Why not? I pay my satellite TV provider for access to some basic channels, and extra for some others. Then other groups pay for advertising, and still others pay to have part or whole of their entire show played.
The FCC mandating how payments are made in the system will undoubtedly distort the market. The computer industry as a whole has consistently driven down prices and upped capability. When the government mandates certain bundles, such as not allowing ISPs to charge other ISPs for high usage, the ISPs will either 1) stop delivering that service in the same manner, or 2) charge us for it.
When Congress passed Obamacare and mandated that health care insurance companies that sold individual policies for minors ignore preexisting conditions, the insurance companies have nearly all stopped selling those policies. It's the natural cost-avoidance of unprofitable mandates.
Similarly, ISPs are either likely to stop selling unlimited bandwidth services, or pass all of those costs to the end consumer. I'm OK if Google cares enough about its content that they pay Comcast to deliver it, rather than Comcast charging me for it. One way or the other, the market will come up with an efficient, fair payment system.
Note:Anti-Net Neutrality arguments are automatically marked down as "troll."
That's because almost all of them are.
The vast majority of shrill comments and ad hominem I've seen are on the pro-side. Yours is a blessed cool breeze, and I appreciate that.
I just can't imagine a good reason to let Comcast restrict the data I pass to other Internet hosts over data lines I built with my tax dollars.
The government has its hands in so many things, it's nearly impossible to find something that your tax dollars didn't help fund. Or, better yet, both fund and restrict, like tobacco.
To stick with a close analogy, roads and rail have been largely built by government dollars. However, UPS, FedEx, and USPS can charge different rates to different customers who ship large and small, and heavy and light packages.
With an Internet "utility" it's about impossible to provide different rates on speed of delivery, such as you can with a physical shipment. (Heck, higher latency traffic is generally more expensive, like satellite based providers.) Bandwidth and uptime are what they have that they can use for pricing.
The FCC has shown over its decades that it is not geek-friendly. It restricts speech (the seven word you can't say on television, the fairness doctrine), and it restricts technology (cell phones weren't allowed for about 20 years after the technology was developed).
I think what's most likely is that the FCC starts relying on an RFC/ANSI/W3C-like system -- slow, behind, though partially useful.
The claim that Net Neutrality is "government regulation of the Internet" is a lie perpetuated by politicians acting on behalf of the cable and telephone monopolies.
Correct. The FCC instituting new rules on Internet providers is in no way, shape, or form the government regulating the Internet. The FCC is now a separate business headquartered in the Conch Republic
Well intentioned laws are not allowed to have bad consequences. If an Internet 911 call was dropped because the network provider was not allowed to give it priority, the network provider would be sued.
Geeks everywhere who don't want to pay for the bandwidth they use have been betrayed by the FCC. The Federal Communications Commission, having been delegated the Constitutional powers of Congress to regulate Interstate Commerce, absolutely refused to tell all network backbone providers that they were unable to set their own rates for using their services.
"I can't believe the FCC won't make AT&T pay for all the bandwidth I want to use on my iPhone" says Liam McCrossen, who hacked his first iPhone years ago, and has only bricked two since. "Just because I want to see streaming video of the old COMDEX conventions doesn't mean I should have to pay for it." McCrossen, who hasn't taken any economics or business classes, is pretty sure the network providers will raise everyone's rates equally rather than just bumping up the cost of his unlimited data plan. "I'm also against paying for trash removal by the trash can" McCrossen opined.
The FCC has been unavailable for comment in their failure to "stick it to the man" and allow some companies to freely enter into contracts.
Yeah, Nixon would probably be thrown out of the GOP. He got the US off the gold standard, instituted wage and price controls, and ended the Vietnam war.
The USPS had to change how they operated for next-day mail service when FedEx and UPS came into the market through a loophole in the postal monopoly laws. Heck, USPS contracts with those two for some of their air transportation. And I don't know if you can count REA as a government success. The first commercial US nuclear power plant was built in 1958, and it only took the government 36 more years to string power lines in all the rural areas. Success!
