Libertarian ping! Click here to get added or here to be removed or post a message here!
(View past Libertarian pings here)
Posted on 09/22/2009 10:59:07 AM PDT by thouworm
There was a time, not so long ago, when the term "Internet Freedom" actually meant what it implied: a cyberspace free from over-zealous legislators and bureaucrats....
Those days are now gone; the presumption of online liberty is giving way to a presumption of regulation. A massive assault on real Internet freedom has been gathering steam for years and has finally come to a head. Ironically, victory for those who carry the banner of "Internet Freedom" would mean nothing less than the death of that freedom....
Here is the reality: Because of the steps being taken in Washington right now, real Internet Freedom--for all Internet operators and consumers, and for economic and speech rights alike--is about to start dying a death by a thousand regulatory cuts. Policymakers and activists groups are ramping up the FCC's regulatory machine for a massive assault on cyber liberty. This assault rests on the supposed superiority of common carriage regulation and "public interest" mandates over not just free markets and property rights, but over general individual liberties and freedom of speech in particular....
Over the last decade, a cabal of activist-minded cyber-law professors have successfully turned the world of Internet policy upside down by persuading an entire generation of law students, policymakers and a number of large Internet companies that "Internet Freedom" means the very opposite of what it used to mean. Borrowing tactics that would have made Orwell proud, they have convinced many in the public and the policymaking community that the old Internet Freedom is slavery, in that we are all just tools of Corporate Big Brother. Thus, they offer us a new Internet Freedom: Neutrality über alles! Their freedom, as in Orwell's Oceania, is not a freedom from the State, but a gleaming utopia that can only be created by the State.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Are you a victim of being conditioned to read only snippets or listen to only soundbites? Can you break that habit and read big chunks -- such as essays, thorough articles, or entire chapters of books at a time?
The US Constitution is only a few pages but over 99.99% of people have never read the entire Constitution. People who won't read longer, more in depth articles or books are victims of their own making.
Hardly. This is supposed to be an essay, a form which has a long literary tradition in English and which has its own rules. If the reader has no clue what an essay is about after four paragraphs, other than that something is Bad, Bad, Bad, that's atrocious writing. This has nothing to do with "conditioning"; on the contrary, this is something that sixth-graders in English Composition class should know.
The Constitution is a legal document rather than an essay, so it's not fair to compare it, but the Declaration gets down to facts in the second paragraph and follows it with factual bullet points.
Even if I agree with the writers, and I can’t tell if I do, this is a poorly written article.
Exactly what is the FCC doing ? Yeah, they’re regulating the internet, but what IS the regulation ? Is it something like stop signs, or something like Obamacare ?
Anybody got a clue ? Me, I’m clueless.
Nice editing approach. My own approach goes like this:
1. Title: Does the subject interest me?
if no, then done.
2. Title + author: Do I know as much as the author and do I agree with their position?
if yes, then done
3. Title: If I disagree with their position, start to read the article. If there are no new facts (usually determined within the first paragraph) then done.
4. Read remaining articles. Note new arguments and facts for and against my positions and learn. Adjust my positions as necessary.
This IS the internet as we've known it. You pay for a pipe and download what you want (ideally) as fast as you paid for. What its trying to restrict is your ISP deciding that the movie you're legally downloading from Netflix is taking too much bandwidth and so they throttle downloads speeds from Netflix to, say, a quarter of the speed you paid for. Or your ISP giving slower or faster, or no access to certain websites depending on if the corporation that owns the site pays the ISP. To protect their consumer of course. BTW, you can bet that conservative sites like this would be paying through the nose for the speed that, say, The New York Times would be getting.
That is not the internet as you've known it. Seriously, based on the comments I've read I wonder if many even know what Net Neutrality refers to, or if they're just objecting to it because its Obama's FCC thats pushing it. This doesn't include those here that are taking a principled stand against government telling private ISP's they can't screw their customers.
Regulations never stop nor do the regulators. The same argument works with health care. It is not perfect, big companies dominate, but better to suffer a little, than a lot.
You know as well as anyone that more government = less liberty. Let the market work out the kinks.
eww! i remember those! luckily for me, i did not enter the workforce (not counting part-time jobs) until 1988... i went straight to a PC... and we also had those tiny little macs--the ones with the 9-inch monitor... in 1990 we moved to Windows... instead of LOTUS 1-2-3, we began using Excel... instead of Word Perfect, we began using MS Word...
Hopefully the courts will protect the internet as we’ve known it.
We need a real blockbuster ruling from SCOTUS. It'll take some brass for them to read the riot act to this administration. But fundamentally the FCC is illegitimate, and the FEC is worse.The FCC is illegitimate because it promotes broadcast journalism as if it were objective - whereas the very claim of objectivity by homogenous journalism is actual proof of its subjectivity. The definition of objectivity must be that the person attempting it must take full account of every reason why he or she might want to form the opinions which he/she finds him/herself espousing. And thus the person who claims to be objective is the very last person who might actually be objective.
Thus the claim of one's own objectivity is inevitably only a smoke screen for sophistry. And sophistry is what Homogeneous JournalismTM delivers.
Google has been building a massive set of data centers and and as-yet unused redundant internet backbone for years - buying up unused infrastructure that became available for pennies on the dollar after the dot com bust.
Best best are they’re going to evolve into a converged web 3.0 of mobile devices, on-demand television, telephony and “print” internet over the next decade.
The phone companies, cable/tv satellite companies, movie theaters and newspapers are all potential victims of the next phase of media evolution. They won’t all survive, if any.
I think the argument of net neutrality will eventually be moot as the local ISPs may become “last mile providers” and commoditized or localized as utilities. This is where government intervention may eventually become problematic, but we’re talking about issues, business models and infrastructure that aren’t fully online yet.
Or Google is building Skynet and we’re screwed in an entirely different way.
Or Google is building Skynet and we’re screwed in an entirely different way
what is skynet?
Or Google is building Skynet and we’re screwed in an entirely different way
what is skynet?
And why would you think that Google would be a good keeper of the net?
thanks for the ping
Re: Skynet - Sorry. Bad Terminator joke.
Was that one of the portable terminals with the big rubber sockets for the phone?
That was a big deal when we got one of those.
With those wonderful orange screens.
No green screens for us!
LOL!
The folks here had trouble networking the Macs so we didn’t get many of those.
Remember Harvard Graphics?
My first connectivity happened with a 103 modem that used the rubber cups for the telephone handset. It was a treasure located at a ham swap meet. Later, I found a 212 style modem at the swap meet with a direct RJ11 connection and auto-answer capability. I designed and built hardware that would use the carrier signal on the RS232 to operate a binary counter chain driven by the 60 Hz line. When the carrier detect was good, it reset the counter. The counter output operated an optically isolated AC switch. That switch remotely booted my H8 computer. That permitted me to use the H8 from the office. If carrier dropped, the counter chain started running and timed out. That dropped power to the H8. It was a fun bit of hacking in my 1981 vintage world of ham radio and computers. The counter chain had a 300 second timeout, so I could dial back into the computer if the disconnect was a transient condition.
I moved to a 2400 baud modem by 1985 and had a SLIP link to a computer at UCSD for internet connectivity. The TCP/IP stack I used at that time was from Phil Karn net/nos package. I adapted the package to run on my TRS80-Mod 16 Xenix system to run the SLIP serial protocol to the 2400 baud modem. The Xenix system also participated in the UUCP network with connectivity to multiple UNIX type systems around the world. I miss the days when e-mail wasn't loaded with SPAM. I dumped the 2400 baud modem for an ISDN 2B+D in 1987.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.