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Twenty-two states ask appeals court to bring back net neutrality

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Re: Twenty-two states ask appeals court to bring back net neutrality

#241

Post by dragonwriter »

zaphar wrote: post #229
travmatt wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more egregious is the proportioned delegates within the electoral college.

While it is possible that the electoral college needs improvement or replacement, any proposals along those lines should be sure to address the dangers of pure majority rule. While imperfect the electoral college is meant to be a way to mitigate that failures mode of democracy.

> While it is possible that the electoral college needs improvement or replacement, any proposals along those lines should be sure to address the dangers of pure majority rule.

The protection against unchecked bare majority rule is Constitutional limits on the power of government, and an independent judiciary not tied to momentary electoral majority enforcing that, and checks and balances between the separately-elected (both in terms of balloting and timing) political branches. It's possible some of those things could be improved from the status quo system (e.g., moving elections for both houses of Congress forward or back one year so that in addition to different term length, Congressional elections were never simultaneous with Presidential ones.)

Skewing representation in a relatively consistent way (the structural bias in representation in the House, Electoral College, and Senate is all in the same direction, though escalating in degree as you move through that list) does not reduce the danger of tyranny of the majority, it just favors particular interests over others in establishing such a tyranny (and even enables tyranny of the minority, so long as it aligns with the advantaged interest.)

Re: Twenty-two states ask appeals court to bring back net neutrality

#242

Post by smsm42 »

sarchertech wrote: post #237
smsm42 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you confuse the caricature of Trump that is pleasing to you to behold because you disagree with him with the actual Trump. While it is pleasing to think people you disagree with are blithering idiots, in case one of them is a President of the US the ignorance of the real state of affairs is not on your side and is not going to serve you well. It is always wrong to underestimate your opponent, it's particularl…

You have heard Trump speak right? You've heard his nuclear speech and his mouth instrument speech? You've read transcripts of his interviews? Listened to him ramble incoherently while tries to answer questions? Read his tweets? "I'm a very stable genius." "I have the best words." "My IQ is one of the highest." etc... It's hard not to believe the caricature is real when the person creating it is Trump himself. Half of…

Yes, I've heard Trump speak. And I've read the soundbites that people whose only professional interest seems to be to hunt soundbites collected. And since Trumps loves to speak, and his speech style is very peculiar, there's a lot of soundbites. But I also looked beyond the soundbites, and that is what any person that wants to understand and not just confirm their biases formed on Twitter should do. And if you look beyond the soundbites, Trump is not an idiot (neither are Bush, Obama, Clinton or any other politicians who people who get paid for painting caricatures and monetizing them as clicks painted as idiots). He is somewhat of an opportunist, though this is pretty common among politicians. He also has some very definite agenda - which is not to everybody's liking, of course - and part of this agenda is massive deregulation. If you didn't notice that, you may have been paying too much attention to twitter noise and too little attention to what is actually happening in the government (which, contrary to popular belief, is not ruled by tweets).

Re: Twenty-two states ask appeals court to bring back net neutrality

#243

Post by smsm42 »

tzs wrote: post #181
smsm42 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you confuse the caricature of Trump that is pleasing to you to behold because you disagree with him with the actual Trump. While it is pleasing to think people you disagree with are blithering idiots, in case one of them is a President of the US the ignorance of the real state of affairs is not on your side and is not going to serve you well. It is always wrong to underestimate your opponent, it's particularl…

You raise some decent points in general, but it is hard to apply them to Trump in the case of net neutrality because he has actually spoken out on it [1]: > Obama’s attack on the internet is another top down power grab. Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine. Will target conservative media [1] https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/53260835850816716...

In general, having Trump speaking on something in 2014 doesn't mean he'd not flip on it in 2018, but Trump has showed very definite desire for reducing regulations, so without an explicit statement I'd say it's unlikely he'd support Net Neutrality. He also doesn't have much tactical reason to - NN is the cause of major content companies, like FAANG, and those are no Trump's friends, and neither they are friends of his base. So Trump has no reason to try and make nice with them.