Before commercial companies got into building the Internet infrastructure, the 'net was "for me, not for thee." The Department of Defense and the universities didn't bring the Internet into homes. Commercial companies did, because they thought they could make a profit at it.
And now we get to the rub. Your argument is based on the assumption that the government is inherently allowed to set all rules, except when someone can petition for not being regulated in some small area. My argument is based on the assumption that government regulation is only authorized in some small areas, and to exercise authority there the government has to make a specific action to remove that authority from someone else.
Your scenario has subjects, not citizens. And a whole lot more lobbyists.
No, I'm saying that you can't use the fact that _some_ regulation didn't get the outcome wanted as a complete excuse that _lots_ more regulation or nationalization are appropriate and logical follow on choices. Other choices include doing nothing, or undoing what was done before.
It hasn't even been established that there is a problem that requires net neutrality as a solution.
Of course I listed sources of monopoly power instead of types of monopolies. Under the definition on monopoly, any company or industry can become a monopoly, so the types of monopolies are unimportant. Anyway, we're talking about net neutrality, so that restricts any of the types of monopolies we'd have.
You state that we have monopolies here because of a combination of 1) high cost of entering the market, and 2) existing government restrictions to enter the market. Your solutions are both variants of complete government control. The first is fascistic (private ownership but complete regulatory control of the business), and the second is socialistic (nationalizing the business).
I reject that the cost of entering the market is too high. Computer automation costs continue to decline, there's plenty of dark fibre lying around, and plenty of historical examples in early electrification of multiple companies and how they were able to work out issues with multiple lines going to residences and businesses. Also, businesses such as phone companies are already forced to share their lines with other companies so you have choice in POTS and DSL companies, so other lines don't need to be run, and there are wireless and satellite options, too.
Which leaves us with regulation as causing the monopoly. It's pretty silly to argue that because the government has regulated an industry so much that it can't behave properly, that the only choice is to regulate it further, or nationalize it.
I haven't even seen that there are any good arguments that the consumers are being harmed and so require regulation!
Or perhaps you should take a free market economics one?
So, to be exhaustive, there are three basic types of monopoly. The most common is one where other groups are forbidden by law to enter the market. As you will see shortly, this is the version we were talking about through a quick process of elimination.
The second is where there are too-significant economic barriers to enter the market. We just discounted the last mile argument, and I've seen ISPs run in basements with cast-away servers, so that doesn't account for the "local internet" version of a non-free market.
The third is usually structured around a monopoly price, where one company has a price so low that it drives all other firms out of the market. The theory then leads you to believe the company racks up the price to gouge consumers, but it pretty well never happens. Again, we are talking about many ISPs, so a monopoly price has not taken effect.
Many definitions will caveat that there doesn't have to be only one company for a monopoly to exist -- it just has to exert significant enough control of the market to mostly control the price or conditions of the sale. This definition has very little practical value, especially since it expands the grouping usually represented by a prefix like "mono" to a group that can be "almost any size."
Any bets how long it'll be until "net neutrality" will force some content or providers to be given preferential treatment? My guess is less than a year after implementation until some group will be found to be under-supported and will be prioritized over everyone else.
The FCC commissioner says "the public should not stand for deals 'that exchange Internet freedom for bloated profits'?" His job is to help regulate the use of public property, not implement economic policy.
It's only a monopoly if a government has forbidden another company to enter that market. Don't confuse the costs of the last mile with government intervention and restriction of the market.
The first thing we need to remember is no-one got voted out this year because of net neutrality. Yes, the Internet is massively important to the world economy, but most people don't have the technical or business expertise to understand the Internet at a deep, personal level.
So, if no-one failed to be reelected because of net neutrality, then why? The core of net neutrality is that 1) the market has failed in providing a "fair" Internet utility, and 2) therefore, government needs to regulate it. Now we're getting much closer to the answer. The same people who will encourage additional government regulation in one area are likely to encourage additional government regulation in other areas.
Government regulation is all about control. If you think the government has a lot to say about how you run your networks now and what data they can pull (even without a warrant), just wait until the government gets to decide if you run your network fairly. They'll have to, at least, look at the packet header level to get correct oversight. And your logs, and your contracts, and your business plan...
