by telling carriers that they can't charge more for premium levels of service

Close.

The original plan was to tell carriers that they can't make Vonage and Skype a premium level service (add the voip package for only $15/mo!) to prevent them from competing with their phone service (only $9.99!). Or make Netflix an unusable service to stop customers from cutting cable. Or make browsing Amazon difficult because Barnes & Noble paid them to. Or sell 90% of the bandwidth they sold to me to their "fast lane" partners, while the sites I actually want to see get the last 10% of the bandwidth I paid for.

Much like the Occupy Movement, nobody took control to keep the message on point and eventually the whole thing devolved into a flaming mess, helped along by the telcos themselves spouting bullshit about how network neutrality meant you couldn't pay more for faster internet.

is your definition of that due to your political positions or is it a moral absolute?

Actually, it's pretty easy to decide if something is a moral absolute or not: If it's OK for everyone to do it then you can, if it's not OK for everyone to do it, then you Kant.

- there is absolutely 0 wrong with providing a company with a promise to buy scheduled services on the clock without interruptions and to pay for the service whether or not you can use 100% of its capacity that day.

If I want to start a shipping business I can talk to an import/export broker and work out a schedule, where regardless of my circumstances I will ship 1 container every 2 days with him on a clock and because of that certainty of payment he will give me a much better price than he could anybody else.

As to Rockefeller's 'secret deal to prevent shipping for others' - baloney. The so called 'secret deal' was no such thing, it was a discount that Rockefeller was getting that nobody else could get because they would not ship a supply of that much oil on the clock, whether they have it or not that time and pay for a prearranged amount of delivery as promised.

Rockefeller was absolutely right and the reason that oil never went below 7 cents was exactly because government destroyed his company and did not allow him to find new ways to increase demand by lowering prices even further. Nobody was finding any better way of doing business in that time, otherwise they would have won against Rockefeller and that is all there is to it.

Microsoft had a temporary monopoly for a very good reason: they provided the computing platform that nobody else could provide at the price and just because you can't accept that doesn't change that fact. Microsoft and others also pushed hard enough in the market that competitors actually had to innovate to become competitive in that market, which is how free and open source software came to existence.

As to me being 'religious' about free market - I cannot stand hypocrisy of the modern society that will vilify the individual and promote the collective and use the force of the collective to oppress the individual. If I am 'religious' about anything that would be the belief that individual freedom tramps every so called 'societal good' that you can come up with that is based on lies, oppression, destruction of the individual, theft from the individual, slavery of the individual by the collective.

But...but..

Robert Byrd is dead and was a Democrat, besides he didn't look all that tough! Maybe he was a bit more spry back in his younger days when he was burning crosses on 'uppity' black family's front lawns with Al Gore Sr.

Strat

Yes, I am saying precisely that, because free market is market free from government oppression, which means government cannot give a monopoly to a company and as long as a monopoly status is not given and not protected by a government the so called 'monopoly' is a temporary state of affairs that clients assign to a company if the company does exactly what the clients want.

A monopoly in a free market is not a problem at all because it doesn't become a monopoly by using force and oppression of government, so it may be a temporary monopoly (temporary as long as the company provides the best product at the best price) but no company stays a monopoly for too long. As an example I consider the break up of Standard Oil in 1911 to be a complete and utter travesty and destruction of individual freedoms. That company was started with one goal, to make money the best way Rockefeller knew how: by building a company that over time reduced prices and improved quality of service, both of which that company did.

The prices for oil product (kerosene at the time) went down from 60 or so cents in 1860s to just around 7 cents a gallon by late 1890s. All of this improved standard of living for people buying the product, the government wanted to steal the proceeds and let inefficient friends to enter the market where in the free market they could not compete on those prices at all.

Yes, a monopoly in a free market shows that the company is doing everything right.

Tell me, what's on the horizon tomorrow that I can't do with my 100Mbps connection

Download two linux cd images in a second?

Exactly my point. Adequate peering should be defined in technical terms based on capacity and measured demand. It wouldn't be terribly difficult to come up with an effective rule.

Something along the lines of some thresholds that mandated that if a peering connection was regularly saturated for X number of hours the previous 3 months, then it would trigger some sort of upgrade negotiation process between the networks with the FCC as arbiter if agreement could not be made.

Whistleblowers have been coming forward, the people have been loudly criticizing it, we elected the Presidential candidate who was most opposed to it in both of the last two elections (the second guy was distinctly more of a "lesser of two evils" than the first), and we've been taking them to court.

So, to recap, that's soap box, ballot box, and jury box that we've been using. To claim that we're letting them get away with it is to betray your ignorance of the facts. Short of revolution, we have done everything we can. This is the oligarchy ignoring the law and the will of the people.

