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I'm on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality

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Re: I'm on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality

#181
post #113
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the beneficiaries of your "net freedom" are a handful of regional monopoly ISPs who are protected by regulations that realistically won't ever be rolled back.

Pre-2015 - keep the govt out of our internet! 2017 - save us government we need your kind regulations! No thanks. It’s amazing what a little bit of polishing a turd and renaming it will do.

That's a nice straw man you got there. Be a shame if someone set it ablaze...

Pre 2015 people were worried about the government actively monitoring and controlling what could be said on the internet. It was a fight to protect free speech on the web.

The current issue about the actions of the FCC focuses on net neutrality. While also being essential for free speech on the web, this issue focuses on the prevention of monopolization and antitrust practices by internet service providers.

Or did I miss some point you made?

Re: I'm on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think this peer-to-peer network wouldn't be throttled?

It has many peers. Even if it's throttled on each one, they could distribute the load.

How much of that load is carried by Comcast-approved hosts?

Re: I'm on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're a dope if you don't vote. It's impolite to mention this, but it is not a political problem, but a Republican problem. A Democratic administration's FCC enacted Net Neutrality, a Republican one is attempting to dismantle it. Vote for Democrats at every level of government, in every election possible. This will change some day, but today the Republican party has lost its mind and morals. To be clear, I'm not cal…

What a delightfully simplistic view of politics. You know about the Blue Dogs, right?

The Blue Dogs are a very belated rearguard action against the partisan realignment that had largely completed when they were formed, and as the realignment progresses and solidifies they have rapidly become irrelevant.

Re: I'm on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality

#184
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be about the Internet, but doing online "protest" will get us nowhere. Real protest means people going to the streets and making the government afraid of real violence. Other than that I don't see any way out.

Real protest means going to your local government to fight the internet access monopolies and duopolies. It means voting with your wallet and not supporting the companies pushing for this. It means showing up to vote next time instead of staying home. It means educating your neighbors about what this will mean for all of us. Don't pretend we've exhausted all alternatives to violence -- we haven't. We've barely done a…

When I only have one option for Internet > 5mbps and my job depends on it how do I fight with my wallet? I would happily pay 3x for municipal fiber but it'll never happen.

The monopoly of ISPs is what makes this whole free market argument completely unbalanced.

Re: I'm on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality

#185

Nick Gillespie: Your plan will, according to a write up in Politico, and I think this is accurate, it quote, "will jettison rules that prohibit internet service providers from blocking or slowing web traffic or creating so called paid internet fast lanes." Question for you, do you think fast lanes will become a thing? What is the value of a internet fast lane? Ajit Pai: The answer to the first is we're not sure. We'v…

> "If murder hadn't happened in a certain area yet, would it be 'too preemptive' to outlaw it?" But even with murder, the law doesn't stop murders before they happen, but rather only acts retroactively (and that is for good reason). > "Fast lanes DO exist in other countries right now." But this is ignoring the whole debate: proponents of net freedom don't consider fast lanes to be a problem.

>But this is ignoring the whole debate: proponents of net freedom don't consider fast lanes to be a problem.

And they literally wouldn't be if internet service was delivered in a free market. The problem is that the market isn't free. ISPs have spent years rigging the market in their favor, politically. The landscape is already hostile to the consumer--they intend to make it more so.

Re: I'm on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality

#186

I feel helpless. In this and in many things that this administration has brought on. Vote? Yeah, right. Sign a petition? Yeah, right. I feel like unless there are real ramifications to the people doing this stuff, nothing we do matters.

You're a dope if you don't vote. It's impolite to mention this, but it is not a political problem, but a Republican problem. A Democratic administration's FCC enacted Net Neutrality, a Republican one is attempting to dismantle it. Vote for Democrats at every level of government, in every election possible. This will change some day, but today the Republican party has lost its mind and morals. To be clear, I'm not cal…

Democrats use drones to kill innocent or presumed-guilty people in other countries. Are you sure their lives don't matter compared to net neutrality? They're also responsible for harsh sentences for drug offences which is a major reason for all the imprisoned people in the US. Net neutrality is still more important than all those ruined lives?