A theme in this election cycle was "no, government is not better able to make quick, informed decisions about what I want to do, than I am." Sure, no congressman is looking for work because he won't let you roll out the new linux kernel on your embedded linux router, it's because of all of the other things he's done to restrict your freedom of choice.
Net neutrality: it's the Obamacare of the Internet!
Great documentation makes a great open source software project. Postgres has it, and just gets used more and more. It's a reason why Django is so popular -- the documentation is fantastic.
Spend time loving your documentation and your users will love you back.
Hopefully this will actually be cost effective. The space shuttle was a boondoggle "reusable" space ship that had to be rebuilt nearly from scratch every launch. I care not a whit about reusable, but I do care greatly about cost.
The asteroid mission is mandated to use nuclear power to travel in space (not launch). I like nuclear power, but there are some hard technical leaps to get through for that to be a viable propulsion source. Granted, it's more likely to work than getting a usable electric powered car in the US, but the odd combination of setting a destination objective (e.g. asteroids) with a mandatory technology (e.g. must run on cheese) shows novice planning work.
What was cancelled to make room for the asteroid mission was the Mars mission. Why? Well, the administration says that the asteroids are closer. I Am Not a Scientist (IANAS), but through careful and methodical research I've determined that the moon is still closer. And it likely has minerals, has some gravity to help with biological issues like muscle atrophy, etc. Oh, and we've already gone there with 1960's technology, so it's a pretty close bet we could do it again.
The current big problem is getting mass to (or out of) orbit. If you want to pretend the government's best role is things like infrastructure, they should fund private companies to develop heavy rockets for lift, space factories for building space-launched rockets, or a space habitat that isn't in low Earth orbit.
My suspicion is the asteroid mission was selected because failure (or future cancellation) will be hardly noticed. However, everyone would certainly notice a habitat on Mars or the moon that we no longer use. The saying goes "If we can send a man to the moon" not "If we can rendezvous with an asteroid!"
Finally, there are no intermediate goals in the strategy. Just "get there." What we don't need is NASA to wander about for years developing "stuff" with no progress. We've already seen that for too many decades.
Opera does appear chome-like -- it's had tabs since at least version 3.0, had "speed dial" (the thumbnails on a new window) before firefox and chrome, had "labels" in the mail client before gmail existed, etc. It has grabbed some good features back, like actions when typing in the address bar, too -- the other browsers innovate as well.
Slashdot Mirror
The FCC mandating how payments are made in the system will undoubtedly distort the market. The computer industry as a whole has consistently driven down prices and upped capability. When the government mandates certain bundles, such as not allowing ISPs to charge other ISPs for high usage, the ISPs will either 1) stop delivering that service in the same manner, or 2) charge us for it.
When Congress passed Obamacare and mandated that health care insurance companies that sold individual policies for minors ignore preexisting conditions, the insurance companies have nearly all stopped selling those policies. It's the natural cost-avoidance of unprofitable mandates.
Similarly, ISPs are either likely to stop selling unlimited bandwidth services, or pass all of those costs to the end consumer. I'm OK if Google cares enough about its content that they pay Comcast to deliver it, rather than Comcast charging me for it. One way or the other, the market will come up with an efficient, fair payment system.
Note:Anti-Net Neutrality arguments are automatically marked down as "troll."
That's because almost all of them are.
The vast majority of shrill comments and ad hominem I've seen are on the pro-side. Yours is a blessed cool breeze, and I appreciate that.
I just can't imagine a good reason to let Comcast restrict the data I pass to other Internet hosts over data lines I built with my tax dollars.
The government has its hands in so many things, it's nearly impossible to find something that your tax dollars didn't help fund. Or, better yet, both fund and restrict, like tobacco.
To stick with a close analogy, roads and rail have been largely built by government dollars. However, UPS, FedEx, and USPS can charge different rates to different customers who ship large and small, and heavy and light packages.
