Since I have zero trust in Obama these days, I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop - or to see what's Obama's angle in this. Is he doing it because he already knows a Republican-backed Congress and FCC have already made up their minds against net neutrality - and he just wants to be remembered that "he tried"?
Or is he supporting full net neutrality because that would give the government much more control over the Internet?
Either way I don't think he's doing this because "he cares". Whatever his angle/hidden agenda, it's probably a bad one for us.
It could be a way to make Democrats relevant again, by being the party they're supposed to be. They just lost big by playing it safe, they might as well push something progressive.
I don't think that his angle necessarily has to be at odds with our angle(s). It could perhaps be that he's trying to change course after a horrible (to him/Democrats) midterm election season, or just to boost popularity of his party in general, which I'm sure works out better for him in the long run somehow. Though, this is the term where presidents are known for pretty much doing whatever they want since there's no looming election so it's really a good question what his motives are.
Yup, easy way to make a lot of people happy[er] after an election indicating a lot of people aren't with him. He can just direct the FCC to "give the Internet common carrier status" and it can largely be worked out via Executive Order; if there are any legal objections, they can be tied up in the courts for years until supporting legislation catches up.
I don't understand this mentality. If Obama comes out as against Net Neutrality, it's him being evil. If he comes out in favor of it, he's lying.
I understand politicians often have ulterior motives but from the information provided, this is exactly what the majority of citizens were asking him (and the FCC) to do.
Sometimes people lie so often that you will never be able to trust them again.
I'd never trust a guy who signs secret kill lists, even targeting US citizens without having a trial. He even publicly joked about this, which is sign of insanity to me.
And then there's the case of a jailed journalist from Jemen (who reported about a drone bombardment in Jemen), where he personally called the president of Jemen to prevent him from releasing the journalist.
In your own way, you're doing the exact same thing that you're accusing your grandparent poster of doing. You're implying/assuming that he has no foundation for his argument.
When you have no trust in an authority, it's perfectly reasonable to question good news and be paranoid about true intentions.
It's an Obamacare architect admitting that they lied to obscure the tax/redistribution ramifications of the law. His direct message is that a lack of transparency is a weapon to get legislation passed.
And we should trust these people? Take them at their word? Why?
"often"? Try only. The problem is a cognitive dissonance, in that hired/owned men only do what their masters pay them to do. So following the money, who told him to propose this and make his speech?
So its a story either way, either he has new owners paying him to say this kind of stuff (who is paying for this point of view?), or the guys who do pay him are going to be really angry that he's being a loose cannon. Either way the reaction will be interesting to watch.
That might be the opposition position, but from his own side, I think the prevailing mood is generally disappointment. Look at the context. Nominating a former telecom lobbyist to run the FCC in the first place is not a sign of sincerity about reform.
I am distrusting him to such an extent that I'd even say he calls for open internet so his spying and subversion agencies have a better chance at creating unrest and chaos in other societies.
My guess: He's bringing this up to drive a wedge between tech donors (pro-neutrality) and Republicans (anti-neutrality) in 2016.
This already seems to be working, with Ted Cruz calling Net Neutrality the "Obamacare of the Internet". Cruz knows he doesn't need tech sector money to get re-elected or to run in 2016.
This proposition (implementation of some of the regulations required for telecommunication services under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934) is taken directly from a notice published by the FCC in 2010
It has been argued previously that the FCC lacks the authority to reclassify Title II common carrier, and that such a reclassification could actually be damaging
I am not American (feel free to ignore my opinion) but this is just a bad joke from someone who seems to be an utmost failure.
Especially in light of last week FBI/NSA/DHS undermining TOR and killing its utility for any dissidents and free speech in authoritarian states. Under his watch the surveillance state has expanded and has become downright creepy
25 years after the fall of the Berlin wall we should be saying "Ich bin ein Ost-Berliner" :(
The Stasi would be proud of the surveillance state that western countries have created with Obama at the helm.
edit: Oh i see the cult of personality is still strong in this one, downvoted in under a minute.
Please don't complain about downvotes, it just makes people downvote you more.
And I suspect the reason you're being downvoted in the first place is that the TC post is about net neutrality and not government spying. While the two are connected (they both involve the internet, after all) they're different topics. If we refuse net neutrality until we also disband the NSA then we'll just lose on two counts.
> Please don't complain about downvotes, it just makes people downvote you more.
No, of course it doesn't.
And, no, there's nothing wrong with complaining about the downvotes as there' heck of a lot of knee-jerk downvoting happening on HN. Almost as much as righteous preaching about proper HN "etiquette", but not as damaging in the long run.
I can't speak for others, but personally I specifically and intentionally downvote any complaint about downvotes, even if I otherwise agree with the poster.
That sort of complaining lowers the tone of the discussion and adds nothing.
Plus 8 times out of 10, just wait a minute and you'll get voted back up.
however it is quite possible it will encumber providers and such with all sorts of new rules, forced compliance, etc.
Forced compliance, as in "You are a utility and all such utilities must comply with NSA/CIA/FBI/ABC requirements"
Maybe they will be brand it under some title like "Internet Bill of Rights" and watch as people don't read the fine print.
All I know is, if I waited for the regulated utility known as the phone company to have provided me with faster internet, let alone a good phone connection during a thunderstorm, it would never have happened without competition.
The feds have had free access to everything for a long time, what you're likely to see after utility conversion is the local cops demanding access to all ebay/CL traffic for an entire city to track down stolen property fences or similar actions. Give me a list of everyone in my district who ever bought lockpicks or lockpicking stuff.
While I agree that there could be such rules that accompany a reclassification of the internet as a utility, net neutrality is what so many people have been pushing for.
Yes there could be unwanted side-effects of such a classification, we have to cross that bridge when we get to it.
I don't think you are aware of the current situation. There is no competition among broadband ISPs. Each player has carved out its own exclusivity zone free of any competition. This is partly out of necessity of not having overlapping/redundant physical infrastructures, and partly the result of these companies buying out local and state officials. Common carrier regulations were established (as far back as ancient Rome) to counter this kind of situation. It basically states that because such monopolies are unavoidable, in order for the company to enjoy such privileged status it must be regulated as a public utility and impartial market player; and most importantly a common carrier cannot use its monopoly position to corner the market downstream (such as shutting out NetFlix in favor of Comcast's own streaming service).
