It may seem like common sense to you, but it is not true.
For the most common cases, it is quite true. The examples I gave are true. Facebook is not a rental property nor is it a public space. They have the right to determine what an authorized use is. You do not want the government making that decision.
There are many laws surrounding access to private property that is otherwise open to the public to enter, shopping malls for example.
The example of trespass is quite accurate even when applied to a shopping mall. All it takes to convert your legal presence into a criminal act is for the owners to have you trespassed from the premises. They call the cops, the cops issue you a trespass notice, and the next time you show up there you can be arrested. It happens a lot. Even for a public space like a public university where the land is owned by the state -- the taxpayers. If you misbehave on a university grounds you can and likely will be trespassed, and that makes your presence there illegal.
The mall's owner's cannot arbitrarily declare that some behavior on their property is a criminal act and have you arrested for that.
That's not what's happening. They're determining appropriate use. Then the laws against inappropriate use kick in.
Suppose the mall decided to disallow wearing a name badge.
There is no law against wearing a name badge. There are laws against trespass. The mall owners determine who is trespassing and who is not; the law is there to back them up. The mall owners did not create the law, they just decide who is violating it.
And what this case is saying, Congress cannot delegate that law-making ability to the owners of malls, nor to web sites.
They aren't delegating any law-making. They have made a law regarding authorized use of private property. The owners have the right to determine what uses are authorized. In the shopping mall example, you might have seen signs that say "no car sales from this parking lot". Or no alcohol. Or many other uses that are not authorized. Break those rules and you will be trespassed, which makes your presence a violation of trespass laws. The laws were not delegated to the property owners; the right to decide authorized use is and was theirs.
The case also points out that the TOS can be changed at any time, so even if you read it, your initially legal conduct could be criminalized at any time while you're using the web site.
It is the right of every property owner to determine if your access to their property constitutes a crime or not. This is simple common sense.
For example, if I open my door and say "party inside, y'all are welcome", then when you enter my property it is not the crime of trespassing. If I put up a sign that says "no trespassing", then your entry upon my property is a crime. Yes, truly, I have determined whether or not your presence on my property is a crime or not. Same act, two different results. I didn't have to have "public notice" or "public comment", I just unilaterally decided that I did not want you on my property. I can even make it specific, and just because you see someone else on my property doesn't mean you are welcome to join them.
In fact, I can trivially convert your non-criminal act into a criminal act by simply telling you to leave. I can change it at a moment's notice. I don't need to ask anyone else or get everyone else's opinion on it. "Leave now".
The laws about unauthorized use were not created by Facebook or any other website. That was a function of the authorized legislative bodies. Determining what is and is not authorized use is a function of the property owner. They make these kinds of decisions all the time, all around you. It's private property. You do not want government stepping in and deciding what "appropriate use" of your property is, so don't expect others to welcome such legal meddling.
Now, "we" have decided that some things require such meddling, like making sure that commercial entities do not discriminate on certain criteria, but "use a real name" or "do not scrape my data" are not amongst those. Even "you must pay me $1000 to use my website" is discriminatory, but "have money" and "don't have money" are not yet protected classes.
And that should not be something in a TOS for one site but not another, it should be for all sites.
Of course not. There may be sites that are happy to have robots come index them, and they should not be limited by laws prohibiting that. Neither should laws permit robot indexing in any blanket manner, since there are sites who have decided they do not want this.
As for this "Determining if "uber" or "airbnb" are illegally discriminating is not an "academic research" problem. ", you're just plain wrong there.
BY DEFINITION, if someone is trying to determine if an illegal activity is being performed, it is not an academic research issue. It is a legal issue.
You're right that it is a legal problem, but studying laws and their impact on society
This alleged research project is not studying "laws and their impact on society", they're looking for illegal discrimination. The assumption that justified doing that is that it has a negative impact on society. They're trying to determine if those sites are violating the law, not whether those laws are good or bad or the violations have any impact. They're using made-up names to see if the sites are making assumptions based on the names and returning different answers, assuming that any differences are because of illegal discrimination and thus bad.
