I challenge you to name one current unregulated market, or one company with a complete monopoly that isn't created by government regulation.
Given that the response to monopolies in un- or lightly-regulated markets experienced throughout the capitalist world was generally applicable regulation to prevent and break up monopolies (even before they became "absolute" monopolies) that are found in, various forms, in all modern advanced economies, there are no current examples, at least in the developed world. You might be able to find some elsewhere, if you really wanted to.
OTOH, just because a problem has been successfully addressed several generations ago doesn't mean that we should disregard it.
We already have plenty of laws forbidding business practices most NN alarmists already preach are going to happen.
Please point to the existing laws which clearly address the issues of transparency, non-blocking, non-discrimination, and, in the context of non-discrimination, paid prioritization addressed in the Dec. 21, 2010, FCC Report and Order.
Or could much easier be added instead of getting the FCC into the Internet)
The FCC has been "into the Internet" for some time, though its previous actions have been case-by-case reactive rulings, and this week's action sets clear rules that are known to all parties in advance. So the idea that the alternative to the recent Report and Order was the FCC not getting into the Internet is ignorant, at best, and dishonest, at worst.
And any observed lack of competition between ISPs is largely caused by the same FCC NN want to hand the keys to.
NN isn't an entity that wants anything.
No one is arguing for handing any keys to the FCC.
Insofar as incorrect or inadequate use of existing regulatory authority in regard to its existing mandate to promote broadband competition is a problem, why shouldn't that problem be corrected by correct and adequate regulation?
It's a bit of a feel good idea with almost no practical or ethical usefulness in the real world.
Beyond the vague generalizations, what are your specific bases for the claim that the Dec. 21 Report and Order by the FCC has "almost no practical or ethical usefulness in the real world".
I honestly don't care what the FCC or government says because it all happens on their whim anyway.
What is this supposed to mean?
The mindless mob grants them the power whether I approve or not.
The FCC's power derives from grants from the Congress. The Congress' power derives from grants from the people via the State legislatures in adopting the Constitution and amendments thereto. Its not clear to me which of these groups you are attempting to characterize as a "mindless mob".
If Government is authorized to prevent something you just handed them the keys to *someday* do the opposite and allow it.
Really? So the Constitution authorization and obligation of Congress to ensure a republican form of government to every State in the Union (Art. IV, Sec. 4) hands them the keys to prevent any State from having such a government? The power of Congress to prevent slavery in the United States (Amend. XIII, Sec. 2) hands them the keys to impose it? The power of Congress to prevent States from imposing poll taxes (Amend. XXIV, Sec. 2) hands them the keys to require poll taxes?
Have you looked at the rules involved in net neutrality? I guarantee you it will be a book, not a one-liner.
The material provided from the Report and Order recently passed is a hair over two pages; given that the reason that the FCC previously gave that the full Report and Order wouldn't be available immediately was that the final document would include material addressing the dissents, I would expect that what has been released already represents substantially all of the rules material.
So, while far from a one-liner, I would say it is also far from a book.
But the problem with having regulation is that, eventually, the "keeper of the net" will become corrupt and find ways to control the flow of data and get rich doing so or worse yet be controlled by the government.
That's a good argument for having clear up-front rules in the regulatory regime, rather than reactive, case-by-case decisions without up-front rules. And, therefore, a good idea for the new Report and Order as compared to the previous mechanisms by which the FCC has exercised the same existing authority with regard to controlling the behavior of ISPs.
Clear up-front rules mitigate the risk of arbitrary action, and make course changes more clearly visible.
Have you heard of the FCC fairness doctrine. The Democrats keep bringing the idea back up.
No, they don't.
There are one or two Democrats in office who have raised the idea occasionally (mostly as a symbolic gesture toward the partisan alignment of certain "news" sources), and they consistently fail to receive support from any other Democrats in Congress, or any substantial number of people of any party, Democratic or otherwise.
And there are lots of Republicans who keep misrepresenting that as "the Democrats", collectively, pushing to restore the Fairness Doctrine, even when, you know, when the Democrats had a majority in both Houses of Congress and their guy in the White House, the issue never even came out of committee. (I'm not even sure if a proposal was even introduced in that time.)
If the FCC has internet regulatory rights; why do you think the FCC will not in the future apply an "fairness doctrine" to the internet?
The FCC doesn't have any rights. It has authority under specific provisions of law passed by Congress, none of which -- at least, none of which that has been cited in any of the FCC actions relating to open internet -- appears to support the kind of content-based regulation of the internet that would be required to apply a "fairness doctrine", not too mention that content-based restrictions would need to meet a high Constitutional hurdle even if they were statutorily authorized.
