Congressmen Send Letters, Hope For Net Neutrality Fades 427
The odds of the FCC implementing net-neutrality rules just got much longer. "A bipartisan group of politicians on Monday told FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, in no uncertain terms, to abandon his plans to impose controversial new rules on broadband providers until the US Congress changes the law. Seventy-four House Democrats sent Genachowski ... a letter saying his ideas will 'jeopardize jobs' and 'should not be done without additional direction from Congress.' A separate letter from 37 Senate Republicans, also sent Monday, was more pointed. It accused Genachowski of pushing 'heavy-handed 19th century regulations' that are 'inconceivable' as well as illegal. ... [U]nless something unexpected happens, the fight over Net neutrality will shift a few blocks down Independence Avenue from the FCC to Capitol Hill. (In an editorial Monday, The Washington Post called for just that.)"
what jobs? (Score:5, Interesting)
What phantom jobs are they talking about? Broadband infrastructure investment in the US is dead dead dead. Verizon was the last company investing in broadband infrastructure with their FiOS deployments. They've already announced that they're stopping. No more FiOS. No more broadband.
How can an industry with a current investment level of ZERO be providing jobs? There are no jobs, because there is no investment. Congress is protecting phantom jobs that don't exist!
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:what jobs? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:what jobs? (Score:5, Funny)
You're a monster Shakrai, but you already knew that didn't you?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
This is the broken window fallacy [wikipedia.org], for those who didn't know this has been repeatedly disproven. Destruction results in a net loss, by definition.
(Also, the Fifth Element is an excellent movie.)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
What phantom jobs are they talking about?
Jobs for lobbyists, and for retiring regulators.. You know... money mules, of a sort
Jobs? I'll tell you what jobs... (Score:5, Insightful)
The jobs at risk are the congressdroids' - they are fearful their corpocleptocractic campaign donors will support someone else if they don't stop this return to normalcy. Fuckers don't even realize they are acting against their own interests - just wait until they end up having to pay extra to all the ISPs so that the voters can get to their own campaign websites.
Re:Jobs? I'll tell you what jobs... (Score:5, Funny)
corpocleptocractic
Government by body-snatchers?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Government by employed, thieving, body-snatchers.
Re:Jobs? I'll tell you what jobs... (Score:5, Funny)
Personally, I think it should be coproclepticratic... Government via the uncontrolled theft of people's shit.
Correct (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is that the approach Genachowski wants to use means adding ISPs into the existing structure used to regulate telcos. While this would insure net neutrality it would also open a giant can of worms in applying the rest of a giant regulatory structure to ISPs.
You won't like that.
The correct approach IS new legislation that narrowly addresses the issue of net neutrality.
Re:Correct (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that the approach Genachowski wants to use means adding ISPs into the existing structure used to regulate telcos. While this would insure net neutrality it would also open a giant can of worms in applying the rest of a giant regulatory structure to ISPs.
Funny, it sure seemed to work just fine up until the Brand-X ruling [wikipedia.org] in 2005.
Re:Correct (Score:5, Informative)
The Brand-X decision said that ISPs are not telecoms because the FCC didn't classify them as telecoms. The court decision has no effect on the FCC's ability to regulate.
You have that exactly reversed. The decision said nothing about classification, it just confirmed that the FCC had the legal authority to make the classification as it saw fit. The thing was, once the decision was made for cableco's that were also ISPs the FCC decided it should apply to all ISPs even if they didn't provide any actual information.
So a flawed decision by the FCC based on conflating the television part of a cableco's business with its ISP business was quickly spread to all ISPs even the ones without a television business to conflate - the result of intense lobbying or utter ignorance of what was being regulated. Either way, the result was a wholesale change to the wrong classification from a one that had worked well enough for the public until that point. That the new FCC wants to reverse that big fat fail of a decision should come as no surprise.
Dumbasses at the WSJ say that a change in classification should only be made when there has been a change in the business landscape, and conveniently brush off the fact that the first change to the wrong classification occurred without such a landscape change. So by their own reasoning this problem should have never emerged in the first place. But apparently history's too inconvenient for them.
Re: (Score:2)
This is wrong; neither the legislative authority under which telcos are regulated nor the intended use of that authority under the approach outlined by Genachowski would apply the entire "giant regulatory structure" currently applied to telcos
Obvious. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Obvious. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the problem is that if the government does not control the flow of information in a fair and balanced way FOR the people, the balance of power will rest briefly in the hands of the people before it gets stolen from them by the corporations, which will then go to war against each other leaving the people in their wake stranded in a marketplace that is a proverbial post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Re: (Score:2)
Foreign owned corporations vs the government. (Score:3, Informative)
Who do we want in control of the infrastructure? Corporations which cannot be held accountable because they are owned by foreigners? Or the government which while still possibly owned by foreigners is at least somewhat accountable.
It's your choice. I think as a libertarian rather than anarchist, you need a government to maintain freedom/liberty for the consumer. Corporations are on their own and in my opinion using the government to promote and support corporations is collectivism.
