FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

The FCC frequently stop pirate radio stations since they were not granted a license to broadcast and were causing harmful interference with those who DO have a valid license.

Please step outside your bubble and understand what the FCC does.

And a citation for you, cheers mate: http://www.fcc.gov/maps/fcc-enforcement-actions-against-pira...

If you wish to test them, please setup a pirate radio station and you will be arrested. The sentencing is not pretty, so tread lightly.

> My thesis is that these accounts are not here for legitimate argument.

If you suspect accounts of not being here for legitimate purposes you are welcome to email your suspicions to us at hn@ycombinator.com. But it's not ok to make accusations of astroturfing in HN threads. The degradation it causes to the discourse is obvious from the current discussion alone: wherever it comes up turns into a toxic waste pond.

Personally accusing paulhauggis of being a shill just because you don't like his politics is one of the worst examples I've seen. I think you owe him an apology. Even if you're right that someone refuses to change his mind when shown superior arguments, the only thing that entitles you to accuse them of is human nature.

That would be the ideal, but infrastructure issues such as this can't be handled by a "free market" acting all by itself.

That's because whoever owns the land the infrastructure runs through can block progress, and the free market solution of competing elsewhere doesn't work. Land access is inherently limited by real world access problems that don't obey free market ideology.

A free market for public utilities would start from the public, i.e. government, OWNING said infrastructure outright and then allowing private corporations to lease the right to use it to provide service. Only the government has the legal right to eminent domain so it can build roads and public utilities and generally seize land for the common good - private corporations would have to negotiate with every landowner whose property needs to be crossed, and that is obviously unworkable in the real world.

From the current situation - which is a hodge podge of municipal services, private corporate services, agreements that limit competition, coupled with land access needs only eminent domain can provide - the only way to arrive at this paradise of "free market competition" is for the government to nationalize the entire thing, void all contracts with private service providers, and recreate the rules to allow competition among service providers by renting/licensing the infrastructure that is owned by the public. Otherwise it would take decades for existing agreements to expire or be renegotiated, and any improvement still have to rely on access and easements and various forms of eminent domain anyway.

I cannot imagine the unending howling of the libertarian-type crowd if this were to happen. They complain that various governments have created this situation (municipalities giving exclusive deals to cable providers) but government power had to be there in the first place or there wouldn't be any infrastructure at all.

> Except the ISPs were never actually throttling content (well, other than BitTorrent, which the FCC promptly told them to stop doing)

Yeah, but Comcast took that FCC order -- made without any advance regulation -- to the courts, which struck it down on the basis that the FCC could not issue such an order under its ancillary authority. Comcast v. FCC, 600 F. 3d 642, D.C. Cir. (2010).

As this specific order to Comcast being struck down was one the things motivating the FCC's initial Open Internet Report and Order which applied nonblocking of lawful applications as a generally-applicable regulation (and which itself was later struck down as being a common carrier regulation which could not be applied without Title II reclassification), its pretty odd to use the existence of the Comcast Order as a way to dismiss the need for generally applicable regulation to prevent blocking (or even, given the history of the subsequent order, to dismiss the need for specifically Title II regulation to prevent blocking.)

It is much cheaper to purchase legislation mandating people buy a product or mandating legal barriers to protect a business from competition than it is to convince people to willing purchase and engage with a business.

Why are people so afraid of each other? Why are people so afraid of allowing their fellow humans to choose the services and products and businesses they want to choose? Why are people so quick to call upon the government to implement through force the ideas they think are best? Especially when they are faced with the reality that their government continually flaunts their own laws when it suits them?

So many intelligent people so quickly willing to give away their rights to a government they criticize on one hand but call upon to protect them with the other.