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112 Comments
- executex, on 10/29/2009, -8/+70So the question is--- is the FCC using Net Neutrality to gain authority to later enforce TV-like censorship, or is the FCC saving us from ISP abuse and throttling/censorship of the network as they claim. Everything about this debate smells like fish.
- limpl0uie, on 10/29/2009, -10/+52I'm going to take a wild guess and say that most of the comments above mine are from Glenn Beck viewers.
- colincornaby, on 10/29/2009, -0/+37I'm all for municipal networks, as the article details as an alternative, but there is no reason we can't have both net neutrality and municipal networks.
- AgeofMastery, on 10/29/2009, -1/+36It's kind of hard to have municipal networks when the various ISPs keep suing towns that try to build them. And then you get "small government" crowd screaming that the towns have no business competing with private companies, etc...
- Falldog, on 10/29/2009, -1/+26A whole lot of 'if's in that piece.
He missed "If we don't do something ISPs could start screwing us more than they already do to our wallets." - Bartboy919, on 10/29/2009, -3/+25Are you retarded?
- Bartboy919, on 10/29/2009, -1/+23WE HAVE A WINNAR!!
- jerbaker, on 10/29/2009, -2/+20The author is guilty of some of the various "wrongdoings" he accuses Net neutrality supporters of. To wit:
"Pro-regulation advocates, including Chairman Genachowski and Google Vice President Vint Cerf, speak in the conditional tense. The word "could" appears 55 times in the FCC proposal."
Then, not two paragraphs later, the author writes with conditional tense, "The risk of non-neutral behavior is significant, but the cost of regulation and the potential for unintended consequences may be higher."
The author is also offering outright distortions such as, "Municipal wireless Internet projects have largely shut down, in large part because state governments and their lobbyist friends maintain that the law allows them to prohibit cities from competing with private-sector communications companies." I only know of one case where a law was passed specifically to block competition. What happens is that those very companies this guy is defending SUE the cities trying to provide for their citizens.
Here's another one, "Despite a few isolated incidents of clumsy interference, however, no one really believes that the lack of competition has created true market failures." The entire US broadband market is an abject failure of the market. The public was ripped off by these telecommunications companies who took our tax dollars to build out high speed networks and left us with *****.
I have a hard time taking an argument seriously who uses distortions and double-standards. - ironhide, on 10/29/2009, -1/+19I guess you've missed all the talk from the big ISPs
- Langford, on 10/29/2009, -0/+17It's a compelling augment against the FCC taking action, but how are we going to ensure net neutrality in the future without something of this nature from some government entity? Does net neutrality need to be protected by congress, and are they smart enough to support it in a bill? I want net neutrality protected, we need it for the good of the nation and for the benefit of the nation's economic future. If this is the wrong way to make it happen, please please lets find the right way to make it happen.
- simongiln, on 10/29/2009, -2/+17From the article: "For one thing, "ancillary" jurisdiction could also be applied, as the EFF points out, to the creation of new Internet decency standards."
You spend most of your article attacking the FCC for regulating a problem that doesn't exist yet, while at the same time attacking the FCC for regulation that doesn't exist yet... Well done. - Dauntless1, on 10/29/2009, -0/+15Hard to tell. The problem is that ISP abuse is real, and is currently happening. With limited or no competition, how do you regulate a private industry without some branch of the government?
- hamchidna, on 10/29/2009, -0/+14McCain's bill - http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:S.1836:
Rep. Blackburn's bill - http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:H.R.392 ...
FCC - http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/ ...
All very interesting reads... - Crimeodial, on 10/29/2009, -1/+14It's not Obama's plan you tool. This was being planned at least 2 years before he became president.
- arunforce, on 10/29/2009, -1/+14There is a case against Net Neutrality?
- TheJuggernaut, on 10/29/2009, -3/+16Wow. This is a thorny issue, and filled with sky-is-falling rhetoric from both right and left sides of the spectrum. My advice: Read all you can about it from as many sources as you can find, and try to connect your own dots.
- Crimeodial, on 10/29/2009, -1/+14Did anybody even read this? It prevents them from limiting what other networks traffic can be passed to. That's the best goal for network neutrality.
- Dauntless1, on 10/29/2009, -0/+12Yes. Mainly being made by anti-gov theorists who are pointedly incapable of offering an alternative that's acceptable in the real world.
