Yes, have to concur on the eminent domain and monopoly agreements bits.

By themselves, corporations can do only so much damage. With the assistance of government, they can do much more. Not as much as government itself, but closer to it.

It would probably help if the first remedy against corporate misdeeds was the revocation of intellectual property (i.e., forms of exclusivity enforced by the government). You aren't a good corporate citizen? Fine, keep competing as best you can, just without our help any longer.

We agree about the problem; there's too little competition. But regulations, price controls and the like have a long and consistent history of creating shortages and *reducing* competition. Even the most benign and well-intentioned regulations raise entry barriers to the regulated industry and increase costs to consumers.

When you saddle an industry with a new obligation -- something they wouldn't have done absent the regulation -- it almost certainly reduces their margins. But no company in its right mind just absorbs that; you have to do better and better quarter over quarter or all the 401Ks and mutual funds that hold your stock will start fleeing. So you reduce value to the consumer somehow, by raising prices, cutting support, withholding bandwidth increases that you used to give for free, etc. All the while the industry has a bunch of new compliance costs, making it less attractive to speculators and harder for entrepreneurs to break into, thereby also making it even *less* likely that consumers will be able to respond to your increasing suckiness by going to a competitor.

Meanwhile, you've set a new precedent, giving a federal agency the authority to make the internet conform to its preferences. That's all well and good when the agency's preferences match yours and they make you feel like you've forced a company to give you something. (You haven't and they never do, incidentally.) But many others are just waiting for a chance to change the internet in very different ways. Obscenity guidelines will surely be close behind. Anonymous connections aren't good for anyone with lobbyists, so those will have to go. Official monitoring for terrorists and copyright infringers is no less likely than ATF agents breaking down doors at warehouses full of counterfeit DVDs. And since the DHS is already usurping domain names on behalf of the entertainment industry, imagine what they'd like do with all that new authority. And you know, all those cable channels have been operating like the wild west, not at all like the orderly and well behaved over-the-air broadcasters who are regulated. Maybe we could stretch that authority just a little teeny bit and bring some much needed reform to cable programming.

We will get neutral access from the marketplace. It may come at a premium at first, but consumers hate limits. No regulation gave us Amazon non-DRMd MP3s. Or AMOLED screens. Or 4G. Or Wi-Fi tethering (now at a premium price, but *actually* unlimited, and will surely be part of the basic package within a decade). No regulation gave us home internet service to begin with. Do we really need to use the nuclear option to get source-agnostic speeds?

Every expansion of authority begets another. Every one of them. Once people see government as a tool for righting wrongs, government acquires the ability to wrong rights as well. Our constitution placed extraordinary limits on federal authority to prevent that, and we'll piss those limits away to stop someone from throttling our Netflix or torrents.

I'm most suspicious of the people who *are* willing to put in the time and effort. Too many of them have ulterior motives that involve depriving me of some further fraction of my property or liberties.

Natural forces are such that corporations' powers inexorably weaken over time, while governments' powers inexorably strengthen between revolutions. At any given moment, the government will serve whoever it most owes favors too. Whoever this is, you can be pretty sure it's not you.

I hate Apple, but I'd rather have an iPhone as my only smartphone option than have Uncle Sam 'even the smartphone playing field.'

Furthermore, if his ISP built the network, they damn well do have the right to degrade the services they wish to. They'll ultimately drive customers away, but hey, it's their network.

I don't get why there is so much blind faith in bureaucracies and so much blind suspicion of companies. It's entirely backwards, when you think about it.

How does any of that answer the parent's point? Can the little guy lobby the Obama administration to have the DHS stop confiscating domain names of potential assisters of copyright infringement? No. They're funded the same way the Bush administration was, and have proven just as susceptible to regulatory capture.

I don't get it. It seems your complaint is that there are problems that net neutrality might solve... problems caused by control of the internet being in too few hands. But your solution is to put that control into even fewer hands, and harder hands to wrest it out of.

Let the ISPs throttle and choke. It will only accelerate the rise of darknets, Wi-Max competitors, and P2P mesh networks. Amazon is selling unencumbered MP3s now, and no regulatory action was needed to make that happen. Even the rate at which consumer tech is overtaking industrial tech is accelerating. At a time when it's getting harder and harder for any commercial interest to establish and maintain control of any resource, it's certainly not the moment to call for greater centralized power over those resources.

Give me AT&T, Comcast & Cox over John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi and the unaccountable commissions they spawn any day. I will be free of the former -- or at least their current shortcomings -- long before the regulations of the latter cease to exist. Once the FCC has established its authority over teh internetz and is done defining 'neutrality', why shouldn't they get more involved in copyright enforcement? The DMCA is law, and vigorously defended by D and R alike. Anything decided by a federal agency is something that can be bought by an industry.

So how about each polling place and printing machine have a mini digital signature. Polling place setup involves loading hashes of the printer signatures into each scanner at the location.

The receipt (that the voter takes with) has a code, and the ballot has a hash of that code. Voters scan the receipt code to "open" the scanner, *then* they can scan the corresponding ballot if the hash matches.

The ballot includes a barcoded signature block using the location key, printer key, creation timestamp and hash of the ballot code. Except when keys are cracked, this restricts the scanners / counters to accepting only ballots created at that location, that day (or hour), by a printer registered to that location.

You could probably also publish logs of all ballots printed, all ballots scanned, and all ballots voided. Polling places with irregularities > n standard deviations off the mean get sent to bed without any dessert.

1. Informative, thanks. 2. I get how they could do this with e.g. android devices, since there are more ways to recognize their signature (screen resolution, other browser headers, perhaps a permacookie of some sort). But on Google TV, wouldn't it theoretically be possible to mimic the complete HTTP request signature of, e.g., a PC running Chrome?

Then there's the "root your Google TV box and change the user agent" option. *Maybe* a legal gray area at worst. Regardless, will probably be feasible for n00bs in 3... 2... 1... [blink]