From the outside it looks like the US political scene is a complete and ridiculous mess right now, led by the Republican Congress.
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House tells FCC to drop net neutrality
71–80 of 101 posts
Re: House tells FCC to drop net neutrality
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm saying that despite the fact that airlines are a textbook example of an industry with high capital requirements for entry, deregulation did not hand the industry over to a cartel of incumbents. In fact, air carriage is regularly shaken up by new entrants and new market forces.
Deregulation is such a blanket term encompassing so many things (especially the things regulated right now) that it by itself can't be judged a cure-all. Imagine deregulating the food industry by disbanding the FDA. Loss of net neutrality will hurt small players in the web space(imagine a startup competitor to Netflix which can't afford deals with so many ISPs).
Where is the startup competitor to Netflix that will be hurt? Can you send me a link or something?
Re: House tells FCC to drop net neutrality
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I am not mistaken, setting up a working telecom startup is quite capital intensive, and has high running costs on top of it, just in terms of handling Marketing and competitive pressures. How would a new startup survive and scale by any change in rules? The market would still serve the incumbents more than the startups - since their scale would make them stronger bets. I'm curious to know what type of regulation w…
So is starting an airline, but deregulation still got us Southwest and Jetblue.
Yes! And believe it or not, Southwest is now the largest carrier in the US! What a success story.
Re: House tells FCC to drop net neutrality
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
By creating rules making it harder to create new companies with novel business models for providing Internet service, because those business models might in theory allow an incumbent to unlevel the playing field.
So, is your position that we shouldn't pass any laws or regulations because they may have unintended side-effects on companies that may exist in the future ? That sounds like pretty weak tea to me. What on earth is wrong with the FCC stating that no company can give precedence to any specific source/destination's traffic over another source/destination's traffic ? All it does is codify the basic principle that the In…
Listen to yourself. Where did you get the idea that I think we shouldn't pass laws or regulations at all? This is a message board political flame war rattling its cage trying to escape. Kill it.
I don't particularly support this regulation (I'm not totally against it, either). Many other things, I do think we should regulate.
What's wrong here is that I think it's too early in the connectivity industry to say that the incumbents we have now are so powerful that we should freeze them into place with regulations. And even if it isn't, it's not the place of an unelected and unaccountable FCC commissioner to pass a law that couldn't get passed through Congress, where the Constitution says new laws should come from.
Every time you say the FCC should be able to make up a new rule, you're in effect saying that the executive branch should be able to make rules there by fiat. I don't recall any us being so psyched about that prospect when Cheney was President.
Re: House tells FCC to drop net neutrality
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you are saying LESS regulation is the change in regulation you would like to see? So what regulations would you remove?
Franchise agreements and rights of way prevent new ISPs from entering the market. If you want to deregulate, you could start there. I don't think it would help due to the incumbents' economy of scale, though.
Cable franchises and rights of way are scarce goods that were quickly priced according to the markets. Regulations are, in part, an attempt to limit the value of those goods and reprice those goods. This doesn't sound like a good plan to me; the government is good at a good many things, but price discovery is not one of them.
The next wave of connectivity providers hopefully will not depend on rights of way. If you want to talk about things the government should do to balance out Internet access, let's reevaluate how we're handling the RF spectrum.
Re: House tells FCC to drop net neutrality
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it's showing cracks now, it's amazing we've held up for 100 years after the cracks we had when Teddy Roosevelt was President. I'm trying to advocate for perspective; I'm not saying things are great or don't need fixing, but remember that things have been much worse in the past.
I feel a lot of the cracks are due to misuse of the system and misallocations in the system.
You think things were used more carefully during the Teapot Dome era? :)
Re: House tells FCC to drop net neutrality
#77Do you have the internet? How would you like it if the FCC required you to pay an extra $20 a month to get movie downloads, whether you want them not, or to allow your kids to access violent video games or adult content, whether you want them to or not, just so everyone would get what the government considers to be “the full Internet experience?” What if you’re low income, and you’d rather spend that $20 on books? Or warm clothes? Or food?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like advocates of net neutrality want low income people to have that choice.
(note words above are not mine)
Re: House tells FCC to drop net neutrality
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a liberal Democrat and I'm queasy about enforced net neutrality; these are rules that govern what companies can do with their own infrastructure, and rules that could unintentionally retard progress instead of protecting it. Further, Congress has a legitimate gripe here. We don't elect FCC commissioners. They're appointed. We should be particularly concerned about them overstepping their bounds. Which a reasonabl…
Wasn't that infrastructure paid for by taxes?
No? Not really? Pretty sure AT&T and Comcast spend way way more of their own money forklifting in CRS1's and terminating circuits? From where do you get the idea that the major carriers are heavily subsidized? I'm sure they get breaks, but no, I don't think your taxes fund AT&T, Comcast, L3, &c.
Re: House tells FCC to drop net neutrality
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a liberal Democrat and I'm queasy about enforced net neutrality; these are rules that govern what companies can do with their own infrastructure, and rules that could unintentionally retard progress instead of protecting it. Further, Congress has a legitimate gripe here. We don't elect FCC commissioners. They're appointed. We should be particularly concerned about them overstepping their bounds. Which a reasonabl…
I think we're at a point where Internet access needs to be classified as a utility, like electricity and water. We are indeed in a situation where many companies have invested in their own infrastructure and maybe that requires consideration. I'm absolutely certain that jimktrains2 has a point: the U.S. taxpayers coughed up tremendous amounts of money to invest in infrastructure which makes those lines ours. (Sure, '…
There is no company I have to deal with on a regular basis that is worse than the electrical company.
This Internet stuff is not really a voting issue for me (health care and education are the big things that make me a Dem and not a Lib), but the candidate that tells me he wants to turn AT&T into Commonwealth Edison has secured a donation from me to his opponent.
Be careful what you wish for.
Re: House tells FCC to drop net neutrality
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a liberal Democrat and I'm queasy about enforced net neutrality; these are rules that govern what companies can do with their own infrastructure, and rules that could unintentionally retard progress instead of protecting it. Further, Congress has a legitimate gripe here. We don't elect FCC commissioners. They're appointed. We should be particularly concerned about them overstepping their bounds. Which a reasonabl…
While I agree that Congress has a legitimate gripe with overstepping unelected officials, I really think that's a separate issue that should be treated independently. Regarding rules that could unintentionally retard progress - that's not necessarily a bad thing. In the same sense, the FDA retards progress of the pharmaceutical industry. We should be able to decide that some things are harmful enough to individuals a…
All this is reasonable. Having said that, on an issue where reasonable people can so clearly have reasonable disagreements, and where so much is at stake, it is simply not unreasonable for Congress to demand that rulemaking occur the legislative process.
The EFF is right about this. Whether you like net neutrality or not, you should hope the GOP wins this one. I don't want to imagine what stupid shit President Romney could come up with for the FCC to do to the Internet.