have the price signals they need to decide how to plan their consumption patterns.
So whenever people mention needing "backup" generation, it's bogus misdirection.
Nonsense. As you noted, the installed capacity of the current grid is greater than average demand (you say by 2.2 times -- we'll go with that) because the grid has to be able to instantaneously deliver peak demand. A watt of solar or wind capacity cannot be relied upon to deliver that watt when needed to meet peak demand, because the sun may not be shining or the wind may not be blowing at that time. So another watt of capacity has to be available -- on a completely sporadic timetable -- to stand in for that solar/wind unit. The only way to guarantee that to the degree needed to reliably be able to deliver peak demand is to pretty much have that extra conventional watt of capacity on standby in the event it's needed. So a solar grid would have to be roughly 2 times peak demand, not 2.2 times average demand.
That's not at all the same thing as having a bit more capacity to compensate for infrequent events like plants being taken down for maintenance, or the loss of ~5% capacity due to hydro having a slow year.
Hint: if you would build a 'back up power plant' for every solar plant, 50% of them would idle at night, probably more. Because: no one needs the power.
The nighttime reduction in demand is not nearly as extreme as you're making out. Take a look at a real-world example in California here.
The useful solar generation period ends around 5:30pm. Demand continues to increase (people going home after work), peaking around 8pm and not returning to mid-day levels until around 11pm. That first part of the night takes a big bite out of the period of reduced consumption from midnight-6am.
There will of course be more imbalance in summer, and less in winter. This time of year probably just about splits the difference.
Heavy footprint? Solar is installed where there are already roofs, usually.
Right now, occasionally and on a voluntary basis. Would you mandate it? I doubt that would sell in the real world. Also, the glare from discrete solar plants are already proving a problem for airline pilots when flying in the area. Your proposal would turn that into a nationwide problem.
In any event, all the roofs in the U.S. wouldn't come even close to providing enough surface area given that a typical house probably has in the neighborhood of 7-800 sq. ft. of usable roof area, which would support about 7-8kw of panels. Based on my math down-thread, reliably supporting a household consumption of ~2500kWh/month would require constant generation of about 3.5kW, which would take about 14kW of panels when factoring in solar cycles and a cloudy day allowance.
The math would be much worse for businesses, factories, skyscrapers, etc.
Thanks for the links. I'm all for having as concrete discussions as possible about this stuff -- I think people spend a lot of time talking across each other on this because they don't use actual numbers and/or look at the big picture.
Also, SoCal Edison has been bringing online some incredible advances in energy storage technology.
As I read your Edison link, it says they're buying a bunch of Tesla battery packs (400MW in total) and installing most of them as fairly small buffers at some of their conventional plants, and also tagging 125MW of those batteries as a renewable pilot. That's a statistically irrelevant amount of capacity.
Your first California ISO link shows a peak solar supply of about 9500MW, which looking at the area under the curve is probably available about 9 hours a day. Let's go with 10 and say that's about the average sunny-day yield year-round, which should be conservative. So you'd need about 13GW of battery capacity to be able to supply 9500MW around the clock.
Then you need additional generation capacity to be able to charge your batteries with 13GW over your 10-hour sunny period, or another 1.3GW for a total of 2.2GW. Statewide electricity consumption looks to average about 32GW, so now we're up to 66GW of solar generation capacity and 430GW of battery capacity.
And we still haven't touched the cloudy day problem. A margin for that which is both safe and feasible doesn't exist, but let's say we're willing to live with 3x (assuming some level of averaging across the system and with some sort of conventional last-ditch generation capacity for the weeks you're wrong). Now 200GW of solar generation capacity and 1.5TW of battery capacity.
That's about 100x the battery capacity Tesla is promising to build by "the 2020s". Just for California.
You now need to multiply the above numbers by about 15 (back of the envelope -- national average consumption looks to run around 450GW). Even if we say a true national rollout would allow us to significantly decrease the cloudy day buffer, that's still approaching on the order of 7-800x Tesla's anticipated battery output over the next several years. And that's not even taking into account practical realities of availability of scarce resources to be able to build (and, eventually, rebuild) batteries on that scale. Nor does it consider the feasibility of securing the ~20 million acres the solar panels would require (which, remember, must be geographically distributed enough to average out weather patterns). Which, it must be said, is a relative bargain compared to the ~200 million acres it would take for a national wind farm (hand-waving that the average effective duty cycle of the wind is about that of the sun, which it probably isn't).
