Title II was written specifically to apply to the PSTN, nothing else.
Congress identified one area of activity (Telephony) and granted certain authority to the FCC; Congress identified another area of activity (Internet) and granted a different, significantly lower level of of authority to the FCC.
The FCC is trying to claim that residential Internet service is the same as the PSTN, for no other reason than to gain more authority. It's an insult to our intelligence.
If they get away with this, they would have gotten away with Broadcast Flag.
I don't like those terms, the distinction between "negative" and "positive" freedoms tends to be a way of explaining people's mis-use of the terms.
They're properly called liberty and entitlement, respectively. And they're mutually exclusive.
e.g. Crusoe can't be forced to stop reading, nor can he force others to provide him something to read (especially hard to do when those people don't exist, as you point out).
I can't speak for Republicans, but for the last decade the FCC has been enemy of technology numero uno. When and how the hell did they become the solution?
Not only that, but there's NO problem that they're claiming to solve with the new rules. The entire ruling and rationale is purely speculative. In particular, they explicitly declined to apply their 'finding' to peering agreements, e.g. Netflix-Cogent-Comcast.
And if the Internet isn't an "information service", what is? They're deploying a massive, unconstitutional power grab, that was unnecessary to begin with: New Neutrality has never failed in court. The ends don't justify the means.
The FCC's rules, in their own publication, do not attempt to solve #2. There is no action an ISP has taken so far, that the FCC has said it could have regulated: they are purely speculative as to what an ISP might be able to do sometime in the future.
In particular, the FCC declined to regulate peering agreements, though it appears to be claiming the authority to (with another vote.
The FCC is claiming it has power it doesn't actually have, what's new?
I hope people aren't basing their studies on freedom based on a work of fiction. If you're going to do that, why not pick Lord of the Flies?
Or if you want to base it on reality, Black Like Me.
It's an analogy. Come on now.
It's the same thing when physicists think about cats in boxes with poison, or spherical cows. It settles fundamental questions.
There is no such thing. Everyone is constrained in what they can do. You might want to fly like Superman, but physics and biology say it's not going to happen. Or you might want to lgo to a live Beatles concert. Nature kind of limits your freedom to.
"Absolute" is a very dangerous word.
I can get sufficiently close to flying to satisfy my desires, thank you very much.
No one was ever talking about omnipotence. We mean liberty.
Out of all the choices a person could make, what is the subset of things that are right to do? One person on an island, everything. Two people on an island, less than everything, but still well-defined. Person A can't physically attack person B, or steal their stash of coconuts, and so on.
On the contrary, freedom is pretty well defined even in contexts of two or more people, it's just a whole lot more difficult to enforce (and study) than a "Crusoe" economy since there's literally nothing that one person can do by themselves to violate one's rights.
The addition of another person to the Crusoe economy is how economists study the origin of natural rights. Crusoe's welfare could improve because of comparative advantage; or it could fail, say, if he were attacked.
Society is basically adding a bunch more people to a much bigger island and studying the limit as n approaches infinity.
Just because it's difficult to study, doesn't mean 'absolute freedom' doesn't/can't exist.
Yeah, except that the FCC rules passed wouldn't have applied to a single case so far.
They vaguely itemize some "threats" that could possibly happen sometime in the near future, and they talk about them as if the existing court system couldn't handle these issues.
But it would have stopped Netflix/Cogent/Comcast, right? Wellll... no. That was caused by a badly negotiated peering agreement, not any action on the ISP's part. And yet the FCC rules: "We do not believe that it is appropriate or necessary to subject arrangements for Internet traffic exchange (which are subsumed within broadband Internet access service) to the rules we adopt today." Oh. Huh. Well. And here we were thinking the FCC could do something useful for once.
It's just a suspicion, though. Without an encryption key - the actual thing that's sensitive - it just looks like random data. It could have been put anywhere else on the Internet. If they could prove it's encrypted, how can they prove you have the key? Maybe you own the key -- on a USB drive at home. And so on.