Using the ubiquitous car analogy, pointing a LIDAR unit at a moving vehicle to determine if it is speeding or not is not "academic research" into the "laws and their impact on society", nor is it studying the physics of light, it is a legal determination, and thus a legal matter. Yes, you, as a private citizen, can point a LIDAR unit at anything you want because it truly has no impact on what you are measuring (unless it is a camera that is sensitive to the IR light, at which point when someone tells you to stop you should) and normally undetectable. Hammering away at a website using fake names can be detected and does have an impact on the website.
You might argue that sampling the speed of many cars is a statistical measure of whether the current laws are being obeyed and what a more appropriate speed limit might be, but sampling one car ("airbnb", e.g.) does nothing to measure that. "Are YOU violating the law" is not a research issue.
Here's what they're talking about: Researchers want use dummy accounts with the names of people that appear to be some minority group, so that they can see if that group is being discriminated against.
However, as a precedent, it would be applied much more broadly.
Automated access to the websites I run is an abuse of those sites, and such access is covered by a robots.txt rule. I don't care if an "academic researcher" thinks that making thousands of hits per hour is going to help him learn something, it's still an abuse and his desire is not an excuse.
I faced this issue back when robots were just taking over. I had a site that ran an ocean tide prediction program that I made available as part of other data for people-users. A very "kind" robot indexer came by and started making one hit per second, following the "next day" and "other sites" links and happily indexing the predicted tides. The problem was, the program took much longer than 1 second to calculate the answer. The term is "geometrical explosion", and I had to modify the code to emit a robots.txt -- it wasn't a web page in itself, it was a program running on a different port. (Because it was a different port than "80" the excuse was that it was a "different site", even though it was the same site, and the main site's robots.txt didn't apply to the happy indexer.)
The choices were not to run the site and deny everyone access to the data, or to block indexers using the standard method. Should this choice happen again today because the indexers or robots are ignoring robots.txt, the choice may not wind up the same. Putting deny clauses in firewalls is a losing game -- chasing robots that use hundreds if not thousands of addresses.
Determining if "uber" or "airbnb" are illegally discriminating is not an "academic research" problem. It is a legal problem. Don't try slipping your web scraping in under "academic research" when your goal is not.
2)McDonalds received a lot of complaints about the too high temperature of their coffee and refused to do anything about it. They received many hundreds of complaints.
And they probably get a lot of people who are happy that the coffee they bought in the drivethrough was still hot when they got to their destination and could actually safely drink it. (Safely as in "not try to drink it while driving".) Those people don't write letters, they just come back again and again.
The proper response if you buy something you don't like is to not buy it again, not write letters demanding that one source out of a thousand change how they do it. If you complain about something to get from McDonalds and then come back to buy it again, then you are implicitly admitting that it is ok. If enough people buy from someplace else, then McDonalds will notice and change their process to keep market share.
What you've said is that the woman had sufficient reason to know that the coffee was hotter than she'd get from other sources and she chose to buy it anyway. If it wasn't an unknown problem, then people knew about it. Knowing that hot coffee is hot is something she should have known.
I have no idea why anybody would even litigate this.
From the CNBC story, referring to Prop 65:
"It allows private citizens, advocacy groups and attorneys to sue on behalf of the state and collect a portion of civil penalties for failure to provide warnings."
Here is a example I just found: Combination Wrench, 5-7/8", 9mm,Chrome Vanadium Steel, Westward, 36A224 . How can a steel wrench be poisonous?
Iron, no. Chromium and vanadium, yes.
The notice says that it "contains", and chrome vanadium steel contains chromium and vanadium, even if it is in such small quantities and bound tightly enough in the steel that you'll never get a significant dose of either.
Why do you think there are companies selling things like this? I've posted this sign in my lab, even though I'm not in California just because it really is that ubiquitous, and therefore stupid. I'm sure that, at some point, there is a chemical "known to the state of California" that causes something bad to happen. Oh, wait. I have a bottle of acetone, and we did have asbestos tiles under the carpet. I guess I'm toast.
Not entirely true.
In the bad old days of AOL, CompuServe, etc. there was the basic fee for X hours of service, plus additional fees to access Usenet, WWW, and internet mail.
That was not paying for tiers of internet. The AOL base membership did not include internet. AOL was a private "internal" service, just like Compuserve. Both were basically large scale implementations of dial-up BBSs. The additional fee to access internet services was to access the internet when they first opened that gateway.
