This. Hm, should we let corporations censor the internet or the FCC? It’s happening either way.
No… they’re not. The crux of the arguement is in fact that an overwhelming majority of federal lawmakers do NOT want the FCC regulating this space. The FCC does NOT have any codified authority to regulate internet activity. Congress has never given the FCC the authority to regulate internet commerce (an authority it alone has the right to give) and that’s why so many lawmakers have written the FCC asking them to not do this. But it doesn’t matter. The FCC passes the new rules, and the rules will be struck down in court because no court is going to let the FCC interpret 130 year old regulations on the internet and say that was the intention of the law… So the FCC is going to have to convince Congress to give them that authority and in the end there are about 70 lawmakers who would be on board for this and everyone else would vote no tomorrow.
It doesn’t matter that the FCC doesn’t think its overstepping its boundaries… anytime a regulative agency regulates something Congress hasn’t given it the authority to regulate it has overstepped its authority. The FEC has new authority because of the Financial Reform Bill, fine it can now regulate more strictly the type of financial products people are allowed to sell. But no where in the US Code has Congress given the FCC the authority to regulate the internet in any capacity and when the FCC has to rely on 130 year old regulations on telephone communication as the legal basis for its opinion stating it has said authority… that’s instant grounds for litigation.
Lothar - You’re the attorney in training around here… If I’m wrong correct me but would you really think that the FCC has a case before any Federal Court in the country? Every lawyer I talk to, conservative and liberal alike, say this thing would get destroyed in federal court pretty quickly.
Oh and as for Comcast slowing down third party router traffic… has anyone actually EXPERIENCED this? Is it provable? Without an evidientary hearing and the traffic logs being taken from the Comcast local routing center that’s nearly unprovable. And before we get all conspiratorial, I’m sure that Comcast doesn’t have its fingers on a delete button in case of a “Discovery petition”.
The government has a purpose when regulating… sure… to get in the way of business it neither understands nor comprehends. Government no longer has officials who have actually worked in these sectors regulating them. We have the most unqualified group of regulators in US History. When people who graduate with bachelors degress is finance for example are hired to become junior regulatory investigators of say hedge funds… who do you think is getting the better of that deal? The only thing the modern regulatory scheme does is imperil the ability of capital to move freely to its most useful purpose in the name of “Protecting consumers.” A line of argumentation I find less than compelling since by and large consumers are adults who have access to more information than at any point in human history and can make rational decisions about the products they purchase. If you want to make an arguement for regulating highly complex products and force consumers to learn about what they’re buying, I’m not necessarily opposed to that, but what you want is regulation for regulations sake. To hire protectors who are incapable of protecting, and all that accomplishes is it forces companies to look for new ways to maintain profitability. Companies don’t change business practices because of regulation… they overcome and outsmart it. What I don’t understand is how people can seem to miss that government doesn’t have a monopoly on smart people, in fact when private sector jobs are more profitable, they have the upper hand on intelligent thinkers.
The governemnt plays chess with kids who were on the chess club in college. Corporations play chess with the grandmasters they hire. Who do you think wins? Even when the game is stacked against the grandmaster they win… The only way to prevent that from happening is to regulate to such a point than an industry is no longer profitable in which case that capital will be moved to a more profitable allocation and this game gets replayed all over again.
And what is wrong with this? Netflix is another horrible corporation. Netflix entire way to exist involves using competitors networks and property to offer services that put those competitors main products out of business.
Netflix live streaming it’s a metric ton of bandwidth that many providers aren’t able to offer, kills of their competitive products, and then Netflix leads the easily duped masses to their pitch forks and blames their competition for the issues.
Here Netflix and L3 are being the giant jackasses, and trying to hide behind net neutrality when they are actively screwing everybody over for a buck and trying to pass the bill and costs off onto their competitors.
