To be fair, I never said it was a good idea. :-) In fact, it's a terrible idea, and the issue you mention is just the tip of the iceberg. If you give in to one world government by providing a back door, then all the others will come to you expecting the same treatment.

So you decide that you need to hold those keys in escrow, and use them to decrypt only specific messages upon a court order. After all, you really shouldn't be providing those keys to nearly two-hundred different governments, for the reasons listed above. But now you have a different problem—one of how to keep that key protected yourself, knowing that if it ever gets out, the entire security model of your software is broken, both for new messages and existing ones.

If you try hard enough, you can come up with all sorts of crazy schemes to minimize the risk of disclosure, such as keeping those encrypted session keys yourself rather than attaching them to the message (and now you have a colossal storage problem), having multiple public keys that have to be used in combination to decrypt a message (and now you have a hit-by-a-car problem), etc.

Basically, it's an awful idea, with far too many problems to enumerate. But the fact that the software is Open Source really isn't one of those problems. :-)

The problem is that you can't give the capability to decrypt by law... it's open source software, so no backdoors, and if you don't have the key you can't decipher.

Nothing is stopping them from requiring that all software encrypt a copy of the session key (or whatever) with a second public key (which the government can decrypt with their private key). OSS can do that just as easily as closed-source software. Sure, it would be obvious to anyone looking at the code, but the law wouldn't exactly be a secret, either.

What the h*** are you talking about? I'm asking to pay for a service, shouting "Take my money!" and they're not doing it. Wanting others to give me money? Quite the opposite.

Let's substitute "Ferrari" for "Fiber" and try that on for size: "I want a Ferrari. Take my money! Here is my $5000! Why aren't greedy corporations giving me my Ferrari for $5000? We need a law to force greedy corporations to give everybody a Ferrari for $5000! Then the poor will finally get the same transportation as the rich! It's a question of fairness!"

All right. Let's do that. I say "I want a Ferrari. I'm willing to pay the entire cost of the Ferrari, and I'm willing to pay the costs for you to stick a Ferrari on a truck and bring it to me. And they said, "No, we don't sell Ferraris to people who live in your area because there are too many people who can't afford one." See how irrational your argument just became when you use an accurate analogy?

Besides, a car is not an educational tool in any meaningful sense. The poor are not harmed in their ability to stop being poor by being able to buy an overpriced automobile. That makes the entire analogy irrelevant.

Keep pace with??? Sunnyvale has average download speeds of 40 Mbps, far above G8, EU and world-wide averages.

But it hasn't kept pace with nearby communities. And until just a few months back, my neighborhood was stuck at 3 Mbps, which is far behind just about everybody. I'm not sure what Comcast is offering, now that they've moved in, but... well, they're Comcast—a single viable option from a monopoly that sets all the rules, take it or leave it.

Besides, you're focusing on a single community, which keeps you from having to acknowledge the pattern of abuse that prevents the poor from having real options. Choice is good.

Is your Latin a little rusty? An "argumentum ad hominem" would be to say "your argument is wrong because you are a greedy and ignorant human being". That is not at all what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that you are a greedy and ignorant human being because of the arguments you make.

One implies the other. Your argument that I'm a greedy and ignorant being is making assumptions based on my position, and you're using those an assumptions to attack me personally as a means to attack the position. The latter half is effectively an ad hominem, and the reasoning is also basically circular.

(I did learn, however, that you have a lousy taste in music.)

Actually, no, you didn't. You only think you did, because you jumped to wrong conclusions based on incomplete information—specifically, you're assuming that all liturgical music is bad music. A lot of it is, sure, and particularly a lot of the modern stuff, but.... :-)

I was referring to the Citizens United case but ...

So was I. Citizens United was about overturning part of McCain-Feingold/BCRA.

And isn't it wonderful that they actually had blackout periods restricting when we are allowed to make political speech? I guess I am supposed to rejoice at the 270 days they still allowed free speech instead of focusing on the 90 where they removed it.

AFAIK, it isn't 90 days around any election; it's 90 days around an election that the person in question is running in. So not 270 days, but rather 640 days for the House, 1370 for the President, and 2100 for the Senate. In relative terms, that's a pretty small window.