- hikaruzero, on 10/29/2009, -1/+12I'll say this. If Lawrence Lessig praises the rules, I am fully with him. I took a class in which I read one of his books on copyright issues and had to release a 25-page paper on outsourcing under Creative Commons, and he came to our college to speak about copyright while I was writing the paper. If he's down with the new rules, so am I.
- Crimeodial, on 10/29/2009, -3/+14Just hold ISPs to the same standards we hold phone companies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier - dalittle, on 10/29/2009, -0/+10So people don't like how the internet is right now and want to let cable companies and telcos carve it up and charge you for every little thing like they do for tv. I don't think so. Net Neutrality is important and is going to pass.
- FredFredrickson, on 10/29/2009, -0/+9Many people live in rural areas where they don't have reasonable choices. My parents, for example, live in an area where there are only two options - the slow but affordable local DSL company or the super expensive high speed satellite company. People in this situation would be screwed without net neutrality.
And that's the problem with the country as a whole - there are only a handful of major ISP's, so "jumping ship" doesn't do much good when they all collude to screw you over somehow. - Dauntless1, on 10/29/2009, -1/+10What do you expect? He's trying to make an argument about how we should trust private entities more than the government with this issue, while completely ignoring the reality of the situation. Which is that the ISPs are ALREADY screwing over customers, and have been for awhile, while the government may or may not, depending on who is in office and what their priorities are.
- venom8599, on 10/30/2009, -1/+9It's not against private property rights if they've taken huge amounts of taxpayer subsidies in order to build out high speed networks, and then of course they used all the money and scrapped the high speed network plans. And built vast amounts of infrastructure on public rights of way through other people's land (or on purely public lands) and been granted monopoly status by local governments, etc... Really though, the Internet has gotten to the point where it's a necessary utility, and I think that it's about time ISPs should be regulated just like any other utility companies.
- Langford, on 10/29/2009, -0/+81. Most people don't have more than one ISP to choose from. They are monopolies that are granted that status from the communities they operate in.
2. It's not about ISPs, it never has been, it's about the whole Internet. Your ISP will have no choice but to charge you more because they will be charged more. These charges will come from companies such as AT&T, because they control the main lines of the Internet. It won't matter that you don't use AT&T for an ISP, because at some point your ISP's connection will cross into AT&T's territory. Your ISP pays for it's connection just as you pay for yours, except they pay more for a larger connection so they can split it up. When your ISP pays more, you will pay more, they will have no choice but to pass the charges along. If your ISP doesn't pay the extra charge, they will not have access to that part of the Internet, and so neither will you. - Langford, on 10/29/2009, -0/+8You fear the regulation, but offer no alternative other than the idea that the regional monopolies will somehow magically stop being monopolies. Their size will always let them prevent startups from mattering, and their control of the main infrastructure will always allow them to control what the lowest price their competition is capable of offering is.
- thebreach, on 10/29/2009, -1/+9It is god damn disgusting that McCain of all ***** people have any say in this.
He admitted out of his own blasphemous mouth that he doesn't use the Internet and has his aids take care of it all.
This is like asking a middle school janitor with a meth problem to have a say in how to run NASA - Hetman, on 10/29/2009, -4/+11Something being long does not make it bad. I work for what is basically a bank kind of. When we give out loans or tax credits the length of the contract can almost be 80 pages. I that is just a contract with one person/company. When dealing with something that spands the entire country you would expect bills to be a lot of pages.
- AgeofMastery, on 10/29/2009, -0/+7It was NOT illegal, it was Bell's company policy not to allow it and to cut off service to anyone who did. And they were taken to court over it. It was never a law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System
As a result, by 1940 the Bell System effectively owned most telephone service in the United States, from local and long-distance service to the telephones themselves. This allowed Bell to prohibit their customers from connecting phones not made or sold by Bell to the system without paying fees. For example, if a customer desired a type of phone not leased by the local Bell monopoly, he or she had to purchase the phone at cost, give it to the phone company, then pay a 're-wiring' charge and a monthly lease fee in order to use it. An oft-heard remark at the time was "Ma Bell has you by the calls". - Crimeodial, on 10/30/2009, -0/+7True, good thing I wasn't talking about cell phone companies.