Re:Obvious. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Obvious. (Score:5, Insightful)
You seem to be unaware that you are responsible for who is in government. Law is how a civilized society addresses grievances between it's citizens without resorting to violence or terroristic threats. You don't just throw the whole idea out because you're too lazy to participate.
"Democracy is the government of the people, by the people, for the people.” -Lincoln
Re: (Score:2)
No, mostly because the game is rigged to ensure that nobody can rise to challenge the structures that are.
Re:Obvious. (Score:5, Insightful)
So you can't think of any oppressed group in America's history that has fought the "structures that are" and beaten them?
The landless poor got the right to vote. Then the slaves earned their legal freedom, though they were still denied it for decades. Then the workers united in the early 20th century and fought bitterly for better wages and working conditions, and got them. Then the women's suffrage movement won their democratic rights. Then the Civil Rights movement finally resulted in the beginning of true equality for all Americans.
The battles are still being fought for gay rights, reproductive rights, immigrant rights, indigenous rights, and now the middle class is demanding rights (though they seem to be unaware of who took them.)
The structures can be beaten if you have a populace willing to sacrifice material comfort for real freedoms, but it seems that willful ignorance, apathy, and materialism are the most powerful structure our democracy has yet faced.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The battles are still being fought for... immigrant rights
I keep hearing this, but I can't figure out what rights immigrants are fighting for. I know lots of immigrants, and they all seem to be doing just fine.
Or are you talking about those people whose very presence in this country is a federal crime?
Re:Hypocrite (Score:5, Informative)
Most of the immigrants that I know came to the US legally, even the ones that came from real holes. The rest made a concerted effort to learn English and make their way through the citizenship process. All of my known ancestors came across legally too (although back then the process was completely different).
For any government interaction, nobody "loved the process." I didn't love getting my drivers license, passport, or fighting with the IRS to get them to fix their errors and get me my money back. In fact, I'd say I rather despised the processes. But I didn't throw my hands up in the air and work outside the law.
Immigration law, like many other laws, is in dire need of fixing, and I fully support legislation to simplify it and streamline the process. But that doesn't excuse people from breaking it for 40 years straight.
And this isn't about some obscure law that you accidentally broke. This is about immigration, something that all countries take seriously. If you're caught being an illegal immigrant in Mexico, they throw you in jail. By comparison, deportation is peanuts.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The landless poor got the right to vote.
Self-earned.
Then the slaves earned their legal freedom, though they were still denied it for decades.
They didn't earn their own freedom, it was handed to them. Big difference. Not claiming it was unjust however. They were prevented from regaining their own freedom by everyone in the country who was profiting from slavery, which was nearly everyone. Of course, there have been many policies since the abolitions of slavery and segregation which are designed to maintain the imbalance and punish people for not being white...
Then the workers united in the early 20th century and fought bitterly for better wages and working conditions, and got them.
True.
Then the women's suffrage movement won their democratic rights.
Also true.
Then the Civil Rights movement finally resulted in the beginning of true equality for all Americans.
Not from where I'm sitting. The new division is monetary, sam
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You seem to be unaware that you are responsible for who is in government. Law is how a civilized society addresses grievances between it's citizens without resorting to violence or terroristic threats. You don't just throw the whole idea out because you're too lazy to participate.
"Democracy is the government of the people, by the people, for the people." -Lincoln
"I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating." - Boss Tweed [wikipedia.org]
The "people" haven't been in control of our government during my lifetime, simply because we're only allowed to pick a name from a list that someone else prepares. I don't expect this to change anytime soon, and see no way the citizens can change it short of armed revolution (which is all to likely to result in something worse).
Re:Obvious. (Score:4, Interesting)
I really don't think blaming the puppet masters for our own failure to form our own political parties is going to help. The obstacles faced by our generation are simply not comparable to the ones overcome by other oppressed groups. We have free access to information, free assembly, and we cannot be jailed for our political views. They at least have to throw some trumped up charges around instead of just the breach of thoughtcrime.
All this talk of armed revolution is introducing a very bad idea. It's the hardest way to solve a simple problem: turn off the TV, organize local political parties, and refuse to elect candidates from the Democratic or Republican power centers.
Re:Obvious. (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I have never liked that analogy, because the world is far more full of sheep than it is of wolves.
That saying tends to come more from wealthy Republicans or their sympathisers.
Democracy is two sheep and wolf deciding what's for lunch. Naturally, the wolf doesn't like this situation and would prefer if the sheep never voted at all.
Frequently, the wolves like to change the perspective of the saying, and claim it's one rich man and two poor people deciding who pays for lunch.
And to be honest, once they do that
Re:Obvious. (Score:4, Insightful)
Is this the level of discourse in your imagined adult world? "No, YOU shut up"?
Sorry guy. You sound like an unhappy person who also happens to be a failed lawyer, judging from your grammar structure and argumentative acumen.
Re:Obvious. (Score:4, Insightful)
That kind of idealistic gullibility would be laughed out of even a high school civics class.
I recommend you give a test run in the morning to see if you're right.
There is no evidence that law implies civilization, and more than a few counter examples: Most of the middle east, much of central Africa, Texas.