It's like today with some cell services. You pay for voice and text, and then there's an addition service charge for "data", which is the internet. That's not tiered pricing of internet, it's one charge for "data".
but without viable competition among providers, we can expect new and exciting predatory practices to become the norm.
And I've already pointed out, if you believe that there is no competition now, then why have such practices not already been the norm? But the fact is, there is already competition, and creating a government-backed broadband service at cheap rates will only cause competition to decrease as smaller providers are forced out of business.
People and companies that should be able to keep their domain, EU people, are fucked when it's revoked WITH THE APPEAL PROCESS REMOVED, due to having a UK address listed.
I'm sorry that English is not your primary language, and that it is causing you so much trouble.
If you are in Belgium, then the statement about the.eu registrar being entitled to cancel your domain name DOES NOT APPLY TO YOU. Thus, any statement about an appeal process being removed DOES NOT APPLY TO YOU.
"DOES NOT APPLY TO YOU" means, in simple terms, that the entire statement DOES NOT APPLY TO YOU. If the.eu registrar CHOOSES to cancel the domain (because he believed he was entitled to based on the statement) then as a Belgian you would have every right to appeal that decision BECAUSE THE STATEMENT THAT THERE IS NO APPEAL PROCESS DOES NOT APPLY TO YOU.
I'm sorry, there is no simpler way to explain it to you.
"clear violation"? Isn't it a bit thick to expect tourists to have heard about it?
I have no doubt that every visa application has a warning that lying about data on the form is a violation of US federal law, probably giving explicit references to some of them. So, no, I don't think it is "thick" to expect people filling out a US visa form to have read it.
"prosecuted for offenses"? Holy fuck - deporting is not enough?
If you violate the law, you can be prosecuted. I don't know about how you do it on your planet, but on planet Earth this is normal. Also, if you have a conviction for immigration violations it is much less likely you will be allowed re-entry.
Or the punishments from said troubles alone?
Of course not. Your "troubles" may be local misdemeanors; immigration law is federal.
Remind me never to visit USA...
Don't go anyplace where you don't believe that obeying the laws of the country is important.
I can only assume that your ellipses were intended to create confusion and a dishonest interpretation of the actual statement, because they elided a critical component of that section. It did not say that the EU registrars WOULD revoke any domain names. Here is some of what you elided -- the actual active part of that sentence:
... the Registry for.eu will be
entitled to revoke such domain name on its own initiative and without submitting the
dispute to any extrajudicial settlement of conflicts...
That is exactly what I said it was. It is a statement of fact. Because entities in the UK will no longer be authorized to hold a.eu domain name, the registrars for the.eu TLD WILL BE ENTITLED TO revoke them. If you don't know the difference between "entitled to" and "will", I suggest any online dictionary.
Cancelled, with no appeal just because your main office is in Belgium.
Belgium is still part of the EU as far as I know, so no, if your main office is in Belgium you are still entitled to a.eu domain and this statement does not apply to you in ANY WAY.
If someone simply says they have no such account, how is the government going to refute him/her?
Given the number of border crossings, it is unlikely anyone is going to look at the data when you enter. It may be cross-referenced to existing databases of suspected terrorist identities online, maybe.
However, this will become of interest if you are involved in any trouble here, since a failure to report information will make your entry a clear violation of 8 USC 1325 and thus increase the likelyhood you will be prosecuted for criminal offenses related to illegal entry.
Many of them are one-shot-throw-aways that I use to fill in online complaint forms.... If this becomes a standard worldwide, I'll be forced to stay at home.
If you weren't such a whiner, you'd be welcome more places.
Additionally, they are cancelling all the domains registered to organizations with UK addresses -
That's not what is happening. They aren't saying they are going to cancel anything. That's a fiction made up by the Guardian writer.
Read the story. The actual statement from the EC says that at the time brexit happens those domain holders will no longer have authorization to have a.eu domain. It does not say they are going to cancel them, it only states the OBVIOUS fact that people who are not in the EU have no authority to have a.eu domain name.
What the EC ACTUALLY said is that holders of.eu domains who are no longer authorized to have them cannot renew their domains once they expire. D'oh.
Auto analogy? When you move out of the state of New York, do you expect to be able to renew your NY driver's license? Or license plate?