With an Internet "utility" it's about impossible to provide different rates on speed of delivery, such as you can with a physical shipment. (Heck, higher latency traffic is generally more expensive, like satellite based providers.) Bandwidth and uptime are what they have that they can use for pricing.
The FCC has shown over its decades that it is not geek-friendly. It restricts speech (the seven word you can't say on television, the fairness doctrine), and it restricts technology (cell phones weren't allowed for about 20 years after the technology was developed).
I think what's most likely is that the FCC starts relying on an RFC/ANSI/W3C-like system -- slow, behind, though partially useful.
Note:Anti-Net Neutrality arguments are automatically marked down as "troll."
Correct. The FCC instituting new rules on Internet providers is in no way, shape, or form the government regulating the Internet. The FCC is now a separate business headquartered in the Conch Republic
The free market is allowed to have choices in services. Not so much in Government services, though.
Feel free to continue to ignore possible negative secondary consequences.
Well intentioned laws are not allowed to have bad consequences. If an Internet 911 call was dropped because the network provider was not allowed to give it priority, the network provider would be sued.
Geeks everywhere who don't want to pay for the bandwidth they use have been betrayed by the FCC. The Federal Communications Commission, having been delegated the Constitutional powers of Congress to regulate Interstate Commerce, absolutely refused to tell all network backbone providers that they were unable to set their own rates for using their services.
"I can't believe the FCC won't make AT&T pay for all the bandwidth I want to use on my iPhone" says Liam McCrossen, who hacked his first iPhone years ago, and has only bricked two since. "Just because I want to see streaming video of the old COMDEX conventions doesn't mean I should have to pay for it." McCrossen, who hasn't taken any economics or business classes, is pretty sure the network providers will raise everyone's rates equally rather than just bumping up the cost of his unlimited data plan. "I'm also against paying for trash removal by the trash can" McCrossen opined.
The FCC has been unavailable for comment in their failure to "stick it to the man" and allow some companies to freely enter into contracts.
Yeah, Nixon would probably be thrown out of the GOP. He got the US off the gold standard, instituted wage and price controls, and ended the Vietnam war.
The USPS had to change how they operated for next-day mail service when FedEx and UPS came into the market through a loophole in the postal monopoly laws. Heck, USPS contracts with those two for some of their air transportation. And I don't know if you can count REA as a government success. The first commercial US nuclear power plant was built in 1958, and it only took the government 36 more years to string power lines in all the rural areas. Success!
Before commercial companies got into building the Internet infrastructure, the 'net was "for me, not for thee." The Department of Defense and the universities didn't bring the Internet into homes. Commercial companies did, because they thought they could make a profit at it.
Your scenario has subjects, not citizens. And a whole lot more lobbyists.
It hasn't even been established that there is a problem that requires net neutrality as a solution.
You state that we have monopolies here because of a combination of 1) high cost of entering the market, and 2) existing government restrictions to enter the market. Your solutions are both variants of complete government control. The first is fascistic (private ownership but complete regulatory control of the business), and the second is socialistic (nationalizing the business).
I reject that the cost of entering the market is too high. Computer automation costs continue to decline, there's plenty of dark fibre lying around, and plenty of historical examples in early electrification of multiple companies and how they were able to work out issues with multiple lines going to residences and businesses. Also, businesses such as phone companies are already forced to share their lines with other companies so you have choice in POTS and DSL companies, so other lines don't need to be run, and there are wireless and satellite options, too.
Which leaves us with regulation as causing the monopoly. It's pretty silly to argue that because the government has regulated an industry so much that it can't behave properly, that the only choice is to regulate it further, or nationalize it.
I haven't even seen that there are any good arguments that the consumers are being harmed and so require regulation!
And the all_mail_in_one_folder M2 mail client, with "labels" so you can filter just the messages you want to see. Which Google copied into Gmail.
Cool, last time I was marked "troll" it was because I quoted scientists in Newsweek. At least this time it was because I just stated an opinion.
So, to be exhaustive, there are three basic types of monopoly. The most common is one where other groups are forbidden by law to enter the market. As you will see shortly, this is the version we were talking about through a quick process of elimination.