You have confused culture with civilization. Any sufficiently complex religious or political organization is called a civilization. There are good civilizations, bad civilizations, and likewise, there are good laws and bad laws. The existence of a legal code does not presuppose any form of government. The rulers who claimed they were Gods were simply above the law when they wanted to be.
Equality before the law, without kings or holy men outside of it, is an ideal that has been pursued since the time of ancient Greece, and one that was partially realized in the US Constitution. It's been trampled since then, but I've never run across anyone who denied it's significance as a major step towards legal equality.
More abstractly, *all* government power to enforce laws is derived from one of two sources: Willingness of the people to go along with it, or violence. The former does not scale beyond the most local levels, leaving the latter for most state and federal laws. Before you claim that is not the case, think of what would happen to the schmuck who breaks one of these laws and decides that he's not going to cooperatively go to prison.
And mob justice is somehow superior? Or divine justice? Would you like to submit to the authority of the Pope as the arbiter of the One True Religion, or to an Imam, or to some Hindu priest? Do you really understand the differences between barbarous tribalism and civil society? Government overreach of it's authority to use force is certainly an injustice, but also entirely within the power of a democratic society to be altered.
The entire purpose of laws is to collectively trade some liberties for some security
No, law is there to remove uncertainty and enable progress. You establish sets of standards, like weights and measures and the width of roads. You establish how property is owned and sold, and most importantly, how citizens go about seeking justice when they feel they have not received it. As long as it is mostly functional, it's vastly superior to the injustices of mob violence, blood feuds, and totalitarianism.
Unfortunately, when a society stupidly allows itself to fall into a fox/henhouse situation like we have in the U.S, the "rule of law" becomes no longer sacrosanct, and instead becomes a vehicle for the corruption to spread virally.
You can't blame our modern ideals about law for human failings. This is exactly analogous to blaming fidelity because your wife had sex with someone else. The problem isn't with the standard of fidelity or law, it's our constant failure to meet the standards that have been set.
When they are allowed to make end-runs around any methods to stop them that the people who might object to this situation might have, they have little reason to be concerned with the will of the people anymore. That's the situation the US is in now.
Your problem is not with the ideals of equality before the law. Your problem is with the current US Government, which not incidentally, I also hate and despise. But I haven't confused this particular iteration of judiciary and political power with the ideals of Enlightenment.
No it won't. (Score:5, Insightful)
Because if Network Neutrality goes, the companies get to censor you. They get to censor anyone they feel like, and there's not a damn thing the Constitution will do for you. It only applies to the Government, not private companies. If there's no Network Neutrality, the regional provider will tell you where you can and cannot shop. So you change provider, right? Wrong. There's not much in the way of competition at tier 1 and you don't get to pick what tier 1 your ISP uses. Besides, with much of the redundancy cut out of the Internet as it stands, there IS no way for you to circumvent such restrictions. Oh, and that means that if one backbone provider blocks vendor X, then vendor X will be essentially blocked from ALL backbone vendors downstream of that location. A puritanical backbone provider in one State can impede the commerce in another.
Sure, sure, the providers claim they can't handle the sheer volume of Internet traffic and some small fraction of users use most of it. They can use QoS. ECN, Hierarchical Fair Service Curve and an adaptive packet-dropping scheme like BLACK would be sufficient. (There are a number of schemes, including BLACK, that are designed to prevent packet streaming from clogging up the network. ECN messaging allows the network to tell servers and clients when they need to throttle back. HFSC ensures that nobody can game the system and take unfair advantage of the resources.) This would not be contrary to Network Neutrality, as it ensures that all users are treated absolutely as equals. The networks would be true Common Carriers, rather than Mafia bosses.
Oh, and that reminds me, have you considered that when the RIAA and MPAA started to form and seize power, there were probably people - in all innocence - saying that the industry should take care of itself, that interference would cause problems, that the corporations needed all this extra power for the benefit of the poor, starving artists. Given that the money collected by the RIAA and MPAA never gets seen by said artists, and no serious opposition to this exists, do you seriously expect me to believe that the ISPs and backbone providers will spend the money they rake in through the ultimate protection racket will ever get seen by the poor, starving engineers? Give me a break. You'd have to be insane.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's look at this list.
Ok. How is telling people that they have to play fair a "power grab"? Surely, the strongest you can say is that this is a denial of a power-grab by the corporate sector.
Ending up an over-reaction? Uhhh, network neutrality h
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
No, government MUST prevent the corporate powers from controlling the flow of information. That's part of what government is supposed to be for -- to protect the weak from the strong. Otherwise we might as well have anarchy (followed by monarchy, as anarchy always is).
Re:Obvious. (Score:5, Insightful)
Come on if net neutrality doesn't pass do you really think ambulance services will suddenly gain top priority?? That's not profitable... think about it, who has all the money? Porn sites, spammers and related advertising agencies.
Re:Obvious. (Score:5, Insightful)
Or else, put me in charge, at least.
The way I see it (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't about "regulations" its about getting what you paid for: to "modernize" America with faster internet access, not access to a handful of sites, no non-traditional ways of getting content, etc.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But since most ISPs use public land or funds, we, the taxpayers have a say in their operations.
