You've missed the point. I never said anything about being inaccurate or of making up facts.
Only amateurs show their bias via making things up (although I'll admit there does seem to be more "reporters" being exposed doing that than usual, lately). Most news organizations and reporters demonstrate their bias via what they choose to report, what they choose to include and not include and how they choose to frame the narrative they invent about the facts.
It's possible to be very competent and full of facts and also incredibly biased at the same time.
It's pretty funny when in an article which quotes Obama as stating "One of the dangers of the internet is that people can have entirely different realities. They can be cocooned in information that reinforces their current biases." so many people like you are posting to demonstrate the truth of your own cocooned reality.
You only think the BBC isn't biased because their news coverage happens to have a bias similar to your own bias.
Hint: If you're of the belief that only the articles which support the "other side" are ever biased, then that's a strong indication you're unable to recognize bias which you agree with.
Now tell me again, why do you want your internet access and the internet access of millions of other people to be subject to paid prioritization, blocking and throttling?
I want to be legally able to contract with whoever I want for whatever Internet services I want instead of having the FCC cost me money and features by subjecting my ISP to a bunch of bureaucratic rules and paperwork to "prove" they're complying with whatever restrictions the FCC has decided to set around Internet service based on their non-technical outdated understanding of how some committee member thinks the Internet "should work" informed by the large incumbents in the Industry who most recently or best lobbied them.
So how about you stop trying to make my Internet choices illegal and let me be responsible for who I want to contract with and what I want to pay for or not?
But at least now you've publicly admitted you have no idea what's even in Title II of the Communications Act of 1934, let alone have read it, because not only couldn't you list where your meaning was in the FCC rules, you couldn't get past the non-binding summary of the rules, let alone the actual law in Title II (which is different and not what you were trying to summarize as your language construction above implies).
I rarely re-read books, but yeah, I only purchase new books by authors I already know I like.
Most books I read are either from one of the nearby library systems (do a lot of reserving to get specific books/series) or on Kindle or KU (if available).
Yeah, I once sat down and figured out how many books I'd read. It was about 12K.
That was more than 10 years ago. A couple of hundred books a year is when I'm working a lot and don't have time to read. Since when is 80 books a year a "super reader"?
I'd guess their averages aren't so far off (some people just don't read many books), but they seem to have no idea where the extremes are.
Here's the full 400 pages of the rules. Feel free to point out the page which contains "Don't fuck with your customers' internet access" as part of the rules.
If it's not in there, then it's a phrase which as I said before is irrelevant to what the FCC would actually do or not.
You seem to think FCC rules mean whatever you've heard or read somewhere or wish was in there. However, they actually write these things down and at best only follow what's actually written, not what you want to read into them. The actual effect of the couple years of Title II FCC authority over ISPs was primarily actions aimed at preventing Facebook from being provided to people for free who otherwise wouldn't have access to it.
Title II is a reference to the Communications Act of 1934. It's the section specifically designed to relate to common carriers. I've actually read the section, have you?
Saying "Some laws are good" doesn't make all laws and regulations good.
I can just as easily say "Some regulations are bad" and give you example after example. Does that mean all regulations are bad? Try using some logic next time.
For example, "Don't fuck with your customers' internet access" may or may not be a good rule, but it's also not anywhere in the regulations the FCC enacted under Title II, so that makes it pretty irrelevant to what the FCC actually would do or not.
If the FCC literally regulating Internet access under Title II is "Net Neutrality", then how is that not the FCC controlling Internet access? Do you not know what the meaning of the word regulate is?
regulate reylt/ verb verb: regulate; 3rd person present: regulates; past tense: regulated; past participle: regulated; gerund or present participle: regulating
control or maintain the rate or speed of (a machine or process) so that it operates properly.
"a hormone that regulates metabolism and organ function"
synonyms: control, adjust, manage
"the flow of the river has been regulated" control or supervise (something, especially a company or business activity) by means of rules and regulations.
I've emphasized a word in the definition to see if you can spot whether regulating something has anything to do with controlling it or not...