At any rate, what the FCC might conceivably try to do in the future is not an argument against the specific Report and Order that has recently been adopted. If you want to argue that Congress should pass a statute expressly forbidding the FCC from applying the Fairness Doctrine to the internet, well, I think that's probably superfluous and paranoid, but also harmless, and, in addition, completely irrelevant to the debate over the Report and Order recently issued regarding open internet rules.
Much of the point of the recently adopted Report and Order is to prevent problematic policies that certain large ISPs that are often regional broadband monopolists have been openly looking into adopting.
That there are not problems now is very different from saying that there aren't reasonably foreseeable problems.
Additionally, there are current problems with internet with regard to things that the FCC has been given a mandate from Congress to ensure, such as the deployment on a "reasonable and timely basis" of broadband connectivity to all Americans.
No, the claim that the government will limit itself to what you call Net Neutrality is the lie.
If and when the FCC proposes regulations outside of that scope, feel free to make an argument against those regulations on their own merits. However, that is not an argument against the Report and Order the FCC has recently adopted within that scope.
Yes, most of the people who argue for Net Neutrality are arguing for something that would prevent the ISP big players from shutting out competitors, but all of the proposed government "net neutrality" plans are about regulating content.
There are no "proposed government 'net neutrality' plans". There is the Report and Order that has recently been adopted. That's it -- there is no other proposal currently active.
You are free to point out anything in the part of the excerpts from the Report and Order that has been published that constitutes "regulating content", or to, when the final Report and Order is published in full to point to the specific provisions that are "regulating content", but waving your hand at unspecified and irrelevant proposals and asserting without evidence that they "all" are about "regulating content" is nonsense.
Just because you mean the obvious by a term, doesn't mean that's what the politicians and bureaucrats mean when they use the same term.
And the fact that someone else could conceivably mean something other than what a term means when they use a term is not an argument against a specific regulatory enactment.
Either you trust the government : no choice of provider (that much, history should prove) Or you trust business : you can choose (for a little more money probably, yes, deal with it) a better provider, additionally you can build something yourself
Actually, monopolies in unregulated markets are actually fairly common, so history shows that you are wrong. Its quite possible to trust neither government nor industry, but to seek -- in a regime of government of, by, and for the people -- to establish a regime where government has the powers necessary to promote competition and prevent harmful monopoly (either by preventing monopolies or by limiting the harms therefrom, or both) while relying on private business to actually provide services within the regulatory regime thus established.
Not only are the effects you attribute to each position inconsistent with the historical evidence, the idea that the polar extremes are the only choice is clearly false on its face.
We have to wait until the ISP's do something so egregious that there is a huge public uprising, and then Congress and the Senate can get together to prevent that specific thing.
First, the Congress includes the House of Representatives and the Senate, so saying the Congress and the Senate can get together is incoherent.
Second, the Congress already has granted the FCC regulatory authority with regard to promoting broadband access, promoting broadband competition, promoting telecommunication competition, providing terms that serve the public interest for licenses to fixed and mobile wireless broadband providers, and promoting competition in the video market.
Of course we don't want bad regulations. But to say we shouldn't have any regulations is a bad idea (see Wall Street as a guide).
The target audience of the Wall Street Journal is exactly the people who think that the absence of Wall Street regulations -- and bailing out Wall Street to assure that other people bear the costs of any problems caused by that deregulation -- is a good idea.
We all know what we want: We want Comcast to be unable to charge Google extra for the service of letting customers access Youtube. But it's really hard to phrase this well enough and clearly enough that it lets network admins do the kinds of QoS and traffic shaping things they need to do in order to provide good service, or for that matter, block unwanted traffic entirely.
The text of the non-blocking and non-discrimination rules in the Report and Order are available, as is the discussion from the Report and Order of how the non-discrimination rule applies to paid prioritization (including prioritization of the ISPs own services.) This includes an explicit definition of "reasonable network management."
Please clarify exactly what in the rules and definitions that have been published you find "too vague and poorly defined".
I am not at all convinced that getting the government involved will improve my life.
The government -- indeed, the FCC -- is already involved in this area. In fact, they've been enforce network neutrality principles on a case-by-case, complaint-based, reactive manner for quite some time.
The real question is: will having clear, published rules that set standards in advance, improve your life compared to the reactive, case-by-case approach previously taken in this area?
However, the regulation that no packet shall be discriminated against based on its origin requires fiat control.
No, it doesn't. It requires some discretion within a particular set of policy objectives and constraints, which the FCC has -- and has exercised -- for quite some time.