Systems like these will begin taking hold across the country over the course of the next decade, changing the dynamics of solar energy availability and reliability.
See above. I don't think people really comprehend what it would take for something like this to scale across the country.
Or you do what others do: you have a back up solar plant. Wow that was so simple again.
So you're talking about having to navigate land purchase, permits, regulations, NIMBY lawsuits, etc. etc., to build plants in (at least -- see below) two geographically diverse locations just to (maybe) get the capacity of one? That's a different use of the word "simple" than I think most people are accustomed to.
And on top of that, you're now chewing up (at least) twice the real estate for what is already a very heavy-footprint technology.
When was the last time that whole Africa was under clouds? Or whole USA?
The whole USA doesn't have to be under clouds -- just the two particular locations you selected for your primary and backup plants.
I really can't think of anything wrong with solar, other than the obvious... it only works a part of the day.
There's nothing at all wrong with solar as a way to generate electricity.
The problem comes when people suggest that solar is a way to reliably generate electricity. As you note, it isn't.
Since we like the lights to come on whenever we flip the switch, that means that even if the power companies come up with reasonably low-loss storage technologies to even out the part of a day problem, that still doesn't solve the cloudy/rainy day problem. And thus, installed solar capacity can't be counted on to be there at any particular point in time and requires fossil fuel capacity as a backup.
So at the end of the day, the conventional plants still get built, have to be maintained, staffed, etc., and also have to be spun up and down when needed, which decreases their overall net efficiency. And that means the top-line numbers of installed solar capacity don't have much bearing on how much conventional capacity they're actually displacing in operation.
(I'd be interested to know whether the graph in TFA includes backup capacity, or whether the coal/natural gas installations are solely for standalone capacity. If the former, it seems like there'd be a little something there for everyone.)
Now THERE's some scientific consensus for you. LOL
For an injunction to apply to a non-party (i.e., someone who did not get their proverbial day in court), that non-party has to be in "active concert or participation" with the defendant. There's a fairly accessible overview of the issue here.
Given the unlikelihood that ISPs and search engines are actively colluding with SciHub (or indeed treating them any differently than any other site out there), it would greatly surprise me if a court would find them to satisfy the above standard and hold them in contempt for not complying with the injunction.
Now, might they simply decide to comply with the injunction anyway to avoid the hassle of having to go to court to prove they shouldn't be subject to it? Absolutely. But that's more of a business decision than a legal one.
They're an ad company that places paid favored links towards the top of their searches, so yes they are a gatekeeper.
Particularly after ending its FCF program, every single one of the websites Google returns in a search can be freely accessed without leave from Google.
Simply installing a huge neon sign pointing to a particular gate does not make one a gatekeeper.
How much can states override the FCC's proclamations?
It's funny how lefties have suddenly rediscovered the allure of federalism now that they're temporarily out of power. I'm sure it will go back in the dustbin after the next election cycle or two.
Tell me -- how would you have reacted had individual states simply refused to comply with the Net Neut regulations Wheeler put in place?
Well, the USB key has been available for well over two years now -- for less than $20.
And what makes you think you wouldn't be able to buy the rest of the new security package if you wanted to (a) pay the going rate, just like above, and (b) live with the restrictions re third-party app access? TFA (which is basically somewhat educated rumor-mongering anyway) simply says it would be marketed to high-profile users, not that it would be restricted to them.
Remember: the Internet operated over telephone lines for most of its existence
This is a gross oversimplification that elides the entire point of the Net Neut debate: Yes, the user's connection to the ISP was over a telephone line and was regulated by Title II. But so what? There was zero regulation of (1) the rate at which the ISP decided to send any particular piece of data over that telephone line; and (2) the rate at which the ISP decided to allow its customers access to the Internet at large. All that was handled by big scary market forces.
Net Neut regulations truly paralleling Title II would mean that the ISP (e.g., CableCo) has to send all data between itself and its customers down at the same rates, but that's not what anyone really cares about. As I've said before, this entire battle is generally a proxy for "stream as much as I want to without paying more," which involves not just data flow from the ISP to the customer but data flow to the ISP from the outside world. This puts ISPs in a position of having to set all-you-can-eat prices without any reasonable expectation of what a given customer can and will actually "eat." That's an unsustainable business model. Just because the FCC temporarily pretended there was a free lunch doesn't mean that there really is one.