Re: Twenty-two states ask appeals court to bring back net neutrality

#244

Post by smsm42 »

openasocket wrote: post #176
smsm42 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to think "checks and balances" means "we have so many ways to get what I want through and it's ok to use any of them in any ways as long as at the end what I want is getting done". It's not the case. "Checks and balances" does not mean "if legislature doesn't get us the result I want, we should try courts next". It means each branch of the government has its role, and for the courts it's upholding the existi…

I recommend reading the filing I linked ( https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/nn_govt_petitioners_br... ) for their arguments, but I'll summarize them here. The alleged APA violation isn't a matter of not filling out the right forms, it's that their whole ruling was based on faulty logic. Basically the APA specifies that agencies have to make their rulings based on existing evidence and provide evidence-based reaso…

> The filing claims they did act arbitrarily and capriciously.

And that's baloney. There are arguments for and against NN, and just claiming "pooh, these other guys just saying nonsense, ignore them" is not a valid argument. It's asking the court to decide that only one side of the policy is correct, and the other side is just idiots. That's not how political decisions should be made in a democratic country.

> which completely ignores the fact that the reason they historically have not throttled people is because it was illegal

If it was illegal before 2015, then doesn't returning to pre-2015 state keep it so? In any case, if it's not illegal now, the Congress can easily make it illegal, it's not for the court to decide that though. Again, the discussion of whether we can trust providers to not throttle and whether we need government regulation to enforce that does not belong in court. It belongs in public discourse, which leads to electing representatives, which produce relevant legislation (or don't if people do not elect those representatives that want to do it).

> The actual argument is pretty technical, but that's the gist of it.

I am not nearly qualified to evaluate the technical arguments on merit, but for a common person something like "it's legal to enact NN, but it's illegal to rescind this action" sounds insane. If they just said "you're ok to remove federal NN rules, but you can't prevent us to make such rules on more local level", then they might have an argument there (though it still doesn't make that decision "arbitrary", it's just a discussion about limits of federalism in a particular case) but is that what they are arguing? I thought they are arguing for the return of federal legislation as enacted in 2015, aren't they?

Re: Twenty-two states ask appeals court to bring back net neutrality

#245

Post by smsm42 »

peterwwillis wrote: post #139
smsm42 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's called checks and balances, and it was how the system was designed to work. No, it's not. Just repeating "checks and balances" doesn't mean courts can be abused for doing something that is not court's purpose. The court's purpose is preserving the consistency of legislation (including the Constitution as supreme, very hard to change part of the law) and adherence of executive to the law. In this case, the exec…

> They are being used to force through a policy that is not supported by either legislature or executive. That's not a function of a proper court. They're asking the court to reverse the repealing of legislation, with the argument that the FCC should not have been allowed to repeal it because their legal reasoning was flawed. Who is pushing policy? Was Obama pushing policy by instituting regulation? Was the FCC pushi…

> Was Obama pushing policy by instituting regulation?

Yes.

> Was the FCC pushing policy by repealing it?

Yes.

> Welcome to government.

There's no problem with either Obama's executive or Trump's executive pushing their respective policies. People elected Obama, people got Obama's policies. People elected Trump next, people got Trump's policies. That's how it should work. The problem is when people are unhappy with Trump's policies and try to use courts to declare that only one side of the issue is legal and another is illegal. That's not how policymaking should work.

> It's all about pushing policy, any way you can.

Not in a proper government. In a proper government, courts should not be for pushing policy. If you want your policy, convince people to elect you and then enact the policy. Otherwise there would be no stable government possible - the Republicans would appoint their judges which would block every decision of Democrats, and Democrats would appoint their judges which would block every decision of Republicans, and it will always be about which team wins and never about getting anything good done. We're almost there anyway, but it's not a good thing, and there's no reason to make it even worse. Even if that means sometimes your team doesn't win.

> Politics is the art of doing anything you possibly can to advance your agenda

Why not murder your political opponents then (say you could get away with it at least long enough for the policy to be enacted?) Why not fake mass casualty terrorist attacks in the name of your opponents? Why there should be any rules at all? I think you'd agree there's some place where we'd like to draw the line. I'd want the line to be at using legislature for lawmaking and courts for enforcing laws.

Re: Twenty-two states ask appeals court to bring back net neutrality

#246

Post by learc83 »

smsm42 wrote: post #242
sarchertech wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have heard Trump speak right? You've heard his nuclear speech and his mouth instrument speech? You've read transcripts of his interviews? Listened to him ramble incoherently while tries to answer questions? Read his tweets? "I'm a very stable genius." "I have the best words." "My IQ is one of the highest." etc... It's hard not to believe the caricature is real when the person creating it is Trump himself. Half of…

Yes, I've heard Trump speak. And I've read the soundbites that people whose only professional interest seems to be to hunt soundbites collected. And since Trumps loves to speak, and his speech style is very peculiar, there's a lot of soundbites. But I also looked beyond the soundbites, and that is what any person that wants to understand and not just confirm their biases formed on Twitter should do. And if you look b…

>He also has some very definite agenda

I don't think this is true at all. You could say that deregulation is his is goal, but you'd have to ignore his opposition to free trade and immigration, which are every bit as central to his policies as tax cuts, and reigning in the EPA.