What people forget is that the FCC has already been enforcing 'net neutrality' -- or, perhaps more correctly, the 'open internet' principles it articulated in 2005 -- via case-by-case reactive rulings.
The recent action isn't the assumption of new authorities which it has not previously exercised, it is prospectively announcing more specific rules than the broad principles previously announced, which provide more certainty for consumers and ISPs as to what the rules are that the FCC will apply.
Its actually a step back from arbitrary control.
The price for a near-free Internet will be eternal vigilance for people who will seek permanent fiat control.
Since that's the price for any freedom at all in a system which involves a government with any role at all, that amounts to a zero marginal cost for internet freedom. So I'd say internet freedom would be a bargain at twice the price.
What is needed is are regulations to stop ISPs from doing any or all of the following:
Discrimating by site. Non-DDoS traffic to site "A" should not cost more than going to site "B".
Non-discrimination is Rule 3 of the recent Report and Order.
Add/modifying/deleting in flight traffic. Throttling/QoS is one thing, adding adds via Phorm, or changing people's postings to Web boards in flight is another.
Most of that would seem to fall within the Rule 2 provisions on blocking or the Rule 3 provisions on discrimination in the recent Order.
Blocking/slowing down one site, just to make another site seem faster.
Again, Rule 3 on non-discrimination.
Unneeded snooping on connections. Traffic should be considered PII, stored only a few days to check for security breaches, then binned. It is not to be sold to any ad companies who want router logs.
Separate regulations addressing privacy in the ISP-customer relationship may be needed; the recent Report and Order does not address that topic.
Expanding infrastructure.
Non-discrimination, non-blocking should address this indirectly, since its reduces the ability of providers to charge for broadband service while crippling uses that take advantage of the available capacity; this should encourage the use of resource to expand generally-available capacity.
We need to address issues exactly, not bundle them under the hazy "net neutrality" topic.
"Net neutrality" isn't actually the label that the FCC uses for the subject of the recent Report and Order, or the previous publications on the same topic. The term they've used is "Open Internet".
In any case, while regulatory actions often have high-level labels, they do address specific issues, and most of the specific issues you raise are directly addressed in the Report and Order recently issued by the FCC.
If the FCC gets ahold of control over the internet they will screw it up really, really badly.
FCC has had "control of the internet", insofar as they do with the recent Report and Order, for some time. The only thing the Report and Order does is provide advance notice of how they will exercise that control, rather than the exercise of control being exclusively reactive and ad hoc (though based on the same principles that the recent Order is based on.)
This provides clarity to consumers and ISPs as to the rules that will be applied and reduces uncertainty for all market participants.
The FCC works for the phone companies, who are the ones pushing against net neutrality.
But, oddly, the position -- against net neutrality -- that the phone companies were pushing for secured the support of only two of the five members of the FCC, and now is being taken up by the people saying that the problem is the FCC. Which is, you know, kind of odd if the FCC is controlled by the people who are against net neutrality.
However, the question should be asked, is granting control over the Internet to political appointees the way to go?
That's actually not a relevant question in regard to the recent decision. No power was granted to political appointees that they did not already have under existing law. What happened was the parties to whom power was granted in existing law chose to exercise it in a manner which is proactive and provides advance notice and clarity as to how it will be applied, rather than the reactive, case-by-case manner in which the same political appointees have previously used the same grants of authority to pursue the same ends.
Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't the Internet remain free from regulation?
(1) The internet wasn't free of regulation before the net neutrality order; it was already subject to FCC oversight which was exercised on a case-by-case basis exercising the FCC's statutory authority, on top of that, it is subject to generally applicable laws, and, on top of that, the ability to offer connection services is subject to a wide variety of government regulations securing property rights, creating easements for specific purposes, governing telcos and cable providers outside of their ISP roles, etc. (2) The concept that the internet should be "free of regulation", whether that means actually free of regulation (i.e., lawless) or merely free of the particular kinds of regulation adopted this week is a political point of view, and the attempt to portray it as if it were a universal norm independent of political viewpoints is extraordinarily disingenous.
There was no mention of any conviction of breaching copyright laws. How can anyone be an accessory to a "crime" for which no one was convicted?
Even in the US -- both under federal criminal law and under the criminal laws of most states -- it is quite possible to establish the facts necessary to convict someone as an accessory to a crime independently of whether or not anyone has been convicted as a principal of the crime.
Otherwise, e.g., the death of the principals in a crime -- which would preclude their prosecution -- would also let all accessories off the hook.
You mean, as opposed to your (US/UK) common law system where laws are made up by judges as they go along?
Most US federal case law (judicial decisions) is rather negative on the existence of any US federal common law (judge-made law, as opposed to judicial application of written law to specific facts.)
