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

latimes.com

291–300 of 423 posts

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

#291
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those appear to be economists, not Internet domain specialists. Less than half agree or strongly agree and in the weighted chart, a whopping 41% are Uncertain, which suggests they recognize that they don't know much about the subject. Many of the comments by Agree and Strongly Agree respondents indicate they don't understand the subject fully.

> 41% are Uncertain, which suggests they recognize that they don't know much about the subject > comments by Agree and Strongly Agree respondents indicate they don't understand the subject fully So according to this reasoning no matter what answer you give, you don't understand the issue. > Those appear to be economists, not Internet domain specialists. NN is about regulating the internet. Economists are experts in t…

> NN is about regulating the internet. Economists are experts in the domain of regulation.

Wait, what? Knowing a lot about regulation in general doesn't mean you know shit about any given subject of regulation in particular.

By your logic we should fire the doctors and scientists at the FDA and replace them with economists.

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

#292
post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's wasn't obvious to me that trucking is much less energy effecient than rail. According to treehugger.com rail achieves "400 ton-miles per gallon whereas trucks currently hover around 130 ton-miles per gallon" [1]. I wonder why that would be - rubber tires vs steel-on-steel? Traffic? There isn't much traffic during the majority of a long-haul and the last few miles have to be done by truck anyway. [1] https://www.…

Braking and acceleration - once you get x tons of anything moving, it generally wants to keep moving. Trains are tens of times longer than trucks, brake significantly less often, and have a lot more horsepower for acceleration.

The other thing is, you can string wires along the rails relatively easily, and power everything directly with electricity - which offers substantial savings from efficiency of large scale power generation, even accounting for distribution losses. Better yet, you can then use regenerative braking, and feed energy back into the line.

I do believe there's some benefit from the tracks themselves as well, though. Surely there's a lot less friction (per ton of weight) between the train wheels and steel rails, than there is between truck tires and the road?

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

#293
post #250
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the language is wrong. Getting rid of net neutrality doesn’t introduce fast lanes, it introduces slow lanes. Nobody will get faster service than today, but some will get slower service.

Some people could get faster service than they do today, in the sense that a given flow (e.g. VoIP data) might go from having equal QoS priority to having higher QoS priority, meaning that under congestion , their flow might go from being slow (before) to being the-speed-they're-paying-for. Of course, that would come at the expense of other flows (e.g. BitTorrent) having lower relative QoS priority, making them slowe…

The net neutrality in the EU isn't perfect, but it does allow for QoS for things like VoIP.

EDIT: Example: Free Music Streaming by T-Mobile [1] is active in EU as well. So if you stream from Spotify its "free" yet when you stream from your home server, via a VPN, or an unsupported service it isn't "free".

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/18/t-mobile-stops-counting-da...

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

#294
post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's wasn't obvious to me that trucking is much less energy effecient than rail. According to treehugger.com rail achieves "400 ton-miles per gallon whereas trucks currently hover around 130 ton-miles per gallon" [1]. I wonder why that would be - rubber tires vs steel-on-steel? Traffic? There isn't much traffic during the majority of a long-haul and the last few miles have to be done by truck anyway. [1] https://www.…

Braking and acceleration - once you get x tons of anything moving, it generally wants to keep moving. Trains are tens of times longer than trucks, brake significantly less often, and have a lot more horsepower for acceleration.

I'd also say increased engine efficiency resulting from being able to have a bigger engine to move more tons.

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

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could make the valid argument that no matter how beneficial net neutrality may be it isn't within the regulatory authority of the FCC to define or enforce such according to the agency's definition per their charter. This is perhaps the best argument for killing net neutrality. The common consideration is that killing net neutrality poses a direct and immediate harm to consumers of potential discriminatory practic…

https://www.fcc.gov/about/overview > The Federal Communications Commission regulates interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories. An independent U.S. government agency overseen by Congress, the Commission is the federal agency responsible for implementing and enforcing America’s communications law and regu…

> I am real curious why people think that the Internet, which is a communication medium, is not within the regulatory authority of the FCC.

Despite the name the FCC does not regulate communications. The FCC regulates spectrum and interstate commerce thereof. Despite the definition on the FCC.gov site and the Wikipedia page the FCC cannot regulate cable even if they wanted to as mentioned by both Pai and Wheeler.

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

#296
I think the best possible investment one can ever make is politics. These people have probably got paid million or less dollars and they would generate the reruns of literally 10s of billions of dollars. Nearly guaranteed 10000X returns in just year or two is unheard of anywhere else. I wish politicians were available as ETFs.

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

#297
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bunch of the GOP seems to hold this belief. If there wasn't such a strong movement for net neutrality, I bet a bunch of Democrats would like this as well. I understand there are a lot of lobbyists, but there are many people who sincerely believe the "less regulation and more competition will solve the issues" mantra. I place a lot of the blame on outlets like the Wall Street Journal giving credence to arguments tha…

I'm pretty liberal, and I believe that there is some truth to the "less regulation and more competition will solve the issues" mantra. The issue here being that there isn't a real way to inject more competition into the ISP space. Soooo, we are just getting less regulation. Which will inevitably lead to abuses.

If the government owned the infrastructure, would be held accountable to maintain it, and would provide access to different ISPs there would be more competition. The problem is that some people see this is "regulation" or "socialism" or "lack of choice" while others see this as "healthy competition" and "liberty".

If there's just one infrastructure, or maybe two (cable and DSL) and the ISPs own it then there's barely any competition. That's when you get anti-competitive behaviour.

Such behaviour would be punished in a free market even if it were allowed. But we don't have a free market in this segment. We got monopolies and duopolies.

There are different ways to limit the power of monopolies and duopolies. One is legislation to force them to treat all data equal. Another one could be to break up the large mammoths who are monopolies and duopolies. The latter ain't happening, so why revert the former?

Either due to sheer stupidity or because of heavy lobbying from certain interest groups who'd profit greatly from this (ISPs is my guess).

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

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, the Arab Spring, that beacon of hope and light for the world.

For that part of the world, it certainly was. Not sure what your point is. Yes, ultimately it failed, but it is difficult to dispute that it was a noble attempt. More will come in time.

It was a noble attempt by some, less so by others. The people who were involved in it all had very different goals - it's not like it was an ideologically monolithic movement even within country boundaries. The only unifying force was the opposition to the existing regimes. Which are/were bad, but what some people wanted to replace them was even worse.

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

#299

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.

Murders are illegal "upfront". The regulator declared it illegal. The police would definitely stop a murder attempt.

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

#300

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.

Wait a minute, the opposite of net neutrality is called "net freedom"?

This is sick (the lack of net neutrality is more likely to reduce freedoms than to promote them). If you remotely support net neutrality, please never use that term again. This is self defeating.

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