You can call it fraud and I'd agree with you. The problem is that most of the ISPs are monopolies or, at best, duopolies. If you want to a wired broadband connection to the Internet, you NEED to go through them. They are also big, powerful companies with plenty of lawyers to tie up fraud cases in court and lots of lobbyists to make sure the rules are written to favor themselves.

The end game of all of this isn't so much to cripple the Internet as it is to profit off of it. They see companies making a lot of money off "the Internet" and they feel that they are owed some of that money because those companies are making money off of their (the ISPs') customers. Of course, a pizza place doesn't owe money to Verizon because some of Verizon's customers use their Verizon phones to call the pizza place and order a pie. Still, the big ISPs see others making this money and want a chunk,

Moreover, they feel threatened. Internet video isn't killing off the ISPs' own video offerings, but the potential is there. They aren't stupid and so want to kill off Internet video before it becomes a threat.

When you combine a series of giant organizations with greed and seeing their existing profit centers threatened, you get a dangerous (for consumers) combination.

I took the "movies" reference to be "home movies." For example, a movie of your son walking for the first time. If my house burned down and I lost all of my possessions (we're assuming all family members got out just fine), what I would mourn the loss of most would be all of the photos and videos of my kids that were on our external hard drive.

I had a camera stolen from me at the end of a trip. Insurance got me a new digital camera (much nicer than the stolen one, even). However, the 100+ photos that were on the camera when it was stolen were lost forever. If given the chance, I would have happily handed the thief our camera if he had let me remove the memory card from it. (Now, when I travel, I backup photos as I go and will swap out the cards during flights just in case.)

On one hand, yes, you'll get tons of hits on Google for "long term video tape backup."

On the other hand, many of those hits will be old forum posts whose authors' experience is unknown, companies advertising their services (quality of which is unknown), etc. Posting on Slashdot ensures that your question will be answered by a group of experiences folks who know what they are talking about and have likely done just this sort of thing.

Obligatory PhD Comics.

I'm wearing this hat to ward off antibiotic resistant viruses and their army of self-replicating toxins.

Because ISPs would immediately accept these limitations and then work behind the scenes to allow relaxing of the rules - or would flaunt them openly and get mere slaps on the wrist. Look at what happened when Verizon was under contract (having received taxpayer money) to wire an entire state with high speed access. They didn't do it and, when brought to task, argued that their wireless network counted as "wiring the state." The state government bought it and declared that Verizon lived up to their end of the contract.

The same is true for merger conditions on Comcast-Time Warner. Comcast will agree to the conditions and then will start working behind the scenes to ensure that they don't actually have to follow them.

The problem is, right now, we have the choice of letting the ISPs decide their own Network Neutrality policies or letting the FCC decide it.

If the ISPs decide it, you can be sure that they would enact Fast Lanes and Slow Lanes. Any content that competes with them (e.g. Internet Video Services) would get tossed into the slow lane and would be unusable unless the service paid the ISPs big money for fast lane access. As the ISPs are monopolies/duopolies, customers couldn't switch to another ISP. Requiring people to move to a different part of the country for Internet access isn't reasonable. Especially since there would be no guarantee that the ISP whose area they moved into wouldn't either get bought out or wouldn't go fast lane themselves. Letting the ISPs decide is effectively kissing Network Neutrality goodbye.

If the government decides, there's the chance of corruption (ISPs "lobby" Wheeler to make the "right" decision), but at least the government is somewhat answerable to the people. If a million people wrote to Comcast telling them not to do X and Comcast did X anyway, there would be no consequences. If a million people told the government not to do X and they did it anyway, there's a chance of consequences.

I'll agree that, ideally, it would be best if the government didn't have to get involved. Unfortunately, I don't see any scenario in which "non involvement" doesn't immediately result in Network Neutrality being killed off.

From: Tom Wheeler
To: All My Friends At Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, etc.
Subject: Network Neutrality

Message:

I thought you guys could use a laugh... or a couple hundred thousand laughs. I've attached a file containing all of the pro-Network Neutrality comments the FCC received. The idiots actually thought we'd take their comments into consideration!

