This is an argument rather than an article. A few of the biggest corporate opponents of Net Neutrality - whose arguments this article echoes (while also vulgarly invoking political partisanship) - sit on stockpiles large enough that they could build their own infrastructures if they so chose. The competitive clout wielded by the Silicon Valley crowd makes them vulnerable to no real risk in a free market situation. One could easily advocate that Net Neutrality instead harms the consumer, by depriving infrastructure providers of the option to choose how they dispense or regulate their services - limiting their pathways to organic growth. It certainly benefits the GoogleFacebookNetflixarchy by eliminating what might be a major component of their cost of distribution.

Um, welcome to the '90s. Seriously, Slashdot?

This post breaks down in so many ways. Premise in a nutshell: FB allows the spreading of fake news, and this is why HRC lost. Immediate irrefutable response: Assume FB allows the spreading of fake news. Since they don't enforce any partisan content restrictions (on personal status updates), this makes it equally easy for any political position to spread fake news benefiting their narrative. During this election cycle, I spotted fake news from both sides of the race. So let's start by tossing out the implication that fake news came only from Trump's supporters. Then we can easily toss out the notion that it had any measurable impact on one side's propaganda versus the other's. Secondary point: Snopes has been accused of operating under a political agenda of its own. The implication that they constitute an example of objectivity introduces a flaw into the chain of logic. Tertiary point: IMHO a much more honest/impartial discussion might arise from the new proliferation of primary sources online for people to do their own fact-checking. As an example, I went straight to Wikileaks to find out what was there when the story broke. Many acquaintances of mine (from one side of the race) only ingested editorialized, filtered reports about Wikileaks; and many others (from the other side) know almost nothing about the content, dismissing it as the propaganda of a malicious foreign power. In both cases, the stories being ingested are once-removed from the original facts because of an editorializing intermediary. If anything, social media's role in this election served as an agent of confirmation bias - on both sides. Just as partisans choose media outlets that reinforce preconceived notions (CNN, FOX, NYT, etc), social media users accept self-reinforcing memes as fact , and reject those that contradict.

The first line of attack for someone who has no sound argument is ad hominem: attack your opponent... the reasoning is that if you can discredit the purveyor of an argument, you have discredited their argument. Ad hominem arguments are worthless, since they don't even deal with the issue at hand. But boy, are they informative. When I see such an attack, my opinion of the person being attacked is strengthened. If you disagree, attack the argument, not the person.

Thank you for this very informed and totally apolitical answer. This is the kind of discussion I was hoping for, though we all know the trolls come out when they smell the bait.

So this is clearly the wave of the future for household dopamine production. I'll explain: I didn't ditch cable tv last year because my wife needed today's Oprah/Dr.Phil/Real Housewives show, and my 3 kids needed today's Peppa Pig/Dora/iCarly. I have friends who have been off cable/sattelite tv for years, because they're content with a smaller, better quality content selection. With the coming latency drop teased by this google publicity stunt, the current mega-ascension of NFLX, etc, and the rumor that Hulu will deliver any show the day after, I'm tempted to ditch cable. But with peak possible media usage of, say, four concurrent high-bandwidth streams in my household, I'm not convinced we're there yet. Do I wait for gigabit to get to my neighborhood? Or do I just adopt today? Sure would be nice to cut down that $200/month bill.

Fire and Brimstone. In the 70's it was the next ice age. In the 80's it was the African Killer Bees. in the 90s it was Y2k. In the aughts it was anthropocentric Global Warming. All interesting doomsday scenarios with just enough soft science behind them for them to show up on the cover of Time magazine. The only reason Global Waring hasn't been replaced as the fashionable fear of the decade is that political parties took sides on the issue, meaning that moneyed interests crept in and entrenched themselves around it.

I wish I had done a little less laughing and a little more investing when Al Gore emerged from his post-election-defeat depression with his week-old facial scruff and his Birkenstocks. His hockey-stick Powerpoint road show, with its accompanying feature film and Nobel Prize, has personally profited him hundreds of millions of dollars in the carbon credits business. Should have seen that one coming.

How interesting what happens when big political money gets involved in science: the community is perfectly happy to speak of the 'theory of evolution,' or the 'special theory of relativity.' But when anthropocentric global warming, a theory with much less convincing experimental proof than those two, is spoken of as a 'theory' and not fact, the thought police rush in to deride the speaker as a holocaust denier.