Presumably that's better than having silent spyware like a key logger, which can cause significant financial harm far in excess just buying a new laptop.
Nowadays there's nothing it can't mean, but I originally understood it to mean "Virtual machine hosted on lots of identical nodes with no guarantee of uptime for any one node" -- as opposed to a mainframe, or time-shared machine.
Then it sort of became "Use the Internet to store things normally kept on your computer, have your content on all your devices." Well, ok, but that's what the Web is.
Then it was existing, long-established companies just rebranding their service without any change. "Cloud email!" Um, wat.
How about never dealing with cash, never calculating tip, never even discussing payment, receipts sent to your email, and never having to wait more than five minutes for a ride.
You can't sue unless you're an injured party, though. Being a competitor doesn't generally rise to that level. (In some cases, a lawsuit as a competitor would be illegal in and of itself for being anti-competitive.)
If you bought the product and found out it was misrepresented, that's an injury.
You could almost say capitalism is... a race to the top? Improving the living standard of everyone, where even the poorest of the poor have A/C and television? *gives cookie*
Yeah, people have been saying this since the beginning and yet, all the scientific, economic indicators say, for the vast majority of the time (like 98%), things are getting better, not worse.
GDP, nutrition, productivity, hours of relaxation time, variety of entertainment, cost of basic necessities and transit... all improving, many even through recessions (i.e. when GDP is going down).
That's still a naive way of modeling an economy. Prices help allocate resources. If a tax is levied on a particular industry, it'll end up decreasing the total output of that industry.
Strictly speaking, a tax on a corporation shifts the supply curve (or demand curve depending on how the tax is collected). The result of this shift is an increase in prices, close to but almost never equal to or exceeding the amount of the tax (let's assume that "tax" here includes cost of compliance). The part of the tax that didn't show up as an increase in price is what's eaten by the corporation, in the form of lower quantity supplied and lower profit.
Finally, the reduced quantity supplied times the tax revenue per unit is the "societal loss": The amount of value lost because the customer didn't choose to buy the product because of the increased price, less the value that would have gone to the government as the tax. This is eaten by society as a whole in the form of a less developed economy, lower GDP, or however else you want to measure it.
The way you phrase it, it sounds like producers will happily keep producing and the consumer is an innocent bystander. This is only about 90% correct.
This is incorrect because it neglects to account for the change in demand for money.
A consumption tax and income tax are, for the purposes of economics, the same thing.
Increasing the prices of all goods uniformly
is the same thing as decreasing your income
is the same thing as taxing your income.
If the "rich" get to keep more money than the poor, that's immediately offset by the fact they have to save more money to buy the same amount of goods.
If there's differences, it's a difference in how the tax is scheduled, not in consumption vs. income. For example, it's impossible (or much more difficult, paperwork-wise) to implement rate schedules with a consumption tax.
No one said the tax was at "the expense" of anyone.
The difference between the consumption tax is you pay 20% when you receive it, versus paying 20% when you spend it. To the rich and poor alike, it's the same thing.
I didn't say anything about dumping on a neighbors property, I said polluting the air and water.
How is that not the same thing.
And until the last 50 years or so, such polluting was NOT criminal, it was the normal way of life. It only became criminal when a LAW was passed (see how that works). Why was such a law passed? Because it was decided that the right of the population in general to have clean air and water was MORE IMPORTANT than the right of some people to choose to have cheap products, or the right of some people to make a profit/be in a business that they want to.
The passage of the law had very little to do with causing cleanliness of the environment and more to do with the fact it became economically viable to have such laws after technology had progressed to the point that cleanliness became economically viable.
Society has been becoming progressively less polluted for centuries. The Middle Ages had lakes so polluted they would CATCH ON FIRE. When's the last time you heard someone shout "gardyloo"? That's unfathomable nowadays.
I.e. such a law didn't get passed sooner because it would have been impossible to enforce. And arguably, it's unnecessary.