Is it just me, or does this seem fairly petty and petulant?
Yeah, the headline certainly makes it seem so. But the headline is typical/. muckraking. The summary tells a better story: no new registrations and no renewals of current registrations. And one comment that they MIGHT cancel existing ones, but that's only a maybe that they're thinking about.
making all those domain owners re-register with addresses in continental Europe,
If they're not eligible for a.eu because they're UK-based, then they aren't eligible for continental Europe domain names either.
I see no issue here. Who else but the EU registrar is authorized to determine who is allowed to register under the.eu TLD? If you leave the EU and are no longer authorized, why should you be able to renew your domain?
The ONLY problem would be for multi-national companies with a true EU presence that are based in the UK. They should be able to have a.eu domain address. That may require a subsidiary do the actual registration.
It's not like the people who buy bonds are just throwing their excess money away - they expect a return on their investment.
In fact, the expected return on investment means that if there isn't enough money coming in to run the broadband operation, then not only is the deficit operating expense paid for by the taxpayers, but the interest on the debt as well.
Or do people still believe that governments automagically have enough money to do anything they want to?
Well, it certainly seem that they do, given the number of things they expect the government to give them. "Single payer healthcare", for example, which is actually a dishonest name for "taxpayer funded healthcare". There was a recent editorial in our local paper talking about the costs of implementing that in our state. Something like an estimated 15% tax on income.
Net profit margins for telecoms are around 11%; that's the maximum you could save if government operated as efficiently as a for profit corporation.
You assume the government operation would break even from user fees. They don't have to. They can make up any deficit through taxes. You can save a lot more than 11% when you are taxing you neighbors to fund your internet use.
why should they be forced to cross-subsidize the real-time low latency streaming of gamers and Netflix addicts?
The whole reference to paying for "tiers" regarding email, video, streaming was a fiction. It didn't happen before NN rules went into place, and nobody has announced such a pricing structure now that they are removed. We can make up all kinds of horror scenarios, but doing that is a really bad basis for laws.
OTOH, for a lot less effort, real competition can destroy the executives that continue to harm America.
All that municipal broadband will do is drive out the smaller competitors, who are not the evil America-destroying companies that everyone here loves to hate. Comcast can survive a long time at a loss in any specific market. Joe's local ISP cannot.
Let's me ask you this: if I can get wireless broadband from my city government at a very cheap rate (ignoring the taxes I have to pay to get it, too) then why would I buy wireless internet from the local company? Why would anyone? That local company goes out of business, reducing competition. Isn't that an obvious result?
Local municipality's don't have "monitoring" resources.
Oh my God, how naive are you?
Local Governments are usually run by direct citizen elected councils.
Don't be stupid. I didn't say that the city council members would be doing the monitoring themselves.
Local IT departments are understaffed
We're not talking about the local IT department, we're talking about the municipal broadband "company". If you want to claim that they will be staffed with people who are ignorant of modern technology and how to monitor users, then you need to explain why you would expect any kind of reasonable service from them.
For a city council to increase staffing/software/infrastructure is literally a vote to raise local taxes - a nonstarter for the most part.
Except that is EXACTLY what it takes to create a municipal broadband service. They can't do it with the staff they already have, they must hire new people, and to build the infrastructure does require, if not new taxes, then taxpayer-backed bond measures.
If you think muni-broad band when implemented money maker, think again.
Where the hell did you get the idea I think this? I've been very consistent in saying "taxpayer-backed" and "taxpayer-funded", which means they operate at a loss made up for by the taxpayers. That's one of the real downsides to such operations. It doesn't need to operate at a profit so it can charge a lot less. It doesn't even need to operate break-even, so it can charge even less. Any deficit will be paid for by all the taxpayers, even if they never touch the internet, or if they buy their service from a commercial ISP.
And while this municipal ISP is charging less, it will be driving competition out of the market. It will leave, at best, only the major companies, eliminating the local competitors.
Slashdot Mirror
It may seem like common sense to you, but it is not true.
For the most common cases, it is quite true. The examples I gave are true. Facebook is not a rental property nor is it a public space. They have the right to determine what an authorized use is. You do not want the government making that decision.
There are many laws surrounding access to private property that is otherwise open to the public to enter, shopping malls for example.