Seriously, the unrest is brewing in our towns. The powder keg is filled to the brim, all it takes is a spark, and any kind will do, to blow it up. You're getting close to a critical mass of people who are severely unhappy with how things are going, the only thing missing is a focal point for this anger. As soon as a justification is found to vent that anger, you have a riot.

Seriously? Critical Mass? Seriously?

I kinda doubt it...this is pretty isolated. Seems mostly to just be a problem in the few highly packed urban centers in the US. You don't see this type of behavior, or even sympathy to it in most of the US.

And for the most part, I think the 24/7 news channels blow it up to much more than it actually is. They often choose camera angles to try to make it look like more people than it is.

The majority if folks in the US rarely if ever have a personal encounter with the police in their cities. The majority of US citizens while concerned that these isolated events are coming to our attention, they also don't see it as much a problem in their local areas or states.

However, there are limited limits. The old "you can't yell fire in a crowded movie house" comes to mind.

I should think the same rules apply to social media? I mean, that tweet that went out saying "there's going to be a PURGE at 3pm..etc" could the powers that be not have that taken down, blocked, etc?

I"m guessing no mechanism now..but shouldn't be hard to figure how to put filters on there, no?

I don't say this type thing lightly either, it is a slippery slope...in that righteous expressions that may be controversial, political and all could be in jeopardy, but I think it is something to be discussed.

You have plenty of rights to free speech, but incitement to riot isn't one of them.

At the very least...track down the folks that tweeted to riot, and throw the book at them. Maybe just use existing law to get those doing this would be better than a censorship method like I first proposed...it might not STOP a riot as well, but after awhile people *might* actually start getting wise that it isn't smart to incite a riot on social media of any form.

Compare the policies of the Democrat party with those of the Conservative Party in the UK. The Tories are left of the Democrats, that makes the Democrats a right-wing party and the Republicans further out than Genghis Khan.

And that comparison has exactly what to do with US politics?

We're talking left vs right here in America...not the rest of the world which leans far enough left to be socialist in so many ways.

I consider Obama to be very left in his views, and if he'd not gone checked by congress, would take us down the European path.

I figure if you want to live European style, move to Europe. The US broke off from Europe many moons ago because we did not want to be European. The majority of us still don't.

- wrong. 2 things are necessary for free markets to exist:

1. equal application of all laws to all individual regardless of their individual circumstances.

2. protection of ownership and operation of private property against the government intrusion, against the mob and the collective.

A feudal system does not treat all people the same under the law. Neither does any of of the current socialist / fascist systems. As an example the so called 'progressive' income tax increases tax rates on a smaller and smaller percentage of the population relative to their greater income. This is unequal application of the law, as it creates a gigantic divide between people who run businesses, own assets and the rest, who want to steal from those who run businesses and own assets.

- actually this is one of the worst forms of government, since it creates oppression that cannot be eliminated by taking down any one particular individual. A dictator can be shot, even a single party system (like what we had in the USSR) can be stopped, but a hydra that is 'democracy' cannot be simply shot or stopped because it pretends that it exists on the voluntary participation of the electorate, which is nonsense and it does not give power to any one particular governer, instead it provides power by proxy to the most connected individuals (companies) and it keeps a puppet in the spot light.

You can go ahead and shoot that puppet but not the puppeteer, and the puppeteer is intelligent enough to give you the impression that you are in control of the government.

Democracy is a horrendous system, where few in power (the puppeteers) use the mob to keep the power structure going by setting up the useful puppets that promise to keep the mob happy by stealing from the minority (employers, 1% or whatever) and handing the stolen goods to the majority (electorate).

Of-course the reality is that the mob gets crumbs, the money is stolen from everybody and the puppeteers have direct access to the actual reigns of power and to the fake money printing presses.

Netflix wasn't looking for a free ride on Comcast's network to service Verizon's or some other network's customers... Netflix was looking to locally peer with Comcast to serve content that Comcast's own customers were themselves requesting and those customers had already more than adequately paid both Comcast and Netflix to have sufficient access to.

Net Neutrality is or should be about preventing that kind of monopolistic and destructive abuse of our communications infrastructure to cynically squeeze money out of monopolized customers. The Comcast/Netlfix deal is and was some sort of protection racket or payola scheme not a legitimate business practice.

No one is saying if I have a server in California that a Massachusetts ISP should be forced to connect to me in California. But if a network's customers are regularly saturating the local link to another network, then yes there should be an effective regulation to say that the Massachusetts ISP has some defined obligation to peer to the long haul network at sufficient bandwidth at a locally designated peering point.

That is how the Internet was built. In good faith, in the best interest of efficient communications without sabotaging peering arrangements to squeeze more money out of customers.