Essentially, we cannot create more competition at the broadband utility level but we can prevent monopoly power from begetting more monopoly power. Common carrier is regulation purposed towards facilitating a free market.
One thing that is guaranteed to occur, is that the US Government will regulate the Internet to a greater degree every year that goes by. It's what they do with all segments of the economy, and that regulation has been accelerating for decades. Tech had been largely spared, but the Feds have been increasingly pushing their nose into every area of tech the last decade.
What will ultimately happen, is the government will regulate the Internet so tightly, it will become extremely difficult, time consuming, and costly to create a start-up (while the technology cost will continue to fall). This process will not be fought by the existing tech giants, because they will think they benefit from it by limiting competition with artificial barriers. It's the exact same thing that has played out in every other major segment of the economy, and it's exactly what is about to happen to the Internet. These days will be viewed as the unregulated wild west, when you could spend $50 and create a start-up without hardly a concern.
It's entirely possible that the notions of surveillance (and the egregious examples of that which have come from the top-down in this country) and net neutrality can be evaluated independently of each other, particularly because they are dissonant concepts.
I am an American and I agree with your bad joke assessment. It's rather depressing to see my fellow citizens fall for these jokes over and over again, all the while losing their rights, even their right to privacy.
Agencies have been spying forever. From opening letters to eavesdroping phone calls. I'm not saying it's right, just that the agencies have not become worse with time.
However, I totally agree with you when you're concerned about the diminishing privacy. I think the advance of technology is the key factor for this. Agencies are as ruthless as always and use this new technologies.
Most people are totally fine to tell Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc. everything about their private lifes in exchange to ... distraction. Think of all the health shit ... they gonna make furtunes selling our data to the pharma and insurrance industry.
I'm not a huge fan of Obama, but do you really think the surveillance state was created during his presidency? This type of thing has been going on... well, probably forever. It's gotten more sophisticated in the Internet age, but that started before Obama too.
It wasn't created under him, but now is his opportunity to do something positive about it. His track record on the subject hasn't been good for the last 6 years; here's hoping the next 2 will prove substantially better.
It did not start with Obama and by all accounts it was not stopped, slowed or in any way diminished by him. I think the backlash is from people who thought he'd be different and embrace a different mindset than the one he apparently has. He was a constitutional law professor and the hope that he'd be different than what he is was quite a let down.
Compare the Bush-era level of surveillance intrusiveness with the Obama-era level.
You'll find that what Bush started, Obama has drastically developed, distributed, and expanded.
Under Bush we had increasing levels of surveillance which were undesirable, but the veneer that it was still all about terrorism could at least be believed. Now, we know it's targeted specifically at us for the purposes of exploitation and domination of us.
>the veneer that it was still all about terrorism could at least be believed. Now, we know it's targeted specifically at us for the purposes of exploitation and domination of us.
The great thing about hyperbole is that it rebuts itself.
Is it really hyperbole when we know via Snowden that one of the projects of the NSA is to infiltrate, discredit, and disrupt any/all dissenting groups?
What about parallel construction, putatively started to help with terrorists but now usually used in drug investigations in order to sidestep civil rights safeguards?
> Under Bush we had increasing levels of surveillance which were undesirable, but the veneer that it was still all about terrorism could at least be believed.
Not if you were paying attention to any of the players involved before 9/11. Or even after for that matter.
That 9/11 was used as a pretext for things the people involved wanted for other reasons and had been seeking for years (in some cases decades) without any connection to terrorism was pretty obvious. These were in some cases the very same people that were openly upset while serving in the Ford Administration against the legislative constraints that were placed in the wake of abuses by Nixon.
It was never believably about terrorism, it was always about restoring overwhelming executive power.
In the eyes of the public, I think that it was very much believably about terrorism-- people have internalized the false maxims that security must be sought, and that liberty must be traded to get security. This wasn't really a popular trope before the anti-terrorist propaganda came along.
I agree with you when you say that it was never about terrorism but rather increasing executive power, though. There certainly was a trend toward increased surveillance for many years before, but the entrance of surveillance into the new world-dominating media of the internet is a story in and of itself, I think.
It's not something that began under Obama.
When CALEA passed, people like me were complaining that it would be abused.
When The USAPATRIOT ACT passed, people like me were complaining that it would be abused.
Now, that there is undeniable proof that they are being abused, the retort is that it's been going on for decades.
I'm sorry but that's not good enough for me.
I am an ideologue, not a partisan. I'll complain about it when a Democrat steps over the line just as quickly as I'll complain about it when a Republican steps over the line.
It was legalized (both retroactively, covering events that had occurred prior to the act, and prospectively by broadening the allowed surveillance under the law) through the FISA Amendment Act of 2008, signed by George W. Bush on July 10, 2008.
Its true that Obama signed the bill passed by Congress extending parts of the FISA Amendments Act that were scheduled to expire in 2012 for five additional years. But that just kept it legal, it didn't legalize it.
Let me explain a few things about the American government.
The most important thing to understand is that the ability of the executive to influence the direction of the government is limited. The reasons for this are several, but I will try to elucidate a few here.
First, it is commonly believed that because of the ability to hire/fire people the President can more or less do whatever he wants in regards to the direction of various governmental agencies. This true to an extent, but to a much more limited extent than is commonly believed. The President can nominate candidates for various positions, but these positions must be approved by Congress. Since President Obama has had a Congress whose primary tactic is to oppose everything the president wants, regardless of merits, this has severely limited his ability to get policies in place that he has otherwise wanted. This applies both to agencies like the FCC (the current chairman was Obama's third choice, IIRC; the other two were filibustered), as well as the judiciary.
Second, the government itself is made up largely of agencies which are outside of the ability of the democracy to affect. This includes the military, the intelligence agencies, and the federal law enforcement agencies. (You could arguably include the Federal Reserve here, as well.) These are what Lofgren[1] calls the "Deep State". They are almost completely unaffected by elections, especially of Democratic presidents, and seek ever to increase their power and funding. Efforts to rein them in are rarely, if ever, successful.