This is largely blown out of proportion, also Comcast should do this, it’s bad business not to. Most people do not know how to setup and run a home network, so in order to properly serve your customers you back up and support a few models that you provide with the support fee built in. I’ve never heard of anybody with any IT skills having any problems with third party routers, but Comcast, rightly, won’t support them.
if it was just comcast not supporting the routers and installing them for people that’s one thing. however the suit filed against comcast by the manufacturer states that comcast has specifically blocked a large number of their routers from functioning with comcast service even if you have an IT person available to do all the settings. that’s what has been filed, it’s about all i have to go on.
as for the netflix business model, the customers allready pay for the bandwidth, why should comcast get paid twice for that bandwidth?
We could also get into what you can do with various third party routers after you hack the crap out of them. This isn’t really a comcast issue and there are plenty of good reasons only to support and allow proper, tested, licensed hardware onto a network.
Don’t pull that “won’t someone think about the consumers” crap, that’s the same sort of logic L3 trotted out, and guess what, this fight is in no way about the consumer. Here is how it works, comcast is a company that sells cable, internet, and it’s own video service. Another company, Netflix and L3, use comcasts internet to sell you a product that destroys comcasts cable and video service, without which they are not really a viable company. Furthermore it over burdens and hurts comcasts internet service. I hate to say it but comcast is the victim here.
L3 went out and demanded comcast give them 27-30 new ports, and this is after L3 upped it’s own 2.9tbs of carrier service on it’s own. Furthermore L3 sends roughly twice the amount of data over comcasts network than comcast sends over L3.
You are already paying for receiving the data, comcast just wants L3 to pay to send the data, which is legal, in an arrangement where L3 is completely fucking them from every angle and across the board. And the greedy corporate bastards at L3, rather than pay fairly, would rather continue to fuck comcast into the ground and play chicken with their own customers rather than have to pay for fair service… and so they’ve portrayed themselves and the customers as the victims when that was never the actual case here.
This is a pissing contest over peering and various content providers trying to find ways to screw each other or quit being screwed, it doesn’t have anything to do with the rights of the end consumer.
But hey, blame comcast and state that everybody can’t charge fees when they are getting raped by external profit mongers that are damaging to their business… and then watch when that service dies off and companies focus on other products where they don’t get screwed.
Hmmm… Indeed… How… to… prove… that… ?
Beyond extreme greed, the problem lies largely with the Telecoms not wanting to spend the $$$ on upgrading their infrastructure. Basically it’s like a Taxi cab with no AC/heat, shoddy brakes and a cracked windshield constantly charging more for a ride but never using any of the increased profits to fix up the cab. We’re already in the stone ages and it’s gonna get worse if Comcast gets their paws into NBC.
Comcast also has their hands in way to many things to be naturally competative without trampling over innovative start-ups. As an ISP, they really, truly should only worry about dishing out the net. But they have all these other interests to look after as well and they are just juggling too many balls to be trusted with any one of them.
I also find the fact that broadcasters would block Google TV appalling. It’s a freaking PC that insta-connects to your TV and has an interface + storage (basically a PC with HDMI out). Someone made it easy to get the same content that can be viewed on a PC and now they don’t want to play ball. "well, you’re supposed to watch that on one of them tiny screens… not on your tee vee… Hur hur hur… " you can do the same thing with a regular PC. They need to be punished by the consumer for this, but they won’t be.
Once again… if people will truly dissatisfied with their internet experience and felt that Comast (as an example) had not been improving their product in line with their competition, people would switch! You’re taxicab analogy is I think grossly inadequate, or at the very least an overwhelming majority of consumers would not see it that way. I would argue that the internet now is like a basic American sedan, it gets you from A to B and that’s what people want. People’s B is different but the internet is the internet and what their B is is their business. I think there are some people who want rocketships who get them from A to B more quickly but for the overhwleming majority of customers this isn’t an issue. How many complaints do you think Comcast recieves that its service is too slow? I would bet not many since most people can’t tell the difference between 6mbps down and 22mbps down. It just makes no difference and Comcast will tell you if you want to HD Video over the web you should get the 22 and that’s it.