A quaint and interesting idea. In this scenario, we should have a say in how all of our tax money gets spent. What do you suppose would happen if we all declared that we wanted our tax money to go to public education and welfare rather than the military-industrial complex?
Re:The way I see it (Score:4, Interesting)
A quaint and interesting idea. In this scenario, we should have a say in how all of our tax money gets spent. What do you suppose would happen if we all declared that we wanted our tax money to go to public education and welfare rather than the military-industrial complex?
You can, it's called a "tax deduction." You get to put your money directly to certain causes of your choice. In exchange, the government does not tax that money. The mathematical result is that you have diverted taxes to the causes of your choice. Try it sometime.
The Letters (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The Letters - Thanks (Score:3, Insightful)
The letter confirms The Corporate Welfare state that replaced the Social Welfare state provides reason to stupidity.
We pay for what we get, what the government gets, what the business C*Os get, and what our government gives to business with privileges, tax breaks, civil rights, kick-backs-by-proxy....
Corporate Institutions are more enfranchised than private citizens in the USA a pure plutocracy of the entitled of Corporate American Governance.
This November.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Vote for ANYONE but republican or democrat. Anyone. I don't care who. Whatever you do, absolutely do not vote for a republican or democrat. Please?
Bi-partisan only means that the same corporation has bought you both. That is the only thing that word means anymore.
It's important to care who. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's important to care who. (Score:5, Insightful)
Running for an office in the US, at least when you want to run for one that surpasses the office of mayor, requires a metric ton of money to get off the ground. It's pretty hard to afford that, especially given the risk and the minuscle chance of succeeding.
That's the basic problem of the rampart lobbyism. To get anywhere in the US politics, you need money. To get money, you have to sell out to some or many corporations. If you want to eliminate the bribery, you'd first of all have to change that system.
Re:This November.. (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think that will actually work, because by supporting minority parties you're not actually making any changes to the government. Okay, you hope that it would, that if you make enough slashdot comments you'll be able to elect a green or a libertarian, but honestly I just don't see that happening. There are a lot more voters than people reading slashdot.
One thing I think might work is voting against incumbents. What will that accomplish? I don't really know. But it's a stark way of expressing your disapproval of the people who *have* been running things.
Re:This November.. (Score:5, Insightful)
What's better? Voting for the lesser evil, knowing that it's still evil and basically the same turd sandwich, or voting for someone who you know can't win but would be the right candidate for you?
I keep hearing the myth of the "lost vote". Voting for someone who has no chance of winning is "throwing away" your vote. Know what? Casting it for someone I don't want is throwing it away.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What's better? Voting for the lesser evil, knowing that it's still evil and basically the same turd sandwich, or voting for someone who you know can't win but would be the right candidate for you?
That's a false choice. What's better is voting. Vote in every election for every office, from President to sanitation commissioner. If you've every missed an election because you were too lazy to get off your ass then you are the problem.
But what's better still is voting for somebody good that can also win. That means voting for a Republican or Democrat for higher office, and voting Libertarian or Green for local offices.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
They vote for the lesser of two evils, because if they didn't, they're afraid the wrong lizard will get in.
=0=
Ford Prefect, of course, had an explanation for this, as he sat with Arthur and watched the nonstop frenetic news reports on television, none of which had anything to say other than to record that the thing had done this amount of damage which was valued at that amount of billions of pounds and had killed this totally other number of people, and then say it again, because the robot was doing nothing
Re:This November.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Voting for third party candidates isn't so much about what policies you want to see in place now, as much as it is about wanting a long-term change in the voting system. In other words, your strategy is not based on winning this election, it is about just trying to win some election in the future.
People may want to vote for third parties, but don't because they don't expect others to- it's basically a reverse tragedy of the commons. People interested in third parties may be willing to vote for such a party after seeing them get 10%, 15%, etc. of the popular vote- more additional voters would be expected as you increase how many votes you get. In that sense, it is rational to vote for a third party candidate, as you would be helping to trigger this snowball effect. Your only rational way to improve the odds of a third party eventually winning, is to continually vote for them and encourage others to follow suit (voting reform would be more helpful, but not likely until third parties get involved).
I would love to vote for a candidate I actually agree with, but doing so right now would guarantee I will never get a good candidate in office. What we must do is pick green or libertarian and vote for them regardless of whether we agree with their platform. Don't stop until the two party system is thoroughly broken. Chances are, we will need voting reform before we move beyond 4 viable parties- we won't get that reform until we have at least 3 parties.
In short, you aren't voting for a candidate. You are simply voting against the two party system.
...to save jobs. (Score:2, Insightful)
Think Of The Children!
Your Country Needs You!
The War On [Insert Topical Cultural Demon Here] Must Go On
Burn The [Insert Topical Cultural Demon Here]!!
There are of course loads more. Anyway, it all sounds as if no-one has moved on since the 11th century so let's remind those that order soldiers around that you can't always get what you want and usually, you regret what you wish for.
