471–480 of 598 posts
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Hm. I would encourage a different, less intense angle here. It’s possible the doomsday didn’t come to pass because a lot of passionate people worked very hard to make sure we avoided it.
The null hypothesis is that market forces takes care of it. Like your airline ticket prices. The onus of proof is on you to market forces aren't enough.
The FTC chair and this honestly is the best reason to vote for the Biden Administration (I feel like at this point whose in office largely doesn't matter 98% of the time, they're too old and or self absorbed to be heavily involved). Really just voting for the people they put in charge of everything below them, which was always the case, just more so now.
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It's probably because none of the hysterics or doomsday propaganda actually came to pass.
The doomsday "propaganda" didn't come to pass because several states and localities promptly passed their own net neutrality laws after it was deregulated at the federal level. The larger ISPs couldn't find a workable way to implement their non-neutral bullshit in some markets but not others, and the local ISPs in places with no net neutrality laws never really had enough clout to do crappy things in the first place.
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The usual claim in right libertarian circles is that monopolies only arise because they can bribe the government into passing laws that enable them to exist.
Or everyone is happy with the monopoly.
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The American libertarian dream confuses me because unlike libertarians abroad (where it's a synonym with "anarchist") they stop with political authority, and seem to have no issue with corporate authority. The ISP business in the USA is very clearly an oligopoly with the top players colluding. Not sure how a rugged individual is supposed to fight back against that.
The usual claim in right libertarian circles is that monopolies only arise because they can bribe the government into passing laws that enable them to exist.
And for this purpose, “government action” excludes protection of what the libertarian in question thinks of as proper property rights, which almost dogmatically have no adverse consequences.
I thought Net Neutrality was a “has been” idea … Opponents have been doing a victory lap for some time. COVID especially showed how much better the US Internet expands and contracts based on demands. As far as I know, nobody has accused ISPs of throtteling Netflix. The whole idea behind CDNs is we should stop treating all Internet users as equals, and connect based on geography. Not dystopian censorship, but the sort…
In those areas, I can use a vpn and easily get hd video.
Although, the cell network is pretty terrible where I am, and more often than not there is no hope for streaming hd video.
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Earmarks are back. They were against the House's rules for 10 years, but the 117th Congress started allowing them again in 2021.
And the past three years have seen the return of friendliness and comity unseen for a decade /s
The rules under Obama were far better, and strangely better under Trump. They have taken the privacy provisions back that were allowed previously. Please read the fine print, and call your congress person, and senator and let them know you demand true net neutrality, and your privacy needs to be protected, with emergency services only having priority above other traffic.
Please read these new rules.
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The American libertarian dream confuses me because unlike libertarians abroad (where it's a synonym with "anarchist") they stop with political authority, and seem to have no issue with corporate authority. The ISP business in the USA is very clearly an oligopoly with the top players colluding. Not sure how a rugged individual is supposed to fight back against that.
libertarians are a subgroup of classical liberalism; limited government and socially liberal, or at least the right to live as one wants within reason in a society. Anarchists, at least to Americans, have so many subgroups I don't even know where to start, it always seems completely watered down to me other than the "no central government" part.
No, they aren’t. There is some overlap between “libertarians” and groups from left to right (in the modern sense) that are grounded primarily in classical liberalism, and those include the bulk of what tend to get labeled “libertarians” in America (which are mostly the center-to-right subset of the classical liberal subset of libertarians.)
But “libertarian” also encompasses anarchists, libertarian socialists, and a number of other left-libertarian ideologies that are not particularly grounded in what would usually be regarded as classical liberalism (most of them are grounded in newer philosophies which could reasonably be viewed as later developments from or reactions against – but not in a reverse direction – classical liberalism.)
great, what are the odds they reverse the reversal next year in a hypothetical new administration?