- Dauntless1, on 10/29/2009, -1/+8@elnerdo
And it's just plain common sense to understand that in a race towards corruption the highest talent company gets there first. In this case, that would be the ISPs, who are already ***** with the internet.
So, we shouldn't ignore the potential for issues with the FCC but at the same time those possible issues with ISPs running a non neutral internet are ALREADY happening. The ISPs doing corrupt and shady things to the internet is not a supposition, a hypothesis, or an assumption. They are FACTS. The question then becomes this: the ISPs are factually corrupt, so cannot be trusted to do what's right for the consumer/public, and the government may or may not. If we don't want the government to do the regulating, what do we have for choices on a third option? - arunforce, on 10/29/2009, -0/+7The TV spectrum is limited and belong to everyone and not hard to enforce thanks to the high cost and very little providers, Internet is theoretically unlimited and has very low cost and separate networks cant be built and it's very hard to enforce.
There isn't that much wrong with regulating the public spectrum, but the private spectrum should be left alone (Cable), and it is. And since almost all the Internet backbone was partially funded by the US, they should be subject to US laws. - Dauntless1, on 10/29/2009, -2/+8Yeah, well, the "small gov/big gov" crowd need to drag their collective asses into the 21st century and understand a governments effectiveness has NOTHING to do with size. It's about SMART government. Just like the "more regulation/less regulation" crowd are wasting everyone's time by not realizing the real issue is having the CORRECT regulations.
- iimjpii, on 10/29/2009, -0/+6I think that applies to everything.
- scoottie, on 10/29/2009, -1/+7Sure there is, the ISP's have a lot of money to pay congress people to do what the ISP's want
- Junkyarddawg, on 10/29/2009, -1/+7Network Neutrality has nothing to do with FCC censoring of users. It's perfectly possible they may one day try to do so, not least as this is already happening in most european countries, but network neutrality is irrelevant to that. Anti-stalking and anti-slander laws, for instance, are not dependent on network neutrality or non-neutrality.
- AgeofMastery, on 10/29/2009, -0/+5You don't have to be in a rural area to be short on broadband options. Most places have one cable company and DSL via the phone company.
This isn't like the days of dialup when you had multiple ISPs to chose from, if there still was that level of completion I wouldn't be worried. - jessemoya, on 10/29/2009, -1/+5I think what Bartboy919 was getting at is that net neutrality ensures that NO ONE has control over the internet, as it always has been and as it should always be.
- Bookant, on 10/30/2009, -0/+4Neutrality isn't about billing for bandwidth. It's about banning ISPs from treating different traffic differently based on the *content* or *where it comes from.* Or to use your Pipe analogy - it means that your ISP can't agree to sell you a certain sized "pipe," then start deciding they're going to slow down Website A because it comes from a competitor of theirs, and Website B because they don't like its politics, etc.
In short, it prevents the ISPs from doing exactly what all the paranoid Beck fans are claiming the FCC is going to do - regulating the *contents* of your internet traffic and thereby deciding what you can and can't see/read/watch/use. If they sell you a 'pipe,' they have to pass all traffic through that pipe equally, regardless of what's in it. - simongiln, on 10/29/2009, -3/+7Neither is it bad to assume companies will chose monopolization over consumer choice.
I know what the goal of the article is. I'm just saying his argument is inconsistent. You can't argue against a slippery slope problem with a slippery slope argument.
I don't like the "ancillary jurisdiction" issue either, and I wouldn't be surprised if it got struck down by the courts. However, I don't see why the regulations the FCC is proposing can't be passed on to congress for a vote. Make it actual law; not just shaky FCC policy that could be expanded or expunged at will. - BigT383, on 10/29/2009, -2/+6Czars aren't unconstitutional. Their power comes from the president- all they can do is make recommendations to the president and he can choose whether or not to go along with those recommendations - just like any other part of the Executive branch. And the president is of course limited to the executive powers laid out in the constitution.
- jessemoya, on 10/29/2009, -2/+5Sure people refer to it that way, how many average citizens know anything about it? But the Republicans are quite purposeful about the way they name or refer to things. Take for example the Clear Skies initiative, The Democrat Party, or Barack HUSSEIN Obama.
In this instance there's nothing patriotic about the USA PATRIOT Act. But then, if you don't know the first thing about it (you know, like it's name) then you might not realized that. - SpeedSteamBoat, on 10/30/2009, -1/+4How about making broadcast television and radio possible by regulating the AM, FM, UHF, and VHF spectrums?