Business as usual (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, how many people ACTUALLY think that this was anything more than Congress muscling the FCC aside to better suckle at the corporate teat?
Maybe I'm just being cynical, but I don't see Congress getting territorial over any issue that isn't backed by multi-billion dollar industries.
Re:Business as usual (Score:5, Insightful)
The USA only has Corporate Citizens, the human has been disenfranchised.
USA and EU Democracy is simply periodic insubstantial public fanfares, China saves millions by avoiding the public fanfare.
Just listen to the news.... (Score:4)
The news never says "US citizens" unless it's a kidnapping or a plane crash in foreign lands.
Nope, the news says "US consumers".... US consumers this, US consumers that...it's all you are to the politicians.
End run (Score:5, Interesting)
I say the FCC should license a nice fat chunk of wireless spectrum for high power ad hoc peer to peer networking. Then people can put up their own antennas and run their own community-wide public access points. Then maybe the government can help out by connecting the major cities with the longer haul infrastructure. I have to wonder how big of a mess it would be to start, but I also kind of wonder if it might self-organize into a new internet. It'd be delightful to see Comcast's reaction to something like that.
Re:End run (Score:5, Insightful)
That's exactly the fucking way to do it too. It will never ever EVER be encouraged by government or corporations either.
For one, government would just create those "long haul" infrastructure points at considerable cost without any national-security-I-can-see-you benefits. The most they could hope for is setup massive analysis points along the way to deep scan packets and possibly decrypt them. That's not possible too. For all the NSA's scariness and bluster they can't slice and dice their way through AES256 for each and every citizen in real time. I would give them credit for having the resources to do it in a reasonable time frame on a very small scale, but not at a national one. Without the ability for the National Security apparatus to at least isolate where the communication is coming from they can't be motivated to proceed. Look at Clipper and Carnivore. I seriously doubt the government would go along with the creation of any infrastructure that created technological obstructions to carry out the ideals of such data interception programs.
The other very serious issue for law enforcement is that mesh networking would have no way to establish, without any doubt, the business-customer relationships where money was exchanging hands, and consequently, there would not exist a 1) Fairly consistent and reliable information about the customer paying the bill and 2) Reliable way from a networking perspective to establish the identity of the customer.
Mesh Networking is the Holy Grail of Freedom, Anonymity, and Privacy on networks for average citizens. It would be extremely hard and time consuming to identify a single one person on it, especially if you added some TOR/Freenet/Darknet to the equation . At that point all the citizens in a densely populated urban area might as well be a single citizen.
There would be so much pressure against us to get that started I sincerely doubt it could ever get off the ground. The moment that Mesh networking gets serious at all watch how fast from local municipalities up to Federal Government makes it illegal and uses the FCC to make such transmissions dangerous.
"heavy-handed 19th century regulations" (Score:5, Insightful)
Kind of like modern IP laws...
Re:"heavy-handed 19th century regulations" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"heavy-handed 19th century regulations" (Score:4, Insightful)
Hehe, that's what I was going to say.
28 year copyrights with an optional one time renewal of 28 years, that's what they had in the early 1900's. It wasn't until 1976 that it went up to life of the author + 50 years. That's just insane (inspired by the French, no doubt). Then the Sonny Bonno act bumped it up to life + 70 and made copyright automatic. That's right, you actually had to apply for copyright for most of the 1900's. We have whole genres of music that almost certainly wouldn't exist today (soul, rap, rock, just to name a few) thanks to the loose copyright laws.
The old laws actually made sense. Hell, I'd be willing to make the renewal unlimited so long as the rights ended at the author's death, provided there was some moderate fee - say $10,000 inflation-matched. That way they have to decide if it's actually worth more than $10k to renew, and if it is, then great! It obviously means it was a rare huge success.
100% of modern culture is locked up by copyright. Everything from the 70's should be public domain today, yet we can't even get stuff from the 40's. We can get stuff from the 30's for anybody who died around the time they produced the work, but nearly everything from 1900 to the present is locked away by copyright. That is absolutely insane.
Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
It accused Genachowski of pushing 'heavy-handed 19th century regulations' that are 'inconceivable'
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I'd like to respond better to this (Score:5, Informative)
If it's not broken... (Score:2, Funny)
Same guys that passed the DMCA? (Score:3, Interesting)
The people who pass the DMCA and the Sonny Bono copyright act lose the right to complain about g 'heavy-handed 19th century regulations'. Corruption in the US seems to have reached new lows.
What concerns me even more is that world-wide it seems like politicians are more willing than ever to act against the best interests of the people they are meant to be representing, or pass universally unpopular legislation that a well informed public would never vote for directly. Now THAT is corruption. And there seems to be nothing and no one anywhere with the will or ability to stop the landslide.
Net Neutrality (2006) (PBS NOW) (Score:5, Informative)
Watched a old documentary, Net Neutrality (2006) (PBS NOW). /.ers do not even seem to notice.
It was amazing how different the issues were then, anti net neutrality then is now common practice that even
One of the main reasons that the people back then were given to allow the anti net neutrality was that the ISPs could never go overboard and do anything really bad, since the FCC had the ability and power to stop them.
