Censored Internet Getting Closer and Closer>
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I think that's the core of the problem: the current state of the legislative system. It's not to be trusted because it's heavily influenced (at the very least) by the private sector. Meaning - it's corrupt to the bone. And I'm not talking about any specific party - they are all involved. If corruption wasn't an issue, I don't think anybody would have a problem with the FCC setting up rules that benefit everyone.
But corruption is an issue, and a big one. In other words, not much in a country can function as it should, or normally would, when the system is corrupt.
So what's the solution? Don't let the FCC do anything and we give the private sector the freedom to limit their customer's freedoms. Let the FCC govern the internet and you allow a corrupt government to decide about the rights of the very entities that are putting the money in their pockets.
And the weakest piece of the chain is...
There are sensible rules, but governments don't make sensible rules. To paraphrase Gary Vaynerchuk, you don't want 70 year old douchebags running things.
A better idea is to let customers decide with their dollars, and punish companies which do not satisfy them, just as they do in thousands of other industries.
Is it profitable to limit customer freedoms? Where there is competition, is the firm who gives less to their customers the more likely to prosper?
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The whole thing is somewhat bizarre, because America went through this 26 years ago with telephone deregulation, and now people want to re-regulate communication (after a tremendous boom in market based innovation in communication) all over again.
I'm just speculating, but we would still be talking on cell phones like this if governments were running phone services as public utilities.
The tea party and libertarians do believe in a free and open internet. That article just spins it all to hell.
You really think handing over control to the FCC would serve us better?
Heres the reality noone wants to believe or just too apathetic to allow to sink in. If google and verizon want to do some bullshit deal with their services, they have the right in this country to do so. The same right that religions have to build their churches, mosques, synogues, whereever they want. Even if its in poor taste.
If you dont like what the phone companies and internet companies are doing, you have a few options. First, dont use the services if you dont like the hoops they put you through.
And while were on the topic of government regulation, if there wasnt so much red tape to start your own telephone company or internet service provider, you could start your own and compete with these bigger companies and offer something that people would flock to by the thousands.
But no, you vote in more and more regulation that makes it easy for big companies to do this. Since they dont have to worry about competition.
You really think handing over control to the FCC would serve us better?
Heres the reality noone wants to believe or just too apathetic to allow to sink in. If google and verizon want to do some bullshit deal with their services, they have the right in this country to do so. The same right that religions have to build their churches, mosques, synogues, whereever they want. Even if its in poor taste.
If you dont like what the phone companies and internet companies are doing, you have a few options. First, dont use the services if you dont like the hoops they put you through.
And while were on the topic of government regulation, if there wasnt so much red tape to start your own telephone company or internet service provider, you could start your own and compete with these bigger companies and offer something that people would flock to by the thousands.
But no, you vote in more and more regulation that makes it easy for big companies to do this. Since they dont have to worry about competition.
Go to a nicer country... here everything is cheaper and they ain't control the internet because no one uses this magic shit.
You seriously have the chicken and egg thing backwards.
The reason the Govt is corrupt is because they have stolen power they should not have to regulate things that they have no business regulating. If they did not have the power then there would be no corruption. Nobody would be bribing those Govt scumbags if they did not hold power over them to kill or help their business. Why should anyone in Govt have the power to regulate your business or anyone elses? The only reason they do it is for money and/or power.
I can not think of one instance where having the Govt involved in business has been a good thing. It always ends up screwing up whatever it touches.
I completely agree with this, but I also think this is a special case. In theory, of course customers will choose the best value for their money when they know what the difference is.
But the telecommunications market is an oligopoly, and the product is a highly complicated one.
If one ISP starts sculpting their bandwidth, the other three are likely to follow. Add to that that there is a huge misinformation about the internet among the general population, and you have a customer base that can't tell any difference between a "free" internet and a limited one. They will likely not even notice any difference.
So in effect, they will just stick to the ISP they have had for years, while those silently developed a new revenue stream on their end by limiting and dissecting their product.
I'd choose a free market over a regulated one anytime, but I think there are cases that warrant basic ground rules, as in "make sure the car you build is safe", "make sure the drug you make doesn't have any long-term side effects", and "make sure your customers have free access to all information, and not just to the one you've selected for them".
I think in essence, you're agreeing with me. I said the government was corrupt. I didn't talk about any reasons for this, or why I think that's the case - I was talking about present issues.
I do agree with what you said, but I don't see where my chicken is any different from yours...
