New 'Net Neutrality' Bill Introduced

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Reps Ed Markey (D-MA) and Chip Pickering (R-MS) introduced the 'Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008' (HR 5353) this week. The proposed legislation [PDF] would not legislate what is and is not 'neutral'. Instead, it would add a section to the 'Broadband Policy' section of the Communications Act which spells out principles the FCC is expected to uphold, in addition to having them hold summits which would 'assess competition, consumer protection, and consumer choice issues related to broadband Internet access services' and make it easy for citizens to submit comments or complaints online."

Re:Non news

[TheRaven64]

Less than 1% of the voting population ever writes to their representatives. That means, to an elected representative, each letter is assumed to represent at least 100 votes, often a few orders of magnitude more. Once my former local MP explained this to me, I started writing whenever an issue of importance to me came up.

Re:This is a good thing

[Jherek Carnelian]

Since there isn't yet a problem for Net Neutrality laws to fix, it seems a little early to define what is and isn't net neutrality.

Net neutrality was the law of the land in the USA until just a couple of years ago.

In 2005 the supreme court reclassified ISPs as "information providers" rather than "telecommuniactions providers." Those terms have specific meaning under the tariffs that regulate the telecom industry. Essentially "telecommunications providers" have a set of rules they must abide by that include most of the concepts generally referred to under the umbrella of "network neutrality" while "information providers" are not so regulated.

Brand X [wikipedia.org]

Re:Non news

[The One and Only]

The basic idea is, in a sufficiently large election, there's a fantastically low probability that the vote will be tied (or within 1 vote of a tie) but for your vote. Since this is the only case in which your vote actually makes a difference, the probability of your vote making a difference is fantastically low, and thus there's a correspondingly high probability that your vote will make no difference. There are a few ways of getting around this: one is by making multiple thresholds of your vote mattering, one is by forcing a low sample size. In practice, the ability to influence the votes of others is also important. But straight up-and-down secret-ballot first-past-the-post voting systems, like we have in America, pretty much minimize the probability of your vote making any difference.

Compare this to, for instance, a jury. A jury is a small sample size in which every juror has the ability to influence the votes of others. Also, due to the unanimity requirement, every juror has the power to make a difference, and a truly intransigent juror can single-handedly force a mistrial via hung jury. Even in a caucus, a caucusgoer can influence the votes of others and there can be multiple thresholds of "making a difference" (i.e. a minimum level of support for a candidate to be considered "viable") rather than just the single threshold of putting your candidate over the top, or into a tied position.

The actual proposition to be proven would probably be some relation between voting population and probability of any given individual's vote mattering under any given voting system. There could be different relations and different proofs for different systems, or perhaps a single theorem could cover all cases. Discovering and proving that relation is left as an exercise to the reader--but I hope my argument was illustrative if not convincing.

Re:Bullsh!t

[smilindog2000]

My wife described to me the hand-signing machines used by politicians. It uses a real pen, and copies the signature better than a geek like me can tell. That said, I agree with you and we should write letters. Even if your actual representative didn't respond to you, someone on his staff did. That still counts for more than ranting on this site.