The other thing is who built the infrastructure in the first place? What Comcast chooses to do with the billions of dollars it invested laying fiberoptic cable around the country it is business. If you don’t like what they’re doing with it, go with the competition. Comcast as a business has been extremely successful at managing its internally competing interests and buying NBC was bold and I think will prove quite the investment, lord knows you can’t run NBC any worse than its run now…
Eh… blocking Google TV isn’t so much about what Google TV is, its more about WHO it is. Google already owns the internet search, they own Youtube, they have an extremely popular mail client, this is about telling Google who runs the TV show. That is about broadcasters protecting themselves and their current revenue streams. They don’t want to lose ad dollars because people are watching youtube videos on their PC. Its hard to remember, that the vast majority of people we (and by we I mean nerds) associate with have an infintely higher technical computer ability than the average consumer. Your average consumer isn’t putting a Media Center PC in their home to put HD internet content onto their big screen in their front room. They’re not running networked media servers to consoles hooked up to their TV. To the vast majority of consumers these are still two very different things. TV and the Internet are not one in the same and as long as that’s true, you can’t blame broadcasters from trying to keep it that way when a product like Google TV (especially since its Google and Google is already so ubiquitious in our daily lives and has tons of corporate credibility) couild actually do damage to that notion.
It’s okay that companies fight with each other. We all don’t need to play nice. If there is some sort of illegal collusion going on, then let the Justice Department handle it. Otherwise, let them figure it out.
P.S. Comcast curbing bittorrent traffic was known long ago and that’s not what we were talking about. We were talking about blocking traffic to certain types of home routers. BTW, Comcast lost its case on blocking Bittorrent traffic and to my knowledge has since stopped. But Comcasts arguements on the matter were at least reasonable and since you declined to mention those lets all at least admit that Bittorrent is the most popular and strongest pirating system ever created and that probably 90% of the traffic that goes across torrents are of pirated material of some nature, whether its TV, Movies, Porn, Games, Books, Music, whatever. But that gets into a larger issue of how we defend intellectual property in the 21st century and that’s not what this is about… today.
Were you paid to write that post or what?
In the stone ages, compared to what, and to who? We aren’t, we are on the cutting edge. True, parts of this nation are stuck in the backwater compared to say Denmark, but then again those countries are tiny and the government helps out. It simply isn’t possible to build the type of high speed utopia people want here without bankrupting the telco’s… but hey, fuck having a functional business, they exist to serve me, and do it cheap, who gives a fuck if they go broke eh, I want my pie and eat it to and I don’t want to fucking pay for it!
This is all on L3. They were offering a service that they know would hurt the ISP’s since the backbone to do it didn’t exist in many areas, and isn’t economical and worth it to put it, and went ahead and did it anyways. And are now relying on dolts and stupid consumers to go and attack their ISP’s and make them pay for it so L3 can save a few bucks.
It’s sad to see so many people fall for this.
compared to other first world nations… yes we are in the stone ages of information technology. and there isn’t really the option of “well comcast isn’t upgrading infastructure very fast and services rendered” because none of the major telcom companys are because they have an effective oligopoly that does stifle innovation.
and comcasts moves to stifle competition and innovation in the fields that they are in is in direct opposition to the ideals and economic interests of the country. Similar situations are why we went after and broke up the big banks 100 years ago and why they went after Microsoft a decade or 2 ago. the people who get hurt when any one corporations gains control of that large a market share are ALLWAYS consumers.
edit: i just noticed that you tried to say the US is on the cutting edge of networking infastructure… man wtf are you smoking. normally i enjoy reading your posts as they are fairly well informed and moderate, however, in this case you have no clue what your talking about. I also find it EXTREMELY hard to view a gigantic corporation like comcast as the victim, because they are the ones with the power to bend someone over the barrel… smaller corporations like L3 can’t simply make demands and expect comcast to meet them… while comcast did make demands and L3 did have to meet them (while filing a suit against comcast).
Yes, they do have an oligopoly… there are industrial organization concerns in the broadband access marketplace… but those were created by and from government regulation and interference. The FCC created regional cable monopolies in most of the country but even that still has created an environment where the products of 2010 are much better than the products of 2008 for 60% of the US Population. Really, if you live in any of the 25 largest metropolitan areas in the United States, you can get high quality broadband coverage.