Well,/. finally is reduced to quoting paragraphs of an editorial instead of trying to influence people with something pretending to be an actual news story.
Ignoring the people and arguments on the other side of the issue to assume everyone thinks in lockstep about something isn't how proponents are going to accomplish convincing them and create the bipartisan support you need this to have.
The two philosophical sides are in part: 1. We trust the FCC to benignly regulate Internet access to benefit people instead of large companies. 2. We don't trust the FCC to regulate Internet access because they'll over time be captured by those they regulate, so leaving it to the market is a better idea.
When the proponents of #1 keep claiming that they lost because large companies have too much influence on the FCC, it sort of proves the point of the proponents of #2. This ongoing argument between two sets of giant corporations (The giant content providers vs. the giant ISPs) also proves the point that the FCC isn't going to be making rules to benefit individuals and small companies at the expense of industry incumbents. At best, they'll pick whichever set of industry incumbents influenced them last or the most.
The reality of "Net Neutrality" is that the actual effect of the rules was to discourage new infrastructure spending and new ISPs with paperwork designed for phone monopolies while creating causes of action against attempts to let people use Facebook without it counting against their data. Difficult to find a grand principle there in the 400 pages of former rules, especially because "Net Neutrality" isn't one of the terms actually defined in the former FCC rules.
When Net Neutrality was in place, Verizon was forced to allow traffic.... but now that our friend Pai has removed that requirement, any upstream provider is free to extort any amount they want to restore traffic.
How does that fit in with the fact that the FCC change doesn't actually take effect for another couple of months?
Hmm.... unlikely that stuff now is being impacted by something which hasn't even happened yet, or did you get that arrow of time backward again in your causality equation?
Which specific government safety net had funding cut in the 1980s which impacted the level of homelessness?
The Democratic Congress at the time which controlled the purse strings spent more money on most everything, so your theory seems like it contradicts reality.
However, I'm always willing to be proven wrong, so please give us the specifics of the non-mental illness-related safety net program which was actually cut in a budget which was enacted by Congress during that time. I'll be waiting, but not holding my breath.
No, the opposite. See, one of the requirements for rent-seeking is for some government official or commission to be able to create rules which govern the company's industry. For example, the FCC's Title II authority to regulate Internet access. That sort of power leads to corporate rent-seeking behavior and corrupts things into say, 400 pages of regulations supposedly to implement a simple concept like net neutrality.
If instead of that, someone were to take away the FCC's ability to issue regulations and do favors, then the companies wouldn't have that avenue for rent-seeking behavior. See also Baptists and Bootleggers.
Basically what this article is saying is that Motherboard and Vice have decided to start an ISP to compete with other ISPs.
So, exactly what anyone in favor of repealing the FCC rules would have suggested they do and other than the attempt at publicity for their ISP using political buzzwords, not something which relates in any way to FCC Title II regulations.
The worst part is the authors of the article don't even seem to realize what an ISP actually is and that what they're doing is creating one. That doesn't bode well for their ability to run one long-term.
Because this was never really about net neutrality. That's just the populist excuse the FCC used to get more control on internet access, because the courts kept telling them they weren't legally allowed to. So they came up with this Title II B.S. and said they were doing it for the children, I mean, for the customers, all the while knowing that once the FCC could write rules to manage the Internet, they then had the power to tell ISPs what to do in lots of ways.
So the ISPs and the people smart enough to understand how government regulations actually work (see public choice economics) have been fighting to get the FCC out of creating regulations for the Internet and we just won that battle, at least for now.
Yeah, they present this as if it's some sort of evidence in favor of having the FCC in charge of regulating Internet access, when it's actually the opposite.
But don't worry, if they kept their regulatory control, over the next few years/decades there will be plenty of industry "experts" willing to come in and give them a hand in "understanding" what needs to be done in the regulations...
No, the government (in the form of a Republican Congress decades ago) made a deliberate decision not to let the government regulate the Internet.
