Yeah Obama's turned into a pretty sour disappointment. Had high hopes for him but I guess either it was all rhetoric from the start, or he just ended up caving to pressures he wasn't expecting when he got the job. Either way, he certainly hasn't lived up to his promises.

Bush was still bad though. Its hard to say these days who's worse. Bush' worst atrocities at least were (mostly) confined to the areas where he started pointless wars. Obama's rights-eroding policies have the potential to affect the entire world thanks to the US' position as schoolyard bully (especially on the internet which is still fairly US-centric.)

China will likely stand up to the US sooner or later but well.. China's track record with human rights is not exactly a shining beacon of hope.

MS transfers US data to Ireland and Irish data to the US and now neither government has subpoena power? Yeah, something's going to break there.

This only works if you can also prevent the same companies from just transferring data around. Borders have to apply to everyone equally (at least in theory) or they're meaningless.

As long as the companies are free to transfer data out of the country, the government is going to want to be able to transfer that data back into the country when required. Tax havens still exist because they disproportionately benefit the politicians that could put a stop to the practice. Data havens so far do not enjoy that level of political protection and will, one way or the other, get snubbed out.

The only way to stop this practice is to find a way that having data stored out of country benefits the politicians in a significant manner. Currently privacy laws, ignored as they are for the general populace, can protect a politician's data sufficiently that data havens aren't necessary to protect them.

They also forget to mention that most of them have ties to the very companies that benefit from these tricks.

There's a bit of a fallacy in that comment -- we have no proof that Iceland wouldn't be just as bad if they had the opportunity. If Iceland had the same vendor presence internationally that the US and China do, there's a fairly good chance that sooner or later someone would come into power who feels a need to abuse their position.

What will (and in a lot of places has started to) happen is that all of the countries will just turn inwards and shut out everyone.

Canada for example has started building our own backbones after relying on the US ones for decades because we no longer trust our data passing over US carriers after PRISM was revealed.

Similarly, many countries and companies have stopped buying routers made in China after the talk a few years about back doors being built in (I'm not even sure that was proven but just the rumor was enough to make people look to other vendors.)

There's a difference between the US being coercive and the foreign entity giving in (bullying tactics) as compared to a legal requirement (actual law.)

Of course none of that is particularly relevant in this case as its a question of the US government placing demands on US companies to produce (presumably) US data and the companies basically saying "nyah nyah I don't have it with me!"

Others have mentioned the idea that the internet is international and then use that fact to claim the US government should suck it up because borders. I'd say though that the real argument is in the reverse -- just as the company has no barrier to transferring data out of the country, the US government should have no barrier against having that data transferred back into the country.

Assuming of course its actually US data that's only been transferred out in an attempt to hide it (which I did assume above.) If they're trying to subpoena data generated in another country and stored in another country well, that's another story.

The more troubling question is how long before other governments enact similar laws? Companies like Microsoft and Google that have operations in most major countries and many of the smaller ones as well will basically be in a position where they're forced to either share everybody's information with everyone in the world or essentially shut down operations.

There's some potential trickery though. What if MS "closed" their Ireland operation and replaced with with "MS-Ireland," a wholly-owned subsidiary. Does that subsidiary's data fall under the US' new laws over the parent company? What if they made the US operation the subsidiary and their legal "Headquarters" was in some third country (ie: a loophole similar to tax havens?) Would the US laws have the applicability to force some (again, legally) unrelated company to fork over data just because they have a shared parent in some out-of-both-jurisdictions country?

All that said, and much as I don't like the idea of my data spreading around even further without my authorization, I can't exactly disagree with it either. A natural person who gains dual citizenship is theoretically subject to the laws of both countries, regardless of which one they're currently residing in. I'm not sure there's a good argument for corporations to have more leeway than a real person on that count.

1. Embrace <-- you are here
2. Extend
3. Extinguish

Math working out isn't evidence. We construct math to describe the universe, not the other way around. Interesting mathematical findings (particularly symmetries) can suggest areas to look for new physics, but can never in themselves be evidence of physics.

A corollary of this is that there is no such thing as a universe that doesn't follow the "laws" of math -- if a universe was constructed that it couldn't be described using our known math, we'd just come up with new math that can describe it. Excluding Godel-like degenerates such as "this universe can not be described by any math" of course.

I meant "wire" in the more general sense of "not wireless." The exact technology wasn't really relevant.

Divvying it up into small segments (geographically) only works to a certain level. If my phone has 100 tiny little towers all within its range, its going to have a hell of a time deciding which one to use.

But then I'm not a wireless technician so maybe they've come up with ways of handling that such that they can divide an area the size of a stadium (ie: much smaller than your average cell phone's reach) in such a way that everyone can use the same piece of spectrum at the same time without confusing the hell out of the handsets. My impression so far though from what I HAVE seen is that this isn't really how its done and they mostly just divide the spectrum itself into smaller and smaller chunks.