That's simply not true. News organizations were explicitly excluded from limits by McCain-Feingold. If anything, their exception was probably too broad, as it potentially allowed them to editorially declare their support for a candidate during the blackout period while denying that right to non-media companies.

Free speech has limits. It always has. Companies can't lie in ads. You can't shout "fire" in a crowded theater. And so on. One particular category of limits is frequently not a first amendment violation: time, place, and manner restrictions. Examples include limits on sale of porn mags within a block of an elementary school (place), bans on protests near cemeteries during funerals (place and time), and limits on size and style of signage for businesses (manner). Those restrictions are allowable if the law is:

• Content neutral. This doesn't discriminate among candidates, nor among affected third-party groups, so it meets this criterion.
• Be narrowly tailored. This affects exactly one thing: ads that mention a candidate by name. That's pretty darn narrow. Okay still.
• Serve a significant governmental interest. This prevents outside parties from effectively subverting election contribution laws. Still good.
• Leave open ample alternative channels for communication. In my view, the law as written applied only to advertising, not to news coverage or other non-advertising channels of communication, so in my view, it passes this test as well. However, others disagreed, and the result was the CU decision, which I view as a serious error on the part of the SCOTUS.

My opinion has nothing to do with ignoring the first amendment, and everything to do with having a deep understanding of it and of how the courts have interpreted it for several decades. Come back when you've taken at least one class on communications law or constitutional law, and we can have a serious conversation on the subject.

Exactly, it's about you wanting others to give you money. All the rest is a smokescreen. It's no different when Blackwater, the cable companies, or the prison union go to Congress with their hands open. They also say "but it's for everybody's good!".

What the h*** are you talking about? I'm asking to pay for a service, shouting "Take my money!" and they're not doing it. Wanting others to give me money? Quite the opposite. I'd willingly pay the entire cost of running a fiber to my house up front if anyone would do it.

No, it's because right now, they'd make less money on it than elsewhere and because they have limited capacity to put in fiber and backbone. Rushing out service to your area is going to cost them dearly, both in opportunity cost and inefficiency. They are not going to accept lower profits, they are going to raise prices; the simplest way for them to raise prices is to charge a premium for the new fiber service and to eliminate all low-cost, slower services. And so your "poor kids" now have to pay $70/month for fiber, instead of $12.95/month for basic DSL.

First, most parts of the world can't get DSL for $12.95 per month. Even Earthlink's horrible offering isn't that cheap.

Second, a sizable percentage of poor areas are either outside the reach of DSL or don't have DSL-enabled COs, which means they already pay a higher bill for cable Internet.

Third, what makes you think that the people running the fiber have any say whatsoever in the cost or availability of DSL? Most of those cheap DSL services aren't provided by the phone company; they're provided by CLECs. And thanks to government regulations, once that DSLAM is set up for DSL service, the phone company is generally required to lease line access to third parties, and the cost of that lease is usually limited by law. Yes, there are some exceptions, like if you allow the phone company to rewire you for FTTN, but that's your individual decision, and is unaffected by the availability of fiber.

Basically, the results you're afraid of are simply impossible. They can't happen. And even if they could, it's really, really easy to provide tax credits to fix the problem if it happens, making your argument based on completely irrational fear rather than any sort of realistic concern.

What policies like this really end up doing is redistributing money from the politically weak (mostly poor folks) to an educated intellectual elite like you. And you add insult to injury by pretending that enriching yourself that way is for everybody else's good.

Enriching myself? How is expecting the quality of Internet service in my community to keep pace with the rest of the world "enriching myself"? There's a difference between enriching yourself and refusing to let yourself and your neighbors get walked on by a bunch of greedy corporate f**ks. I guarantee that the things I propose will not cause poor people to be unfairly burdened. How can I say that? Because we ALREADY DID IT TWICE—ONCE WITH PHONE LINES, AND AGAIN WITH DSL. The poor were not unfairly burdened by having access to either of those technologies, both of which had the properties that I described.