Simply put, and very simply put, advocates don't want a situation where hosting or content providers (ie: your hosting provider or you with a website) has to pay various internet providers for faster or any access of users delivered to their site. For example if a User with Verizon FIOS tries to visit your site and you didn't pay the 'fee' for access, that user would either be redirected or would have a slower throttled connection speed to said site. Thats the scenario we don't want. Comcast tried to do it for a while for making torrents slower and other websites (course with the guise of preventing piracy but such would require invasion of privacy).
We're fairly close on this. But the first two examples you provided;
"make sure the car you build is safe"
"make sure the drug you make doesn't have any long-term side effects"
is very different from this one;
"make sure your customers have free access to all information, and not just to the one you've selected for them"
The first two are, "make a good product". The last one is, "you must provide something."
The first ones are negative obligations, "do no harm". That last one is a positive obligation, "you must do good".
Many people have been educated to believe that businesses must perform social functions because they are businesses. This is a very dangerous concept because it lays the foundation for state control of the economy.
Businesses provide social good by providing ANYTHING which consumers want to buy and are willing to exchange money for. Businesses cannot however be responsible for achieving social agendas.
Governments have monopoly power of law and the purse and struggle to achieve social agendas, setting such a standard like that for the private sphere puts the fix in. Everything is a market failure after that point, which of course, justifies government intervention.
There wouldnt be a big telecommunation oligolopy if the government didnt have a hand in it.
I believe the original reason for regulating telecommunication companies went back where they started horror stories about how if they didnt limit the number of phone companies then the phone wires would block out sunlight in big cities. (or maybe that was electric companies, ill have to check)
Either way, what he's saying is you cant corrupt something when there isnt anything to corrupt.
When the government is involed, the upper hand goes to whoever can bribe politicians into giving their companies priority and outright denying the possibility of owning a similar business to everyone else by making it impossible with red tape.
When the free market is involved, the upper hand goes to whoever can provide the biggest supply at the best price.
A lot of ISP's kind of already do this through their Fair Access Policies. They draw out rules based on how much bandwidth you can use per day, week, and month. If you cross that threshhold your ISP connection crawls to the point where it might be faster to just dial up.
They also limit how many open TCP connections you can have open, this is a more brutal limitation because you can do it quite easily without knowing. Your connection speeds grind to a near halt for a good 8-24 hours.
This would make it very difficult to seed large torrents such as linux distos and of course, pirated media. Downloading would be difficult too.
Just talk to anyone whos had to suffer through a satellite ISP such as direcway. They may not know why they have good days and bad days with their ISPs but I'm sure they notice a few quirks.
I don't think they did stop. I heard there was court case or something but I'm too lazy to look it up. I know that I still notice my shit slows down when I download torrents though, and I don't download much anymore. Pretty sure they have caps in place on bandwidth, even if they don't admit to it.
They didn't.
They will.
Edit: I haven't looked into the story for a while because we don't have Comcast around here, just Mediacom (which is another reason "the free market" isn't going to save the world here... I have one option for broadband Internet where I live. One). Anyway, it looks like the lawsuit finally ended and Comcast has to pay up: http://www.cio.com/article/599018/Judge_Approves_Comcast_Traffic_Throttling_Settlement
However, that's just for the torrent throttling (there are still reports of throttling all over). Not to mention the fact that since the lawsuit was filed, Comcast has taken to limiting access in terms of a GB cap every month.
No we are making very different arguments. You are saying that the reason for not getting the Govt involved is because it is corrupt. I am saying that first off the act of getting involved is what makes the Govt corrupt and second it does not matter if the Govt is corrupt or not. We have very different reasoning behind not wanting the Govt involved. While we agree on the end point in this particular case the philosophical reasoning behind our reasons are light years apart.
The quote above very clearly shows that you are not sure which is the better choice and only fall on the side of the Govt staying out of it because of the corruption.
Even if there were absolutely no corruption at all I do not believe the Govt especially the federal Govt should be involved in regulating business at all. The regulate commerce clause in Article 1 section 8 was to make sure that the individual states did not put up barriers to trade between the people in different states. It was not meant as a way for the Federal Govt to regulate business but as a way to keep the states in line. Anything more than that is wrong and a complete overstepping of constitutional boundaries.
It stopped because it was an invasion of privacy, they were not only throttling, but closing the connection on their end, basically sending the 'hangup' signal to the other peers acting as the person's computer. As someone mentioned above there was the lawsuit for the throttling don't know what happened regarding the intercepting the communication.
LoL, this is why I hate it when lawsuits go class-action, the lawyers make out like a bandit and those affected get a McDonald's Meal for Two.
WTF is up with the Lotus Notes bit though...