Third, the current state of affairs re: intelligence gathering, etc., began in earnest with the passage of the National Security Act of 1947.[2]
So while it may be convenient to blame Obama for the current state of government, it is overly simplistic. It has nothing to do with any cult of personality, but rather a simple recognition of the current realities of political power and the various players.
The President can nominate candidates for various positions, but these positions must be approved by Congress.
President Obama was inaugurated January 20, 2009. At that time, his Democratic party controlled both houses of Congress decisively[1]. It was not until 2011 that his party lost the house. And in fact, his party still retains the Senate but will lose it in January 2015. But it is only the Senate that approves appointments and his party has controlled it the entire time he has been President. And if you look at the make up of his cabinet, you will see that he has been able to fill it with people that are reviled by the opposing party [2]. To say that he hasn't gotten his way on the vast majority of cabinet appointments just isn't true.
Second, the government itself is made up largely of agencies which are outside of the ability of the democracy to affect. This includes the military
The President is the Commander in Chief of the military. He exercises complete authority over them. [3] All the heads of the other agencies you listed are appointed by the President including the Federal Reserve.
Your comment is typical of the current rhetoric surrounding attempting to "debunk" the thought that the President has substantial power. The fact is the President does have substantial power and saying otherwise is merely attempting to excuse the performance of Obama that so many people are disappointed with.
At no point since 2009 did the Democrats control 60 or more seats in the Senate, which would be a requriement to beat a filibuster from the opposing party. So no, the Democratic party did not have a free license for appointee approvals.
EDIT: Came to my attention that Democrats did have a exactly 60 seats in the Senate for a brief period before Ted Kennedy passed away and his seat was won by Scott Brown in 2009. However, the point still stands that there was a very brief period over a span of 5 years where control of Congress was even possible for Democrats.
Ironically, the fact they changed the rules speaks against your claim that Obama could easily instate who he wanted. In fact, from the article you posted, it gives a graph that shows that more filibusters have been filed in the previous three senates than have been in recent history.
This [1] shows a breakdown that includes filibusters of nominations.
To further refute your point, the appointment relevant to the discussion, Wheeler, assumed office after the rule change[2].
It's not just filibusters, even. Senators can also issue "secret" holds. At one point, Jeff Sessions (R-AL) put a hold on every single nominee simultaneously until some pork was added to a defense spending bill.
These holds have been common practice and they are very rarely publicized.
> Other than that, I guess you don't follow the news much. Harry Reid changed the Senate Rules in 2013 to disallow filibusters of appointments.
Which lead to Republican senators using another procedural technique (refusing unanimous consent) to slow down appointments.[1] This means appointments were delayed for days, and even weeks, after which time the same obstructing senators often voted for the appointee anyways.
It's disingenuous to claim that appointments would go through scot free after Reid altered Senate procedures.
as they passed the ACA, they simply changed to rules to use the reconciliation process to pass what they wanted without the Republicans being able to say a word.
Reid was pro at changing the rules to prevent opposing views, people need to understand just how much of the problems in th Senate were his doing and his doing alone. Mister Nuclear just got nuked by the electorate
>as they passed the ACA, they simply changed to rules to use the reconciliation process to pass what they wanted without the Republicans being able to say a word.
Untrue. Fillibuster rules were only changed in late 2013, after years of being unable to even get votes on nominees.
>>as they passed the ACA, they simply changed to rules to use the reconciliation process
No they passed the bill with 60 votes during the only time they actually had a supermajority. There were no rules changes needed or required. ACA was passed and signed before changes were made in the reconciliation process.
> as they passed the ACA, they simply changed to rules to use the reconciliation process to pass what they wanted without the Republicans being able to say a word.
Not quite. The Democrats had 60 Senate seats for a very brief period before Scott Brown took over Ted Kennedy's seat when he passed away. The main ACA bill in the senate was passed with 60 votes the normal way. A second bill that was to modify that bill was passed with reconciliation as a way to get members of the House to drop their version of ACA, accept the currently passed Senate version, and then modify that to appease some of the concerns of various congresspeople.
> Reid was pro at changing the rules to prevent opposing views, people need to understand just how much of the problems in th Senate were his doing and his doing alone. Mister Nuclear just got nuked by the electorate
I so very much hate the 'going nuclear' talk. Filibuster breaks at 60 votes is a shit idea in the first place, plus changing it only in one case for appointments is hardly shaking up the political order at large. In fact, the reluctance to do it for all types of votes shows how conservative leadership for the dems were being.
> But it is only the Senate that approves appointments and his party has controlled it the entire time he has been President.
This is irrelevant, since the minority party can filibuster any nominations, and they have used done so extensively throughout Obama's tenure. In this regard, the party with the majority simply does not matter.
> The President is the Commander in Chief of the military. He exercises complete authority over them.
Again, I believe that this is an overly simplistic view of the Presidency. There are political realities around what Presidents can and cannot realistically do that contradict the "ultimate power" view of the Executive branch.
> All the heads of the other agencies you listed are appointed by the President including the Federal Reserve.
With Senate approval, and where no filibusters have been threatened or executed. And remember, there have been more filibusters during Obama's tenure than at any other time in history.
> The fact is the President does have substantial power and saying otherwise is merely attempting to excuse the performance of Obama that so many people are disappointed with.
Not at all. I am disappointed in the American government itself. I have never voted for Obama, and am merely stating my thoughts as an amateur observer. But if there is ever going to be any positive change in limiting Federal power viz. the military, intelligence agencies, or LEO, then clarity of causality is important.
> The President is the Commander in Chief of the military. He exercises complete authority over them.
No, he doesn't. The Constitution specifically limits the President's ability to make war and wage military campaigns. He has a great deal of authority but even the US' current adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq are backed by Congress' approval through passed laws.
> At that time, his Democratic party controlled both houses of Congress decisively.
This displays a lack of insight around the Democratic party. Senator Lieberman was nominally a Democrat but he voted more often with the Republicans in the last few years of his career in the Senate. So-called "blue dog Democrats" are more conservative than you might think; that's why we got such grand bargains as the "Cornhusker Kickback" during the PPACA debates.