If you want to talk about a real problem you can discuss the problems with rural access, say in the Central Valley of California for instance but for the vast majority of consumers in urban to suburban to exurban areas, their access to quality broadband access is on par with smaller countries. Let’s also remember that in most of those countries there are much harder caps on monthly bandwidth allotment which are much more strictly enforced. (I remember hearing this, but if I’m wrong I happily stand corrected) I believe for example in Australia for instance and most of Europe they have a hard monthly cap of between 25GB to 50GB of internet traffic to any individual subscriber per month.
Yes, if we look at places like South Korea which has the landmass of approximately New Jersey it is much easier to upgrade their fiberoptic networks nationally simply because there isn’t the geographical constraint of covering 9,161,966 sq km (the United States) compared to the aformentioned South Korea total at 99,720 sq km. To put that into perspective, the United States is literally 100 times larger than South Korea (and much more geographically diverse between mountains, deserts, plains, snow plains, large lake coasts and oh yeah two states that are literally separated from the rest of the country in a distance measured in the thousands of miles…) and when you consider the cost of upgrading fiber optic networks over that kind of distance… I’m not personally sure that the United States has much to complain about when as is stated in the data, the overwhelming majority of consumers are happy with their broadband service.
In terms of you arguement concerning the abust of monopoly power, I think we have found the Sherman Antitrust Act more than adequate to curb the overabuse of EARNED monopoly power. Microsoft paid its (very large) fines (which I still believe Microsoft did nothing wrong. It had an operating system, it bundled a web browser that in nearly every way was superior to Netscape… fining Microsoft for making products easier to use…). Today’s large banks do not have near the degree of monopoly power their predecessors did in the early part of the 20th century. I do believe the government made a mistake in bailing them out and keeping bad capital running inefficiently, but that’s what government does. Let’s remember that banks came up with highly innovative financial products as workarounds to existing regulations, oh yeah and it helped that the bankers were infintely smarter than their regulators (which as I’ve said before due to the incentives of working in highly paying and often highly regulated fields is almost 100% true).
your basically saying my points for me… except i don’t agree that our 25 largest metropolotin (i just butchered that word didn’t i?) have exceptional infastructure. IMO they have passable infastructure at best. the main problem is not even close to all of the country lives in one of those area’s (i will soon, moving into san fran baby!). I realize that we have the extra hurdle of geographic location, and i COMPLETELY agree that the oligopoly in telcomm is 100% gov’t made. (basically state and local gov’ts were so over-eager to get cable access into homes that they allowed the major companies to run lines in the easements for rediculously low prices) and that’s why i think it’s all the more imperitive for the gov’t to intervene when one of those companies is abusing the market advantage provided to it by the state.
that being said i don’t consider it the responsibility of the telco’s to fully fund infastructure upgrades, i believe telcomm infastructure is as vital to a modern nation as water infastructure or dams bridges and roads etc. as such i believe the state has some responsibility to fund large-scale infastructure projects for the betterment of the country. Because while it is true that we are at a disadvantage because of our geographic size, that never stopped us in the past from being innovators and on the cutting edge. I would actually argue that because we took the massive steps for things like the national highway system that we had the level of economic prosperity that we did for so many years and i can see similar opportunities in telco as well as other fields if we simply fund infastructure projects. (added benefit of those types of projects are of course jobs… both in the public sector to plan the growth and in the private sector to build the materials and then do the work)
What first world nations have as large a land mass and such a distributed popluation as we do, answer, none!
You’re making the argument for nationalizing our backbone, which I am in favor of. But you can’t compare us to say the Netherlands (where my family is from) where it’s a tiny ass place with dense population centers. It’s not the same thing.
Without some monopolies things would be worse. Competition is great, but does breed higher priced custom products. For some things this is great, for others this is bad. Hence why I move to the left on services and say nationalize the hell out of it.
We are, if you live in the right area. I have both a FIOS and a T3 connection to my appartment, one I pay for, one work does. That’s squat compared to the OC3’s I have to our other offices in the US that I control, and I can still hit the overseas offices better than our Euro offices can.
The problem is in the US, once you get into “fly over land” it drops off a fucking cliff. Other first world nations don’t have this problem to deal with. Fuck you could fit most of them in Texas.
