Speaking of delusional, can you imagine or recall how well web video worked "when [the internet] was almost entirely a government-funded project"? It's the commercial internet that provides with WiFi hot spots, multi-megabit internet, cloud computing, World of Warcraft and internet video. If you'd prefer to go back to text mode MUDs, fine, don't ask the rest of us to go back.

Any time you don't want AT&T or Comcast involved in your life, drop them. You don't have that choice at all when it comes to federal regulation.

Bingo! In practice regulating markets limits competition by making the barrier for entry higher. Look at car manufacturing, by constantly raising standards for safety and efficiency they make it impossible for new companies to break in. When Toyota first entered the US market, they're product was drek, but soon customers began looking for the one thing that Toyota was better at: efficiency. Then came consumer interest in safety and Volvos became popular.
With ever increasing mandates, new manufacturers must be incredibly good at all things to get in. It's not a matter of having cheap cars kill people, even Toyota has problems, but by allowing the market to choose the winner consumers get a larger voice in who is allowed to make a car.

It's hardly impossible. When my parents left Comcast for Verizon they simply let Verizon run fiber up to the house. Ta Da! Choice in the market right up to the last mile.

You have a very broken idea of what 'free market' means.

A free market allows private entities enter into any consensual agreement between parties to accomplish their goals. If they need to run cable across someone's property, they arrange, or lease, access. If they don't have the infrastructure, they lease resources from another party. ( See 'roaming cell service' )

What prevents a free market for broadband in the fullest sense is government regulation preventing carriers from running cable the last mile or under the sidewalk, etc. If a carrier can lease access from the city to put cables under the sidewalk, that's still the free market at work.

I'm sorry you live out in the boonies, but don't ask me to subsidize your youtube.

I've never known anyone who lived within ten miles of a POP unable to choose their internet provider. Since most of the country lives in cities or their suburbs rather than out in the country, I doubt your situation is common. My mom lives in a very rural area of Oregon, she has at least three choices for broadband.

One detail you left out is that government regulation mandates monopolies on utilities. It's not a natural condition.

That's like saying it's okay for the government to regulate the highways but not the cars. Because, you know, THAT way the government can't control where the on-ramps and off-ramps are. This is not a realistic description of how the internet works.

Once the government can tell service providers how to operate their private property, the pipes, and how to manage traffic flows in order to protect consumers, we will have accepted the premise that allows the government to restrict or block traffic to destinations that the government considers 'dangerous' to consumers.

Imagine a federal black list of websites and domains. Imagine the No Labels crowd have the power to block web traffic to MSNBC and FNC. Imagine the government requiring all service providers to block traffic to known wikileaks sites. The government doesn't need to regulate the content anymore if it can block the destination. It won't happen today, but invariably regulation grows increasingly restrictive once in place.

The FCC has just arrogated itself the authority to create a Great Firewall of America, and THAT is what concerns net neutrality opponents.

Regulation invariable helps big business, more than consumers. They can afford to sustain the costs of handling the overhead costs incurred by regulation while smaller outfits cannot.

I have only one cable provider in my area, and Verizon gave up expanding FIOS in my state, but I have two sat companies who are aggressively asking for my business, both partnering with the telco.

It's not that competition has gone away, it just doesn't look like it did fifteen years ago. That's normal.

I'm surprised that people trust the government "a series of tubes" to regulate something as complicated as the internet after they make obvious, repeatedly, they don't know what they're doing. The latest example? The FCC said they would have imposed stricter regulations, but they recognized Android was 'open'...

You have the freedom to pick any damn internet service you like. China implemented government mandated neutrality onto the internet, but we call it the Great Firewall of China.

We should have elected John McCain, then Apple would have fully supported work that satirizes public officials.

If the kid's own embryonic stem cells had been harvested for this kind of experimental work, he would never have developed a problem with his trachea. Isn't this why we need to fully fund embryonic stem cell research with everyone's tax dollars? /irony

I've yet to see any proposed change that doesn't undo some unnecessary change made in the past twenty years. Was there a hue and cry when the textbook interpretation of the civil rights movement went from being a color blind society to being an ethnically obsessed and divisive movement?

If someone can point to an article in the NY Times or Washington Post about how CA or some similar state put a liberal stamp on the nation's textbooks, then I'll begin assuming this article might be something more than an idiotic culture war volley.

Glad to hear the state's finally running a surplus again. I'm sure this means they've got their spending priorities under control.

Please people, regardless of the benefits a /statewide/ animal control registry provides ( on the assumption that CA govt can provide anything effectively ) you have to balance that against maintaining funding for school programs, criminal justice programs ( like State appointed attorneys ), environmental protection programs.

The state has been in the red for eight years, how can any elected official there justify creating any new program?

Until very recently it seems no manufacturer let the public into the 'black box' without a court order of some variety. In California, it was/is a legal requirement.

A few states are joining the debate. A California law that went into effect in July 2004 requires manufacturers to provide customers with information on black boxes in cars and states that the data cannot be obtained without a court order or the owner's permission.

See this old CNET story Rocky road for car 'black boxes'.

Toyota's lack of openess about data that imperils individual privacy is no skin off of my back. If Government Motors wants to penalize Toyota for it, perhaps it should be mentioned that mandating car electronics more accessible is a bad idea. Look at how Google got hacked by China.

The very problem the original author Eschenbach describes, is what the Economist author ( also of unknown background, there's no evidence to assume related statistics expertise ) considers a feature. Given the supposed problems with the temperature record at Darwin, some scientist used a 'statistical tool' to 'homogenize' it. The result became the mirror image of the actual raw data. The yardstick by which the 'homogenized' data was validated was also homogenized data that we now know was 'fixed' using several 'tricks' that an anonymous contributor described as 'botch after botch after botch'.

Further, it's surprising to describe 'cherry picking' in a contributor's work without mentioning, at least contrasting against, the recent Briffa controversy wherein the history of global climate was measured by three trees in an entire valley in Siberia. Maybe it was valid, but if so why did Briffa suppress the source data for a decade?

Since the obvious trend in the Darwin data is a cooling trend, the question remains, what changes to the screen or siting produce /consistent/ cooling even as global temperatures are supposed to be rising? This is supposed to be the hottest October in record so the raw data should illustrate that somehow.

The Economist author also appears to miss the controversial disclosures regarding peer review. With a collection of scientists working to change who reviews peers, who accepts papers, and even redefining what 'peer review' itself is supposed to mean, the final appeal to authority near the end of the piece undermines his thesis by grabbing for a rhetorical stanchion that has rusted through.