In reality, the President's party firmly controlled roughly 51-54 votes in the Senate with the remainder of the "majority" part of the coalition as a result of them simply not being as good a fit with the Republicans. That has arguably been one of the Democrats' greatest weaknesses: the Republican party has demonstrated its ability to move in lockstep even when some members disagree. The Democrats have not.
Absolutely none of this has any bearing on whether President Obama could call the NSA director into his office today and order him end all mass surveillance programs. Which he could, and his order would be obeyed. That he chooses not to is a practical political issue, not a legal one.
[EDIT: Well, he couldn't literally call anyone into the Oval Office today, since he's in Beijing, but a phone call would work just as well.]
> The President is the Commander in Chief of the military. He exercises complete authority over them.
No, he doesn't. The Congress has quite expansive (nearly plenary) power over the military (and to a lesser extent, the militia) expressly in the Constitution. The one limit on that power in the Constitution is that the Congress can't adopt a law giving the supreme command of the military (or the militia, when called into federal service) under the rules they adopt to anyone but the President -- that's what the designation of the President as Commander-in-Chief means.
Because American exceptionalism is a core element of national identity, and includes the idea that all elements of American government are basically democratic. This believe is convenient for those in power who are not very accountable to the electorate and is a deeply held idea by voters in the United States. When deeply held ideas conflict with reality, beliefs will usually stay and reality is the one that is discarded.
That`s what it supposed to be like and we wish it was. In reality, starting with Iraq war, Patriot Act, Health Care, Bailouts and much more, didnt have time for debates in Congress. President pushed it, Congress approved.
President is Executive branch of government, therefore can pass a new law just by signing it without approval of Congress. Example Executive Order 13233 (signed by Bush, makes President an exception from Freedom Of Information Act)
I think you're way too easy on congress (and they will happily pass the buck for unpopular decisions to the president). They could have done more, but chose not to. This is not a case of the president "pushing" their agenda through, but of the president's agent coinciding with the agendas of congress.
"President is Executive branch of government, therefore can pass a new law just by signing it without approval of Congress."
This is false. The president can change interpretations of law (this is how E.O. 13233 was couched), but cannot pass a new law on his own. This is in Articles I and II of the Constitution.
In time of war or crisis, people will allow generous interpretations of the President's role to interpret the law, but time catches up.
Obviously Health Care (i.e., ACA) caused huge debate and negotiation with Congress.
The Iraq War resolution (the 2002 one) was a different situation in which Congress passed a wishy-washy resolution that was, in typical fashion, over-extended by the Bush administration. But Congress went along.
Whatever. You can call it anything you like : act, interpretation, change, results are the same. If President signs piece of paper that restricts your liberties, then he has power to change the law, and that power is substantial - that was my point.
> President is Executive branch of government, therefore can pass a new law just by signing it without approval of Congress.
The executive branch of government executes laws, it does not (and Constitutionally cannot) create them. Executive orders are valid to the extent that they direct actions within the executive branch within the laws binding that branch and apply only powers the President has under the Constitution and laws.
The practical distinction may vanish when the other branches do not effectively check the executive when it exceeds its Constitutional power, but that's not inherent in the President heading the Executive branch -- the same is equally true of excesses in other branches, though the unitary nature of the executive provides less of an intra-branch check on abuses by the President than exists for any actor in the legislative or judicial branches (though collective excesses, such as -- as a purely hypothetical example -- the Supreme Court intruding into Congress' Constitutional role in judging the propriety of Presidential electoral votes including the process by which they are assigned -- can still occur and be problematic if left unchecked by the other branches.)
While I've suspected that the "deep state" as you and your source calls it are "behind the scenes", Obama did come out in support of the intelligence community after the Snowden leaks, so he certainly did not oppose them completely. [1]
While I'm happy Obama is supporting net neutrality, I don't find him blameless.
[1] You didn't explicitly say that Obama really desired to reign in this "deep state," just that any attempt to do so would be difficult. If you did not mean that, I apologize.
No, I did not mean that. And I certainly believe that there are actions that the President could take that would help to promote a more limited role for the intelligence agencies, etc. I do believe, however, that the ability for any President to limit the power of the government is limited both by Congressional action and by the government itself. No agency wants to see its powers reduced, and will oppose any measures which could affect them.
Basically, any president which seeks to limit the existing power of government institutions will run into institutional resistance.
The NSA spying program is authorized by executive order not statute.
It's a signature away from ending. And Obama can forward any issues to the DoJ. If he wanted to end the NSA spying program he could simply have Holder charge those involved.
Obama is always powerless whenever people want him to do something he doesn't want to do, but to summarily try, convict, and execute a US child is apparently within his power.
> Let me explain a few things about the American government. The most important thing to understand is that the ability of the executive to influence the direction of the government is limited.
Compared to most other parliamentary democracies the president in USA is nearly a dictator. So Obama has exceptionally broad abilities in that direction.
Compared to most other parliamentary democracies, is not even comparable. In parliamentary democracies, political parties can almost never survive by completely stonewalling the opponent in power, as by nature of being a parliamentary democracy, opposition parties are forced to work together, or form alliances with one another, in order to function.
Totally wrong. In other parliamentary democracies the winning parties/coalitions get on a plate executive and legislative branches simultaneously and big ability to influence judiciary.
This was about president's powers, not what winning party/coalition in parliamentary elections gets. Parliamentary systems with active (but less powerful vs the US) presidents such as France, Finland, etc. (but re your tangent, minority governments happen and are common in some places. See eg. Denmark)
>>> Second, the government itself is made up largely of agencies which are outside of the ability of the democracy to affect.
Obama has been at work long and hard to make that the case. Since he has been unable to build any relationship with the Congress, and even holding majorities in both Houses his legislation and nominations had hard time going through, he has taken the decision to leverage his regulatory powers to circumvent the Congress as much as possible. It is not something that just happened - it is a deliberate policy which Obama chose. Of course, not him first - many presidents did the same, and some - like FDR - went a lot further than Obama ever did - but Obama is among those who believes in the Deep State and uses and intends to use it to the fullest extent possible. So if there is to be effort to rein them in, Obama is not your guy - he is the opposite of your guy. Of course, the blame does not lie solely or even primarily with Obama - it started long before him and undoubtedly won't end when he retires. But he is contributing as much as he is able to the raise of the power of the regulatory agencies and their ability to conduct policy completely independently of the Congress.