We are first rate… if you live in the right area. But so many people do not, and as a for profit business, there is little to no logical sense in laying the backbone to those areas.
If you want my solution of nationalizing the internet and taking over the telco’s, that’s another thread but I’m pretty much a socialist on this issue, and kinda sad it hasn’t happened.
Then again I live in Rosslyn VA, the home of the DOD, CIA, and various other items, so we have damn good connections here.
EDIT- just because a person is a juggernaut doesn’t make them inherently wrong or evil, at times the bigger player is getting fucked over. I hate comcast, but in this instance they are in the right.
@Highlulu: Well we may disagree on a lot of things, but we’ll often find there’s common ground when we get into the data. I think you do make some good points. I actually think this discussion has been pretty good myself. Certainly the challenge of innovating across the geographical divide has caused people to come up with innovative solutions and that’s good. I am not completely opposed to some degree of public sector goods being provided. What we would disagree on would be the nature of and the amount of said public goods. Whether that be healthcare, infrastructure, regulatory scheme, etc.
I think its fair and there is an arguement for having the Federal Government really take an important role in laying down the infrastructure necessary for the 21st century. (Of course anytime you put the words "Public Sector and “Plan Growth” together I shudder lol). I would be curious, since I’m not an expert on the quality of international broadband services, but say for example, what is the maximum bandwidth size you could purchase in say S. Korea or Japan? I think for most consumers, we don’t need the absolute biggest pipe. Now, if we want to talk about government services and large companies having the ability to pay for top of the line pipes that’s something else entirely. I for example want the Department of Defense to have as much pipe space as it says it needs. I don’t care if that’s an OC 780925734 (Or whatever number they’re actually up to now on those things). But I don’t need a T3 going into my home (Although I have to say, it would be pretty cool, not that I would know how to use it all).
Acerbic is also right that monopolies can also be good for somethings, especially when they’re earned. For instance, for the PC its very nice to know as a developer that 90% of computers run Windows. Could you imagine the types of cuts in features software developers would have to make if they had to make products for say 3, 4, 5, or even 10 different operating systems? We already see this in gaming when you have dual releases on PS3 and 360. How much extra money does it cost to develop for both systems? It’s a noticable cost. But it is important to note there is a difference between earned monopolies and government handed monopolies (i.e. cable / telecom).
@Acerbic: Don’t hate on flyover land lol. Okay, now that that is out of the way, you are definetly a beltway kind of guy huh? Yeah, D.C. and the suburbs of D.C. really are a completely different world than the rest of the country. I go there 3 or 4 times a month for research and to talk to Republican Policy Makers and political consultants and such and everytime I come back home it takes me 2 days to get back to normal lol. I personally am neve going to be in favor of “nationalizing” industries. I think historically public sector monopolies have been proven to be damaging to economic inefficiency in often obvious and surprisingly sneaky ways.
I think so much of this comes down to the functional difference between A+ service and B service or maybe even C service depending on where you are. The Internet is the internet. how different is it really between two people? I mean I can drive a Ferrari or I can drive my Impala, both cars run on gas. They both transport me. I have to follow the same laws no matter which vehicle I drive. The Ferarri looks cooler, runs faster, and may be statistically better in everyway, but in an era where there are speed limits (and on the internet we have speed limits based on what speed servers can send stuff to us) if I’m going 55 in a Ferrari or in my Impala, I’m still going 55. Now if the limit was 200 I couldn’t do that in my Impala but it seems to me, that we’re not there yet.
Is there something I’m missing?
sounds like me and you completely agree on what needs to happen with our internet infastructure so there isn’t a whole lot left to say there.
as for your edit, don’t get me wrong, i’m not at all saying that major corporations are either wrong or evil. However when dealing with and regulating them we have to keep a very very important fact in mind: they are A-moral. it’s a machine set up with 1 and only 1 legal responsibility; making more money. as such when there is a conflict of interest between what’s good for the consumer/public and whats good for the bottom line the corporations will allways choose the bottom line unless there is something in place to force them not to. I just personally think that this is one area where consumers and the public will be hurt if we allow comcast to go purely for their bottom line. hell they allready make enough money from the MASSIVE subscriber base they have which is partially their base due to gov’t programs of the past, so i don’t see it as being unfair to them to expect them to curb their bottom line in some area’s for the betterment of the country.
