Frequency allocations, overseen by the FCC, are a government protected monopoly.

Frequency competition has the most clear natural limits on competition of any of the carriage technologies you mention, but they exist for all of them. If more than one carrier uses the same slice of spectrum, they all degrade. Laissez-faire does a horrible job of maximizing production with wireless spectrum. Easements for wires and the natural barrier to entry of sinking new cables create a similar problem with wired carriage.

The FCC is not creating fiat carriage monopolies, they are managing natural limitations to carriage competition.

It is worth noting that there are genuine fiat monopolies at the local and state levels, but those are almost always created by the corporations through lobbying, partnerships, or collusion, not by the unaided whim of a bureaucrat.

which form of Net Neutrality? A) protocol neutral? B) endpoint neutral?

Both -- the carrier should not make prioritization decisions for me. My network and software should handle that, since my ISP can't know which packets are highest priority to me.

I am convinced that government regulators will find a third definition for Net Neutrality

That is a good reason to be eternally vigilant of the FCC, and the Internet is worth our effort. It is not a good reason to abdicate the decision to the ISPs, whose financial interests and both naturally- and regulatory- limited competition ensures a market-inefficient solution. The ISPs have the privilege of operating the carriage of our network for a profit. If they don't want that privilege, they can sell their gear and rights-of-way to a competitor. Both Google and municipal operations are wiping the floor with the incumbents everywhere they pop up.

As to the will of the people--we're talking net neutrality. People support it because they like the word "Neutral."

There may be some like that, but people like me, who have been working on the Internet since before hypertext, support it because the idea of letting ISPs make deals for fast lanes is about as stupid as allowing the electric company make deals with companies to cut off electricity to their competitors.

The best days to announce things like, "We've decided to completely ignore the will of the people and do what the guys with wheelbarrows full of money tell us to" are the days right before Thanksgiving and right before Christmas. My bet is on Nov. 25, leaving a day to get home to family, but Nov 26, or Dec 19, 22, or 23 would not surprise me.

We can also say with some certainty when they won't announce; Dec 2, 9, or 16 -- Tuesdays during full work weeks -- are extremely unlikely.

Basically what they are saying is that you should not use Tor at home or at work, but in other places, where you don't do your normal browsing.

Close, but not quite ideal. You should use TOR at home to do strictly legitimate things, to create the haystack in which the needles can be hidden. Then, when you want to do something without being watched, you use TOR with clean hardware and connectivity. Also, when travelling to your clean connectivity, leave your cell phone and other tracking devices at home, and do it somewhere with lots of other people.

'With Gamergate, it's not enough to ignore the trolls.'

It may not be sufficient, and if you have good ideas to add please do. But an effective solution to any problem must be both sufficient and necessary. And in this case, ignoring the trolls is necessary, even if you do not find it to be sufficient.

Trolls gain steam from attention. Any strategy for shutting down trolls must include ignoring them. There may be additional tactics that are worth employing, like advocating courtesy in Internet communications, but "don't feed the trolls" is a required part of the solution.

That it is realistic to have highways wide enough that there will never be congestion?

Obviously not, and you can't possibly think I do think that. So I can only conclude that your question is not sincere, but meant to be dismissive. That is neither mature nor productive.

In a real internet (in fact on the internet for its entire existence), the network is managed.

The provider should be managing the allocation of data based on the subscribers' contracts, not on who they are connecting to, the content of the packets, what port it is on, what protocol it is using, or anything else. People who need high speed should order high speed packages. People who need low latency should pay for low latency. People who need both should pay for both.

Different data has different priorities, it just does.

Of course it does, but the ISP cannot know which data has what priority based on the port, protocol, endpoints, or packet content. Only the end user can determine those things, and the ISP making contradictory decisions is a breach of the data carriage obligation under which we have granted them privileges like rights-of-way and protection from liability for the data they transport.

Email and web traffic can tolerate significantly higher latencies, for example.

Bullshit. You don't know which of my traffic is higher priority. The end user can and should have network management tools, but the ISP better damned well not decide that my kids watching Nemo in HD is more important than my rsync transfer of a log file telling me why the master server just barfed. That is my choice, not the ISP's.