The example of trespass is quite accurate even when applied to a shopping mall. All it takes to convert your legal presence into a criminal act is for the owners to have you trespassed from the premises. They call the cops, the cops issue you a trespass notice, and the next time you show up there you can be arrested. It happens a lot. Even for a public space like a public university where the land is owned by the state -- the taxpayers. If you misbehave on a university grounds you can and likely will be trespassed, and that makes your presence there illegal.
The mall's owner's cannot arbitrarily declare that some behavior on their property is a criminal act and have you arrested for that.
That's not what's happening. They're determining appropriate use. Then the laws against inappropriate use kick in.
Suppose the mall decided to disallow wearing a name badge.
There is no law against wearing a name badge. There are laws against trespass. The mall owners determine who is trespassing and who is not; the law is there to back them up. The mall owners did not create the law, they just decide who is violating it.
And what this case is saying, Congress cannot delegate that law-making ability to the owners of malls, nor to web sites.
They aren't delegating any law-making. They have made a law regarding authorized use of private property. The owners have the right to determine what uses are authorized. In the shopping mall example, you might have seen signs that say "no car sales from this parking lot". Or no alcohol. Or many other uses that are not authorized. Break those rules and you will be trespassed, which makes your presence a violation of trespass laws. The laws were not delegated to the property owners; the right to decide authorized use is and was theirs.
So, if you share your data with a group, anyone in the group can access your data. D'oh. What am I missing here?
"What is worse, their mobile numbers can be used to identify and target them."
So, if someone has your mobile number, they can use it to identify you and target you. D'oh again. Is this really surprising?
The case also points out that the TOS can be changed at any time, so even if you read it, your initially legal conduct could be criminalized at any time while you're using the web site.
It is the right of every property owner to determine if your access to their property constitutes a crime or not. This is simple common sense.
For example, if I open my door and say "party inside, y'all are welcome", then when you enter my property it is not the crime of trespassing. If I put up a sign that says "no trespassing", then your entry upon my property is a crime. Yes, truly, I have determined whether or not your presence on my property is a crime or not. Same act, two different results. I didn't have to have "public notice" or "public comment", I just unilaterally decided that I did not want you on my property. I can even make it specific, and just because you see someone else on my property doesn't mean you are welcome to join them.
In fact, I can trivially convert your non-criminal act into a criminal act by simply telling you to leave. I can change it at a moment's notice. I don't need to ask anyone else or get everyone else's opinion on it. "Leave now".
The laws about unauthorized use were not created by Facebook or any other website. That was a function of the authorized legislative bodies. Determining what is and is not authorized use is a function of the property owner. They make these kinds of decisions all the time, all around you. It's private property. You do not want government stepping in and deciding what "appropriate use" of your property is, so don't expect others to welcome such legal meddling.
Now, "we" have decided that some things require such meddling, like making sure that commercial entities do not discriminate on certain criteria, but "use a real name" or "do not scrape my data" are not amongst those. Even "you must pay me $1000 to use my website" is discriminatory, but "have money" and "don't have money" are not yet protected classes.
And that should not be something in a TOS for one site but not another, it should be for all sites.
Of course not. There may be sites that are happy to have robots come index them, and they should not be limited by laws prohibiting that. Neither should laws permit robot indexing in any blanket manner, since there are sites who have decided they do not want this.
As for this "Determining if "uber" or "airbnb" are illegally discriminating is not an "academic research" problem. ", you're just plain wrong there.
BY DEFINITION, if someone is trying to determine if an illegal activity is being performed, it is not an academic research issue. It is a legal issue.
You're right that it is a legal problem, but studying laws and their impact on society
This alleged research project is not studying "laws and their impact on society", they're looking for illegal discrimination. The assumption that justified doing that is that it has a negative impact on society. They're trying to determine if those sites are violating the law, not whether those laws are good or bad or the violations have any impact. They're using made-up names to see if the sites are making assumptions based on the names and returning different answers, assuming that any differences are because of illegal discrimination and thus bad.
Using the ubiquitous car analogy, pointing a LIDAR unit at a moving vehicle to determine if it is speeding or not is not "academic research" into the "laws and their impact on society", nor is it studying the physics of light, it is a legal determination, and thus a legal matter. Yes, you, as a private citizen, can point a LIDAR unit at anything you want because it truly has no impact on what you are measuring (unless it is a camera that is sensitive to the IR light, at which point when someone tells you to stop you should) and normally undetectable. Hammering away at a website using fake names can be detected and does have an impact on the website.