That lasted until the Obama administration finally found a way around the laws (after losing several court cases) by reclassifying Internet access under Title II so they could start regulating it.
Now we're just talking about repealing that and returning it closer to the "wild west" you remember so fondly.
Somehow we never had any irresolvable issues in the decades before the FCC had Title II authority to regulate the Internet, but after only a couple of years of validity (and use mostly to investigate charges of free Facebook access for people) repealing it is suddenly all going to doom the Internet forever.
"We should expect to see participation at around the same percentages as the population of the area."
This is factually and statistically false. There is no significant area of human endeavor where the percentages of the population naturally lines up neatly with the percentages of participation. If software engineering started to do so, it'd be a first.
Here's a fun random internet example:
An analysis of the ESPN database of NFL players for the 2016-2017 season by position for place kickers and punters reveals the following:
1. Of the 35 place kickers on 2016-2017 NFL rosters, 34 are white, one is Hispanic (Roberto Aguayo of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers) and none are black.
2. Of the 34 punters on 2016-2017 NFL rosters, only 1 is black (Marquette King of the Oakland Raiders) and the rest are white.
Even though black players represent 69.7% of NFL players overall this season, they represent less than 1.5% of players at the positions of kickers and punters – only one of out 69 players at those positions is black.
The exact same people would have to discriminate against black kickers in the NFL as would be discriminating in favor of blacks in the rest of the NFL. That sort of proves the disparate statistics in either direction can't be the result of bias based on skin color, unless you can come up with a reason they'd be biased based on skin color only when the player's job involves kicking or not.
You don't seem to understand how government commissions work... how they've always worked. Try looking up the history of a few of them, it's a pretty well known cycle.
Some "reformer" says, "Hey, here's this problem, let's have a government commission make some regulations about it!" and people go, "That does sound like a problem, great idea!"
So the regulatory commission takes it on and "solves" it with some regulations. They aren't exactly what the reformer's crowd would have done, but after some input from those being regulated, they're fairly close.
Then some time passes, the original people aren't paying attention anymore, because it was solved with some regulations, right?
Guess who keeps attention with dedicated employees and lobbyists? Guess who has all the industry expertise to provide to the Commission? Guess who can give great jobs after their "public service" is over? Guess who gets to tweak the rules and regulations over time to ensure they are benefited at the expense of any newer companies who want to do things differently, or who can't afford to pay for all the compliance costs now required?
And that's how you end up with yet another regulatory body captured by those it's supposed to regulate. The wikipedia article has at least 14 U.S. examples listed, with more from other countries.
How you solve this public choice problem is that you don't give them the power to make the rules and regulations in the first place. Then they can't do anyone any special favors and bias the regulations in favor of entrenched interests.
But hey, as long as you can get a bunch of short-sighted people to be their patsy "reformers" to start the crony government process, I guess these companies can just get whatever they want done, right?
I'm one of the ones who think the FCC regulating Internet access under Title II just leads over time to established/entrenched interests using that to preserve the status quo and prevent innovation and change which might disrupt them in favor of consumers, but hey, as long as/. has a soap box, they're going to keep shouting their view over and over and over again until even people on their side are going to be so annoyed they will stop listening.
Personally, I'm hoping for a bright-line test for the police to come out of this case which lets everyone know that the police can't go through data people normally don't have access to. I'm not holding by breath, though.
So to you, the fact that Ajit Pai has publicly come out in a WSJ editorial wanting to switch the Obama era FCC rules from what this judge just upheld (Title II FCC micromanagement) back to "light touch regulations" similar to what this judge rejected (but on a national level, not just for one locality) is proof to you that his position is the exact opposite? Let me guess, you've never actually read anything Pai's said or written about ISP competition?
So you apparently have experience in organizations like Equifax, rather than ones with good security and risk management practices.
Some places actually take this stuff seriously and have people whose job it is to ensure the company isn't taking risks which the CEO and the Board aren't fully aware of. That tends to concentrate the minds of those individual contributors and their immediate managers you mention.
