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Net Neutrality to Win Big on Capitol Hill?
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Jan 03, 2007 05:01 PM
from the no-hope-in-sight dept.
from the no-hope-in-sight dept.
The New York Times has weighed in again on Net Neutrality, this time with a hopeful message of change in the near future due to the shift of power in the House and Senate. The opinion piece takes a look at Ron Wyden in the Senate and Edward Markey in the House who have both promised to lead the charge to pass a net neutrality bill in the coming months. Lessig, on the other hand, has a somewhat more cynical view of the new Congress.
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We really should start thinking of the 'net... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We really should start thinking of the 'net... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
That doesn't happen in every case. The highway system has not been privatized, for example, as many libertarians would like it to be. Thank god they're not and probably never will be in charge.
Arguably, the phone network would never have been built if not for the subsidies and government-granted monopoly.
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Although your point about the phone network is possible, there are other ways to subsidize than to create monopolies.
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The problem, of course, is graft. I live in California which seems to have the worst roads in the nation. This is especially pathetic because most of California doesn't have the extreme weather problems that account for road problems in much of the rest of the US. F
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I'm not sure that's true, but I'd agree that California seems to have a problem here: I expect that, as you note, inadequate "transparency and citizen oversight" plays a role, not because California is structurally worse, in outline, than other states in that regard but simply because that a state level bureaucracy like Caltrans is inherently more opaque and distant than a structurally identical organi
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What the government should have done is install and maintain conduit, which would have solved the "natural monopoly" problem in the first place by providing ample space for X companies to run N strands of wire/fiber/whatever without the "oh noes, my road is being torn up every three months" syndrome of letting them run the wire themselves.
But hey, this way they could get megabucks from corpor
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Well this is now off-topic but there are private highways near where I live and they are better-maintained and if you added up how much of your income/state/sales/fuel taxes go to roads and such you might be shocked at your return on investment.
Private highways work well in certain cases. The problem is that they want every road in every neighborhood to be privatized. As in, you need to pay a toll to go from your house to the grocery store. A toll back. Basically, since everything would be private prope
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I don't know where this comes from, I have never heard a Libertarian say all roads should privatized. Can you provide a link, or is this smoke?
Right from the Party Platform [lp.org]:
...
Ah, neither on the snippet you provided nor on the actual page of the link you provided appears either "highway" or "road". I went ahead and searched the LP website using "road" and "privitize" [lp.org] and all I found was a post in a forum wherein a poster writes:
But [lp.org], many of our critics like to accuse us of not living i
Out of the frying pan, into the fire. (Score:2)
At least now I can maybe choose who I get screwed by: the phone company or the cable company; that's more of a choice than I have about my water or gas.
The solution to a dearth of competition is not to el
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Read up on Enron, and you really wouldn't want the net manipulated in the same way that they screwed with the west coast power access.
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Nobody knows/cares (Score:3, Insightful)
There is a lot of money AGAINT net nuetrality and not enough for it. On an issue that the average person doesn't care about few senator's are going to give up their potential re-election money just for a few informed techies. I am pessemistic about this like Lawrence Lessig, very fews things change in congress.
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Vetos (Score:5, Interesting)
That's because of signing statements (Score:5, Insightful)
More signing statements in history than any other president, including gems such as (paraphrased) "I'm signing this bill into law but I don't like it so it won't be enforced"
I'm probably way off on grammar as the statement shouldn't be in quotes as it's not exact. . . but the gist is there.
Parent
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Nope, that sounds like something our president would write.
Re:Vetos (Score:5, Informative)
Wikipedia says you're wrong [wikipedia.org].
Parent
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More or less.
One veto?!? (Score:2)
Wikipedia says you're wrong.