I'm not sure comparing the size of the filing cabinets of the Stasi and the NSA is particularly helpful in understanding the differences between those two organizations.
Then how do you explain how the Stasi kidnapped and killed lots of German citizens, while the NSA has yet to do the like?
I can understand if you're saying you fear the NSA's power grab because of similarities with the Stasi. I have trouble believing that you think there is literally no difference between the Stasi and the current NSA, given their body of work has significant differences.
The NSA spies on far more people than the Stasi could have ever hoped to. The NSA is just the intel branch of a government that has killed and imprisoned more people than the East German government did.
Arguing about the niceties of barbaric practices is fruitless anyway, but we can argue about the size of the weapons wielded by the barbarians.
I'm in agreement that the NSA shares certain characteristics with the Stasi - spying on its own populace is one of them. I also get it if you don't differentiate between citizen/non-citizen in terms of targeting. Heck, I'm with you in regards to (most of) what I believe to be your position.
However, your tone and word choice, along with the hyperbole of your statements, serve to weaken your point.
The Stasi created a culture of fear in the populace of the nation they were supposed to protect. They used the citizenry against itself; fathers doubting children, wives were suspicious of neighbors.
German citizens and residents found sufficiently undesirable were imprisoned or executed by the Stasi.
While the US has committed some terrible acts abroad in the name of anti-terrorism, I still contend there is a significant difference between the current NSA and the Stasi.
It's similar to how I object when people equate the US internment of their Japanese residents with the Nazi Final Solution. Similarities, sure. Both awful, sure. But there is a difference between immorally and illegally imprisoning people based on race for a few years and trying to wipe an entire race from the face of the planet in a systematic and sick environment.
Anyone who conflates arguments like that sound like they're shouting with an agenda, and it only serves to weaken what would be, in a more measured tone, a strong argument.
I know we're not historicans here, but I'm German, so I am quite sensitive when it comes to the Stasi: Please be aware of the thousands of people who have been killed, tortured, inprisoned and repressed by the Stasi in the DDR. The Stasi took the freedom of a whole nation. They destroyed so many lives. You can compare the spying techniques but not the wrongdoing (not saying the NSA is free of any wrongdoing). It's another dimension, better, several dimensions.
You do know that the US has the largest prison population in the world...
It outdoes the DDR by a factor of two with regard to those they imprison, as well the DDR stopped executing anyone in 1987, as of last year the US still executes minors.
I'm not going to ignore your opinion as a result of your not being American; I'd say that foreign perspective is very useful in such discussions.
I do however take issue with the ad hominem attack on the President. It's not necessary, nor constructive, to lay down a blanket criticism like "[he's] an utmost failure."
The "surveillance state" does exist, but it's a global phenomenon. In the US, at least, it's something that we're actively fighting, and the government is not shutting down dissenting opinions. The same cannot be said for countries like China, where the government's control depends heavily on the citizenry not questioning it.
In the US, at least, it's something that we're actively fighting
Are we really, thought? At least at any meaningful scale? A handful of geeks on HN, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and Slashdot isn't much of a resistance. Do you perceive that people who care about this issue have mobilized in sufficient quantity and enthusiasm to do something meaningful, like influence election outcomes?
It's good that at least some of us care, but just chattering with each other here probably isn't going to accomplish much.
"Under his watch the surveillance state has expanded and has become downright creepy"
According to Snowden's documents, several mass collection programs shut down under his watch (including email header collection), and no new mass collection programs were added.
Would you prefer Obama to call for a closed internet?
You are confusing different things. Just because someone might be wrong with a lot of things doesn't mean he's not allowed to be right with something else.
As other's said: The world wide wrongdoing by the secret agencies is no invention of Obama. Not even an invention of the US. I'm German and even the BND did whatever it could to gain for it's purpose useful information. They did under governments of all kind of political orientation.
And then you're confusing things again. The downvotes most likely come from your indifferentiated opinion about net neutrality and spying activities. Not from your dislike of Obama.
> I am not American (feel free to ignore my opinion)
You're saying obama is responsible for everything - which is not as everything was there before him - and complain when he publicly asks to fix some of the most important issues... Then complain some more about some cult of personality and compare him as worst than the nazi regime.. Then complain about downvote.
Theres some interesting things to discuss regarding the validity of obamas actions but that doesnt seem to be the best way to start that debate ;)
For the rest of the Western world, the Obama administration has been the worst thing to happen to a free and open internet in the past two decades.
I see all kinds of American apologists in this thread, but the fact is that regardless of what it inherited, this particular administration has of its own volition pursued an aggressive anti-freedom and anti-privacy agenda both on behalf of its own intelligence agencies, its tech industry and its copyright exploitation industry.
The fact that this president dares to call for a free and open internet disgusts me.
Here's the thing that bothers me the most about a lot of the talk about net neutrality by government officials:
> If a consumer requests access to a website or service, and the content is legal, your ISP should not be permitted to block it.
Specifically "and the content is legal" is what raises a flag for me. I've seen similar phrases in nearly everything I've read coming from any government official regarding net neutrality.
If this phrasing makes it into eventual laws regarding net neutrality, it seems to me that it could easily require inspection of all traffic by ISPs to ensure the legality of traffic.
Not quite the "whole" point. It's not so much about accountability as not demanding customers pay more based on content; not being accountable for content is a consequence of not analyzing that content for whatever reason. It's about customers getting the bandwidth they pay for by not throttling the content they're requesting.
It's a pretty massive stretch to go from "ISPs are permitted to block illegal traffic" to "ISPs are required to perform deep-packet inspection to ensure the legality of all traffic they carry".
You're right to be concerned. If they keep using the same language in these sorts of statements, you better believe it's for a reason. Look for any legislation or regulation to implement such language.
Those two statements from a legal (writing) perspective are mutually exclusive, sort of. One is a Right and the other is a law. But both need to exist is some form to make the other possible.
Also, they both require the same technology to be automated and possible. The main constraint for the latter is computational power.