OTOH, most US jurisdictions accepted the common law as it existed at the time of the formation of that jurisdiction (there are exceptions, particularly in Louisiana, whose legal system derives from the French civil law system rather than the British common law system), though even the common law jurisdictions have generally shrunk the domain of the common law greatly by superceding it by written constitutions and/or statute law.
The bigger difference, I think, is between the US on the one hand with its Constitution which is binding on the government and applied by the courts, vs. systems like the UK and, I think, Sweden which feature parliamentary soveriegnty; in the US system, an act of Congress may be "struck down" by the Courts because it conflicts with the Constitution, whereas in a system featuring parliamentary soveriegnty this is not the case, the defense of the fundamental order of government and liberty rests in the election of a national legislature that will not violate that order.
How is this better than a web-based news source, even a paywalled one?
There is zero chance that I someone will post a link to it that I will be tricked into clicking on and being subjected to a News Corp property, so there is some benefit to me -- and at no cost.
If all News Corp-owned outlets were paid-subscription, iPad-only, with no web or broadcast presence, I'd be even happier.
So you click on the slashdot article about a service you would not want on a device you don't have? Then leave a comments letting us know you don't care about it?
You click on the "Reply to this" link on an comment that apparently doesn't interest you, and passive-aggressively ask questions about the comment to which the answers are expressly stated in the comment to which you are replying.
I just learned that around 800 pedestrians per year are hit in San Francisco alone. Forgetting jokes about bums and jaywalkers, I'm guessing a significant percentage of those people were doing exactly what they were supposed to and the car just didn't stop for the red light, or didn't yield, or they didn't see that car coming from behind in the six-way intersection.
And mostly not hit by electric or hybrid vehicles, so they wouldn't be helped by this law at all. And many hit by vehicles moving at speeds at which the noise level from tires, etc., even from an electric or hybrid vehicle would exceed any minimum likely to be adopted under this law (which specifically is directed at the "problem" that electrics and hybrids are too quiet at low speeds) and so wouldn't be helped by this law.
It seems to me that the study that spurred the drive for this legislation is really inadequate to conclude that the likely safety benefit, if any, of this law is really worth the massive increase in sound pollution this is going to produce -- and the disincentive to purchase electric and hybrid vehicles, since the quiteness is part fo the appeal of such vehicles.
OTOH, if it doesn't require retrofitting (which I haven't seen anything indicating it does), it may stimulate the purchase of electric and hybrid vehicles in the period between adoption of the law and its implementation.
If the FBI did this without a court order, wouldn't they have been in breech of laws regarding attempted wiretapping and/or unauthorized computer access?
Probably not; AFAIK -- even assuming wiretapping laws would apply -- there is no law prohibiting the FBI from contracting others to build in a capacity that could be used for wiretapping. The only time they would need a warrant is to actually make use of the facility.
Wrong, science (by definition) has a particular kind of scrutiny (empirical testing) which is applicable to its scope of inquiry (in fact, the scope to which the scientific method and its applicable form of scrutiny can apply is precisely the boundary of the scope of scientific inquiry.)
Necessarily, things outside the scope of science have qualitatively different scrutiny, since they type of scrutiny applied in science is inapplicable.
That does not mean that science does -- and certain not "must" -- have the most scrutiny, the difference is of kind not degree.
If one philosopher makes a mistake in a leap of logic, because they are of a particular viewpoint to start with, it is fairly likely another will do the same.
Errors in logic are generally equivalent to errors in arithmetic, and are reasonably transparent to scrutiny of the same sort one would apply to pure math. They can, of course, be trickier to sort out than simple arithmetic errors especially when they are obscured by linguistic fog in the form of equivocation and other semantic ambiguities, which is why formal, symbolic logic can be an important tool in philosophy, since it helps to separate definition from reasoning, and let each be scrutinized separately.
This isn't even about the iPad -- it's about realizing that the 15 years we've spent using the web for everything has led to really crappy user interfaces, all bound to the HTML paradigm. I'm glad to finally see the web being eclipsed by actual applications and interfaces. This will happen on Android, Microsoft, Blackberry, and every new device that comes along.
Well, except for ChromeOS applications. And, applications that need to economically target a broad range of devices rather than being rewritten from scratch for each OS. And...
Seriously, get over the whole iPad/Apple bashing thing, and recognize that tablets (of all forms) and the like are fundamentally changing the rules and the prevalence of everything being a frigging web page.