This discussion is seriously making me mad at this point. Your reasoning is unsound, and about half of your argument seems to be ad hominem attacks on someone who regularly writes software and gives it away, who composes music and gives at least some of it away, who spends nine hours a week doing liturgical music rehearsals and performances (unpaid), and so on. I use my talents to for the benefit of others. A lot. Before you go attacking me and claiming that I'm somehow greedy and trying to steal from the poor, you might want to get your facts straight. I fight for the poor because I believe everyone deserves the chances that I had. Nothing more, nothing less.

Not precisely. Any intolerant philosophy can be countered by rational argument, but first you have to get the person to actually start listening. In the case of terrorists (foreign or domestic, religious or otherwise), that doesn't work because the second part can't be done for various reasons. However, in the case of people thinking about joining a terrorist group, that can work to some degree, because they haven't yet closed themselves off to argument.

Unfortunately, most governments don't even try. For example, the U.S. government's war on terror primarily fans the flames rather than countering the philosophy. They fight unnecessary wars that kill innocent people, thus turning those innocents' friends and relatives against them, resulting in a steady stream of people who are angry at the western world, who are then prime targets for radicalization. They lock innocent people up for decades without a trial, thus giving people even more reason to hate them. Then, when they find out that someone might be becoming radicalized, they monitor them, often going so far as to encourage them to commit fake crimes so that they'll get caught and can spend the rest of their lives in prison, rather than attacking the rot of hate by countering it with rational argument. All of these things make people hate the West even more.

In short, I'm pretty sure the U.S. government is doing almost everything it possibly can to encourage extremist behavior. What I don't understand is why. Are they trying to bring about the end of the world, or are they really that clueless?

Just to be clear, I'm not trying to justify the horrible actions of people who use bombs to try to kill as many people as possible, most of whom likely had little or nothing to do with whatever they're angry about, many of whom might even agree with them, at least in principle. I'm just saying that many of the attacks are undeniably at least partially the fault of the western world for fomenting hatred among the people of the Middle East and for failing to take even the slightest actions to counter that hatred among people that it knew were heading down that path. It's a bit like not locking your doors and then wondering why your insurance company won't pay for your missing widescreen TV....

The only true way to fight hate is to face it head on, by teaching people not to hate. If you manage to do that—if the very idea of hating others becomes so antithetical to everyone's core beliefs that nobody joins hate groups—then eventually they'll go away by attrition.

Just saying.

I have yet to have one single person who hates the Citizen's United case tell me that they knew that.

We all knew it. That was the whole point of the act—preventing anyone other than the candidate from making ads that name a particular candidate close to the election. By preventing that, you prevent what amounts to an infinite amount of support for candidates by the rich, thus removing a giant loophole that negated all the benefits of having campaign finance limits in the first place.

The reality is that the CU decision ensured that only establishment candidates could campaign, because they're the ones with rich friends who can help them out by running independent TV ads when their coffers start to run dry.

In that particular case, you'd be wrong. I live in Sunnyvale, can pay for it, and want to pay for it. They won't put it in Sunnyvale because half the neighborhood are retirees who aren't demanding better performance, living on a fixed income, who are willing to accept the status quo.

I.e. I'm right: many of the people living there don't want it, so it's not cost-effective for companies to put it in. Furthermore, the reason you advocate this policy is because after buying into Sunnyvale because it's cheap, you now want it to become just like the rest of Silicon Valley.

It is just like the rest of Silicon Valley, or at least within the margin of error. The other half of the people in the neighborhood work for tech companies. And when I moved here almost fourteen years ago, our Internet service was also approximately as good as the rest of the valley. Since then, our quality of service (by every metric) has fallen further and further behind the rest of the region, because DSL just hasn't kept up. I advocate this policy because I don't feel it's right to be limited to low-quality service simply because of where I can afford to live.

It's textbook special interests (like yourself) pretending to look out for the poor when actually they just want to enrich themselves.

Special interests? Special interests are something that applies to a few percent of the public at most. Every single man, woman, and child in this country should have great Internet service available to them, and should have choices of providers to ensure that those companies truly compete. And the fact that non-poor people (including myself) would also benefit from having fiber available, with multiple choices of ISPs running over that fiber, would not in any way negate the fact that the poor would benefit considerably from not being stuck a choice between DSL and satellite (ugh).

They would make less profit because they'd be paying off the loan more slowly because they would have way less than 100% penetration. That's not the same thing as taking a loss.