The second is where there are too-significant economic barriers to enter the market. We just discounted the last mile argument, and I've seen ISPs run in basements with cast-away servers, so that doesn't account for the "local internet" version of a non-free market.
The third is usually structured around a monopoly price, where one company has a price so low that it drives all other firms out of the market. The theory then leads you to believe the company racks up the price to gouge consumers, but it pretty well never happens. Again, we are talking about many ISPs, so a monopoly price has not taken effect.
Many definitions will caveat that there doesn't have to be only one company for a monopoly to exist -- it just has to exert significant enough control of the market to mostly control the price or conditions of the sale. This definition has very little practical value, especially since it expands the grouping usually represented by a prefix like "mono" to a group that can be "almost any size."
Any bets how long it'll be until "net neutrality" will force some content or providers to be given preferential treatment? My guess is less than a year after implementation until some group will be found to be under-supported and will be prioritized over everyone else.
The FCC commissioner says "the public should not stand for deals 'that exchange Internet freedom for bloated profits'?" His job is to help regulate the use of public property, not implement economic policy.
It's only a monopoly if a government has forbidden another company to enter that market. Don't confuse the costs of the last mile with government intervention and restriction of the market.
Eric Raymond (esr) has been saying this for a long time now.
The first thing we need to remember is no-one got voted out this year because of net neutrality. Yes, the Internet is massively important to the world economy, but most people don't have the technical or business expertise to understand the Internet at a deep, personal level.
So, if no-one failed to be reelected because of net neutrality, then why? The core of net neutrality is that 1) the market has failed in providing a "fair" Internet utility, and 2) therefore, government needs to regulate it. Now we're getting much closer to the answer. The same people who will encourage additional government regulation in one area are likely to encourage additional government regulation in other areas.
Government regulation is all about control. If you think the government has a lot to say about how you run your networks now and what data they can pull (even without a warrant), just wait until the government gets to decide if you run your network fairly. They'll have to, at least, look at the packet header level to get correct oversight. And your logs, and your contracts, and your business plan...
A theme in this election cycle was "no, government is not better able to make quick, informed decisions about what I want to do, than I am." Sure, no congressman is looking for work because he won't let you roll out the new linux kernel on your embedded linux router, it's because of all of the other things he's done to restrict your freedom of choice.
Net neutrality: it's the Obamacare of the Internet!
Great documentation makes a great open source software project. Postgres has it, and just gets used more and more. It's a reason why Django is so popular -- the documentation is fantastic.
Spend time loving your documentation and your users will love you back.
It sounds like Armadillo is going the right way, then. I wish them the best of luck.
Hopefully this will actually be cost effective. The space shuttle was a boondoggle "reusable" space ship that had to be rebuilt nearly from scratch every launch. I care not a whit about reusable, but I do care greatly about cost.
What was cancelled to make room for the asteroid mission was the Mars mission. Why? Well, the administration says that the asteroids are closer. I Am Not a Scientist (IANAS), but through careful and methodical research I've determined that the moon is still closer. And it likely has minerals, has some gravity to help with biological issues like muscle atrophy, etc. Oh, and we've already gone there with 1960's technology, so it's a pretty close bet we could do it again.
The current big problem is getting mass to (or out of) orbit. If you want to pretend the government's best role is things like infrastructure, they should fund private companies to develop heavy rockets for lift, space factories for building space-launched rockets, or a space habitat that isn't in low Earth orbit.
My suspicion is the asteroid mission was selected because failure (or future cancellation) will be hardly noticed. However, everyone would certainly notice a habitat on Mars or the moon that we no longer use. The saying goes "If we can send a man to the moon" not "If we can rendezvous with an asteroid!"
Finally, there are no intermediate goals in the strategy. Just "get there." What we don't need is NASA to wander about for years developing "stuff" with no progress. We've already seen that for too many decades.
Opera does appear chome-like -- it's had tabs since at least version 3.0, had "speed dial" (the thumbnails on a new window) before firefox and chrome, had "labels" in the mail client before gmail existed, etc. It has grabbed some good features back, like actions when typing in the address bar, too -- the other browsers innovate as well.