The haters (i.e., the Republicans) on the FCC voted today (nytimes) to kill off the net neutrality enforcement rules.
Let’s assume that the government can’t fire anyone. What do readers want to see the bureaucrats who were enforcing net neutrality doing?
My personal suggestion: find a way to stop spam phone calls (see Set a minimum price for phone calls?)
Better ideas?
Net Neutrality is bullshit. These regulations existed for only about two years — give or take. So any moron who thinks this is the end of the Internet is just that, a moron. The Internet blossomed just fine from its birth through 2015 without the government telling businesses how and how much they can charge for their services. Let them charge what they want and how they want. I’ll buy want I want from whom I prefer. That is enough.
I’ll rather put that decision in the hands of greedy corporations whose services I can freely decide purchase or not to purchase, than in the hands of the Washington Swamp and appointed ideologues. Greedy corporations, however powerful, cannot compel me to buy a product, cannot fine me or put me in jail.
Good Riddance.
No, the government perhaps cannot fire anyone, but we can make them quit. Let’s send all these Washington Swamp creatures to sit in room on Diego Garcia or some other place in the middle of nowhere with no air condition, no internet access and absolutely nothing to do. They can quit or they can sit there and munch on MREs for the next 7 years doing absolutely jack shit. It’s better than whatever damage they are doing every day in the Washington Swamp.
The PR psyop push by google/amazon/netflix/etc. has been something to behold. The media and forums and comment sections have been stuffed full of pro net neutrality talking points for months.
This is the most interesting aspect of this episode to me. How much did these bandwidth hogs spend trying to manipulate public opinion? It was amazing to see huge numbers of obvious sock puppet accounts hitting the talking points in comments.
It looks like the Russian trolls have found this little corner of the internet.
Phil, you have arrived!
I was going to respond to the poster above me, but he already did it when he chose his username.
Dress them up like the Krampus and send them to spank naughty wall-streeters!
You could withhold their “step increases” and give them interior offices with no windows. I handled a case many years ago where a bureaucrat failed to do his job so that hundreds of millions were lost (in those days that was a big number). When his supervisor was asked how he was punished, the supervisor proudly testified that they withheld his “step increase.” Another punishment that i saw when working in government was people being given interior offices with no windows and no work to do. So they could sit there till the end of time with no windows or work and stare at the ceiling — till they finally gave in and decided to retire. I bet that either or both of these punishments might encourage the net neutrality enforcers to leave.
> These regulations existed for only about two years — give or take.
Why do people say this?
Isn’t it the case that net neutrality was baked into arpanet routers in the 70s and established as part of the Internet with the first peering agreements in the 90s?
That explicit regulations have only existed for two years, says nothing about how the net operated or the assumptions about traffic.
We’ve only had rules legalizing gay marriage for about five to ten years.
Prior to that two men could not fall in love.
Admins did things like delist the binary newsgroups from USENET as soon as they became a bandwidth and storage problem, twenty years ago. That’s not even throttling.
Almost all the discussions on this subject are retarded because they’re not upfront that the real issue is streaming high-def video. Apple and Amazon and Netflix want to force everybody to pay for the infrastructure to handle gobs of peak usage bandwidth to every home so they can show ads and charge for content. They basically want to make it illegal to buy a fast & cheap connection that doesn’t chip in to build out always-on hi-def Netflix to every house.
> Prior to that two men could not fall in love.
LOL
Send them on a snipe hunt to track down the Russian bots on the interwebs and fazebooks. The secret to identifying them? Throw them down a well: if they drown they were innocent, but if they float they are definitely Russian bots and need to be burned at the stake.
USENET, you mean admins on a peer to peer and mostly dial up network then. Thanks. I agree. People who refuse to run torrent or tor are violating net neutrality.
“Apple and Amazon and Netflix want to force everybody to pay for the infrastructure to handle gobs of peak usage bandwidth to every home so they can show ads and charge for content. They basically want to make it illegal to buy a fast & cheap connection that doesn’t chip in to build out always-on hi-def Netflix to every house.”
No, almost everyone wants hi-def streaming. Apple, Amazon, and Netflex already pay to get their traffic to a peer and ISP customers already pay to get that traffic from the peer to their device. A “a fast & cheap connection that doesn’t chip in to build out always-on hi-def Netflix to every house” is just a high bandwidth low cap plan which is perfectly legal under net neutrality rules. If it isn’t available it’s probably because no one wants one. Axing net neutrality is about monopoly ISPs not being satisfied with their rent on the “always-on hi-def Netflix” to every house infrastructure which they have built/are building and wanting to leverage that infrastructure monopoly into a content monopoly by making competing content providers non-competitive.
Yes, the internet did fine before the relatively recent net neutrality rules. That’s because net neutrality rules were less critical because there were no competing internet content providers and we all were just stuck with the cable monopolies anyway. Is axing net neutrality the end of the world? Probably not. Apple, Amazon, and Netflix can certainly look out for themselves and consumer expectations will constrain even monopoly ISP behavior somewhat. However, there are certain kinds of start-ups which I might be more hesitant to pursue under this new regime.
You could have a cheaper account where Netflix probably doesn’t work during the evenings. That’s really the whole issue here. That’s the whole reason this is in headlines endlessly.
I don’t watch any of this garbage, and in fact I’ve often not even bothered to have broadband or cable at home in recent years. I steal low bandwidth wifi from an adjacent coffee shop in recent months. The net neutrality lobby are saying that I should have to pay to allow google to shove hi-def video ads down my throat.
“You could have a cheaper account where Netflix probably doesn’t work during the evenings.”
The cost isn’t “Netflix”, it’s bandwidth usage; axing net neutrality isn’t required to service your use case. Come to think of it, there is one other possible reason why the plans you want aren’t available: Monopoly/oligopoly control of high speed internet access. With net neutrality gone, they aren’t gonna give you cheap access with no Netflix. They are just gonna make Netflix more expensive so they can shunt people back onto cable or their own (expensive) bandwidth hogging services.
Well, the lack of enforcement of Sherman & Robinson-Patman anti-trust stuff is an entirely separate subject. Large parts of the doctor industry should be legally nuked. Verizon and Comcast should be broken up.
Non of this has any bearing on “net neutrality.” I should be able to buy an internet connection that is filtered or throttled however I want it to be filtered and throttled. It’s none of your damn business.
What I noticed, is that after the very public Facebook/Google/Twitter etc. SJW delisting or removal of WrongThink content (including Jordan Peterson) and accounts, and after YouTube’s SJW-driven demonetization, and Amazon.com’s refusal to carry Confederate flags (but still carry Che Guevara and Antifa merch) with the argument that “these are private corporations, they can run their services how they want, it is not a First Amendment violation” … the support for Net Neutrality that would benefit these same private corporations, dropped off substantially.
It is no longer seen, post-censorship by the “biggies”, as something 100% correlated to being civic-minded…
Just put him in the same place where the EPA guys protecting us from dioxins went, or the same place where the DOE guys protecting us from radio-cesium went, or the same place where the DOEd guys protecting the schools from creationism went, or the same place where the DOJ guys preventing the police from equipping themselves with bayonets went, or the same place where the consumer protection guys protecting us from financial flimflam went, or the same place where … some of you will get the point.
Dept of Homeland Security ?