On the other hand, just think about it: now you have the wedge in, there'll be a massive lobby (Hollywood, recording companies, 'big media' if you will) trying to use that wedge to push stronger legislation in. In fact, the government itself (NSA, FBI) will think 'hey, now that we have this, we might as well use it to Protect Our Children (tm)'.
On the other hand, besides the ACLU and maybe a few people organizing over the internet, there will be no money spent in lobbying to tighten up definitions and improve privacy.
So there, it's a 'pretty massive stretch' but by no means it's an unexpected thing.
Unless, of course, direct encrypted communication is prohibited. Because, you know, Internet is a public utility now, and if you are using public thing, you should abide by public's rules. Like connecting to SSL sites only using approved ISP SSL proxies that allow lawful intercept. After all, you accept that to drive on public roads you need a license. So, to browse on public internet, you need to follow the rules too. And the rules say law enforcement should be able to see what you are transmitting - given properly signed court order, of course - so that means you can not use non-interceptable encryption. See how this logic works?
I don't see 1st amendment issues if this is content-neutral (I don't think the Supreme Court would consider the choice of encryption scheme being speech by itself and thus protected expression) towards underlying data. As for 4th amendment, right now I think the prevailing position is that ability to collect data is not search until the data is actually collected, so providing capability for lawful intercept would not be considered 4th amendment problem. I don't like it too much, but that seems to be the state of affairs now.
Oh, this is totally coming. If they really manage to pull off the "you can't encrypt your own device because TERRORISM" (what Comey has been asking for) then what guarantee you have that they won't force corporations to stop using encrypted transfer between servers? It's so much easier to force corporations with an NSL than trying to pass legislation violating the rights of individual people.
Agree. ISP owner here. Not all web sites or IP addresses contain 100% illegal material. Virtual hosting (hosting more than one web site from same IP address) poses problems as does content among sub-domains. I don't have the resources to monitor and track such things and if I were forced into it, I would either go out of business or try to become a search engine.
I don't see why the good old model of "Someone deposits a complaint against a website at a police station, then the server/website is investigated upon, then the fine is raised against the renter/owner of the server" isn't enough.
I've actually wondered how do you go about providing access to internet? I write a lot of code and spent a good amount of time on the internet and it's always made me wonder how exactly one goes about providing internet to customers. Really curious for any resources to read about this if you have any resources to read or just your personal experience!
I don't think internet is what he provides, as an ISP (Internet services provider). He mentioned virtual hosting, so he's probably offering webhosting services.
Basically it's a reselling system no matter which way you go. You buy access into a bigger ISP's network and then provide services on top of it.
If you've got a huge wallet you could run your own physical infrastructure but it would be hugely expensive for anything more than a small userbase [1]. If you went that way you'd make peering agreements with your closest internet backbone providers to hook into the rest of the internet (backbone providers being even bigger ISPs than those mentioned earlier, the ISP's ISP if you like)
I think the concern is somewhat misplaced, because we've already seen the FCC take multiple stabs at regulations on net neutrality, that have been based on the principle of no or limited interference with lawful content, and they haven't required inspection of traffic.
Its not a requirement that ISPs block unlawful content, its a prohibition on blocking lawful content. A strong enough prohibition on blocking lawful content (e.g., one which provides consequences whenever lawful content is blocked, even if the intent was to block unlawful content and the lawful content just got caught up in the net) actually reduces the incentive for ISPs to attempt to identify and block unlawful content, since attempting to do so but making a misidentification in the process can result in penalties.
In fact, I'd argue that a no-blocking-lawful-content rule combined with a safe harbor provisions preventing ISPs from being liable for transmission of unlawful content by customers so long as the ISP wasn't actively involved in soliciting or promoting the specific illegal content is probably a good protection against ISP-initiated snooping, since it eliminates any liability-based incentive for it.
OTOH, it doesn't stop ISP-snooping-at-behest-of-government, but if you get a mechanism to do that, its going to be outside the context of net neutrality.
I agree that my concern may be misplaced and everything could work out fine. I'd categorize myself as "cautiously optimistic" about these laws still, but wanted to bring this up since I don't see much discussion about it.
Additionally, I almost brought this up in my original post, but decided against it, but "lawful content" is another phrase I commonly see in the same discussions. IANAL, but my understanding is that unlawful != illegal. "Lawful" means the subject is specifically addressed and permitted by law, and "unlawful" is anything else. So traffic can be legal, but not lawful.
My biggest fear is that we in the tech community will rally behind a net neutrality law which sounds good in theory, but ends up a nightmare in practice. Phrases like "ISPs will not be able to filter lawful content" are nowhere close to "ISPs will not be able to filter traffic". I'd much prefer the latter in a net neutrality law.
While your concerns are valid and should be discussed, I don't think they warrant backing down from supporting what Obama calls for here and what we've generally been calling for, reclassifying ISPs under title II. I'm not aware that being under title II gives them a requirement (explicitly or implicitly) or an incentive[1] to filter "unlawful" content.
I agree with GP that the issue of snooping is important but is an issue unrelated to net neutrality (other than that they both concern the internet).
[1] That is, an incentive greater than the pressure they've received in the past from law enforcement/the NSA/the CIA already.
> IANAL, but my understanding is that unlawful != illegal. "Lawful" means the subject is specifically addressed and permitted by law, and "unlawful" is anything else. So traffic can be legal, but not lawful.
Inasmuch as there is a distinction between "lawful" and "legal", but its pretty much the other way around. Both address conformity to the law, but "legal" focusses more on procedural, technical conformity. Something can be lawful (e.g., a contract for a non-prohibited purpose wherein non-prohibited performances are exchanged) but illegal (because, say, its a contract for a purposes for which the law requires certain procedures for registration, etc., of the contract, and these were not correctly completed.)
In the case of content in the US, an example might be commercial adult content where all the content standing on its own conformed to the law (so that it was lawful), but where the producers had not followed all the technical record-keeping requirements relating to such content (such that it was illegal.)
On the other hand, he's also calling for it to be classified under Title II. Unless Title II is modified, that would prohibit ISPs from deep packet inspection.