The housing shortage in San Francisco is democrats too. Maybe with money saved from rents to landlords could be spent on rents to non-neutral ISPs.

It's far from a simple as "always vote democrat". That kind of naive arrogance is why the US has two entrenched parties that both maintain the status quo of terrible things you don't like.

Re: I'm on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality

#187

Nationalize the internet. I'm not kidding. We paid for it in the first place, and if it's such a critical piece of economic infrastructure that market intervention needs to be mitigated, the solution is to nationalize it. How? Take the municipal broadband idea, and scale it up. It's not really hard. Net neutrality only privileges one set of multi-billion-dollar corporations over another set of multi-billion-dollar co…

There's a problem with that idea, which is that then the internet is at the mercy of those in congress who want to shut down the government all the time, because they won't pass a budget unless we go on a governmental starvation diet, while at the same time giving tax breaks to the rich.

Just like how policing, the military and roads stop when congress decides to shut things down

Re: I'm on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality

#188
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong. Net neutrality proponents have been advocating for the FCC's pro-NN actions long before 2015, the problem was courts kept shooting them down because they said (probably correctly) that they didn't use their authority the right way.

Most people want NN, when it comes to censorship (this is why I use Sonic.net). They don't want NN when it comes to gaming latency vs. email latency. There's a big difference, but NN lumps them in as the same thing. This is why we should punt to Congress that ensures NN applies to the First Amendment but not to voluntary trade.

> They don't want NN when it comes to gaming latency vs. email latency.

That isn't a thing. ISPs don't actually do that.

Latency on any reasonably provisioned network is determined by distance and the speed of light. There is no magic thing routers can do for special packets to make it go down, it's just the laws of physics.

They could only do something when the network isn't reasonably provisioned and the ISP's uplinks are fully saturated, but that should never normally happen unless the ISP is either incompetent or creating artificial scarcity for anticompetitive reasons.

Re: I'm on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality

#189
post #138
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But this is ignoring the whole debate: proponents of net freedom don't consider fast lanes to be a problem. I think that this is the part that I can't comprehend. The railroads misbehaved so badly that the government had to break rail transportation as an industry to kill them. Ninety years later we're still using long-haul semi trailers for everything. Bell's abuse of its monopoly was similarly severe. How do peop…

>Ninety years later we're still using long-haul semi trailers for everything. No. There's actually a very healthy cargo rail system and relatively little trucking is truly long haul.

According to the DOT [1] it looks like my intuition is a bit out of date. Right now US freight about even, trucking still a little bit ahead by ton-mile. Ten years ago rail carried 2/3 as much freight as trucks. Last-mile delivery on trucks (from the rail station to the point of use) is taken care of by the unit of measurement (one ton of freight traveling one mile), so I think that those numbers are relatively reasonable.

So I'll admit: fair enough, the rail industry is still healthy and carrying a good amount of cargo. I'll withdraw the wording; we do not in fact use long-haul trucks for everything. The fact that trucks are competing with rail at all, however, given the geographical extent of the US and how horrible long-haul trucking is, I believe makes me stand by my claim that the US rail industry was broken and never recovered. It frankly astonishes me that driving something down the highway is even remotely financially effective in comparison to rail freight.

And, of course, none of this is relevant to my original point: the railroads abused their powers to an astonishing degree and the government was forced to smash them for the good of the economy. Is it obvious to me that today's ISPs are following in the footsteps of yesterday's railroads and telephones and I don't understand how people convince themselves otherwise.

[1] https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pu...

Re: I'm on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're a dope if you don't vote. It's impolite to mention this, but it is not a political problem, but a Republican problem. A Democratic administration's FCC enacted Net Neutrality, a Republican one is attempting to dismantle it. Vote for Democrats at every level of government, in every election possible. This will change some day, but today the Republican party has lost its mind and morals. To be clear, I'm not cal…

Democrats use drones to kill innocent or presumed-guilty people in other countries. Are you sure their lives don't matter compared to net neutrality? They're also responsible for harsh sentences for drug offences which is a major reason for all the imprisoned people in the US. Net neutrality is still more important than all those ruined lives? The housing shortage in San Francisco is democrats too. Maybe with money s…

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