You might argue that sampling the speed of many cars is a statistical measure of whether the current laws are being obeyed and what a more appropriate speed limit might be, but sampling one car ("airbnb", e.g.) does nothing to measure that. "Are YOU violating the law" is not a research issue.
Here's what they're talking about: Researchers want use dummy accounts with the names of people that appear to be some minority group, so that they can see if that group is being discriminated against.
However, as a precedent, it would be applied much more broadly.
Automated access to the websites I run is an abuse of those sites, and such access is covered by a robots.txt rule. I don't care if an "academic researcher" thinks that making thousands of hits per hour is going to help him learn something, it's still an abuse and his desire is not an excuse.
I faced this issue back when robots were just taking over. I had a site that ran an ocean tide prediction program that I made available as part of other data for people-users. A very "kind" robot indexer came by and started making one hit per second, following the "next day" and "other sites" links and happily indexing the predicted tides. The problem was, the program took much longer than 1 second to calculate the answer. The term is "geometrical explosion", and I had to modify the code to emit a robots.txt -- it wasn't a web page in itself, it was a program running on a different port. (Because it was a different port than "80" the excuse was that it was a "different site", even though it was the same site, and the main site's robots.txt didn't apply to the happy indexer.)
The choices were not to run the site and deny everyone access to the data, or to block indexers using the standard method. Should this choice happen again today because the indexers or robots are ignoring robots.txt, the choice may not wind up the same. Putting deny clauses in firewalls is a losing game -- chasing robots that use hundreds if not thousands of addresses.
Determining if "uber" or "airbnb" are illegally discriminating is not an "academic research" problem. It is a legal problem. Don't try slipping your web scraping in under "academic research" when your goal is not.
2)McDonalds received a lot of complaints about the too high temperature of their coffee and refused to do anything about it. They received many hundreds of complaints.
And they probably get a lot of people who are happy that the coffee they bought in the drivethrough was still hot when they got to their destination and could actually safely drink it. (Safely as in "not try to drink it while driving".) Those people don't write letters, they just come back again and again.
The proper response if you buy something you don't like is to not buy it again, not write letters demanding that one source out of a thousand change how they do it. If you complain about something to get from McDonalds and then come back to buy it again, then you are implicitly admitting that it is ok. If enough people buy from someplace else, then McDonalds will notice and change their process to keep market share.
What you've said is that the woman had sufficient reason to know that the coffee was hotter than she'd get from other sources and she chose to buy it anyway. If it wasn't an unknown problem, then people knew about it. Knowing that hot coffee is hot is something she should have known.
Funny thing, they've found a much higher correlation between obesity and cancer than between coffee and cancer.
Sorry, but the State of California KNOWS what causes cancer. It's not just a positive correlation to them.
I have no idea why anybody would even litigate this.
From the CNBC story, referring to Prop 65: "It allows private citizens, advocacy groups and attorneys to sue on behalf of the state and collect a portion of civil penalties for failure to provide warnings."
That's why.
You know if you add a flavoured grease like coconut oil or some salted butter to the pan
Frying in Crisco and adding a bit of sodium saccharine make it quite tasty. Also, adding a bit of bacon (or just bacon fat) does wonders.
I am reminded of the tale of "stone soup".
Here is a example I just found: Combination Wrench, 5-7/8", 9mm,Chrome Vanadium Steel, Westward, 36A224 . How can a steel wrench be poisonous?
Iron, no. Chromium and vanadium, yes.
The notice says that it "contains", and chrome vanadium steel contains chromium and vanadium, even if it is in such small quantities and bound tightly enough in the steel that you'll never get a significant dose of either.
Why do you think there are companies selling things like this? I've posted this sign in my lab, even though I'm not in California just because it really is that ubiquitous, and therefore stupid. I'm sure that, at some point, there is a chemical "known to the state of California" that causes something bad to happen. Oh, wait. I have a bottle of acetone, and we did have asbestos tiles under the carpet. I guess I'm toast.
