We don't know what's buried in their 300+ pages of rules, but have you read Title II? It gives the FCC an enormous amount of power, if the Internet falls under it (it doesn't).

The Internet is actually becoming less monopolistic. Decades ago, there was usually only one provider you could go to. Today, the majority of households in the US have a selection of two or more Internet providers.

Furthermore, this ruling wasn't about government-granted monopoly (which is wrong, and presumably still legal), this is about government-run Internet, which frequently turns into a monopoly as a municipality has the advantage of "free" taxpayer money.

but has no business standing in the way of any group of users who wish to band together to organize service of their own.

Who is standing in the way? Link? If you want to do this, well... go do it. Form an LLC, seek investment for shares of ownership, buy capital, sell Internet. Done.

Capitalism works if people were smart. Persons are smart, people are stupid and that is why it doesn't work, unless you put a LOT of efford in it. With teh cigarettes, I was not legally allowed to sell them at those prices (or at all).

Not so. The laws of economics are laws that govern any exchange, usually economists use it for transactions involving money, but they apply just as well to trade-offs that we make every day, "Should I go to the grocery store today or tomorrow?" And so on.

The laws of supply and demand do not change regardless of how many people are in the market, if it's just yourself, if it's a huge monopoly, or if it's a perfect competition with a vary large number of nearly identical sellers; if we have perfect information or if everyone is as dumb as bricks.

The outcomes in each condition will be different, to be sure (very different and sometimes outright bizarre, in the case of perfect information); but there is no statute that can improve on the basic laws of economics, any more than they could pass a law making a round earth flat.

The Federal government has the authority to regulate Interstate commerce: This is the opposite of stopping it or preventing it.

And the Federal government has no power to intervene in the affairs of local, intrastate transactions, even if that would later result in packets being moved across state lines. This case of packets going across state lines would instead fall under interstate peering agreements, that is Federal jurisdiction. But that has nothing to do with local governments setting up taxpayer-funded Internet, and the legality thereof.

Congress cannot lawfully (constitutionally) delegate their authority to another branch of the government, certainly not for any longer than their two-year term, when a new Congress comes into session.

Congress' own operating rules (on themselves) have to be re-approved every term, but a Congress from a century ago can give the President war-declaring powers today, or the power to censor broadcast (and now private) media, information, and telecommunications? Do I understand this logic right?

How in the world do you manage to make the jump from: "The Congress shall have Power ... To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers" (emphasis mine) to "whatever it takes to run the country and enact the peoples will, they can do."

The "To establish post offices and post roads" clause lets the Federal government create a post office.

The Necessary and Proper clause let's them purchase the raw materials, land, and labor to actually construct it.

In other words, the Necessary and Proper clause gives the federal government a narrow and limited set of powers to do things in direct connection to one of the previous mentioned powers, if those things would be necessary (can't build a post office without materials) and proper (say, merely renting a post office location might be inferior).

You know why I know this? The Framers themselves said your interpretation was wrong, in response to people worried that it would grant the US government too much power (as if that was a bad thing! And indeed it is!), in Federalist 44.

Let's review: The necessary and proper clause grants Congress the powers to that which matches ALL of the following:

• Necessary to execute another power of congress
• The proper way to act on another power of congress

That seems like a far cry from "do whatever the people want"!

One more sentence: If you think Internet access is expensive now, wait until it's free!

SCOTUS never said "businesses and unions are people". Corporations are merely owned by people, and those people have the full protections of the First Amendment, whether they're operating as sole proprietors or in a voluntary association, like a corporation.

That was the fault of Cogent, not Comcast, under their peering arrangement not exchanging data symmetrically. That had nothing to do with Net Neutrality and everything to do with Netflix taking 1/3rd of Internet traffic on top of bad routing.

Netflix was not uniquely targeted. The proposed FCC rules would have done jack.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc... may also be of interest.

Well then by all means, make it a part of the contract at the time you take the money.

But you cannot retroactively say "Ha! You took taxpayer money last year, that makes you our little bitch!"

During WWII, corporations like Chrysler were legally obligated to produce what the Federal government told them or face being commandeered. If there's such a thing as corporate slavery, that was it.

The corporations thereof that used these exact rules to maintain their monopoly and prevent customers from owning telephones outright? Those laws?

Oh boy, forgive me for not appending [sic], too.

Not necessarially opposed to grammatical errors, just the nonsense that it causes. Like this one up here ^

So it would appear that POTUS is now towing a line advocated by none other than whistler-blower Snowden who asserted [8] that “properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on.”

Only there’s a problem with this narrative and its promise of salvation: When your threat profile entails a funded outfit like the NSA, cyber security is largely a placebo.

How many pointless articles could be avoided if authors and editors understood the difference between a necessary condition and a sufficient condition? Of course comsec is not a solution per se, Ulbricht can tell you all about that! (And how many more pointless discussions could be avoided if everyone knew "per se" = "by itself".)

300+ pages of justification, like Eric Holder's secret justification on how it's constitutional to shoot down unarmed American citizens without any charge or trial.

They voted on the entire thing, Title II the FCC an enormous amount of power over whatever system it covers (and it does not include the Internet imo - If the FCC is right, can you name any company that'll fall under the "information service" label, now? No?), and at least one of the FCC commissioners who wants to publish the rules seems to disagree with that assertion anyways.