Okay but think about what you’re asking corporations to do when you ask them to basically volunteer to give up revenue. You’re asking them to not take the money that they will use and reinvest into the corporation to grow, create jobs, create new products to maintain their market position.
There seems to be this dynamic where corporations who are profit maximizers are evil. I personally believe its irresponsible and immoral for a company (who is at its core, a group of people working towards a singular goal, providing the best product(s) it can and sell that product(s) to at the price that maximizes its revenue). Should the millions of people who have retirement accounts that have Comcast stock just take less money to retire on because Comcast decides “Eh, we’re just going to leave money on the table.”? No, that’s crazy and thankfully for millions of seniors that doesn’t happen. If profits are left untaken by one organization, they will be taken by someone else. Even if that means they have to find a new revenue stream to do so. Just for the sake of argument lets say you find a way to prevent the company from taking extra profits at the expense of some business activity and that money doesn’t get taken by someone else… All that has happened is that capital has been allocated from a highly useful purpose (one that would have created wealth for someone based on the ability to have been captured otherwise) to a less valuable purpose and therefore wealth that would have been created basically falls into a black hole. What good does that do anyone? None. That’s not money creating jobs, capital, investing, advertising, or doing anything remotely useful in the economy, it would just simply disappear. I don’t think anyone really wants that.
So, lets think about it this way, do you want the companies you invest in (either now or in your future retirement savings) to be profit maximizers for your benefit? Or do you want them to not be profit maximizers and lose to someone who does? We can not treat economies like static enterprises. The goal of an economy is to grow, to provide wealth for the people who work and live in that economy. Forgoing profitable opportunities does nothing to further that goal. That won’t reduce the unemployment rate from 9.8% or provide jobs to the millions of families who were hurt because of the horrible mismanagment of capital and the subsequent saving of those enterprises which so badly mismanaged their capital.
In short, I want my companies to maximize profits. That’s how they surivie. That’s how they compete with other companies who are doing the same thing. That’s how innovation happens. There are very few truly public goods. The only one that really truly comes to mind (and by this I mean a good that everyone uses and everyone has a part in paying for it) is national defense. Not roads (there are people who don’t drive), not education (there are plenty of people who for one reason or another do not attend public schools, my children will be among them), etc. These are all semi-public goods which largely tax more people that who use it.
Sometimes, you can make the case for a Semi-Public good, like the national highway system, some people make the case for a national broadband infrastructure along the same lines (at best this could probably be a good public/private partnership but that would make for messy details which would make an already long post way too long). But the corporation does the MOST public good (i.e. provides the most amount of benefit to the most amount of people) when it is pursuing maximium profitability. To do otherwise means by definition it must do less good for less people. That doesn’t seem like a good trade.
Yep grew up here. If you are familiar with the area in Potomac, Fairfax, Arlington and NW GT. After that lived in Navy Yard, Dupont, AM, and Anna… now in Rosslyn. Prior work was all DOD, STATE, and since then proxies for both.
So yeah, I’m that type of “I don’t have a party, pragmatism is god” type of worker here. Toss in a security clearance, and combat vet status, and I’m just one of the many here.
I do realize that DC is stupid land, all the charm of the North, and the work ethic of the South. And everybody is cleared to hell and back, and has “field” experience.
Don’t get me wrong, I like what I do, but I am DC, for better or worse.
I’ll PM you my info, we should grab a drink when you are here. I work off that dreaded K street (it’s not so bad, they aren’t all demons).
Now on to the meat of this. Nationalization and public services. Didn’t we, as a nation, agree some time back that air waves, water, power, were all public goods, and thus should have some sort of state control? I’d tend to lump internet into this group, it’s a huge boon and I can’t see why we don’t nationalize it for the sake of the public and private good.
I’m a sysadmin by labour, and I can see the good in it. I also, as a government contractor, see the fiascos that might happen, but I do feel it should be done.
…
Well, next time I’m in DC we’ll go get something, but I don’t drink so make sure its somewhere that serves Coke without Crown alright? lol.