Not entirely true. In the bad old days of AOL, CompuServe, etc. there was the basic fee for X hours of service, plus additional fees to access Usenet, WWW, and internet mail.
That was not paying for tiers of internet. The AOL base membership did not include internet. AOL was a private "internal" service, just like Compuserve. Both were basically large scale implementations of dial-up BBSs. The additional fee to access internet services was to access the internet when they first opened that gateway.
It's like today with some cell services. You pay for voice and text, and then there's an addition service charge for "data", which is the internet. That's not tiered pricing of internet, it's one charge for "data".
but without viable competition among providers, we can expect new and exciting predatory practices to become the norm.
And I've already pointed out, if you believe that there is no competition now, then why have such practices not already been the norm? But the fact is, there is already competition, and creating a government-backed broadband service at cheap rates will only cause competition to decrease as smaller providers are forced out of business.
People and companies that should be able to keep their domain, EU people, are fucked when it's revoked WITH THE APPEAL PROCESS REMOVED, due to having a UK address listed.
I'm sorry that English is not your primary language, and that it is causing you so much trouble.
If you are in Belgium, then the statement about the .eu registrar being entitled to cancel your domain name DOES NOT APPLY TO YOU. Thus, any statement about an appeal process being removed DOES NOT APPLY TO YOU.
"DOES NOT APPLY TO YOU" means, in simple terms, that the entire statement DOES NOT APPLY TO YOU. If the .eu registrar CHOOSES to cancel the domain (because he believed he was entitled to based on the statement) then as a Belgian you would have every right to appeal that decision BECAUSE THE STATEMENT THAT THERE IS NO APPEAL PROCESS DOES NOT APPLY TO YOU.
I'm sorry, there is no simpler way to explain it to you.
"clear violation"? Isn't it a bit thick to expect tourists to have heard about it?
I have no doubt that every visa application has a warning that lying about data on the form is a violation of US federal law, probably giving explicit references to some of them. So, no, I don't think it is "thick" to expect people filling out a US visa form to have read it.
"prosecuted for offenses"? Holy fuck - deporting is not enough?
If you violate the law, you can be prosecuted. I don't know about how you do it on your planet, but on planet Earth this is normal. Also, if you have a conviction for immigration violations it is much less likely you will be allowed re-entry.
Or the punishments from said troubles alone?
Of course not. Your "troubles" may be local misdemeanors; immigration law is federal.
Remind me never to visit USA...
Don't go anyplace where you don't believe that obeying the laws of the country is important.
It was fun, but this is why we can't have nice things.
I thought you were referring to Facebook. What "nice things" are you actually talking about?
That is exactly what I said it was. It is a statement of fact. Because entities in the UK will no longer be authorized to hold a .eu domain name, the registrars for the .eu TLD WILL BE ENTITLED TO revoke them. If you don't know the difference between "entitled to" and "will", I suggest any online dictionary.
Cancelled, with no appeal just because your main office is in Belgium.
Belgium is still part of the EU as far as I know, so no, if your main office is in Belgium you are still entitled to a .eu domain and this statement does not apply to you in ANY WAY.
What a sad muckraking attempt.
If someone simply says they have no such account, how is the government going to refute him/her?
Given the number of border crossings, it is unlikely anyone is going to look at the data when you enter. It may be cross-referenced to existing databases of suspected terrorist identities online, maybe.
However, this will become of interest if you are involved in any trouble here, since a failure to report information will make your entry a clear violation of 8 USC 1325 and thus increase the likelyhood you will be prosecuted for criminal offenses related to illegal entry.
Many of them are one-shot-throw-aways that I use to fill in online complaint forms. ... If this becomes a standard worldwide, I'll be forced to stay at home.
If you weren't such a whiner, you'd be welcome more places.
. . . just like the Upper House of Parliament in the UK, the House of Lords, who are appointed, and not elected.
And every domain registration operator, who are not elected. When was the last time you voted for the CEO of Network Solutions, for example?
Additionally, they are cancelling all the domains registered to organizations with UK addresses -
That's not what is happening. They aren't saying they are going to cancel anything. That's a fiction made up by the Guardian writer.
Read the story. The actual statement from the EC says that at the time brexit happens those domain holders will no longer have authorization to have a .eu domain. It does not say they are going to cancel them, it only states the OBVIOUS fact that people who are not in the EU have no authority to have a .eu domain name.
