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FCC votes to restore net neutrality rules

nytimes.com

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Re: FCC votes to restore net neutrality rules

#531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also gun laws. Any firearm enthusiast can tell you how inconsistent and incoherent various ATF rulings and determinations have been.

You lost me at "firearm enthusiast." Try again when US gun laws look more like Japan's -- including an assault weapons ban. https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/08/asia/japan-gun-laws-abe-shoot...

I don't see the relevance to the topic being discussed.

The fact remains that the ATF enjoys the ability to unilaterally revise firearm policy well beyond what many find reasonable without a change in law made by Congress.

Re: FCC votes to restore net neutrality rules

#532

While they're at it they could restore the FCC fairness doctrine, repealed in 1987.

As a United States immigrant, I had never heard of the fairness doctrine before. My first thought is: how would it be compatible with the freedom of the press granted by the First Amendment?

Your instincts are correct. It is not compatible with the First Amendment.

Re: FCC votes to restore net neutrality rules

#533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, the right to free speech is not a right to commit fraud or slander against another. If it were, society would fall into catastrophic disarray. Fraud and slander are not illegal purely on the basis of content of the speech used to conduct the activities. A sufficiently culpable and provable malicious intent must also exist. It's not fraud or slander to state an opinion one sincerely believes in, and obt…

> Fraud and slander are not illegal purely on the basis of content of the speech used to conduct the activities. A sufficiently culpable and provable malicious intent must also exist. Now point me to where the first amendment says "except in cases where a sufficiently culpable and provable malicious intent also exists". It doesn't say that. It makes no concessions and imposes no bounds itself on the right to declare…

Have as anybody ever done any research into the consequences of removing consequences from your average person through excessive government smothering (protection for some depending on your upbringing).

This causes the lowest common denominator to live and influence the world much more vividly than ever before. And our politicians are super cool with that because it's their secret for creating long political careers.

So, they subsidize the lowest common denominators of society, the ones that would have dunning-krugered themselves ten times over, then the politicians tell them if they want to survive, they have to vote for us, or the other guy will take your livelihood. 9/10 times it's a lie, but they're super easy to manipulate and cheap to subsidize (buy votes - this cheapness is important to their super PACs low cost per vote is just simple business, better to buy one McConnell or Pelosi than 5 fresh faces) so they keep the voters miserable, in pain, and desperate for government help.

But what is this doing to the average competency of humans overall? This group of low-understanders keep demanding that we put together more bureaucracy and regulations slowing down progress so the politicians can look like they're doing something when they should be demanding the opposite and instead pushing for transparency and consumer choice laws. These nip profits pretty badly though, so our bought politicians never push the idea.

Even this Net Neutrality scuffle is just them creating solutions to problems they've already caused with overregulation creating no competition. Then we get the lowest common denominators cheering it and it's just sad.

Re: FCC votes to restore net neutrality rules

#534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the FCC Net Neutrality is inconsequential.

Localities experimented with a policy, a federal agency agreed with the outcome of the policy, so the agency adopted the policy. It's a functional example of letting states be experimentation grounds for policy. Could you explain what makes this process "inconsequential"?

The internet with FCC Net Neutrality was the same as the internet without FCC Net Neutrality.

Ergo, FCC Net Neutrality is inconsequential.

Re: FCC votes to restore net neutrality rules

#535

The amount of pro-net neutrality in here is a clear demonstration of the opinion forming power of John Oliver, by dressing the issue as affecting users instead of companies. A lot of people seem very confused about what “neutrality” means, and it’s consequences. As an analogy, VAT is an equal tax (everyone pays the same VAT) but it’s a very non-progressive tax (it burdens poor people more than rich people. Your ISP d…

I became "pro-net neutrality" back in the 2010's when Verizon was trying to charge an extra $20/mo for hot spot functionality on my provider locked android phone.

After some rooting and side loading I was gleefully working around that until FCC came down on them for it [1]. Net Neutrality was passed after that and only seemed like a logical response as a means of consumer protection.

It has always been a user facing issue, it's just not one that many people seem to want to expend the energy to think about how it impacts them. Netflix isn't using that bandwidth, the users are. Without users, Netflix would use low/no bandwidth, just as it did when it was renting DVDs. The users are paying for their own access and speeds to be able to watch netflix over the internet instead. And in turn Netflix is paying their ISP to be able to provide that data. Punishing either the users or the web hosts for finding a more effective use case for the internet than just sending static pages is the ISPs either trying to find a way to blame someone else for having over provisioned their network. Or they are trying to strong arm web hosts into paying more because they have regional monopolies and can get away with it. As a consumer if I had a choice between two ISPs and one of them throttling Netflix to try and extort them for more money, even for self centered reasons I would pick the other just to have better service. But there are a lot of areas where that isn't the case and there is a single major broadband provider who has free reign.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/what-verizons-fcc-tethering...