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You've missed the point. I never said anything about being inaccurate or of making up facts.
Only amateurs show their bias via making things up (although I'll admit there does seem to be more "reporters" being exposed doing that than usual, lately). Most news organizations and reporters demonstrate their bias via what they choose to report, what they choose to include and not include and how they choose to frame the narrative they invent about the facts.
It's possible to be very competent and full of facts and also incredibly biased at the same time.
It's pretty funny when in an article which quotes Obama as stating "One of the dangers of the internet is that people can have entirely different realities. They can be cocooned in information that reinforces their current biases." so many people like you are posting to demonstrate the truth of your own cocooned reality.
You only think the BBC isn't biased because their news coverage happens to have a bias similar to your own bias.
Hint: If you're of the belief that only the articles which support the "other side" are ever biased, then that's a strong indication you're unable to recognize bias which you agree with.
I want to be legally able to contract with whoever I want for whatever Internet services I want instead of having the FCC cost me money and features by subjecting my ISP to a bunch of bureaucratic rules and paperwork to "prove" they're complying with whatever restrictions the FCC has decided to set around Internet service based on their non-technical outdated understanding of how some committee member thinks the Internet "should work" informed by the large incumbents in the Industry who most recently or best lobbied them.
So how about you stop trying to make my Internet choices illegal and let me be responsible for who I want to contract with and what I want to pay for or not?
But at least now you've publicly admitted you have no idea what's even in Title II of the Communications Act of 1934, let alone have read it, because not only couldn't you list where your meaning was in the FCC rules, you couldn't get past the non-binding summary of the rules, let alone the actual law in Title II (which is different and not what you were trying to summarize as your language construction above implies).
I rarely re-read books, but yeah, I only purchase new books by authors I already know I like.
Most books I read are either from one of the nearby library systems (do a lot of reserving to get specific books/series) or on Kindle or KU (if available).
Yeah, I once sat down and figured out how many books I'd read. It was about 12K.
That was more than 10 years ago. A couple of hundred books a year is when I'm working a lot and don't have time to read. Since when is 80 books a year a "super reader"?
I'd guess their averages aren't so far off (some people just don't read many books), but they seem to have no idea where the extremes are.
Here's the full 400 pages of the rules. Feel free to point out the page which contains "Don't fuck with your customers' internet access" as part of the rules.
If it's not in there, then it's a phrase which as I said before is irrelevant to what the FCC would actually do or not.
You seem to think FCC rules mean whatever you've heard or read somewhere or wish was in there. However, they actually write these things down and at best only follow what's actually written, not what you want to read into them. The actual effect of the couple years of Title II FCC authority over ISPs was primarily actions aimed at preventing Facebook from being provided to people for free who otherwise wouldn't have access to it.
Title II is a reference to the Communications Act of 1934. It's the section specifically designed to relate to common carriers. I've actually read the section, have you?
Saying "Some laws are good" doesn't make all laws and regulations good.
I can just as easily say "Some regulations are bad" and give you example after example. Does that mean all regulations are bad? Try using some logic next time.
For example, "Don't fuck with your customers' internet access" may or may not be a good rule, but it's also not anywhere in the regulations the FCC enacted under Title II, so that makes it pretty irrelevant to what the FCC actually would do or not.
If the FCC literally regulating Internet access under Title II is "Net Neutrality", then how is that not the FCC controlling Internet access? Do you not know what the meaning of the word regulate is?
Here. let me help you with that Google search:
I've emphasized a word in the definition to see if you can spot whether regulating something has anything to do with controlling it or not...
You don't understand that "The FCC should mandate that your ISP" is literally an example of the FCC controlling my ISP?
Is English not your first language? You seem to fail at reading comprehension, here. I never even mentioned censorship in my comment.
Also, Comcast has no impact on my Internet access, so why would they be a benevolent dictator for it or not? They can't force me to use their service.
Anyway, you're obviously just flamebait, so I suppose I should just ignore you.