It would also prohibit ISPs from modifying responses in situ - like inserting tracking beacons gifs into HTML responses or returning a custom search page (with associated ad revenue) when a DNS lookup fails.
Edit: So, with the 'if the content is legal' clause, Obama was probably referring to refusal to carry / illegal purpose court decisions. This can be applied only in very, very limited circumstances. A couple court decisions that are relevant:
* Nadel v NY Tel., 170 NYS2d 95 (1957); carrier suspected caller of using the telephone for illegal gambling transactions and terminated their service. Court ruled that service should be reinstated: the telephone company "is not at all qualified, in the absence of evidence of illegal use, to withhold from the petitioner, at will an essential and public utility."
* Shillitani v. Valentine, 53 NYS 2d 127 (1945); "a telephone company may not refuse to furnish service and facilities because of a mere suspicion or mere belief that they may be or are being used for an illegitimate end; more is required."
* People v. Brophy, 49 Cal.App.2d 15, at 33, 120 P2d 946, at 965; "public utilities and common carriers are not the censors of public or private morals, nor are they authorized or required to investigate or regulate the public or private conduct of those who seek service at their hands."
I hope you're correct and deep packet inspection is prohibited. The language being used still concerns me though.
> If a consumer requests access to a website or service, and the content is legal, your ISP should not be permitted to block it.
This implies that ISPs would be permitted to block illegal content. How can they know traffic is legal without some form of traffic monitoring/inspection?
Going from the court decisions, they would know that traffic is illegal if a court tells them it's illegal. Again, refer to People v. Brophy: the common carrier is not "authorized or required" to investigate. Probably meaning they can aid in investigation (e.g., supply information to police) but not perform an investigation (analyze said information themselves).
In addition, Title II would probably put internet traffic on the same level as wiretaps in terms of (non-DHS) data snooping. If anything, it would give internet users more protection for this sort of thing than they are granted now.
It would probably be a specific url. Or an entire domain for something like a site dedicated to illegal gambling. Though why they wouldn't just go after the website to take it down like they do currently eludes me.
Pretty much. If it's hosted in the US, they'll take it down. If it's not, they'll do pretty much whatever they can ... which boils down to seizing the domain. Usually with the kinds of sites people are typically worried about USGOV taking down, they leave up ... and watch the traffic. It's like in The Wire - they don't want the criminal's site (cell phone) to go down when they're watching the connections it's making.
Title II combined with the 2nd amendment actually prevents things like The Great Firewall :)
Usenet is a common carrier service. However, they do make content inaccessible if there's a takedown request for copyright. But they don't filter anything that gets uploaded or block your downloads.
i don't think usenet is a common carrier service. if it were, it would be illegal to block or prohibit access to it... and currently a lot of ISP's explicitly block access to usenet.
Do they actually block it? I thought the issue was that ISPs stopped hosting usenet servers for their users. You can still access usenet hosted somewhere else.
I've never seen an ISP block usenet. I've seen ISPs stop hosting their own free Usenet servers, but that's not blocking Usenet.
I'm searching for an adequate source for this information but I'm failing to find anything to stand on its own. It's definitely been treated like common carrier for many years, but as for an official classification... I'm struggling to find one.
>public utilities and common carriers are not the censors of public or private morals
Well of course they are, to a limited degree. They are not the sole carrier - I sometimes find it hard to express or notice the plural distinction - of moral, but neither is the justice system, although it likes to paint itself that way. As can be shown:
lt. moralis: proper behavior of a person in society
They have to decide a proper course of action for themselves. It would just be nice if it was in accordance with the censorship of the law. OTOH, i find the result proper.
>nor are they authorized or required to investigate or regulate the public or private conduct of those who seek service at their hands
Clearly not authorized, but morally, they might be required to regulate, therefore to investigate, if possible without violating privacy rights, which with automation can be ensured to a degree. Even if warranted by a judge, or done by the police, it meant massive overhead for the providers, too. So it would be nice if we can go on without all that hassle. Maybe it would require relaxing some laws, that require those investigations; Or moving on as society, as calling on moral draws in a bag of huge implications.
What if crack junkies buying crack on silkroad steal copper cables from the grid? The Telcos are indirectly affected by that, when the users get unsatisfied and directly they have to pay for replacement.
The users are directly affected and responsible, so in first degree it's their responsibility. (not as implied, the court's or w/e).
I think that it is preventative of headlines "Obama wants pedophiles to be able to download kiddie porn fast" that the other party pundits are sure to make.
Edit: I am not defending any party, just assume that in current poisonous climate ANY action of ANY high position party official of ANY party will be stretched and twisted by the other side.
Inspection of traffic with the coming certificate pinning and https implementations will be very hard. And you always have VPN. At worst there will be overnet in which bittorrent will flow.
The problem is that society has been sitting on its laurels and even though the default should have been that the inherent spirit of the Constitution be extended into the digital world, instead, we have allowed and been complicit in allowing government to not only become authoritarian on the internet, but even to subvert and pervert the very fundamental concepts that set parameters on our whole existence.
People, the world is cruel, savage, sadistic, perverse, and brutish without social agreement on fundamental principles. If the underlying concepts that the Constitution is based on are eroded further and further the way they have been for years now, we will, with guarantee, find ourselves in the same predicament as all other people who wake up one day and are dominated by a totalitarian regime.
Some may see that as hyperbole, but too often humans take privilege, safety, and security for granted and squander away what their ancestors had to pay with their lives and livelihoods for to achieve.
The government created the internet. For a while in the early 90s corporations tried to create it, and what they came up with were walled gardens, the open internet blew them away, look up Compuserve, AOL and Prodigy.
The internet works because of the underlying open, bidirectional, equally privileged connections. If the corps are starting to change that it must be stopped. The internet is one of humanities greatest achievements and we can't let greedy monopoly beuraucrats kill it.
The government didn't create the internet. At the most, the government gave money to some projects that developed some technologies that were subsequently used to create the internet. Yes, there were a lot of failed attempts at how to handle the informational world - like AOL (which btw is alive and well as a company with multibillion revenues), Compuserve, etc. - but some of these attempts worked. And that what we call the internet now. Of course, it's not only companies, but NGOs, universities, etc.