The FCC should go ahead and do this (Score:5, Insightful)
If the FCC has the authority to classify ISPs as "telecommunications providers" instead of "information providers" it should do so regardless of what Congress says.
I wish more people in Washington had the guts to do what Julius Genachowski is doing and stand up to those "suits" in their fancy leather chairs in the executive offices at Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner, Cox, Verizon, Sprint, Qwest and the other ISPs. Those ISPs do NOT have a right to make profit at the expense of consumers and I applaud the FCC for having the guts to do something about it.
Here's a tip for Comcast... Instead of blocking BitTorrent, just charge those customers who use more bandwidth (regardless of what they use it for) more money each month. And implement QoS that shoves BitTorrent packets to the back of the queue to give everything else a chance.
Of course, if they actually did that, people might stop paying for expensive cable channels and start downloading the content instead. Cant have that now can we :P
What's Really Needed (Score:3, Interesting)
What's really needed here is something to take as much political influence out of the process as possible, and to eliminate as far as possible the resulting laws'/regulations' ability to be used to control/silence speech.
Many people feel the internet is another world. I'd agree with this basic concept with the exception that at this point the internet is more like another country and deserves it's own Constitution and Bill of Rights in order to grow, prosper for all, and fulfill the promise the internet holds for every human on the planets' future.
We need something along the lines of an Internet Constitution & Bill of Rights amended to the US Constitution setting out specific duties, powers, & limits to what the government, ISPs, and backbone providers may do along with a set of basic individual rights for the internet.
We don't need to re-classify the internet under telco regulations or pass some massive multi-thousand-page monstrosity of a bill that will be a political payoff and power-grab by *somebody* in the end, with very little to address the actual concerns of most here while almost certainly making things worse in multiple ways for most internet users.
Unfortunately, the only way I can see getting something that isn't a power/wealth grab by one political/corporate interest or another is to have it be a grassroots movement of some sort, as anything coming from politicians of any stripe is nearly guaranteed to be corrupt, or at least end up corrupted by the time it's passed. It would have to be a powerful enough popular demand to overcome fierce resistance from the entire political/governmental structure.
Well, one can dream.
Strat
Re:I care more about this than net neutrality (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I care more about this than net neutrality (Score:5, Informative)
In case anybody's wondering if their congresscritter signed on to this letter, here's the list [americansf...perity.org]. You can get a laugh out of the "threat or danger" propaganda at this site too, if you're amused by that sort of thing.
The thing to pay attention to is that a total of just over 100 congresscritters signed either the blue dog democrat letter or the republican letter. So characterizing this as congress taking a position on what the FCC has done is nonsense, and it's unfortunate that cnet feels they can get away with such a blatant misrepresentation. This doesn't even represent a third of congress, much less a majority.
I used to think Declan McCullough was a reasonably intelligent fellow, but this is just a propaganda piece. Congress didn't do anything, and if hopes for net neutrality fade, it's because we believe this tripe, not because congress has said anything to anyone about anything.
Re:I care more about this than net neutrality (Score:4, Funny)
It left, you just missed it.
Re:I care more about this than net neutrality (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I care more about this than net neutrality (Score:4, Insightful)
I still believe it, but you shouldn't mistake the republican version for the one that Obama actually ran on. See, republicans want you to believe in Obama as some sort of savior, and then be disappointed when that fails. What Obama actually ran on was that the populace should have more hope, and the populace should enact the change. He wanted people to get involved in government again.
So maybe you should quite your partisan wining and actually DO something about net neutrality.
MOD PARENT UP (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I care more about this than net neutrality (Score:5, Interesting)
And do what, vote? Who does he propose we vote for if we want to see change, if not himself?
Are you suggesting that his platform was "I'm not going to bring any positive change, but I think it'd be neat if someone else did"? Like it or not, he was running on a platform of "change", and now that he's president Gitmo is still open, the government still hates the internet and free speech, there is still no end in sight to our little pet wars, and we not only still have the PATRIOT Act, it was fucking renewed. Obama isn't just "not doing things" because he doesn't have the populace to back him up, he's actively maintaining the status quo.
And for your knowledge, I'm anything but partisan, I hate all of these fuckers. My contribution to net neutrality is to, as often as possible, advocate a crypto-anarchist mentality and provide people with the technical ability to enforce their own rights. The government is broken, I'm sick of it. The idea of electing a politician to reign in on government overstepping it's bounds is dead. ...Oh don't worry, I'll still vote in every election I'm able to, but that doesn't mean I have to like the situation, and I'm certainly not going to be naive enough to think I'm going to make a difference this way.
Re:I care more about this than net neutrality (Score:4, Insightful)
Believe it or not, constituent sentiment is taken into account.
If every single constituent sent a nasty letter to their congressman you can bet they would think long and hard before jeopardizing their seats. Unless they *really* strongly believed in it and were willing to sacrifice election chances they will bend in the wind of public opinion.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Forget health care reform (at least lots of people supported it in principle even if they didn't like the specific bill) - how about the bailouts at the end of the Bush presidency?
