Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

Wireless isn't a viable option for video streaming, downloading large files, gaming etc...

They all throttle you past 20GB or so, they aren't nearly fast enough, latency is terrible, and they suffer huge congestion problems.

But let's assume you think that wireless is currently good enough to replace cable and DSL for your needs. Switch half of the population over to wireless. I guarantee you it won't be good enough then.

Satisfaction ratings for Comcast are atrocious--if wireless was a viable option, everyone would already be using it at home.

You've missed the point of my argument entirely. The FCC was put into place to regulate airwaves, i.e. who can use what airwaves and for what purpose. It didn't take long for them to start regulating the content said airwaves.

My point is that I really don't care what your good intention are, or what you believe the government will limit itself to. That's all nice and sweet, and a great discussion for a 5th grade civics class, but what I'm saying is how long do you think before well intended, someone please think of the children types (or more recently those of the outrage culture spawned from university campuses), will start regulating the content? Once you give them authority to make decisions about how the internet should be regulated, they'll start getting creative. The FCC is a historical example of that, and it's the exact department your handing over the internet to.

Unable to pull up site

> I don't see how removing anonymity is inherently by its very nature a bad thing. It seems likely it would be like everything else, you'd need to legislate the legality of certain things given that all activity is non-anonymous, etc.

I see a few issues with such massive violations of privacy:

1. Slippery slope: Knowledge of people's private lives is extremely valuable, and nobody with the power to collect or use it is going to relinquish it, if anything they're more likely to try to get more, until they have absolutely everything. This isn't inherently bad, as concentrated power is very easily abused. We have a wonderful case study of this with the NSA, their ever expanding powers, their willful breaking what few legal limits are imposed upon them, and their inability to prevent themselves from breaking their own policies about abusing access to their treasure trove.

2. Benevolent dictator: This privacy invasion will most certainly work it's way back to the government, which has severe implications for civil disobedience and political dissent in general. While it's all peaches when the government is "nice", you're never going to have all citizens agree with the government, and future politicians abusing previously allocated power/resources is extremely likely (not that there has ever been a government administration worthy of invading everyone's privacy to begin with).

3. Drawing a line here is not only a great place, it also lets everyone consolidate resources to fight for a known good state. There's a lot of information to be gleaned from the data, and it's unlikely that everyone can commit fully to understanding the ramifications of letting this information out, much less understand how it will be used, or how it can be used. And much like giving the legislation a pile of money with legislatively imposed spending limitations, they're going to be constantly fighting to tweak and remove those limits. And its so much harder to be constantly vigilant when there's dozens of laws governing what can or cannot be done with the data, before we even presume that we agree with those laws to begin with.

4. As noted above with the NSA, it's not possible to trust custodians of this treasure, they're only human, and they're bound to abuse their power at some point. But we don't just have to worry about people with legitimate access obtaining this data, we also have to worry about hackers grabbing it from poorly secured servers, which seems to be an inevitable computer event, even more so for such massively useful information.

I'm not sure putting the internet into the same class of service as a telephone made sense for all the unintended consequences. Everyone is fine until they wind up paying $50/month for their internet and then seeing another $15 in government fees added to their bill. From a pragmatic point of view, I'm sure the government will always have the option to regulate it later on.