Similarly, in the past there was no regulation of taxi service. This lead to highly unscrupulous practices (such a rates that change at the whim of the driver), dangerous vehicles (that a race-to-the-bottom inevitably produces), dangerous driving (like trying to beat a competitor to a fare), and just plain unseemly behavior (like cabbies fighting over fares).
Citation needed. As with pollution, consumer safety was worst at the start and has continuously gotten better, regardless of the legislation.
If what you say is true, that doesn't really explain away Uber, now does it? My Uber market is entirely unregulated by any law or bureaucrat, and I'm not exactly seeing any of the horrible things you describe.
When was the last time you went for a ride with an Uber driver who just happened to be going to the same place as you? You didn't. Not once. Ever. Uber isn't a ride sharing service, it's an unlicensed livery service.
So?
If you and I are driving from Los Angeles to NYC together and we agree to split gas, then we are ride sharing. If I pay you $40 to take me to the airport after work, then you're providing a taxi service. See the difference?
So?
It's perfectly legal for you and I to carpool together. It's legal for me to buy you gas for giving me a ride somewhere. It's not legal (in many jurisdictions) to offer unregulated livery services.
So?
The people that those regulations listed by the GP are trying to protect are the passengers. Do you think that the taxi drivers want to be out there during unprofitable hours? That they want to charge the same rate at 5pm as they do at 1am? No. So I am not sure how you think those rules are protecting the taxi companies.
Government rules have strange ways of protecting industries, usually by shutting the door on new entrants to the market. I don't claim to be cognizant of exactly why, but just look at all the taxi cab drivers and owners protesting any relaxation of the above-mentioned rules and you'd guess it has to be benefiting them in some way, probably unfairly since it's the force of law.
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Title II was written specifically to apply to the PSTN, nothing else.
Congress identified one area of activity (Telephony) and granted certain authority to the FCC;
Congress identified another area of activity (Internet) and granted a different, significantly lower level of of authority to the FCC.
The FCC is trying to claim that residential Internet service is the same as the PSTN, for no other reason than to gain more authority. It's an insult to our intelligence.
If they get away with this, they would have gotten away with Broadcast Flag.
I don't like those terms, the distinction between "negative" and "positive" freedoms tends to be a way of explaining people's mis-use of the terms.
They're properly called liberty and entitlement, respectively. And they're mutually exclusive.
e.g. Crusoe can't be forced to stop reading, nor can he force others to provide him something to read (especially hard to do when those people don't exist, as you point out).
I can't speak for Republicans, but for the last decade the FCC has been enemy of technology numero uno. When and how the hell did they become the solution?
Not only that, but there's NO problem that they're claiming to solve with the new rules. The entire ruling and rationale is purely speculative. In particular, they explicitly declined to apply their 'finding' to peering agreements, e.g. Netflix-Cogent-Comcast.
And if the Internet isn't an "information service", what is? They're deploying a massive, unconstitutional power grab, that was unnecessary to begin with: New Neutrality has never failed in court. The ends don't justify the means.
The FCC's rules, in their own publication, do not attempt to solve #2. There is no action an ISP has taken so far, that the FCC has said it could have regulated: they are purely speculative as to what an ISP might be able to do sometime in the future.
In particular, the FCC declined to regulate peering agreements, though it appears to be claiming the authority to (with another vote.
The FCC is claiming it has power it doesn't actually have, what's new?
I hope people aren't basing their studies on freedom based on a work of fiction. If you're going to do that, why not pick Lord of the Flies?
Or if you want to base it on reality, Black Like Me.
It's an analogy. Come on now.
It's the same thing when physicists think about cats in boxes with poison, or spherical cows. It settles fundamental questions.
There is no such thing. Everyone is constrained in what they can do. You might want to fly like Superman, but physics and biology say it's not going to happen. Or you might want to lgo to a live Beatles concert. Nature kind of limits your freedom to.
"Absolute" is a very dangerous word.
I can get sufficiently close to flying to satisfy my desires, thank you very much.