Gee... assuming that article is up-to-date GWB has got exactly one veto to his name so far. I'm not a GWB fan by any stretch of the imagination but this is hairsplitting. GWB may not be everybody's idea of a good president but he has a looooooong way to go before he tops Franklin D. Roosevelt's grand total of 635 vetoes. GWB will have to veto at the rate of almost one bill per day if he want's to beat good old FDR before the 4-11-2008 presidential election and god help the USA and for that matter the whole
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The is quite interesting if you look at the history. Most of the early vetos were made on constitutional grounds or to protect the constitution.
Now vetos are just for politicking.
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(that you know of, anyway)
A little research:
Some Presidents who never vetoed a bill (in months):
Thomas Jefferson: 96
George W. Bush: 62
John Adams: 48
John Quincy Adams: 48
Millard Filmore: 31
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George W. Bush: 62
No longer true as of July 2006:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/5193998. stm [bbc.co.uk]
"US President George W Bush has vetoed a controversial bill which would have lifted a ban on federal funding for new embryonic stem cell research."
Add Taylor, Harrison, and Garfield to the "no vetoes" list.
Vital to net existance (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA A good reminder that every politician is in someone's pocket, regardless of political affiliation.
Edward Markey (Score:4, Informative)
Money and visibility (Score:2)
So if they d
Why Net Neutrality will remain. (Score:3, Insightful)
They are remarkably good at that, especially with the divided government we have now: remember, it takes 60 senators to pass legislation, and the dems only have 51.
Still not a fan of the idea (Score:3, Insightful)
I am never going to approve of stopping people from doing what we want them to do just to stop them from doing what they're not going to do.
Re:Still not a fan of the idea (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to see how a non-neutral net works, look no further than your cell phone. Chances are it has a camera, and for many users the camera can only be used with your network provider's lame "picture mail" service. You may even access your own email service from your phone, but it still doesn't matter. You have to use their picture mail service to ship the picture to your regular email, then use your regular email to forward it to where you want it to go.
Try getting basic information on how to use your phone to give your laptop network access. Sure, it's on the feature bullet list, but if you call tech support to find out how, you'll get an earful of bad attitude. Seriously, I had to go through several levels of technical support to find out the number to dial to access network service, and the guy I got literally screamed at me as soon as the world "Bluetooth" was out of my mouth. Now at the time I worked for a company that resold this vendor's service, so I called a manager we worked with to report a serious breach of professionalism. As soon as he found out what it was about, his attitude was anybody to tried to access Internet services other than his company's was on their own, even though Internet data access was a listed feature of their cell service.
This shows you what the network provider's natural attitude is towards interoperability, when they start to get into the content business. They want to lock you into their inferior proprietary services, and put road blocks up to your accessing the services you want, then grudgingly allow you to use the services you paid for if you can beat the basic information you need out of them.
A non-neutral net is the beginning of the end of competition in Internet content services. It will soon become like broadcast radio: a wasteland of redundant "formats".
Parent
Net neutrality goes on the back burner (Score:4, Informative)
And to think we were so close to having Berman promote himself to where he wouldn't be able to do any damage by chairing whatever foreign relations committee it was he was looking at. We would have had Rick Boucher chairing this committee, which would have been a serious victory for fair use advocates worldwide.
I wonder how much the content cabal paid Berman not to take the better job.
Good luck. (Score:3, Insightful)
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It's still that way, it's always been that way, and for the foreseeable future I think I can safely say that we're still not going to trust them enough to let those rascals get together any more often than that.
Government is a puppy: Dangerous when bored. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's ironic that although the Founders of this country realized the dangers that having a standing Army presented, they evidently never realized those posed by a sitting Legislature.
Parent
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Sorry, but not being a US resident (I am British, for the record) I do not understand this with regards to the army. You have a larger, better equiped armed forces than any other country in the entire world.
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To compare with the Texas situation, is Texas not a place where the governor has fairly limited power? I think I'd be concerned for a place with a rarely-involved legislature but a strong powerful executive branch.