Congressmen reported that their phones were ringing off the hooks with opposition. The first vote on the bill resulted in a defeat. Then the various powers that be told the representatives who they really served, and they fixed it on the next ballot.
I won't point at any particular party - they were both complicit. The first-pas
Re:I care more about this than net neutrality (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think as many people were opposed to it as made to appear on Big Media infotainment outlets.
Polls showed differing numbers, depending on how the questions were asked (even more deviant than normal) and the big "NO" polls were asking in a more or less roundabout way about a government takeover of healthcare, which Obamacare is most certainly not, so the Democrats went for it.
The people that are screaming about government taking over healthcare are/were already going to vote against Democrats out of ideology, it's why they so readily believe the lie that anything this President or this Congress has done so far is "socialist" or even more hilarious "communist".
Personally, I think Obamacare is a joke, but for pretty much the exact opposite reasons that people were railing against it. It's uber-capitalism (well, uber-modern-capitalism anyway, we all know it's different than Adam Smith's vision) in an area where I believe a more social touch is needed.
Re:I care more about this than net neutrality (Score:4, Insightful)
[Obama] wanted people to get involved in government again.
And do what, vote?
No, he wants people to apply government jobs and/or government cheese.
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From my point of view (as a European having now lived a lifetime in the US), Obama was elected by the virtue of not being Bu
Re:I care more about this than net neutrality (Score:4, Insightful)
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Wow how naive can you be? Obama came to power with an agenda to implement certain things that left had wanted to do for years and finally got their chance (no 1 being the healthcare bill). That's the change he was talking about. According to any poll, majority of people were against the bailouts, majority of people were against the stimulus, majority of people were against Obamacare, majority of people are in favour of Arizona type immigration control. I guess the change the according to you the populace should enact would be very different to the change that he is actually enacting. Dems were elected simply because people were sick of Bush and neo-cons, they never got the mandate or popular support to do any of those things they are doing.
Actually, if you look at the polls, a majority of people had no fucking idea what they were talking about on any of those subjects. Not the first clue. We have got to have one of the least informed electorates in existence.
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That was before the election, now it's after the election.
Re:I care more about this than net neutrality (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I care more about this than net neutrality (Score:5, Insightful)
The United States is not a dictatorship and one person cannot, by law, rule unilaterally. Obama tapped Julius Genachowski [slate.com] to head the FCC, and thus had done more than anyone reading this thread to promote network neutrality. When you consider the myriad issues facing the USA, and how intractable most of them are, it's remarkable a single person is expected to fix even a fraction of them.
Indeed, it's a miracle that politicians accomplish anything at all considering the electoral minefield they enter every time they attempt anything of consequence. Many of these people entered politics with dreams of saving the world, then learned that votes come not from sound policies but from hyperbolic promises and expensive ad campaigns. They learn that trying to do their jobs right garners nothing but controversy, disapproval, and well-funded enemies; play-acting for the cameras, pork-barrel projects, screwing the future for short-term gain, and funding their campaigns with corporate-sponsored bills are the secret to staying in office.
And for that, the blame can squarely be laid upon the people. It's called a representative democracy for a reason: The quality of the government reflects the quality of the voters. The voters by and large are ignorant masses that vote for whatever politician promises the world and asks for no sacrifices in return. Later, when the politician fails to deliver on the impossible promises—the ones he had to make to get elected in the first place—the voters toss him out in favor of the next guy with fancy TV commercials and exactly the same promises.
If you want to change the representatives, you need to change the voters. Start a campaign to educate your community about the truth behind important issues. Get them to ask tough questions and to expect real answers instead of sound bites. Get them to vote not for the candidate with the biggest promises but the one who offers detailed policies. Explain the federal budget and where tax monies really go, and how it might be fixed. Explain the issues that matter most to you. And if you can't find anyone to represent your views in congress, run for office yourself.
But if you can't be arsed to do anything but make hollow demands, expect your representatives to do nothing but make hollow promises.
Re:I care more about this than net neutrality (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's not forget that the US voting system robs people of all hope for third party candidates so most vote for a guy they don't like but still don't hate as much as the other.
Re:I care more about this than net neutrality (Score:5, Insightful)
"The sad thing is that I can't see how this changes without bullets . . ."
This system is going to collaps under its own weight. We've been printing and borrowing to avoid dealing with recession ever since the beginning of the Bush administration, and it has only accelerated in the last two years. Every day that they continue this nonsense makes the day of reckoning worse. This year alone the Federal government will borrow and spend at least $1.5 trillion. That's almost 10% of GDP. Then, they'll release official BS statistics which claim that the economy "grew" by 2-3%. Remove the unsustainable debt spending, and the economy clearly shrank. Furthermore, if they balanced the budget tomorrow, it's an immediate 9+% drop in GDP.
It won't take bullets to change things, just another few years of the status quo.
When the asshats in D.C. refuse to deal with a glaringly obvious fiscal crisis, why should we have any hope that they're going to do something like network neutrality?
Re:I care more about this than net neutrality (Score:4, Informative)
What happened to the hope, change and a new kind of politics?
We haven't started any new wars for a while. That's a change.