How about the Fairness Doctrine? You'll here a lot of guff over that one over at Fox News, likely because they couldn't get away with what they do (lie) if we still had it. It was a good thing. - archiesteel, on 10/29/2009, -4/+7"and that has the side benefit of being able to intimindate people that post things critical of whatever administration is running the Country"
If that ever happened you'd have grounds to sue the Federal government. - SpeedSteamBoat, on 10/30/2009, -0/+3Here's an apt anology for the situation many people find themselves in:
CABLE COMPANY: "Hello there. This is the Cable company. Would you like some internets? GREAT! All you need to do suck this big fat dick to get it! Oh, you don't wish to suck this big fat dick? Okay then, good bye."
*dissatisfied costumer decides to stick it to the man and calls the local competition, the PHONE COMPANY!*
PHONE COMPANY: "Hello there. This is the Phone company. Would you like some internets? GREAT! All you need to do is lick these hairy balls to get it! Oh, you don't wish to lick these hairy balls? Okay then, good bye."
Then they go crawling back to the cable company because, well, at least that big fat dick was clean shaven. And boy do they ever suck that dick for their internets. Sometime later, the phone company might get around to shaving those balls, you know, in order to compete. The customer might think about switching at that point, but it's still a choice between ball licking and dick sucking, ya know? At the end of the day, both companies feel pretty good about the way they run their business. They're getting their nuts licked and their dicks sucked and see no reason to have it any other way. They even find the time to share some of the love with the local government, who then agrees that this really is a great arrangement in which everyone wins. Well, everyone except you that is, but who gives a ***** about you? - SpeedSteamBoat, on 10/30/2009, -1/+4Care to expound on either of those conclusions.
It seems to me that a national communication network which is vital to our nations livelihood is the exact opposite of "private property."
Btw, companies are offered regional monopolies. There is little to no competition. Good luck starting your own company, and by that I mean good luck with your lawsuit from Charter/Comcast/AT&T/etc. - SpeedSteamBoat, on 10/30/2009, -0/+3This is the crux of the whole issue if you ask me.
On the one hand, ISPs have used the protection offered by Common Carrier as a defense against accountability for what kind of content is passed over their lines. Basically, the RIAA can't come after your ISP directly for copyright infringement occurring over their lines. Then, ironically, they turn around and try to regulate what their lines are used for anyway (exactly what common carrier prevents). Because the law is exactly clear on whether Common Carrier really applies to ISPs are not they are allowed to play these kind of games. They wish to have their cake and eat it too.
I agree with you completely. Congress should just officially extend common carrier to ISP providers and be done with it. Why spend all these time and resources creating some completely new regulatory standard when their is a perfectly good one sitting right in front of us? - theuniversal, on 10/30/2009, -0/+3And the case for the FCC's Net Neutrality Plan:
http://digg.com/d318Qpa - FishThePirate, on 10/29/2009, -2/+5"And the myth of obscenity is a myth that is perpetuated in order to keep a censorship mechanism in place, because as long as there can be censorship, for one thing or another, as long as they can convince somebody that you need to have a watchdog to keep the dirty words off the air, then that same watchdog agency will be able to keep political ideas that are undesirable, or any other kind of social ideas that are undesirable off the airwaves, and that is the real basis for perpetuating myths of obscenity and all that kind of stuff. And I try to attack it as often as I can."
-Frank Zappa - HonoredMule, on 10/30/2009, -0/+3It didn't seem at all like a thorny issue until a very recent resurgence of "interest" just after the rule proposal was actually publicized, all only slightly legitimized by a small display of trepidation from the EFF. Six months ago the active voices were almost unanimously begging for Net Neutrality. The only thing that has changed since is ISPs now believe it's actually coming. So I'll give you three guesses where most of the new voices with an anti-neutrality opinion originate.
There's no prize for a correct guess. And if you genuinely feel that Net Neutrality is a bad thing and television analogies weigh heavily on those opinions, then do the following: analyze those television analogies very closely and note fundamental technical and business/economical differences between radio/television and the internet; then consider another platform that /won't/ have those fundamental differences--the telephone--and note how regulation has affected /that/ platform. I'm not going to make any grand assumptions, but you *might* start seeing matters a little differently. -
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