What the EC ACTUALLY said is that holders of .eu domains who are no longer authorized to have them cannot renew their domains once they expire. D'oh.
Auto analogy? When you move out of the state of New York, do you expect to be able to renew your NY driver's license? Or license plate?
Is it just me, or does this seem fairly petty and petulant?
Yeah, the headline certainly makes it seem so. But the headline is typical /. muckraking. The summary tells a better story: no new registrations and no renewals of current registrations. And one comment that they MIGHT cancel existing ones, but that's only a maybe that they're thinking about.
making all those domain owners re-register with addresses in continental Europe,
If they're not eligible for a .eu because they're UK-based, then they aren't eligible for continental Europe domain names either.
I see no issue here. Who else but the EU registrar is authorized to determine who is allowed to register under the .eu TLD? If you leave the EU and are no longer authorized, why should you be able to renew your domain?
The ONLY problem would be for multi-national companies with a true EU presence that are based in the UK. They should be able to have a .eu domain address. That may require a subsidiary do the actual registration.
It's not like the people who buy bonds are just throwing their excess money away - they expect a return on their investment.
In fact, the expected return on investment means that if there isn't enough money coming in to run the broadband operation, then not only is the deficit operating expense paid for by the taxpayers, but the interest on the debt as well.
Or do people still believe that governments automagically have enough money to do anything they want to?
Well, it certainly seem that they do, given the number of things they expect the government to give them. "Single payer healthcare", for example, which is actually a dishonest name for "taxpayer funded healthcare". There was a recent editorial in our local paper talking about the costs of implementing that in our state. Something like an estimated 15% tax on income.
Net profit margins for telecoms are around 11%; that's the maximum you could save if government operated as efficiently as a for profit corporation.
You assume the government operation would break even from user fees. They don't have to. They can make up any deficit through taxes. You can save a lot more than 11% when you are taxing you neighbors to fund your internet use.
why should they be forced to cross-subsidize the real-time low latency streaming of gamers and Netflix addicts?
The whole reference to paying for "tiers" regarding email, video, streaming was a fiction. It didn't happen before NN rules went into place, and nobody has announced such a pricing structure now that they are removed. We can make up all kinds of horror scenarios, but doing that is a really bad basis for laws.
OTOH, for a lot less effort, real competition can destroy the executives that continue to harm America.
All that municipal broadband will do is drive out the smaller competitors, who are not the evil America-destroying companies that everyone here loves to hate. Comcast can survive a long time at a loss in any specific market. Joe's local ISP cannot.
Let's me ask you this: if I can get wireless broadband from my city government at a very cheap rate (ignoring the taxes I have to pay to get it, too) then why would I buy wireless internet from the local company? Why would anyone? That local company goes out of business, reducing competition. Isn't that an obvious result?
Local municipality's don't have "monitoring" resources.
Oh my God, how naive are you?
Local Governments are usually run by direct citizen elected councils.
Don't be stupid. I didn't say that the city council members would be doing the monitoring themselves.
Local IT departments are understaffed
We're not talking about the local IT department, we're talking about the municipal broadband "company". If you want to claim that they will be staffed with people who are ignorant of modern technology and how to monitor users, then you need to explain why you would expect any kind of reasonable service from them.
For a city council to increase staffing/software/infrastructure is literally a vote to raise local taxes - a nonstarter for the most part.
Except that is EXACTLY what it takes to create a municipal broadband service. They can't do it with the staff they already have, they must hire new people, and to build the infrastructure does require, if not new taxes, then taxpayer-backed bond measures.
If you think muni-broad band when implemented money maker, think again.
Where the hell did you get the idea I think this? I've been very consistent in saying "taxpayer-backed" and "taxpayer-funded", which means they operate at a loss made up for by the taxpayers. That's one of the real downsides to such operations. It doesn't need to operate at a profit so it can charge a lot less. It doesn't even need to operate break-even, so it can charge even less. Any deficit will be paid for by all the taxpayers, even if they never touch the internet, or if they buy their service from a commercial ISP.
And while this municipal ISP is charging less, it will be driving competition out of the market. It will leave, at best, only the major companies, eliminating the local competitors.