Except that they actually aren't. Native apps were always dominant for things that were performance critical or for which web browsers don't provide APIs, or for which appropriate browser-based UI controls weren't widely implemented. Sure, in the last few years the number of common desktop uses for which that applies has been narrowing, as web APIs, UI features (whether standard HTML, provided by JavaScript libraries, or whatever), and perforamnce for common desktop application tasks has improved.
Smartphones and tablets -- with new features for which standard web tools weren't available, and lower powered processors which make performance hits a bigger deal -- obviously have a slightly different initial native:web balance than contemporary desktop/laptop systems -- but, over time, the same evolution that has happened on the web is happening to them.
Seriously, dial back the bitching about this being about Apple, and start thinking about this in the broader context of what is going to be happening in the industry over the next bunch of years. Now that touch-screen technology is becoming prevalent, you will see this kind of thing on all platforms.
Or, more likely, you'll see more robust common understanding of how to interact with the web via touch, and new common JavaScript APIs for mobile functions, and the web will march on.
Slashdot Mirror
I challenge you to name one current unregulated market, or one company with a complete monopoly that isn't created by government regulation.
Given that the response to monopolies in un- or lightly-regulated markets experienced throughout the capitalist world was generally applicable regulation to prevent and break up monopolies (even before they became "absolute" monopolies) that are found in, various forms, in all modern advanced economies, there are no current examples, at least in the developed world. You might be able to find some elsewhere, if you really wanted to.
OTOH, just because a problem has been successfully addressed several generations ago doesn't mean that we should disregard it.
And every time the FCC tries to rule over the Internet it gets struck down by the courts or by Congress.
This is only true if "every" means "a small minority of the".
We already have plenty of laws forbidding business practices most NN alarmists already preach are going to happen.
Please point to the existing laws which clearly address the issues of transparency, non-blocking, non-discrimination, and, in the context of non-discrimination, paid prioritization addressed in the Dec. 21, 2010, FCC Report and Order.
Or could much easier be added instead of getting the FCC into the Internet)
The FCC has been "into the Internet" for some time, though its previous actions have been case-by-case reactive rulings, and this week's action sets clear rules that are known to all parties in advance. So the idea that the alternative to the recent Report and Order was the FCC not getting into the Internet is ignorant, at best, and dishonest, at worst.
And any observed lack of competition between ISPs is largely caused by the same FCC NN want to hand the keys to.
NN isn't an entity that wants anything.
No one is arguing for handing any keys to the FCC.
Insofar as incorrect or inadequate use of existing regulatory authority in regard to its existing mandate to promote broadband competition is a problem, why shouldn't that problem be corrected by correct and adequate regulation?
It's a bit of a feel good idea with almost no practical or ethical usefulness in the real world.
Beyond the vague generalizations, what are your specific bases for the claim that the Dec. 21 Report and Order by the FCC has "almost no practical or ethical usefulness in the real world".
I honestly don't care what the FCC or government says because it all happens on their whim anyway.
What is this supposed to mean?
The mindless mob grants them the power whether I approve or not.
The FCC's power derives from grants from the Congress. The Congress' power derives from grants from the people via the State legislatures in adopting the Constitution and amendments thereto. Its not clear to me which of these groups you are attempting to characterize as a "mindless mob".
If Government is authorized to prevent something you just handed them the keys to *someday* do the opposite and allow it.
Really? So the Constitution authorization and obligation of Congress to ensure a republican form of government to every State in the Union (Art. IV, Sec. 4) hands them the keys to prevent any State from having such a government? The power of Congress to prevent slavery in the United States (Amend. XIII, Sec. 2) hands them the keys to impose it? The power of Congress to prevent States from imposing poll taxes (Amend. XXIV, Sec. 2) hands them the keys to require poll taxes?
Have you looked at the rules involved in net neutrality? I guarantee you it will be a book, not a one-liner.
The material provided from the Report and Order recently passed is a hair over two pages; given that the reason that the FCC previously gave that the full Report and Order wouldn't be available immediately was that the final document would include material addressing the dissents, I would expect that what has been released already represents substantially all of the rules material.
So, while far from a one-liner, I would say it is also far from a book.
But the problem with having regulation is that, eventually, the "keeper of the net" will become corrupt and find ways to control the flow of data and get rich doing so or worse yet be controlled by the government.
That's a good argument for having clear up-front rules in the regulatory regime, rather than reactive, case-by-case decisions without up-front rules. And, therefore, a good idea for the new Report and Order as compared to the previous mechanisms by which the FCC has exercised the same existing authority with regard to controlling the behavior of ISPs.
Clear up-front rules mitigate the risk of arbitrary action, and make course changes more clearly visible.
Have you heard of the FCC fairness doctrine. The Democrats keep bringing the idea back up.