Anyway, are you critiquing Obama with that? You do realize that the guy they're writing to, the guy who wants net neutrality, is an Obama appointee (see the 3rd sentence in TFA). The 74 house democrats and 37 senate republicans? I can't read make out who signed their names to the house dem letter, but I'm going to assume that most of the 111 congressmen and women didn't actually run on the campaign of "hope, change and a new kind of politics."
If you were expecting one election to bring about hope, change, and a new kind of politics immediately without any resistance, you're even more of a delusional liberal loon than I am.
Re:I care more about this than net neutrality (Score:4, Interesting)
Are you all ready to have the same thing happen to your internet that happened to the fuel prices when they figured out that the government was in their pockets? It's coming and it's gonna hurt!
No, it's not. The internet routes around damage. If internet prices skyrocket (and the U.S.A. is already paying more and getting less than many other countries - go figure), people will just create their own network; either mesh networking, or simply wireless routers configured to bridge with other wireless routers - shouldn't be too hard to bounce the signal up the branch until you find a trunk.
I'm not too concerned about it, anyway; Internet communications are pretty much required to live nowadays. For instance, you can't get a job at a grocery or department store without internet access - they don't have paper applications anymore. The push for paperless has pushed networking onto the stack with the other "basic" utilities. People won't stand for yet another bootheel on the head of the commoners.
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How can we download an entire movie within, say, one minute? Getting the speed up is more important than deciding how to allocate it.
Is it? Who gets to decide how much speed is allocated to the connection between you and the site you're downloading from? Without net neutrality, the answer will be "whoever pays your ISP". In other words, the only sites that will see decent bandwidth are those to which you've subscribed in some way, probably - because it's those sites that will be able to bribe your ISP.
Net neutrality never had a chance (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not as if net neutrality really had a chance. The incumbent ISPs were going to buy enough politicians off to get the concept killed.
Re:Net neutrality never had a chance (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Net neutrality never had a chance (Score:5, Insightful)
You missed the best part.
They basically said the need for regulations was rubbish because ISP's would always act in the best interest of their customers. However, they seem to be neglecting the concept that in most places it's a monopoly with regards to the ISP infrastructure. At best, the choice is two fold and I don't see either side lining up to do what is in the public's interest.
At least he tried very seriously to make a change. I'm a bit shamed congress was bought and paid on this day.
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I bet not 20 slashdotters wrote any politicians that this issue was important to them and why.
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I reached this conclusion many years ago when I wrote a paper about the damaging effects of a 2 party system. Having two parties is the worst possible number because it is so easy to polarize issues. There is no room for moderates when there are two parties and on every issue they frame it as right/wrong, left/right, black/white.
I hope the tea party does well, if for no other reason than we need another serious political party. I don't give two shits about what they stand for, I just want more than 2 partie
Re:Net neutrality never had a chance (Score:5, Interesting)
Well I can tell you I didn't, and here is why. I tried that with my senators and congressmen/woman three times and you know what? Three times I got back a generic "vote for me!" form letter, and they went against the public interest. And pleeease don't give us that tired "vote the bums out!" bullshit, because we done been there and done that and they only get replaced with a shill with a different letter in front of their name.
Have you tried talking to them when they're in town? Even if they don't listen to you, it's kinda fun to watch em squirm a bit.
For instance, I once walked up to Sen George Voinovich (R-OH) and asked him to justify his vote for a large tax cut in light of his longstanding view that the government's budget must be kept balanced. After hemming and hawing for a while, he mentioned that he'd recently gotten a nice chunk of Homeland Security funding to protect the western suburbs of Cleveland (where we happened to be standing) from terrorist threats. I still remember the look on his face when I asked him how that kind of funding to protect against non-existent terrorist threats helped balance the federal budget.
Oh, and the politicians you actually want in office (yes, they do exist) will tend to respond well to constituents. At worst, they'll apologize, point you to their website, and dash off to their next appointment. That's one of the reasons I actually like the Iowa caucuses and NH primaries starting off the presidential race - both of those environments tend to force candidates to actually answer would-be constituents face-to-face.
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Re:Net neutrality never had a chance (Score:4, Insightful)
Making a profit isn't a right, you have to earn it by competing.
Does anyone remember before broadband? Every metro region had dozens of dialup ISP's and they all competed on service and the prices were very reasonable. At first they charged by the minute or hour, then it was by bandwidth, then it was unlimited. Prices started high and slowly fell.
These are all indications of a normal, healthy, competitive market. What we have now is the exact opposite - ISP's don't always run their own mail servers, prices go up, newsgroup access is a rarity, DNS lookup failures are sold to the highest bidder(bing/google/whatever). There is no competition and consumers are paying the price.
Re:Net neutrality never had a chance (Score:4, Insightful)
Bad analogies are like pigs eating ice cream, they both float through a sea of orange soda.
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They're not wholly owned by the telcos. They just hold shares of the congresscritters, nobody needs to buy a complete polidroid. You can rent them these days, you just have to pay more than the guy opposed to you.
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You do realize that ISPs are not and have never been common carriers, right?