Re: FCC votes to restore net neutrality rules

#536
post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did anyone say that?

I think the point the person you're replying to was trying to make is that the line drawn between things the government should have a hand in vs. things they should leave alone is fairly arbitrary, and is a matter of opinion. So saying the government should be kept away from the internet is just one place to draw the line, and it's perhaps interesting to know of other places where someone might draw that line, in ord…

The way you positioned the argument is helpful and conducive to a conversation. Just throwing out scenarios and expecting me to derive meaning isn't productive.

Re: FCC votes to restore net neutrality rules

#537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or everyone is happy with the monopoly.

Yep, the Peter Thiel school of thought. But people like that tend to not stay libertarian in any meaningful sense for long; to quote Thiel himself, "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible". That's how you get neo-reactionaries, basically.

You only get neo-reactionaries out of people that define their freedom as including their abilities to coerce others, and then get frustrated that said "freedom" is being impinged. They think they're morally right because they've defined away the coercion.

Personally, around the time the whole Unqualified Reservations / NRx thing was starting up, I considered myself a libertarian with more rightist sympathies. Reading UR and its classification of left versus right is actually what pushed me back into seeing that my philosophy is more aligned with the left. Axiomatic framing and fundamentalism simply doesn't work (cf Gödel). Systems need to be judged on their effective results regardless of their implementations' terminology.

Re: FCC votes to restore net neutrality rules

#538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fraud and slander are not illegal purely on the basis of content of the speech used to conduct the activities. A sufficiently culpable and provable malicious intent must also exist. Now point me to where the first amendment says "except in cases where a sufficiently culpable and provable malicious intent also exists". It doesn't say that. It makes no concessions and imposes no bounds itself on the right to declare…

I think you just said: these are contradictory, and then you did a cognitive dissonance to avoid that conclusion by saying but it's fine, because I want to build society. But the "Anti-Free/Speech Anti-1A ideas = building society" is just a fallacy that have been assumed. Here, it's even admitted: "It states the complete and universal right without any caveats whatsoever,". then you do the dissonance dance because yo…

There's a difference between "states" and "justly means". The words do not include all of the things that are obviously just and true. It is obviously just and true, both to the official dedicated arbiters of such things, and also to anyone else who thinks even a little bit about the consequences of fraud, that the rights granted by the first amendment necessarily only work with unstated conditions.

Re: FCC votes to restore net neutrality rules

#539

I'm fully in support of net neutrality, but I'm somewhat surprised they're restoring it, as I have not really heard a peep about it since it was repealed in the first place. From my perspective, nothing about the internet changed since then (my experience did not upgrade or downgrade). People stopped talking about it, there weren't major protests, news about it even largely disappeared from the front page of HN (!).…

It feels like everyone has short memories. Net neutrality abuse did indeed happen, a few notable incidents, — Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile slowed down YouTube + Netflix traffic. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-04/youtube-a... — Verizon throttles so much that the Santa Clara County Fire Department’s ability to provide emergency services during the California wildfires. "The fire department experienced s…

the bloomberg article is paywalled. it doesnt event exist, as far as im concerned.

Re: FCC votes to restore net neutrality rules

#540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fraud and slander are not illegal purely on the basis of content of the speech used to conduct the activities. A sufficiently culpable and provable malicious intent must also exist. Now point me to where the first amendment says "except in cases where a sufficiently culpable and provable malicious intent also exists". It doesn't say that. It makes no concessions and imposes no bounds itself on the right to declare…

Have as anybody ever done any research into the consequences of removing consequences from your average person through excessive government smothering (protection for some depending on your upbringing). This causes the lowest common denominator to live and influence the world much more vividly than ever before. And our politicians are super cool with that because it's their secret for creating long political careers.…

> Have as anybody ever done any research into the consequences of removing consequences from your average person

For a lot of it, yeah, it's called history.

Generally speaking, the consequences we have now are because of what was seen to happen when we didn't have them before. Regulations nearly always happen after the fact. Laws against stealing happen because people are stealing, and that's bad. Laws against murder happen because people are murdering, and that's bad. Laws against putting asbestos in things happen because people are putting asbestos in things, and that's bad. Laws against fraud happen because people are doing fraud, and that's bad. Laws about net neutrality happen because ISPs start enacting or publicly preparing to enact abusive policies. You don't need to remove the consequences. We already know what things were like before we started applying them.

Are the consequences we have now the right consequences? That's a much harder question to answer.

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