Yes, that is exactly the same as taking a loss: they need to make a huge capital investment now and take out a loan for that.

If that's your definition of a loss (which would cause any economics professor to rupture an aneurysm, BTW), then these companies shouldn't roll out fiber anywhere. After all, anywhere you roll out fiber, you have to make a huge capital investment and take out a loan. Try again.

Furthermore, the loss is magnified because it isn't just how much they are losing relative to break-even, it's how much they are losing compared to what they would get if they invested that money better.

Only the last half of that statement is correct. That's not magnifying a loss. If I buy a share of AAPL at $70, and the price goes up to $120 before falling back to $100, and I sell at $100, I made $30; I didn't lose $20. If a share of GOOG would have gone from $70 to $110 on that time, I didn't lose $10 by buying AAPL. A failure to gain is not the same thing as a loss. Anyone who says otherwise is probably selling something... like financial advisory services. :-)

Either way, I'm not arguing that their reasons for staying out of poorer neighborhoods isn't profit-based. Of course it is. Anybody with half a brain knows that. What I'm arguing is that much like basic telephone service has been a requirement for holding and keeping a job, Internet service is becoming a similarly crucial service, both for that purpose and for our kids' education. It isn't something that can be made available only for people who have a certain amount of money, who live in certain neighborhoods, etc. The ability to get good Internet service should be a fundamental right, no different from the right to be served by the USPS, the right to have your roads maintained, the right to tie onto the power grid, the right to police and fire protection, etc. Anything else is, at least in my view, unconscionable.

In fact, it's mostly those retirees and poor school children who are going to pay higher rates for fiber they don't want so that you get the fiber you think you deserve.

Actually, if you do it right, you have the government run the fiber. Then, people with higher incomes pay most of the cost of that fiber so that the poor can pay next to nothing. Failing that, the second best solution is to provide tax credits so that the poor can afford to pay for Internet service for their kids. (Oh, wait, we already do that. Try again.)

If they don't put it into Sunnyvale unless you make it mandatory it's for the simple reason that the people who live there aren't willing to pay for it and companies would be making a loss.

In that particular case, you'd be wrong. I live in Sunnyvale, can pay for it, and want to pay for it. They won't put it in Sunnyvale because half the neighborhood are retirees who aren't demanding better performance, living on a fixed income, who are willing to accept the status quo. They would make less profit because they'd be paying off the loan more slowly because they would have way less than 100% penetration. That's not the same thing as taking a loss.

A secondary effect is that if you mandate that poor neighborhoods are brought up to the infrastructure standards of rich neighborhoods, those neighborhoods will become more desirable and housing prices will rise. So, by imposing your preferences on poor neighborhoods, you are really preparing them for gentrification.

Quite possibly, but that doesn't mean poor kids should be denied Internet connections that are good enough for them to do as well in school as their non-poor counterparts. And that's what you're arguing—that the poor should have to find some way to raise enough money to move to a better neighborhood so that their kids aren't disadvantaged. Sure, the difference between cable and fiber today probably isn't enough to keep them from getting into college, but that was true for the difference between dialup and DSL just fifteen years ago.

By shifting the competition from infrastructure to service. Infrastructure can't have competition. It costs too much per customer,

That's pure fiction and fabrication.

Citation needed. In rural areas, from what I've read, the average cost of fiber to the curb is somewhere in the neighborhood of $2,500 per customer. Assume that the ISP charges about the U.S. average fee—$35 per customer. Part of that goes to the upstream ISP for providing the bandwidth, and part of it goes to the cost of interest on that fiber cost, so let's say that maybe $25 of that actually goes towards paying down the principal. You're now talking about 8.3 years just to break even.

Ah, but it gets worse. The cost of buildout skyrockets if you're just doing it for one customer, so you basically have to build the capacity for the expected number of customers up front. This means that if you only get half the people to buy service, that number doubles. Get a third of the people to buy service, and it triples. Get four competitors in a market, and you're talking about a whopping 33 years before you break even. Care to place bets on whether some new technology will have superseded that fiber you're running before you pay it off at that rate? And that's before you factor in the cost of line maintenance, replacing signal amplifiers, upgrading hardware at the head end, replacing customer premises equipment, recovering the costs associated with nonpaying customers, handling technical support, or any of the other myriad costs associated with running an ISP.

