91–100 of 146 posts
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That's a bargain compared to being on the wrong end of a federal copyright lawsuit.
Considering that the 'process' doesn't work (assumming the folks above are correct about being ignored), what makes you think you won't end up on the wrong end of a federal copyright lawsuit even after your $35 donation?
"Don't violate the law over our network" is not an unreasonable expectation, and "we will shut off service to people that violate the law using our network" is not an unreasonable penalty. It's hard to imagine any business of any kind taking the position "feel free to violate the law over our network" or deciding that they just won't do anything about it if people do. Imagine a restaurant that could see you operating…
The law in America is enforced by the courts, not by private corporations.
"Don't violate the law over our network" is not an unreasonable expectation, and "we will shut off service to people that violate the law using our network" is not an unreasonable penalty. It's hard to imagine any business of any kind taking the position "feel free to violate the law over our network" or deciding that they just won't do anything about it if people do. Imagine a restaurant that could see you operating…
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You can still connect to a low speed ISP much in the same way that people banned from Twitter or YouTube can still use much smaller platforms with a lower reach.
My tax dollars helped pay for the infrastructure that the ISP is selling me service over. It's a little different from Twitter or Youtube, who are just a site on the Internet.
I am someone who believes that private businesses should be free to discriminate with regards to whom they provide service but we are faced with varying degrees of subsidization and I'm not sure where you would draw the line. Another issue is that there is really no non-subsidized alternate choice of note to these corporations at this level in the United States. These large corporations lobby and help craft favorable legislation on a continual bases. There is a very complex and murky relationship between the large corporations in the United States and the various governing bodies.
How does this differ from the deplatforming we've recently seen with Twitter, Apple app store, Gab from hosting providers, facebook, youtube, etc?
People actually are accused of doing something illegal by law.
I think OP's point was that if this bothers you and the recent de-platforming of people and websites does not, maybe you should rethink your position. But maybe I misread OP?
How does this differ from the deplatforming we've recently seen with Twitter, Apple app store, Gab from hosting providers, facebook, youtube, etc?
There are a lot of platforms to choose from, but my house is only physically connected by one high speed ISP.
Some of these accounts that were de-platformed completely erased followings that they had developed over years of working that were probably worth millions of dollars to them. To imply that you finding a different ISP is a greater inconvenience than what these businesses had to face is doubtful. Even if you had to completely move to a new home to get service it could be argued that it was still less of an inconvenience.
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> what happens if your service is cut in error. Do you trust ATT to have a fair, easy appeals process? This is where many of the arguments against government regulation break down. If you take government out of the picture, you're still left dealing with massive institutions and bureaucratic regulations. The main difference is that those institutions are even less accountable to the average person than the government…
Yep. We need government, because without government nobody would save us from the abuses of copyright law, enforced by the government! And let's not forget, there is no competition - because the ISP has a legal monopoly, also enforced by the government. Yep, government regulation sounds great. /s
I’m sure many of us believe in following and enforcing laws (even flawed laws like 150yr copyright), but are still made uneasy by this development. I think the source of that discomfort is - what happens if your service is cut in error. Do you trust ATT to have a fair, easy appeals process? Competition in the form of space internet can’t come soon enough, not to enable pirates, but to ensure normal people have reason…
> what happens if your service is cut in error. Do you trust ATT to have a fair, easy appeals process? This is where many of the arguments against government regulation break down. If you take government out of the picture, you're still left dealing with massive institutions and bureaucratic regulations. The main difference is that those institutions are even less accountable to the average person than the government…
This is only true of uncompetitive markets. If Target refused to sell you clothes because someone made a false copyright infringement claim against you, you would laugh in their face and go shop at any of a thousand other stores. And for exactly that reason they don't even attempt to do things like that.
Moreover, in many cases the regulations are what make markets uncompetitive. Providing internet service to urban areas is highly lucrative and has relatively low costs -- if you could pull $40/month from each of a hundred people just for wiring a single high rise, companies would be lining up left and right to do that. But you aren't allowed to do that without also providing service to an area covering hundreds of square miles, including random farmhouses that are ten miles apart from one another. A competent government would instead solve that problem through direct subsidies to providers who expand into rural areas (or leave it to the market to figure out how to connect sparse farmhouses with some kind of medium-speed directional wireless or similar), and then there would be more competition. But we haven't got that.
Moreover, even when there are actual natural monopolies (like roads or rural internet) that can justify government involvement, what works best in those cases is often for the government to just provide the thing directly rather than trying to regulate some independent private entity with a 96% chance of capturing the regulators.
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There are perfectly legitimate reasons for 'consuming' a large amount of bandwidth. For example, I help seed a number of Linux distro ISOs over bittorrent, and once got a letter from my absolute shit of an ISP (Frontier, if you are reading this, it's you).
Plenty of legitimate usage, I'm talking about the fact that masking your traffic with a VPN isn't really protection when these 'courts' can demand you prove you weren't pirating content in order to restore your service. So getting away with piracy by way of plausible deniability is much harder.
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Yep. We need government, because without government nobody would save us from the abuses of copyright law, enforced by the government! And let's not forget, there is no competition - because the ISP has a legal monopoly, also enforced by the government. Yep, government regulation sounds great. /s
Please do educate me as to how the government enforces a geographic monopoly.