No one was ever talking about omnipotence. We mean liberty.
Out of all the choices a person could make, what is the subset of things that are right to do? One person on an island, everything. Two people on an island, less than everything, but still well-defined. Person A can't physically attack person B, or steal their stash of coconuts, and so on.
On the contrary, freedom is pretty well defined even in contexts of two or more people, it's just a whole lot more difficult to enforce (and study) than a "Crusoe" economy since there's literally nothing that one person can do by themselves to violate one's rights.
The addition of another person to the Crusoe economy is how economists study the origin of natural rights. Crusoe's welfare could improve because of comparative advantage; or it could fail, say, if he were attacked.
Society is basically adding a bunch more people to a much bigger island and studying the limit as n approaches infinity.
Just because it's difficult to study, doesn't mean 'absolute freedom' doesn't/can't exist.
Yeah, except that the FCC rules passed wouldn't have applied to a single case so far.
They vaguely itemize some "threats" that could possibly happen sometime in the near future, and they talk about them as if the existing court system couldn't handle these issues.
But it would have stopped Netflix/Cogent/Comcast, right? Wellll... no. That was caused by a badly negotiated peering agreement, not any action on the ISP's part. And yet the FCC rules: "We do not believe that it is appropriate or necessary to subject arrangements for Internet traffic exchange (which are
subsumed within broadband Internet access service) to the rules we adopt today." Oh. Huh. Well. And here we were thinking the FCC could do something useful for once.
It's just a suspicion, though. Without an encryption key - the actual thing that's sensitive - it just looks like random data. It could have been put anywhere else on the Internet. If they could prove it's encrypted, how can they prove you have the key? Maybe you own the key -- on a USB drive at home. And so on.
Presumably that's better than having silent spyware like a key logger, which can cause significant financial harm far in excess just buying a new laptop.
Nowadays there's nothing it can't mean, but I originally understood it to mean "Virtual machine hosted on lots of identical nodes with no guarantee of uptime for any one node" -- as opposed to a mainframe, or time-shared machine.
Then it sort of became "Use the Internet to store things normally kept on your computer, have your content on all your devices." Well, ok, but that's what the Web is.
Then it was existing, long-established companies just rebranding their service without any change. "Cloud email!" Um, wat.
That's been going up too: http://research.stlouisfed.org...
How about never dealing with cash, never calculating tip, never even discussing payment, receipts sent to your email, and never having to wait more than five minutes for a ride.
You can't sue unless you're an injured party, though. Being a competitor doesn't generally rise to that level. (In some cases, a lawsuit as a competitor would be illegal in and of itself for being anti-competitive.)
If you bought the product and found out it was misrepresented, that's an injury.
Encrypted information isn't sensitive, that's the whole point of encryption: To take big secrets (data) and make them little secrets (secret key).
You could almost say capitalism is... a race to the top? Improving the living standard of everyone, where even the poorest of the poor have A/C and television?
*gives cookie*
Yeah, people have been saying this since the beginning and yet, all the scientific, economic indicators say, for the vast majority of the time (like 98%), things are getting better, not worse.
GDP, nutrition, productivity, hours of relaxation time, variety of entertainment, cost of basic necessities and transit... all improving, many even through recessions (i.e. when GDP is going down).
http://reason.com/blog/2012/05...
Yes.
What if I told you
*glasses*
you don't need employees
and you can provide a better, safer service
Even when the law is wrong? Really?
Telling someone they can't make a living by running a pretty darn good service sounds awfully wrong to me.
If you're a billionaire, I can understand your complete utter contempt for people just trying to make ends meet.
I don't like it, I don't agree with it, but I might be able to understand it.
So, why do you hate people just trying to make a decent living?
That's still a naive way of modeling an economy. Prices help allocate resources. If a tax is levied on a particular industry, it'll end up decreasing the total output of that industry.