Which reminds me, let me know when you finish touching up that FCC Network Neutrality Policy so we can publicly release it.

Your humble servant,

Thomas Wheeler

Good point. With a normal organization, it's a good idea to put any objections in writing and in a form that can be tracked by both you and your managers, such as within e-mail messages. This way, if you say "Project A would violate these laws" and your manager says "Continue with Project A anyway", he can't later blame you for not bringing this to his attention.

The NSA is anything but a normal organization. There are enough people who have worked for the NSA and have tried to say "Project A would violate these laws" who have found themselves targeted by the NSA. So the NSA might be telling the truth (Snowden never e-mailed his concerns to anyone) while not telling the whole truth (because, had he done so, we would have had him arrested on trumped up charges to shut him up).

Yes, this was a single album right now, but this opens the door to future "promotions" of this sort.

Imagine that this promotion turns into a regular event. At semi-regular intervals, Apple users find new albums added to their listings. These albums might be things the users like, but it's more likely that the albums are just "who cut a deal with Apple this month." That "skip past that one you don't like" would turn into "weed through those Apple Promotion albums to find the ones you actually want."

Apple is hurting their platform by doing this. If people think that their music library will be polluted by Apple selecting songs for them, they'll look into migrating to another service like Amazon.

At this point, you can pretty much take them at the opposite of their word.

For example, if they say "We didn't find any evidence that Snowden raised concerns about our program", then this really means "We found evidence that Snowden raised concerns about our program." You can also add the following implied section onto that statement: "We want to cover up the fact that he raised concerns, though, because it doesn't fit the narrative we'd like to build of Snowden as a traitor to the US who should have voiced his concerns through 'official channels' instead of someone who had grave concerns about a NSA program, tried to voice those concerns, and was told to keep quiet."

You would think they'd stop before they'd send away $25,000 or more, but...

The problem, once you've fallen for the Nigerian scammers, is that it can be hard to admit you've been scammed and have lost money. You can either admit that and realize you were an idiot, or keep believing that this $1,000 you're sending will finally unlock those millions that are "obviously" coming your way. The deeper these people fall for these scams, the harder it can be to admit that it was a scam and that there never were millions coming to you. So they keep going deeper and deeper in the vain hope that they will finally reach their payday.

They called my father and he almost fell for it. He got wise and called me when they said they were going to have him install software so they could remote in. He had just enough sense to know NOT to do that without asking me. He had told me a similar thing. It sounded fishy, but he was having trouble with Microsoft Office and so thought maybe this was related to it. When my response was "Hang up!", he actually argued with me "But what if they are legitimate?" Finally, he accepted that it was a scam and hung up. Luckily, he's not the type to fall for something twice so when they called him back, all they got from him was a verbal tirade from him followed by a hang-up.

Now my wife's grandmother is another story. No matter how many times we tell her "don't do X", she keeps falling for this stuff.

We use Google Voice for our "home" phone number. When a call comes in, it rings our phones and we have the option to answer or send it to voicemail (where we can listen in and answer at any point). The exception to this is that we can mark a number as "spam." If we do this, they get a "This number is no longer in service" message and our phone doesn't ring. Double benefit in that we don't get harassed by them and they might just take us off their list for having a non-working number.

My boys will often fight (as siblings do). They're not subtle, but one kid will sometimes do something that annoys the other. The second retaliates with a punch or a kick which I see. The second gets in trouble while the first might get off. I don't punish based on "he did X and that's why I hit him" because that's just an open license to have one kid punch the other kid and then make up a reason to get the other kid in trouble. I'll always tell the puncher/kicker, "if you came to me to let me know what he did, he would have gotten in trouble. Instead, by doing this, you're the one in trouble."

My hope is that my boys learn this lesson before they grow up. If they do, they'll be ahead of this guy (assuming he was harassed).

If he spent 10 years doing this, had a mysterious change of heart, and apologized it would be one thing.

Spending 10 years doing this and apologizing once you've been arrested and are facing charges, though, is something entirely different.