Yeah, K Street isn’t so bad… when I’m in town, that’s where I end up. My studies were in Constitutional Economics, Public Choice Theory, and Political Economy (at George Mason University…) and I moonlight as a political strategist from time to time and hence, I’m in DC either doing research for a paper or talking to RNC staff or RNCC or RNSC staff about different political environments for candidates and such. I study the behemoth for a living and in many ways, I think that’s what makes me so much of a free marketeer… I know I can’t trust these people to run an economy LOL :D.
Back to the meat indeed… We do claim that air waves are public goods. Water is interesting in that we treat it as a private good often times run by pseudo public companies (depending on the state and how utility commissions are handled in the state), same with power. Air waves are interesting in that we sort of treat it like land. The state is made up of land in three dimensions. So the air above the land is also “ours” and what goes through it is subject to regulatory scruitany. In many ways the same logic we use to regulate airlines and airplans we apply to who broadcasts what… I personally find that a little strange, but in fairness, we don’t heavily regulate what people can do with airwaves anymore. I.E. Rush Limbaugh can have 20 million listeners a week and you don’t hear anyone (serious… Al Sharpton does not count) saying that the FCC should take away EIB’s radio license because he’s critical. I mean the FCC when it comes to that sort of stuff says, here’s the fee, here ya go. It’s more of a rental arrangement. Yes, they own the house, but while you’re renting it you can do pretty much what you want with a few exceptions.
I think there are arguements to be made on behalf of a nationalization of utilities and perhaps even internet connectivity could be a apart of that if someone wanted to make the case for it, I just personally feel that the status quo doesn’t seem to be all that bad. No one has really made the case of why the status quo is bad and how nationalization really improves the scenario for the mass majority of consumers. To me it seems like there’s not market failure taking place and people seem largely satisfied by the status quo. You’d have to make a case that nationalization would improve conditions so much that people would notice and actively choose national control and I don’t think that would happen. I think if we went to people and said would you rather by internet from Comcast / AT&T / Verizon / whatever other choice or from the government, I think most people would choose from a multitude of products and operators than government control. If I’m wrong on that, I’m wrong but I don’t think so.
Also, being a combat veteran, thank you for your service. I myself am the child of two navy enlisted people who got in early and served and respect service in any capacity… my father is so disappointed that I know work studying the underbelly of what he calls “the great corrupt government beast.”
This is not about Comcast slowing down third party router traffic. The specific problem at hand is any internet provider can provider tiered internet, giving varying levels of performance for different websites. Since you love deregulation, there is absolutely nothing stopping them from giving fantastic speed for their own websites, while delivering crappy dialup modem speed to new startup companies, and forcing them to pay through the nose if they want otherwise.
The internet providers are currently nothing more than a bit pipe. They want to be more, and this will let them strong arm their way into becoming more. They won’t do any innovating themselves (the reasons why would be OBVIOUS to anyone who has tried using comcast customer service) but rather just destroy all the innovators. Imagine you are a small company, and your site suffers terrible performance because you being fucked up the ass by these shitty ISPs. You might have written the code flawlessly but the ISPs can fuck you over and make your page load times slow as hell. Well, good luck attracting any visitors to your site. Good luck attracting any VC money. Paying your devs, testers, ops, in addition to all your datacenter costs are expensive enough as it is, let alone having to pay some horrible ISP to not screw over your website when your customers try to log on. This is going to destroy small internet companies which provide tons of jobs and make the internets the amazing place it is.
There is a reason the vast majority of people in tech are opposed to this. I worked at a startup, and it got acquired. Awesome Cinderella story. Everyone from the startup is opposed to ISPs taking over. Coincidence? Hardly. We just understand what’s at stake here. Government needs to do its job and keep shitty corporations in check. If it had kept AIG and those other shitty wall street morons in check, then none of this would have happened. If SEC had a pair of balls, it would have kept Bernie Madoff in check. Etc etc. I do not trust government, but I trust corporations far less. All deregulation does is make the insanely rich even more insanely rich, at the expense of everyone else.
Sweet. i’ll be sure to get that pirating and e-mail package when it comes out.