Strictly speaking, a tax on a corporation shifts the supply curve (or demand curve depending on how the tax is collected). The result of this shift is an increase in prices, close to but almost never equal to or exceeding the amount of the tax (let's assume that "tax" here includes cost of compliance). The part of the tax that didn't show up as an increase in price is what's eaten by the corporation, in the form of lower quantity supplied and lower profit.
Finally, the reduced quantity supplied times the tax revenue per unit is the "societal loss": The amount of value lost because the customer didn't choose to buy the product because of the increased price, less the value that would have gone to the government as the tax. This is eaten by society as a whole in the form of a less developed economy, lower GDP, or however else you want to measure it.
The way you phrase it, it sounds like producers will happily keep producing and the consumer is an innocent bystander. This is only about 90% correct.
This is incorrect because it neglects to account for the change in demand for money.
A consumption tax and income tax are, for the purposes of economics, the same thing.
Increasing the prices of all goods uniformly
is the same thing as decreasing your income
is the same thing as taxing your income.
If the "rich" get to keep more money than the poor, that's immediately offset by the fact they have to save more money to buy the same amount of goods.
If there's differences, it's a difference in how the tax is scheduled, not in consumption vs. income. For example, it's impossible (or much more difficult, paperwork-wise) to implement rate schedules with a consumption tax.
No one said the tax was at "the expense" of anyone.
The difference between the consumption tax is you pay 20% when you receive it, versus paying 20% when you spend it. To the rich and poor alike, it's the same thing.
I didn't say anything about dumping on a neighbors property, I said polluting the air and water.
How is that not the same thing.
And until the last 50 years or so, such polluting was NOT criminal, it was the normal way of life. It only became criminal when a LAW was passed (see how that works). Why was such a law passed? Because it was decided that the right of the population in general to have clean air and water was MORE IMPORTANT than the right of some people to choose to have cheap products, or the right of some people to make a profit/be in a business that they want to.
The passage of the law had very little to do with causing cleanliness of the environment and more to do with the fact it became economically viable to have such laws after technology had progressed to the point that cleanliness became economically viable.
Society has been becoming progressively less polluted for centuries. The Middle Ages had lakes so polluted they would CATCH ON FIRE. When's the last time you heard someone shout "gardyloo"? That's unfathomable nowadays.
I.e. such a law didn't get passed sooner because it would have been impossible to enforce. And arguably, it's unnecessary.
Similarly, in the past there was no regulation of taxi service. This lead to highly unscrupulous practices (such a rates that change at the whim of the driver), dangerous vehicles (that a race-to-the-bottom inevitably produces), dangerous driving (like trying to beat a competitor to a fare), and just plain unseemly behavior (like cabbies fighting over fares).
Citation needed. As with pollution, consumer safety was worst at the start and has continuously gotten better, regardless of the legislation.
If what you say is true, that doesn't really explain away Uber, now does it? My Uber market is entirely unregulated by any law or bureaucrat, and I'm not exactly seeing any of the horrible things you describe.
When was the last time you went for a ride with an Uber driver who just happened to be going to the same place as you? You didn't. Not once. Ever. Uber isn't a ride sharing service, it's an unlicensed livery service.
So?
If you and I are driving from Los Angeles to NYC together and we agree to split gas, then we are ride sharing. If I pay you $40 to take me to the airport after work, then you're providing a taxi service. See the difference?
So?
It's perfectly legal for you and I to carpool together. It's legal for me to buy you gas for giving me a ride somewhere. It's not legal (in many jurisdictions) to offer unregulated livery services.
So?
The people that those regulations listed by the GP are trying to protect are the passengers. Do you think that the taxi drivers want to be out there during unprofitable hours? That they want to charge the same rate at 5pm as they do at 1am? No. So I am not sure how you think those rules are protecting the taxi companies.
Government rules have strange ways of protecting industries, usually by shutting the door on new entrants to the market. I don't claim to be cognizant of exactly why, but just look at all the taxi cab drivers and owners protesting any relaxation of the above-mentioned rules and you'd guess it has to be benefiting them in some way, probably unfairly since it's the force of law.