Well, /. finally is reduced to quoting paragraphs of an editorial instead of trying to influence people with something pretending to be an actual news story.
Ignoring the people and arguments on the other side of the issue to assume everyone thinks in lockstep about something isn't how proponents are going to accomplish convincing them and create the bipartisan support you need this to have.
The two philosophical sides are in part:
1. We trust the FCC to benignly regulate Internet access to benefit people instead of large companies.
2. We don't trust the FCC to regulate Internet access because they'll over time be captured by those they regulate, so leaving it to the market is a better idea.
When the proponents of #1 keep claiming that they lost because large companies have too much influence on the FCC, it sort of proves the point of the proponents of #2. This ongoing argument between two sets of giant corporations (The giant content providers vs. the giant ISPs) also proves the point that the FCC isn't going to be making rules to benefit individuals and small companies at the expense of industry incumbents. At best, they'll pick whichever set of industry incumbents influenced them last or the most.
The reality of "Net Neutrality" is that the actual effect of the rules was to discourage new infrastructure spending and new ISPs with paperwork designed for phone monopolies while creating causes of action against attempts to let people use Facebook without it counting against their data. Difficult to find a grand principle there in the 400 pages of former rules, especially because "Net Neutrality" isn't one of the terms actually defined in the former FCC rules.
How does that fit in with the fact that the FCC change doesn't actually take effect for another couple of months?
Hmm.... unlikely that stuff now is being impacted by something which hasn't even happened yet, or did you get that arrow of time backward again in your causality equation?
Which specific government safety net had funding cut in the 1980s which impacted the level of homelessness?
The Democratic Congress at the time which controlled the purse strings spent more money on most everything, so your theory seems like it contradicts reality.
However, I'm always willing to be proven wrong, so please give us the specifics of the non-mental illness-related safety net program which was actually cut in a budget which was enacted by Congress during that time. I'll be waiting, but not holding my breath.
No, the opposite. See, one of the requirements for rent-seeking is for some government official or commission to be able to create rules which govern the company's industry. For example, the FCC's Title II authority to regulate Internet access. That sort of power leads to corporate rent-seeking behavior and corrupts things into say, 400 pages of regulations supposedly to implement a simple concept like net neutrality.
If instead of that, someone were to take away the FCC's ability to issue regulations and do favors, then the companies wouldn't have that avenue for rent-seeking behavior. See also Baptists and Bootleggers.
Basically what this article is saying is that Motherboard and Vice have decided to start an ISP to compete with other ISPs.
So, exactly what anyone in favor of repealing the FCC rules would have suggested they do and other than the attempt at publicity for their ISP using political buzzwords, not something which relates in any way to FCC Title II regulations.
The worst part is the authors of the article don't even seem to realize what an ISP actually is and that what they're doing is creating one. That doesn't bode well for their ability to run one long-term.
Because this was never really about net neutrality. That's just the populist excuse the FCC used to get more control on internet access, because the courts kept telling them they weren't legally allowed to. So they came up with this Title II B.S. and said they were doing it for the children, I mean, for the customers, all the while knowing that once the FCC could write rules to manage the Internet, they then had the power to tell ISPs what to do in lots of ways.
So the ISPs and the people smart enough to understand how government regulations actually work (see public choice economics) have been fighting to get the FCC out of creating regulations for the Internet and we just won that battle, at least for now.
Yeah, they present this as if it's some sort of evidence in favor of having the FCC in charge of regulating Internet access, when it's actually the opposite.
But don't worry, if they kept their regulatory control, over the next few years/decades there will be plenty of industry "experts" willing to come in and give them a hand in "understanding" what needs to be done in the regulations...
No, the government (in the form of a Republican Congress decades ago) made a deliberate decision not to let the government regulate the Internet.
That lasted until the Obama administration finally found a way around the laws (after losing several court cases) by reclassifying Internet access under Title II so they could start regulating it.
Now we're just talking about repealing that and returning it closer to the "wild west" you remember so fondly.