So no, it's not pure fiction and fabrication. There's no way in you-know-where that anyone can feasibly create true competition at the infrastructure level unless you're in a big city or unless you manage to trick somebody into footing the bill who has insane amounts of money to burn. I've seen rural areas try to get competition, and it always fails. Why? Because the incumbent provider always has a tremendous financial advantage caused by having already mostly paid off their infrastructure costs. Get rid of that advantage by starting with multiple companies from the outset, and you might end up with two competitors if you're really lucky. Unfortunately, to be perfectly frank, a stable duopoly isn't much better than a monopoly in terms of how badly the customers get bent over a barrel, in my experience. Heck, the cell phone market is barely competitive, and that has four major players.

What you ideally want, assuming you truly want enough competition to actually do some good, is somewhere closer to the dozen competitors that we had back in the DSL era (where the phone company was required to lease lines to any ISP that paid them). Using the earlier math, if twelve companies all built separate fiber infrastructure, that would mean a 100-year break-even point, on average. Even in a big city, where the fiber cost is more like $750 per customer, that's still a 30-year payoff even without factoring in other costs. No bank in the world is going to underwrite that loan. The only way you can make it work is to take the infrastructure cost—the high barrier to entry into the market—out of the equation entirely.

without regulations that mandate full coverage, nobody will serve anyone except in higher-density areas.

So you're saying that regulations currently force people to subsidize a suburban and low density lifestyle and we should have even more of those subsidies. In different words, progressives and liberals who keep whining and complaining about the suburban lifestyle, the lack of public transportation, environmental destruction, lack of high speed Internet, are, in fact, subsidizing the very things they criticize, and the very problems they use to then justify even more subsidies. Thank you for pointing that out so clearly.

Nowhere did I even suggest that urban areas should subsidize rural areas. Maybe that was necessary when the first phone network was rolled out, but at the time, there was one phone company across almost the entire country, so by definition any subsidization had to be nationwide. That's not the case now, and it is unlikely that such a nationwide subsidy would be necessary.

With that said, within a given geographical region (whether that region is primarily rural or primarily urban), some subsidization is absolutely necessary. Without that, you'll get a network that is biased against the poor and thus (statistically speaking) biased against minorities. Almost without fail, when allowed to choose who they serve, companies have upgraded their services in rich neighborhoods long before they upgraded their services in poor neighborhoods, if they upgraded the latter at all. So without mandatory universal service requirements, you'll have fiber in Cupertino, but not parts of Sunnyvale. You'll have fiber in San Francisco and Berkeley, but not in Oakland. You'll have fiber in San Jose except for East San Jose. You'll have fiber in Palo Alto, but not East Palo Alto. And so on.

We're not talking about urban versus rural here. We're talking about unserved chunks right in the middle of major metropolitan areas, just a couple of miles away from areas that get service. And that's why you simply cannot give the wire providers a choice about who to serve. It must be all or nothing within a geographical region (e.g. a county). This is, of course, unrelated to the issue of competition; it's simply the right thing to do.

Why would you get "real competition" out of increasing government restrictions?

By shifting the competition from infrastructure to service. Infrastructure can't have competition. It costs too much per customer, and without regulations that mandate full coverage, nobody will serve anyone except in higher-density areas. But you can have competition in the service providers that sit atop that infrastructure. It just requires two rules: a universal must-serve rule and a mandatory leased access rule.

Not like they pay much attention to any of the promises they've made to the people of the United States anyways.

You were expecting change?

It's called tiered marketing and discriminatory pricing. I'm not sure which business school you went to, but the AACSB accredited one I went to described this situation pretty well to the undergrads, and it makes perfect sense - it's just complex.

Well, it makes sense up until a disruptive technology tears down the boundaries to importing. Like... airplanes. I mean, that sort of crap is the reason Canon USA is sending scare emails to all their customers warning them of the dangers of buying grey market cameras... knowing full well that most of the grey market importers stand behind it with a warranty that's approximately as trustworthy as Canon's, for several hundred bucks less.

Artificially segmenting markets was pretty silly even way back in the DVD era. Now, in the Internet era, it's just plain sad....