No, they don't.
There are one or two Democrats in office who have raised the idea occasionally (mostly as a symbolic gesture toward the partisan alignment of certain "news" sources), and they consistently fail to receive support from any other Democrats in Congress, or any substantial number of people of any party, Democratic or otherwise.
And there are lots of Republicans who keep misrepresenting that as "the Democrats", collectively, pushing to restore the Fairness Doctrine, even when, you know, when the Democrats had a majority in both Houses of Congress and their guy in the White House, the issue never even came out of committee. (I'm not even sure if a proposal was even introduced in that time.)
If the FCC has internet regulatory rights; why do you think the FCC will not in the future apply an "fairness doctrine" to the internet?
The FCC doesn't have any rights. It has authority under specific provisions of law passed by Congress, none of which -- at least, none of which that has been cited in any of the FCC actions relating to open internet -- appears to support the kind of content-based regulation of the internet that would be required to apply a "fairness doctrine", not too mention that content-based restrictions would need to meet a high Constitutional hurdle even if they were statutorily authorized.
At any rate, what the FCC might conceivably try to do in the future is not an argument against the specific Report and Order that has recently been adopted. If you want to argue that Congress should pass a statute expressly forbidding the FCC from applying the Fairness Doctrine to the internet, well, I think that's probably superfluous and paranoid, but also harmless, and, in addition, completely irrelevant to the debate over the Report and Order recently issued regarding open internet rules.
There is very little problem with the Internet.
Much of the point of the recently adopted Report and Order is to prevent problematic policies that certain large ISPs that are often regional broadband monopolists have been openly looking into adopting.
That there are not problems now is very different from saying that there aren't reasonably foreseeable problems.
Additionally, there are current problems with internet with regard to things that the FCC has been given a mandate from Congress to ensure, such as the deployment on a "reasonable and timely basis" of broadband connectivity to all Americans.
No, the claim that the government will limit itself to what you call Net Neutrality is the lie.
If and when the FCC proposes regulations outside of that scope, feel free to make an argument against those regulations on their own merits. However, that is not an argument against the Report and Order the FCC has recently adopted within that scope.
Yes, most of the people who argue for Net Neutrality are arguing for something that would prevent the ISP big players from shutting out competitors, but all of the proposed government "net neutrality" plans are about regulating content.
There are no "proposed government 'net neutrality' plans". There is the Report and Order that has recently been adopted. That's it -- there is no other proposal currently active.
You are free to point out anything in the part of the excerpts from the Report and Order that has been published that constitutes "regulating content", or to, when the final Report and Order is published in full to point to the specific provisions that are "regulating content", but waving your hand at unspecified and irrelevant proposals and asserting without evidence that they "all" are about "regulating content" is nonsense.
Just because you mean the obvious by a term, doesn't mean that's what the politicians and bureaucrats mean when they use the same term.
And the fact that someone else could conceivably mean something other than what a term means when they use a term is not an argument against a specific regulatory enactment.
Either you trust the government : no choice of provider (that much, history should prove)
Or you trust business : you can choose (for a little more money probably, yes, deal with it) a better provider, additionally you can build something yourself
Actually, monopolies in unregulated markets are actually fairly common, so history shows that you are wrong. Its quite possible to trust neither government nor industry, but to seek -- in a regime of government of, by, and for the people -- to establish a regime where government has the powers necessary to promote competition and prevent harmful monopoly (either by preventing monopolies or by limiting the harms therefrom, or both) while relying on private business to actually provide services within the regulatory regime thus established.
Not only are the effects you attribute to each position inconsistent with the historical evidence, the idea that the polar extremes are the only choice is clearly false on its face.
We have to wait until the ISP's do something so egregious that there is a huge public uprising, and then Congress and the Senate can get together to prevent that specific thing.
First, the Congress includes the House of Representatives and the Senate, so saying the Congress and the Senate can get together is incoherent.
Second, the Congress already has granted the FCC regulatory authority with regard to promoting broadband access, promoting broadband competition, promoting telecommunication competition, providing terms that serve the public interest for licenses to fixed and mobile wireless broadband providers, and promoting competition in the video market.
Of course we don't want bad regulations. But to say we shouldn't have any regulations is a bad idea (see Wall Street as a guide).
The target audience of the Wall Street Journal is exactly the people who think that the absence of Wall Street regulations -- and bailing out Wall Street to assure that other people bear the costs of any problems caused by that deregulation -- is a good idea.
We all know what we want: We want Comcast to be unable to charge Google extra for the service of letting customers access Youtube. But it's really hard to phrase this well enough and clearly enough that it lets network admins do the kinds of QoS and traffic shaping things they need to do in order to provide good service, or for that matter, block unwanted traffic entirely.