In other words, I don't think we should consider scaling back the power/in
Re:Government is a puppy: Dangerous when bored. (Score:5, Insightful)
If the country were only facing Texas-sized problems, this would be a good idea. Unfortunately our real problems are bigger than the ones they have in Texas.
The real problems always seem to occur when you have politicians looking for things to do, to make themselves look useful.
Look at us right now. We currently have a lot of stuff that needs doing. No politician needs to be looking very far. Just think of all the things we need to get moving on yesterday- federal budget deficits, global warming and environmental issues, water shortages, accelerating economic stratification, trade deficits, housing bubbles, energy crises, a pending transition from an oil-based economy, etc. And what has Congress been up to during this time?
This is what the 109th Congress thought was important:
- Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act [vote-smart.org]
- Randy Cunningham's Flag Desecration Resolution [vote-smart.org] (thanks, Randy!) [wikipedia.org]
- Public Expression of Religion Act of 2006 [vote-smart.org]
- Pledge Protection Act of 2006 [vote-smart.org]
- The CheeseBurger Bill [vote-smart.org]
- Terri Schiavo Incapacitated Persons Protection Bill [vote-smart.org]
- Independent Review of OSHA Act of 2005 [vote-smart.org]
And that's not even counting their legislation that actually addresses real problems but incompetently, like the Medicare prescription drug bill. The problem isn't that we have a Congress in session; it's that we elect Congresses that like to pander to us on stupid issues while Rome burns.But the 109th Congress shares your opinion that the 110th Congress is best tied up. So they closed their doors after the election without doing their mandated job of closing out their own spending bills. They left behind a half-trillion dollar mess of budget bills so that the next Congress will have to waste time unraveling all of it. Good work if you can get it.
Parent
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They did
Re:Balance of power (Score:5, Informative)
Please explain to me how legislation to protect equal access and prevent multi-tier implementations that favor big business and big government are a un-Constitutional power grab. After all, conceptually, net neutrality goes far back in US history to the mid 1800's to preserve equal access to telegraph lines with the only exception being made for war or emergency purposes. The purpose was to encourage impartial use of the new resource and promote economic development in a democratic manner. I think that perhaps you are confused about the status of the current proposal to break up limits on net neutrality.
Parent
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Oh good, because the FCC is not completely owned by corporate interests...
How would they even know?
Finkployd
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The FCC? Ah, isn't that part of the government? Who do you want making the regs, some unelected bureaucratic body, or your elected and (slightly more) accountable representatives? Without any special instructions from congress, what do you think the FCC will do, what is best for we, the people, or what is best for
Telco competition COULD be reality (Score:3, Interesting)
Agree with the part about a lack of a Free Market. I'm amazed anyone can call two government granted monopolies pretending to fight 'competition.' But you are wrong in that there COULD be competition.
A bold statement, right? Almost every tech savvy type has admitted that telco competition just isn't possible so we are going to have to take it in the pooper from the government, the telcos, big media or somebody. Wrong.
The AT
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Prioritizing traffic can be a good thing when properly applied. For example, VoIP services work much better when there is a guarantee that the packet will make it to its destination in a specified period of time. (A bit like how RTOSes guarantee a time slice to a program.) The only reason why we have a problem is because some telco exec got the bright idea of selling this prioritization service in a general-purpose fashion. (Thus negating the purpose of such a service. Genius, pure genius.) They then trie
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The best part is that idiots such as yourself always seem to point at the other side as to why things don't get done, regardless of who controls the government at any given time.
And to make matters even worse you wasted a mod point on your real accoun
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Welcome to the kleptocracy. This is of course what many of us have been saying all along. It's impossible to fight the system from within because - gasp - you're PART of the damned thing. You have to fight it from without.
What does that actually mean? It means making yourself as independent from all things govern
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If I were you, I'd quit making sense. You don't want to know what happens to people who make sense and actually get people to listen to them.
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Russ Feingold (Score:3, Insightful)
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Wrong. [fairtax.org]