His agenda is whatever works for him right now. He throws out policy ideas and sees what sticks. Granted it does take some amount of intelligence to recognize what's working and what's not, but I think his success is mostly a product of iteration and luck--he's been sticking his toes in politics since the late 90s.

But let's say he is fairly intelligent--his ability to believe his own bullshit means that he is just plain wrong about as often as someone who is actually just dumb. Completely ignoring his speaking style, he is just constantly, factually wrong. He's wrong about little details that aren't politically advantageous to lie about.

And like you said, he likes to talk, but nothing he's ever written or spoken about gives me any indication that he has more than a surface level understanding of any topic.

Re: Twenty-two states ask appeals court to bring back net neutrality

#247

Post by Veelox »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #190
justinzollars wrote: post #40

I would like to see Twitter, Google, CloudFlare and Facebook classified as public utilities. While Alex Jones is a nut case (And shouldn't be defended), other less publicized incidents of censorship by Social Media companies has occurred (related to picking winners between Israel and Palestine) [1]. While I am a Democrat who has been elected in the past, I agree with the conservative argument that: Corporate censorsh…

As a fellow Democrat, I'm deeply disappointed to hear this. First, it's not a conservative argument in favor of free speech, because their criticisms of limits to free speech are limited to speech that they support. Second, the first amendment is clearly and unambiguously intended to protect the right to free speech from governmental interference. There are myriad outlets for speech, and as long as that continues to…

>right to free speech from governmental interference

I don't like where this argument goes. Do you think it should be legal for Google to remove every search result of a cannabis business? Should it have been legal for Google to censer anyone advocating for LGBT rights before they were a protected class? If you answer no to those questions its hard to justify saying that 1A only applies to the government.

Re: Twenty-two states ask appeals court to bring back net neutrality

#248

Post by thaumaturgy »

Veelox wrote: post #247
thaumaturgy wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a fellow Democrat, I'm deeply disappointed to hear this. First, it's not a conservative argument in favor of free speech, because their criticisms of limits to free speech are limited to speech that they support. Second, the first amendment is clearly and unambiguously intended to protect the right to free speech from governmental interference. There are myriad outlets for speech, and as long as that continues to…

>right to free speech from governmental interference I don't like where this argument goes. Do you think it should be legal for Google to remove every search result of a cannabis business? Should it have been legal for Google to censer anyone advocating for LGBT rights before they were a protected class? If you answer no to those questions its hard to justify saying that 1A only applies to the government.

Answer to both was yes, even before I got to your last sentence.

That's not a statement that I think either of those things is right. I would and should expect a lot of user and community backlash from actions like those.

But as far as the law is concerned, those things should be legal. Again, because to do otherwise would mean forcing businesses to adopt the government's position on any number of subjects.

And no, I'm not a free-market libertarian. There are lots of things I think businesses should be forced to do under strong regulatory terms. This just doesn't happen to be one of them.

Re: Twenty-two states ask appeals court to bring back net neutrality

#249

Post by Doxin »

sn0v wrote: post #171
_bxg1 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...which they're now allowed to do, without net neutrality.

Even with net neutrality, they were allowed to do so. In fact, they were mandated to provide an even footing for all websites.

The point being that without net neutrality they can fudge the speed tests by prioritising that bandwidth, and excluding it from throttling.

Re: Twenty-two states ask appeals court to bring back net neutrality

#250

Post by andymal »

onemoresoop wrote: post #164

I was wondering whether post the net neutrality repeal any IP has actually started tiered internet packages based on what content is being accessed, whether they stared throttling as many were fearing. If they hadn't it doesn't mean that they won't, was just curious if it's happened yet

In the ARS article about Verizon throttling the CA fire dept's service they said the throttling policy was changed from "throttling during high congestion" to "throttling when they use their alloted amount of 'unlimited' data". This change was made basically immediately after the repeal went into effect.
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