The text of the non-blocking and non-discrimination rules in the Report and Order are available, as is the discussion from the Report and Order of how the non-discrimination rule applies to paid prioritization (including prioritization of the ISPs own services.) This includes an explicit definition of "reasonable network management."
Please clarify exactly what in the rules and definitions that have been published you find "too vague and poorly defined".
I am not at all convinced that getting the government involved will improve my life.
The government -- indeed, the FCC -- is already involved in this area. In fact, they've been enforce network neutrality principles on a case-by-case, complaint-based, reactive manner for quite some time.
The real question is: will having clear, published rules that set standards in advance, improve your life compared to the reactive, case-by-case approach previously taken in this area?
However, the regulation that no packet shall be discriminated against based on its origin requires fiat control.
No, it doesn't. It requires some discretion within a particular set of policy objectives and constraints, which the FCC has -- and has exercised -- for quite some time.
What people forget is that the FCC has already been enforcing 'net neutrality' -- or, perhaps more correctly, the 'open internet' principles it articulated in 2005 -- via case-by-case reactive rulings.
The recent action isn't the assumption of new authorities which it has not previously exercised, it is prospectively announcing more specific rules than the broad principles previously announced, which provide more certainty for consumers and ISPs as to what the rules are that the FCC will apply.
Its actually a step back from arbitrary control.
The price for a near-free Internet will be eternal vigilance for people who will seek permanent fiat control.
Since that's the price for any freedom at all in a system which involves a government with any role at all, that amounts to a zero marginal cost for internet freedom. So I'd say internet freedom would be a bargain at twice the price.
Non-discrimination is Rule 3 of the recent Report and Order.
Add/modifying/deleting in flight traffic. Throttling/QoS is one thing, adding adds via Phorm, or changing people's postings to Web boards in flight is another.
Most of that would seem to fall within the Rule 2 provisions on blocking or the Rule 3 provisions on discrimination in the recent Order.
Again, Rule 3 on non-discrimination.
Separate regulations addressing privacy in the ISP-customer relationship may be needed; the recent Report and Order does not address that topic.
Expanding infrastructure.
Non-discrimination, non-blocking should address this indirectly, since its reduces the ability of providers to charge for broadband service while crippling uses that take advantage of the available capacity; this should encourage the use of resource to expand generally-available capacity.
"Net neutrality" isn't actually the label that the FCC uses for the subject of the recent Report and Order, or the previous publications on the same topic. The term they've used is "Open Internet".
In any case, while regulatory actions often have high-level labels, they do address specific issues, and most of the specific issues you raise are directly addressed in the Report and Order recently issued by the FCC.
If the FCC gets ahold of control over the internet they will screw it up really, really badly.
FCC has had "control of the internet", insofar as they do with the recent Report and Order, for some time. The only thing the Report and Order does is provide advance notice of how they will exercise that control, rather than the exercise of control being exclusively reactive and ad hoc (though based on the same principles that the recent Order is based on.)
This provides clarity to consumers and ISPs as to the rules that will be applied and reduces uncertainty for all market participants.
The FCC works for the phone companies, who are the ones pushing against net neutrality.
But, oddly, the position -- against net neutrality -- that the phone companies were pushing for secured the support of only two of the five members of the FCC, and now is being taken up by the people saying that the problem is the FCC. Which is, you know, kind of odd if the FCC is controlled by the people who are against net neutrality.
Gosh, is the Wall Street Journal capable of delivering an objective opinion on this?
No one is capable of delivering an "objective opinion" since opinion is, by definition, subjective.
However, the question should be asked, is granting control over the Internet to political appointees the way to go?
That's actually not a relevant question in regard to the recent decision. No power was granted to political appointees that they did not already have under existing law. What happened was the parties to whom power was granted in existing law chose to exercise it in a manner which is proactive and provides advance notice and clarity as to how it will be applied, rather than the reactive, case-by-case manner in which the same political appointees have previously used the same grants of authority to pursue the same ends.
Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't the Internet remain free from regulation?
(1) The internet wasn't free of regulation before the net neutrality order; it was already subject to FCC oversight which was exercised on a case-by-case basis exercising the FCC's statutory authority, on top of that, it is subject to generally applicable laws, and, on top of that, the ability to offer connection services is subject to a wide variety of government regulations securing property rights, creating easements for specific purposes, governing telcos and cable providers outside of their ISP roles, etc.
(2) The concept that the internet should be "free of regulation", whether that means actually free of regulation (i.e., lawless) or merely free of the particular kinds of regulation adopted this week is a political point of view, and the attempt to portray it as if it were a universal norm independent of political viewpoints is extraordinarily disingenous.