Ie: instead of having 100 little towers that each use one chunk of spectrum, they have one big tower that can use 100 chunks of spectrum simultaneously. Or something. I'm sure my gross oversimplification doesn't really do the problem justice but hopefully it at least gets my point across.

My argument did not ignore competitive voice offerings. In fact I specifically pointed out exactly such a case (where AT&T removes regular the regular call function and replaces it with a direct VoIP competitor.)

Skype may be an alternative, but it is NOT a direct competitor. Its kind of like comparing Coke to tea vs comparing Coke to Pepsi. In both cases you're comparing beverages, but in the former its not really a direct comparison except at the very vaguest "its a beverage" level.

As for how they identify the "type" of traffic.. they have lots of ways. They're free to prioritize RTP over BitTorrent. But if some clever person comes up with a way to run her BT client over RTP in such a way that they can't be distinguished well... onus is on the carrier to deal with that. And if they can't figure it out then tough shit. (Though in this case, I can't really think of an argument for prioritizing voice over radio anyway -- choppy tunes are as annoying if not moreso than a choppy telephone chat.)

Its similar logic to why so many protocols have an "over HTTP" mode -- HTTP is open pretty much everywhere whereas many firewalls (and most business-level ones) are set to block pretty much everything else.

As for how the carriers can do it.. things like deep packet inspection exist. And while DPI has gotten a bad wrap due to its potential ability to be a massive privacy invasion, it also has plenty of non-nefarious purposes such as differentiating different types of traffic that happen to use the same protocol. And I'm sure more tricks will exist in the future.

The thing that we really want to avoid when we talk about "net neutrality" in the common understanding is carriers shaping traffic purely for profit (things like selling preferential treatment.) Shaping traffic to deal with actual network limitations is fine and in some cases necessary.

Area doesn't mean a whole lot given that your iPhone has to work just as well at a stadium packed with 50,000 people as it does when you go back to the 'burbs and there's only 100 people in the tower's service area. I mean there will definitely be some realistic upper limit on the number of cell devices you can expect to be in use in a certain area at a certain time, but you basically have to plan for that upper limit regardless of how often its likely to be hit because eventually it will be hit.

And there's a limit to how much you can divide up the spectrum no matter what you do. Whereas there's not really a limit to "run another fat wire out to the backbone" for physical connections (well, at least up to the point that the backbone gets full but that's an upper limit no matter what tech you use to get there. Not that backbones can't also be upgraded of course!)

Net neutrality only affects certain aspects of traffic shaping.

Prioritizing a type of traffic is generally fine under net neutrality. And since phones are generally tied to a single carrier (at least at one time.. even if you unlock your phone you generally can't have more than one SIM card installed,) voice services will pretty much by definition always have to be prioritized to that carrier.

Now if voice calling stops being an integral part of the phone and AT&T just runs voice through a standard app installed right beside Skype's app, then net neutrality would apply because you're talking about the same type of service.

Its true that QoS shaping is not technically "neutral" but its rarely what people are referring to when they're talking about the common term "net neutrality." Typically that term is used to mean provider-neutral service rather than protocol-neutral.

It wouldn't be hard to codify that difference in law. But of course AT&T and friends don't want any law. Equating standard voice calling with VoIP would be a huge boon to AT&T's position because it would mean you can't apply net neutrality without (theoretically) screwing up the regular telephone service.

Its much simpler to add more towers than it is to add more wire.

What's not so simple is adding more channels to the wireless spectrum. Its very hard to keep dividing spectrum into finer and finer chunks without running into overlaps and collisions. And while the electromagnetic spectrum extends infinitely (as best we can tell..,) there's only a finite amount of it that's useful for the purposes of wireless transmission.

AT&T and whoever isn't wrong about wireless spectrum being a finite resource -- they're just wrong about that being an argument against net neutrality. As at least a couple other posters have noted, it should actually be an argument for net neutrality.

This has got a whole lot of fuck all to do with net neutrality. Net neutrality guarantees that the people who can no longer (or are unwilling to) post their videos on Youtube can go ahead and post them on Vimeo or Dailymotion and Verizon (a third party) isn't allow to degrade the quality.

Of course that doesn't mean that Vimeo or DM necessarily have the bandwidth to keep up with Youtube. Nor does it prevent Google from mangling their service if their feel like it. But if Google does decide to mangle their service, net neutrality means that another service is able to step up to the plate and (attempt to) take all of Google's users without being unfairly discriminated by the third party ISPs and other middleman carriers.

If they said it publicly, they probably mean it. They don't really need more lawsuits I'm sure.

The tricky part is that all ToS these days are subject to arbitrary, unilateral and for online services, almost always retroactive changes. So even if they say that today and mean it, they might change what they say next year and if you're really lucky they might give you a grace period to "delete" (ie: hide from yourself but possibly not them) your data and close your account.