Net Neutrality Survives
- Thread starter Fiver
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[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4aaal3jXYE]Bad Religion - The Empire Strikes First - 13 - Boot Stamping on a Human Face Forever - YouTube[/ame]
IMO, the first amendment ends when where private property begins. As a business owner, I fully support your right to hire only dyslexic black albino midgets and totally discriminate against everyone else. I also support your right to discriminate against products you just don't like because the color green scares you.
Free speech doesn't give anyone the right to be heard just like the general public doesn't have a right to unlimited youtube.
I also fully support a business' right to seek fair value for their products. Lets be honest here, access to youtube eats up a ton more ISP bandwidth than does digg. As this is a hard cost, some would say it makes sense to charge more for access to video sharing sites from a financial perspective.
Regardless what that company decides, if I don't like what my ISP does, I can switch to att, cox, or any of the dozens of mobile services that have hotspots ... or move to the T3 market. This is the beauty of a free market, if comcast makes a bad decision about this particular issue they will lose market share while others gain. We win because we have choices.
DC is screaming "censorship" about this, in truth it's strictly a private property issue. The problem is that DC is using this bill to get a foot in the door of the internet to further regulate and tax. Anyone paying attention can see it.
The worst part: the occupy movement is a bunch of people wanting something for free. The general public has no problem voting themselves access to the public treasury (which is specifically why we lost our country).
This bill is a MASSIVE over reach on DC's part (and I've not even read the specifics) ... much more so than we're used to which says a lot. This bill is about legislatively forcing a private company's assets into the public's consumption. They're basically saying you HAVE to give your product away for free.
Prophecy:
1. Bill passes
2. People name their kids Obama
3. comcast finds a different way to get more from all of their customers
4. government claims the internet
5. government makes 20,000 pages of regulations
6. government throws people in jail for "cyber crimes" like using a pen name
7. government starts taxing all purchases online
8. government opens the department of the internet
9. government drives down internet sales to a hault
End result:
1. gov't gets everything they want and squanders it away
2. comcast still makes bank by forcing higher fees onto customers
3. freedom loses out big time
Dude, I agree totally with just about everything you said; but I am starting to get the feeling that you have confused this bill with SOPA or Protect-IP.
Different bill entirely. This one basically says: "The internet must remain free from unfair practices like price fixing and denial of service in accordance with the first amendment."
I too haven't read the fine print here, but this isn't anything like SOPA.
I probably like sopa worse but the rest of the internet can see through that muddy water much easier than the cunningly named "net neutrality" bill. The people are doing a pretty good job crying about sopa one right now.
IMO: sopa is about censorship, neutered net is about private property. These "unfair practices like price fixing" and "1st amendment denial of service" claims are just saying ... we're stealing a private company's bandwidth under the guise of censorship. It's really just a power grab.
Look at the hypocrisy involved. All the companies nick named above stand to gain (or lose) heavily from the bill (google's youtube forced on all ISP plans means billions for them). Neither side is trying to stand on principal and ethical public interest, it's just money. With sopa, google is viciously against it. Why? Because google steals content... it's their business model.
Companies are selfish too, but that doesn't make all of them evil ... just google
sopa sucks ass because it's crony capitalism at it's finest (hollywood/entertainment lobby). However, Net Neutrality is potentially more harmful because the power is being passed to big brother, not a lawyer. This is the ultimate loss of freedom.
Lets twist the story around a little. Nick (falian above) runs dfb .. If net neutrality was focused on linkbuilding, it essentially would tell dfb that it had to deliver 100% of it's forum list to all customers regardless of what they paid just because the government is 1) trying to get some votes and 2)trying to levy a tax on anchor text eventually. This twist is only sort of abstract, I guarantee that if the gov't could, they would.
From DC's perspective: dfb is only bandwidth, just like youtube. They're just pushing electrons.
I won't lie and say I know much about the net neutrality bill, but surely the argument about charging more for access to video sites vs sites like digg doesn't work - they can already do that with monthly bandwidth limits. 10 gigabytes of transfer on youtube is no different to 10 gigabytes of transfer on digg.
This bill calls the above censorship and doesn't allow for different tiers of service based on price. That's my understanding anyways. If I've misunderstood this part, my argument still stays the same because the specifics of this regulation doesn't matter ... it's just a power grab by DC.
A couple of links to previous threads regarding this subject (both interesting reads):
August 2010: http://www.wickedfire.com/shooting-shit/100060-censored-internet-getting-closer-closer.html
December 2010: http://www.wickedfire.com/shooting-shit/111262-how-net-neutrality-coup-happened.html
August 2010: http://www.wickedfire.com/shooting-shit/100060-censored-internet-getting-closer-closer.html
December 2010: http://www.wickedfire.com/shooting-shit/111262-how-net-neutrality-coup-happened.html