Even in the US -- both under federal criminal law and under the criminal laws of most states -- it is quite possible to establish the facts necessary to convict someone as an accessory to a crime independently of whether or not anyone has been convicted as a principal of the crime.
Otherwise, e.g., the death of the principals in a crime -- which would preclude their prosecution -- would also let all accessories off the hook.
Most US federal case law (judicial decisions) is rather negative on the existence of any US federal common law (judge-made law, as opposed to judicial application of written law to specific facts.)
OTOH, most US jurisdictions accepted the common law as it existed at the time of the formation of that jurisdiction (there are exceptions, particularly in Louisiana, whose legal system derives from the French civil law system rather than the British common law system), though even the common law jurisdictions have generally shrunk the domain of the common law greatly by superceding it by written constitutions and/or statute law.
The bigger difference, I think, is between the US on the one hand with its Constitution which is binding on the government and applied by the courts, vs. systems like the UK and, I think, Sweden which feature parliamentary soveriegnty; in the US system, an act of Congress may be "struck down" by the Courts because it conflicts with the Constitution, whereas in a system featuring parliamentary soveriegnty this is not the case, the defense of the fundamental order of government and liberty rests in the election of a national legislature that will not
violate that order.
There is zero chance that I someone will post a link to it that I will be tricked into clicking on and being subjected to a News Corp property, so there is some benefit to me -- and at no cost.
If all News Corp-owned outlets were paid-subscription, iPad-only, with no web or broadcast presence, I'd be even happier.
You click on the "Reply to this" link on an comment that apparently doesn't interest you, and passive-aggressively ask questions about the comment to which the answers are expressly stated in the comment to which you are replying.
Your point?
And mostly not hit by electric or hybrid vehicles, so they wouldn't be helped by this law at all. And many hit by vehicles moving at speeds at which the noise level from tires, etc., even from an electric or hybrid vehicle would exceed any minimum likely to be adopted under this law (which specifically is directed at the "problem" that electrics and hybrids are too quiet at low speeds) and so wouldn't be helped by this law.
It seems to me that the study that spurred the drive for this legislation is really inadequate to conclude that the likely safety benefit, if any, of this law is really worth the massive increase in sound pollution this is going to produce -- and the disincentive to purchase electric and hybrid vehicles, since the quiteness is part fo the appeal of such vehicles.
OTOH, if it doesn't require retrofitting (which I haven't seen anything indicating it does), it may stimulate the purchase of electric and hybrid vehicles in the period between adoption of the law and its implementation.
Probably not; AFAIK -- even assuming wiretapping laws would apply -- there is no law prohibiting the FBI from contracting others to build in a capacity that could be used for wiretapping. The only time they would need a warrant is to actually make use of the facility.
Wrong, science (by definition) has a particular kind of scrutiny (empirical testing) which is applicable to its scope of inquiry (in fact, the scope to which the scientific method and its applicable form of scrutiny can apply is precisely the boundary of the scope of scientific inquiry.)
Necessarily, things outside the scope of science have qualitatively different scrutiny, since they type of scrutiny applied in science is inapplicable.
That does not mean that science does -- and certain not "must" -- have the most scrutiny, the difference is of kind not degree.
Errors in logic are generally equivalent to errors in arithmetic, and are reasonably transparent to scrutiny of the same sort one would apply to pure math. They can, of course, be trickier to sort out than simple arithmetic errors especially when they are obscured by linguistic fog in the form of equivocation and other semantic ambiguities, which is why formal, symbolic logic can be an important tool in philosophy, since it helps to separate definition from reasoning, and let each be scrutinized separately.
Well, except for ChromeOS applications. And, applications that need to economically target a broad range of devices rather than being rewritten from scratch for each OS. And...
Except that they actually aren't. Native apps were always dominant for things that were performance critical or for which web browsers don't provide APIs, or for which appropriate browser-based UI controls weren't widely implemented. Sure, in the last few years the number of common desktop uses for which that applies has been narrowing, as web APIs, UI features (whether standard HTML, provided by JavaScript libraries, or whatever), and perforamnce for common desktop application tasks has improved.
Smartphones and tablets -- with new features for which standard web tools weren't available, and lower powered processors which make performance hits a bigger deal -- obviously have a slightly different initial native:web balance than contemporary desktop/laptop systems -- but, over time, the same evolution that has happened on the web is happening to them.
Or, more likely, you'll see more robust common understanding of how to interact with the web via touch, and new common JavaScript APIs for mobile functions, and the web will march on.