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Government The Internet United States Politics

"Net Neutrality" Coiner Tim Wu Is Running For Lt. Governor of New York 40

speedplane (552872) writes Tim Wu, the popular Columbia Law Professor, author of The Master Switch, and the guy who coined the term Net Neutrality, is running for Lieutenant Governor of the great state of New York. He "has waged a shoestring anti-establishment campaign," that is well underway, and has even begun receiving attacks from the incumbent: "It has not always been smooth for Mr. Wu .... Surrogates for Mr. Cuomo have pounced on his admitted lack of 'message discipline' for comments he made comparing net neutrality to the suffragist movement (which he says were taken out of context) and sympathizing with Airbnb (which he says is 'fair game' because he has a 'wait-and-see approach' to regulating start-ups)."
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"Net Neutrality" Coiner Tim Wu Is Running For Lt. Governor of New York

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    Suffrage not suffragist

  • by The New Guy 2.0 ( 3497907 ) on Saturday September 06, 2014 @04:37PM (#47842865)

    Net Neutrality is another name for "Give me the Internet, not a subset." and is a key part of what a legitimate ISP does, as opposed to a censored ISP like sometimes exists in the USA and often exists overseas.

    • by mi ( 197448 )

      Yep... And — for a car analogy — if I'm driving, I want to be able to drive on any road with any speed by car can go, and park wherever I see fit. No matter, who built the road or attends to the parking lot.

      legitimate ISP does, as opposed to a censored ISP like sometimes exists in the USA and often exists overseas.

      Legislating service is a losing proposition. The service provider will get around the legislation (have we not seen it just recently, when telcos were forced to allow other DSL-provid

      • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

        by ATMAvatar ( 648864 )
        A better analogy is one where you purchase a vehicle capable of going 60MPH, but unbeknownst to you ahead of time, it gets throttled remotely to lower speeds if you drive to Chicago or LA because those cities did not pay the manufacturer enough extortion money. Oh, and it can go 90MPH to Destroit because the manufacturer is based there.
        • by Duhavid ( 677874 )

          Meant to moderate insightful, fat fingered it, so I am just removing that moderation.

        • A better analogy is one where you purchase a vehicle capable of going 60MPH, but unbeknownst to you ahead of time, it gets throttled remotely to lower speeds if you drive to Chicago or LA because those cities did not pay the manufacturer enough extortion money. Oh, and it can go 90MPH to Destroit because the manufacturer is based there.

          This is a perfectly good car analogy. Why is it modded troll? I guess it was a troll doing the modding.

      • Yep... And â" for a car analogy â" if I'm driving, I want to be able to drive on any road with any speed by car can go, and park wherever I see fit. No matter, who built the road or attends to the parking lot.

        Except you purchased a car and I sold you a horse and buggy. You see, the problem without net neutrality is that you believe you are purchasing 10 megs of unlimited internet but if the website you are trying to reach is popular enough but doesn't pay your provider additional money or the serv

      • Yep... And — for a car analogy — if I'm driving, I want to be able to drive on any road with any speed by car can go, and park wherever I see fit. No matter, who built the road or attends to the parking lot.

        How about a phone analogy? When I pick up the phone, I want to be able to call anybody else who has a phone.

        • by mi ( 197448 )

          When I pick up the phone, I want to be able to call anybody else who has a phone.

          Sure. And you can. The price might differ depending on the destination, though...

          Fortunately, we have some choice of phone companies now — so if one of them is not to your liking, you can switch. Until a similar choice appears in the ISP-market, attempting to legislate the behavior of existing monopolies will remain in vain.

  • Tea party (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sumdumass ( 711423 ) on Saturday September 06, 2014 @06:09PM (#47843209) Journal

    It is about time we got some tea party democrats.

    I know, tea party is a bad word, but anti-establishment is almost synonymous with it. It finally sound like we might see a democrat who is still actively supporting the working man instead of riding the coat tails of the real democrats who went before him.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      There already are a bunch of Democrats in the TEA Party - NOT at the top, but at the grass-roots and they tend to be blue-collar working types who've voted "D" their entire lives (because that's the way all their friends and families voted and that party las long pretended to be "for the working man"). Some of those more-conservative rank-and-file Democrats who, like many conservative base voters, have "caught-on" to the game the leaders of both parties are playing and the destruction that is resulting have

    • Yeah, Tea Party is too specific to an existing dogma. But, there are quite a few liberals who skew closer to Noam Chomsky's brand. I think a number of liberals take anti-establishment seriously and believe that libertarianism has some insightful observations on how things work ( e.g. regulatory capture). But a number of liberals have different solutions. Very different from Chomsky's "Anarchist Social Libertarianism" (or whatever he calls it). And especially different from the pro big business of "libe

      • by Euler ( 31942 )

        Yes, this is exactly it. It is the polarization in politics. We argue with each other to support our prejudiced conclusions without looking at our own motivations first. Problems can potentially be solved with moderate, incremental, and mutually agreeable solutions. But that doesn't satisfy the dogmatic, extreme ideas from each side. Add moneyed interests, stubborn defensiveness, and how can we possibly get out of our own way?

        Why should I agree to support any liberal / conservative politicians when I k

  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 06, 2014 @07:32PM (#47843511)

    An interesting development was the New York Times not endorsing any candidate for governor, but did endorse Wu for Lt. Governor over incumbent Cuomo's choice. The editors liked Wu's desire to transform the position of Lt. Governor into a public advocate, where he can proclaim the messages for fairness not only in Internet governance, but in governance in general.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/28/opinion/timothy-wu-for-lieutenant-governor.html

    Democracy Now! recently had an interview with running mates Teachout and Wu as well as gubernatorial candidate Randy Credico, whose quest against inequality includes fighting Rockefeller drug laws.

    http://www.democracynow.org/2014/9/4/new_york_candidates_zephyr_teachout_randy

  • by penguinoid ( 724646 ) on Saturday September 06, 2014 @08:45PM (#47843801) Homepage Journal

    And I think that incumbents have things way too easy for re-election.

  • by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Saturday September 06, 2014 @10:20PM (#47844071)

    >> great state of New York

    Citation needed.

    • "New York is well called the Empire State ... not only because of the vastness of its resources, but because it so conspicuously illustrates the imperial power of law-abiding liberty among the people." Alexander Flick, 1902.

      Now it refers to entrenched political cronyism, Cuomo's promises notwithstanding.

    • That's probably a cross-state dig, but prefacing every state with "the great state" of looks kind of frantically desperate to the rest of the world.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Can't stand the other guy. He's a crook.

  • Wu & net neutrality (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    While Wu is a smart, well-meaning guy, his coining the phrase "net neutrality" set back the public debate by a couple of decades. Introducing a new term for an old concept was, at best, dumb. If he had stuck with "common carrier" - a centuries old legal term - which is well understood, we'd probably have "net neutrality" today.

    The US made telegraphs common carriers in the 1840s and later, telephones. The term also applies to railroads - whose bad behavior outraged farmers in the 1800s -and trucking companie

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