Somehow we never had any irresolvable issues in the decades before the FCC had Title II authority to regulate the Internet, but after only a couple of years of validity (and use mostly to investigate charges of free Facebook access for people) repealing it is suddenly all going to doom the Internet forever.
"We should expect to see participation at around the same percentages as the population of the area."
This is factually and statistically false. There is no significant area of human endeavor where the percentages of the population naturally lines up neatly with the percentages of participation. If software engineering started to do so, it'd be a first.
Here's a fun random internet example:
The exact same people would have to discriminate against black kickers in the NFL as would be discriminating in favor of blacks in the rest of the NFL. That sort of proves the disparate statistics in either direction can't be the result of bias based on skin color, unless you can come up with a reason they'd be biased based on skin color only when the player's job involves kicking or not.
You don't seem to understand how government commissions work... how they've always worked. Try looking up the history of a few of them, it's a pretty well known cycle.
Some "reformer" says, "Hey, here's this problem, let's have a government commission make some regulations about it!" and people go, "That does sound like a problem, great idea!"
So the regulatory commission takes it on and "solves" it with some regulations. They aren't exactly what the reformer's crowd would have done, but after some input from those being regulated, they're fairly close.
Then some time passes, the original people aren't paying attention anymore, because it was solved with some regulations, right?
Guess who keeps attention with dedicated employees and lobbyists? Guess who has all the industry expertise to provide to the Commission? Guess who can give great jobs after their "public service" is over? Guess who gets to tweak the rules and regulations over time to ensure they are benefited at the expense of any newer companies who want to do things differently, or who can't afford to pay for all the compliance costs now required?
And that's how you end up with yet another regulatory body captured by those it's supposed to regulate. The wikipedia article has at least 14 U.S. examples listed, with more from other countries.
How you solve this public choice problem is that you don't give them the power to make the rules and regulations in the first place. Then they can't do anyone any special favors and bias the regulations in favor of entrenched interests.
But hey, as long as you can get a bunch of short-sighted people to be their patsy "reformers" to start the crony government process, I guess these companies can just get whatever they want done, right?
This is just /.'s what, dozenth post of editorials in favor of FCC Title II Net Neutrality rules in the last few days?
We get it already, the /. editors are going all out to preserve FCC regulation of Internet access.
Here's a different view, based on actual economics and studies and stuff...
I'm one of the ones who think the FCC regulating Internet access under Title II just leads over time to established/entrenched interests using that to preserve the status quo and prevent innovation and change which might disrupt them in favor of consumers, but hey, as long as /. has a soap box, they're going to keep shouting their view over and over and over again until even people on their side are going to be so annoyed they will stop listening.
I happened to recently read a couple of insightful articles by law professors about this specific case.
The first article made the very good point that a positive law rule covers a lot of this. In other words, if a regular private citizen couldn't normally get the information, then the Police should need a warrant to get it.
The second writer says he disagrees, but mostly makes the point that just using that standard isn't enough, because sometimes there are other factors which would go into a "reasonable expectation of privacy".
Personally, I'm hoping for a bright-line test for the police to come out of this case which lets everyone know that the police can't go through data people normally don't have access to. I'm not holding by breath, though.
Well, at least you caught part of the joke....
Stop interrupting the sky-is-falling, woe is me, I-can-use-this-politically narratives with facts about reality and the law....
What are you, new to /., where you think you can interject a reasonable comment or something? ;)
So to you, the fact that Ajit Pai has publicly come out in a WSJ editorial wanting to switch the Obama era FCC rules from what this judge just upheld (Title II FCC micromanagement) back to "light touch regulations" similar to what this judge rejected (but on a national level, not just for one locality) is proof to you that his position is the exact opposite? Let me guess, you've never actually read anything Pai's said or written about ISP competition?
So you apparently have experience in organizations like Equifax, rather than ones with good security and risk management practices.
Some places actually take this stuff seriously and have people whose job it is to ensure the company isn't taking risks which the CEO and the Board aren't fully aware of. That tends to concentrate the minds of those individual contributors and their immediate managers you mention.