Similarly, almost everyone agrees that ISPs have some responsibility to control network performance in a manner that guarantees the best service for the most number of people,

Bullshit. Just, bullshit. Citation needed. No, people who understand networks do not believe that the pipeline providers should be doing traffic prioritization based on endpoints.

or that prioritizes certain traffic over others in the event of an emergency.

Vague fear mongering. What if the network companies prioritize the wrong things in their search for a little more revenue and something bad happens to the children? THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

These are all issues that a careful set of regulations could preserve while still mandating neutral traffic treatment in the majority of cases, but it's a level of nuance that most discussions of the topic don't touch. The larger and more serious problem with net neutrality as its often defined, however, is that it typically deals only with the "last mile," or the types and nature of the filtering an ISP can apply to your personal connection.

I don't know if this is intentional or not, but throwing piles of vaguely related and confusing facts at a story then saying, "Therefore, we shouldn't regulate now!" is a standard tactic from the Koch plalybook. Shove it.

The public, including tens of thousands of network administrators, have spoken without equivocation: We want net neutrality. Period. When the ISPs come up with better regulation, they can propose it, and we will consider it. Until then, we will not move an inch on our demand for Net Neutrality. It has worked since the first day of the Internet. It is why the Internet made so many people, including the ISPs, rich. If they don't like it, they can GTFO or DIAF.

I don't care what they say, software written with Emacs is way better than software writen with Vi!

Why should [Stripe] be forced to pick a side?

The reality is they probably were. Agreed it is probably not Stripe's choice -- but if it is, I feel that all payment processors have a duty to not pick and choose the businesses they will cut off. Trade and the economy are too important to allow payment gateways to act as a choke point for morality enforcement. If the business is illegal, it should be shut down. If it is not, all businesses should have equal right and opportunity to engage in trade.

Privately operated toll bridges shouldn't be allowed to ban FedEx trucks, electric companies shouldn't be allowed to refuse service to stores that sell cigarettes, ISPs shouldn't be allowed to throttle content providers who don't pay extra, and payment processors shouldn't be allowed to enforce morality.

But, again, I think this was more likely DOJ or ATF bullying, not Stripe's choice.

It's also a truly fascinating, troubling demonstration of how the ruling could work.

Yes, but not of how it does work. Libel law could work exactly the same way, but it doesn't.

It is important to find cases where this ruling does cause problems, so we can amend or reverse it. Pointing out cases where it could result in legally enforced removal of information that is in the public interest, but almost certainly won't, is crying wolf and is harmful to the goal of reforming the ruling.

According to New Zealand's current Trade Minister, Tim Groser, full disclosure of what is being discussed would likely lead to "public debate on an ill-informed basis before the deal has been done."

I do not understand the lack of clarity in his speech. He could simply have said, "The proletariat are too ignorant for their own good, and must be protected from their stupidity by the aristocracy, like dogs or goats."

But considering just how straight white male oriented the tech industry is

You mean demographic-wise or acceptance-wise? If the former, maybe, I haven't really taken a statistical sample. But if you mean the latter, where have you been working? I mean, when I was working in NYC and SF, and even Seattle, I suppose it would be expected that most of my fellow geeks didn't care about sexual orientation and were vocally pro gay rights, but even now in Phoenix almost all of my geek friends feel the same. I've always assumed it was a natural result of being future-oriented and of geekiness being an outsider culture. If your geek friends are homophobes, they'd strike me as statistically rare. Maybe you just need new friends.

What happens when we start tuning our restraint systems for the obese? Will they continue to function properly for trim people, will they work less effectively, or might they actually become harmful, like airbags for kids?

Perhaps there will be restraint system option packages. The Kid-Size, Fit-Size, Fun-Size, and Super-Size. Of course, then there might be size inflation like women's dresses, so eventually fit people will be driving size zero cars and slender people won't be able to buy off-the-rack at all.

In exchange for the major corporate backing, tech reporters at SugarString are expressly forbidden from writing about American spying or net neutrality around the world, two of the biggest issues in tech and politics today.

You gotta admire the chutzpah. Even as they are saying to the FCC that they can be trusted with the authority to be the gatekeepers of the Internet, they put on a public display of their intent to inhibit public policy debate on the very issue of Net Neutrality itself.

The extraordinary lack of self-consciousness is difficult to fathom. It rises to the level of, "Let them eat cake."