Journal Marxist Hacker 42's Journal: When did Net Neutrality change? 26
As late as last year, I remember Net Neutrality being a libertarian free market concept- preventing a crony corporate takeover of the Internet. Now that it is being implemented by the FCC, it has suddenly become a crony corporate (Democrat Brand) takeover of the Internet, that all good libertarians should oppose.
I haven't had political whiplash like this since the Catholic Church went from those nice monks doing AIDS research and running hospice care centers to those bigots who want to keep THOSE people from marrying.
It changes when the 'wrong' people do it. (Score:1)
That's the nature of all things political. The same was true for 'Obamacare'. The same is true for the wars.
And the Catholic church, please. Those 'nice monks' were quite the fantasy. Those that did/do exist, never get very far in the Vatican. Today's bigotry is a mere vestige of the Inquisition.
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And, while no raging fan of Rome's bureaucracy, I haven't ever met a monk or priest that wasn't a walking copy of the Beatitudes.
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I'm glad you haven't met such a sorry man, I have a couple of times. They strive to be, but priests and monks fail like the rest of us, sometimes spectacularly.
Having said that, the group I'm thinking of is now long gone; they volunteered in 1991 to be a control group for an AIDS infection study. They're all dead now, but their generous donation of their lives is why we have HIV drugs today.
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They were paid back a half a decade later by the parish they went to in San Francisco being vandalized during the Prop 8 debate. That's one of the reasons why I'm not very sympathetic to homosexuals, I've seen how they treat their friends.
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No, it's a function of organizational behavior.
Only of the confrontational kind, which politics definitely is, documented every day on the TV and here on Slashdot :-), otherwise it's categorically untrue and merely scapegoating. There are plenty people that can actually work happily together without any such nonsense. It pretty much boils down to being aware of and controlling one's ego and ambition to avoid what is similar to the *not invented here* syndrome.
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There are plenty people that can actually work happily together without any such nonsense.
I defy you to show a non-trivial, worked example. Even for a stylized case like a symphony, there are still interpersonal rivalries at work. The "entropy of the human soul" can be minimalized (at, say, a monastary), but never retired. And a symphony or a monastery are miniscule, edge cases.
pretty much the opposite here (Score:1)
"As late as last year, I remember Net Neutrality being a libertarian free market concept"
All I've ever seen about it is Left-wingers saying we must have it. I've gathered that it's about getting government to interfere with the free market, by telling carriers that they can't charge more for premium levels of service.
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...telling carriers that they can't charge more for premium levels of service.
Not while they are protected monopolies.
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I said libertarian, not conservative. Left wing libertarians do exist, you know. And common carrier laws have been a part of their mantra ever since the Pony Express, it wasn't exactly internet related.
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But being in support of common carrier laws, that apply to the whole country, would not be even Left-leaning libertarian. It would have to be collectivism, that was completely voluntary. I'm pretty sure that's not what pro Net Neutrality folk were about.
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In what way is insuring a fair and free market collectivism?
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Because, getting back to your original question, it is 'bad' when the collective (you and me, and everybody else) works together and does it, as opposed to merely allowing itself to be subjugated by the private businessman, who, if he does it, then it is 'good'. The act itself is almost irrelevant. Perception is everything. According to one person's book here, each man is an island, and is on his own.
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So a free market is bad when everybody is able to invest, but is good when a chosen few are able to invest?
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Some people actually believe that, yes, though they will evade and obfuscate to no end. An open market with equal access is an anathema to their ideals, and though they claim to be all for 'freedom' and stuff, what they really want is an privilege/entitlement system, a caste system, with indentured servitude. They dream of personal aristocracy. Some will even tell you that only property owners should be allowed to vote. To these people, a collective's investments and consensus and self defense are socialism
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>>> Left wing libertarians do exist, you know.
>> But being in support of common carrier laws, [...]
> In what way is insuring a fair and free market collectivism?
Subjecting businesses to common carrier laws is giving the collective priority over the owning individuals. The government decides how much you'll charge and how much you'll make; hardly a free market.
I think Leftism and libertarianism in combination is like agnosticism (about the existence of God): Possible in theory, but given
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Common carrier laws don't determine either how much you'll charge nor how much you'll make, they merely dictate that you can't discriminate in what you carry.
As in, you can't choose customer A over customer B just for the hell of it.
Now, personally, I'm against common carrier laws because I'm against freedom of communication and against dictating required associations, but that is an entirely different matter than money as well.
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Common carrier laws don't determine either how much you'll charge nor how much you'll make,
My error in conflating that and utilities, so apologies. But my impression is that's what's been behind Net Neutrality, to effectively turn the pipes to the Internet into a regulated utility. And to make broadband a basic human right.
they merely dictate that you can't discriminate in what you carry.
But a la what I posited to Qzukk, how is that "merely" done. How can govt. second-guess a business's motives when a business charges more for carrying something that costs them more to carry. Without degrading into govt. effectively dictating their pricing structure.
As in, you can't choose customer A over customer B just for the hell of it.
I wish
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Yes, but a closer analogy would be ATT or other phone companies, or Western Union. Different type of utility, still as necessary to business. But what if say, the electric company could say "You are small fry, the local aluminum mill pays us more for electricity, so you get n
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Close.
The original plan was to tell carriers that they can't make Vonage and Skype a premium level service (add the voip package for only $15/mo!) to prevent them from competing with their phone service (only $9.99!). Or make Netflix an unusable service to stop customers from cutting cable. Or make browsing Amazon difficult because Barnes & Noble paid them to. Or sell 90% of the bandwidth they sold to me to their "fast lane"
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Thank you for explaining that; I'd missed that nuance to it.
Maybe this points to one of the inherent problematicnesses [new word there] of regulating business. That is, how does one decide (and who does the deciding) at what point is charging more for a costlier service being done for anti-competitive reasons?
Re:pretty much the opposite here (Score:2)
Good question. The main problem with all of these is proof. How do you determine intent of a dropped packet? Was it congestion, a hardware failure, or did the ISP have it in for that packet specifically? The guy screaming "I'm gonna kill you!" is the top suspect when someone turns up dead, but the cops still have to prove he did it.
When Comcast was using Sandvine Comcast denied, denied, denied that they were doing anything to degrade their users' internet experience. It took the EFF and a massive coordi
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I don't know what was going on there, but I don't think it's related. Maybe some part of your web app was using an unusual port or protocol, and TWC was in the process of tightening down their standard configuration, for security and/or having it simpler for lower-paid staff. Insisting it's a bug in the other guy's stuff, before being forced to really look into it, is of course a common (attempt at cost savings) behavior that happens across many sectors, and is not indicative of a more sinister scheme.
So, what is the intent of a setting that blocks access to an ISP user's commonly used websites?
To
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All I've ever seen about it is Left-wingers saying we must have it. I've gathered that it's about getting government to interfere with the free market, by telling carriers that they can't charge more for premium levels of service.
Fuck me. It's not like slashdot has decades of articles and comments on this very issue which would help you not sound like such a tool.