>>> The internet works because of the underlying open, bidirectional, equally privileged connections.
This is very simplistic view which does not match what really happens on the net. There are a lot of barriers, firewalls, routing preferences, private bandwidth exchanges, etc. It still works reasonably well so far.
>>> The internet is one of humanities greatest achievements and we can't let greedy monopoly beuraucrats kill it.
You realize that "monopoly bureaucrats" is the very definition of the government? If you were ever scared of huge bureaucratic power that would take away the control from you and use it for its own purposes, the US federal government would fit this role ideally.
At least theoretically, the government bureaucrat can be influenced for the general good. The corporate monopoly bureaucrat will fuck everybody over if it serves his interest.
True, but corporation can be influenced for the general good too - by its customers. In fact, you can argue customers have more control than the voters - if the politician has 50%+1 votes in his pocket and appoints the bureaucrat, the opinion of the rest of 50%-1 voters have absolutely no weight to him (unless he is of a special rare breed of saint which is so rare in real politics). However, for the corporation losing 50% of their customers would be a huge blow, which given healthy competitive market would probably kill it, so the control of the customers is greater. Of course, with monopoly it would be different, but if the monopoly is not externally enforced, large reluctance of the customers to deal with it will eventually lead to the competition emerging and thus the monopoly would be lost. If the monopoly is persisted by law or regulation then this may not happen, but then the problem again is in that regulation that essentially now forces almost 50% of people to use service they do not want to use.
I always considered the libertarian theory that corporate monopolies are caused by the government as very suspect and entirely unproven.
Natural monopolies are obvious when you think about it a little bit. When your entire ideology depends on them not existing them maybe it's time for a rethink.
When you think a little bit, sure. When you think more than a little bit, it's not really that obvious. Remember how Microsoft was a monopoly and EU spent so much time and money on struggling with MSIE to no noticeable effect? Remember what happens now when the most wished for feature of MSIE is "please die already"? So what happened - is that EU that brought that most natural of monopolies down or was there something else? Maybe thinking more than just little a bit is warranted here.
Not only EU, the US DOJ also sued Microsoft over their monopoly. Microsoft could have blocked Firefox, they could have banned dual booting Windows on Macs. There's a lot of things they could have done to lock down their monopoly permanently, but they didn't do them because they were afraid of government regulators breaking them up. It was a huge win for government regulation promoting innovation.
> if the politician has 50%+1 votes in his pocket and appoints the bureaucrat, the opinion of the rest of 50%-1 voters have absolutely no weight to him (unless he is of a special rare breed of saint which is so rare in real politics).
This sounds plausible, but it isn't correct. Remember, first of all, that no politician has real access to who did and did not vote for him. He has access to polling data, which generally scrubs well enough to reduce people to demographics. Conveniently, we generally engage with our politics through the lens of demographics anyways. But demographics are effectively never 100% accurate: samples are only samples.
Second, votes matter to politicians only if they want to be re-elected. They also matter on ballot measures and propositions and so on, but those are generally not what people mean when they talk about politician-voter relationships. Obama, since 2012, has no real reason to care about who voted for him in 2012 because he's not going to get any votes in 2016. There are other reasons in play, yes, but electoral votes are irrelevant when a politician has no interest in retaining his seat at the next cycle.
Third, politicians care about public opinion. They balance this against other competing interests, to be sure, but public opinion is the reason most of them ran for office in the first place. Those competing interests run the gamut from commercial interests to legal interests to moral interests to realpolitik, and ultimately, their job is to reconcile every interest with every other interest. That's what a politician is. People are afraid of politicians because they do not understand or recognize the interests they have outside of public opinion.
Public opinion is not votes, because public opinion is not tied to the electoral cycle. It suffers from the same problem of votes--that it is polled and often reduced to demographics--but from a far smaller degree because public opinion is also expressed by individuals who are willing to identify themselves.
The problem with public opinion, though, is that it's extremely rare to get anything solid resembling 50%. Nowhere close to 50% of a population is generally willing to identify themselves, meaning such a thing will always come down to polling data.
The advantage that corporations have in influenceability isn't that 50% could walk away (which will basically never happen on solely moral grounds); it's that it can track their interests with far, far more precision. It can know if you stop spending money, and it can calculate exactly what effect that will have on its bottom line. A politician, on the other hand, cannot track your personal opinion, and even if he could, he cannot determine how that would play out against the myriad other priorities he must keep in mind, not least of which is the rest of his constituency's opinions.
A politician makes a marketer look like an engineer in comparison. And yeah. Improving this would basically be a privacy risk. So we're fucked.
>>> Obama, since 2012, has no real reason to care about who voted for him in 2012 because he's not going to get any votes in 2016
That's not entirely true. Obama is not alone, there's a party around him, and what he does influences how this party is viewed and how others in the same party do on elections. However, if their base support is wide enough for being elected, there's no reason to feel any obligation to cater to people who are not part of that base.
>>> their job is to reconcile every interest with every other interest.
If it is so, most politicians do their job extremely poorly, as they are nowhere near every. In fact, it is very common to dismiss interests of opposing or unaffiliated groups completely, or even present them as evil for voicing such interests, let alone trying to get them recognized and respected.
>>> It can know if you stop spending money, and it can calculate exactly what effect that will have on its bottom line.
In theory, it could be possible if some corporation owned/had access to all the data, in practice, I don't think any big corporation does it on personal level. But on statistical level, it works the same way - the difference it, the market share is more fine-grained. So for the corporation offending each person is a direct loss, for a politician usually offending 20-30% of the population is no problem, provided all the others are OK with it.
There are those of us that swore and reswore an oath to defend those principals, some of us continue to uphold that oath personally, even though we have taken off the uniform, that doesn't mean we have taken off the oath. For me, It seemed obvious, I had to become a cypherpunk, or at least support and defend them. I agree with your assessment, and have concluded that I am not willing to let others give my and mine posterity's rights.
I'm betting "illegal content" will eventually come to include things like "bullying." Expect a much broader array of takedown notices once the FCC is granted content-level authority over the internet.
If such "bullying" is found illegal in court, then I don't see the problem here. Nobody is saying the FCC should be in charge of deciding these things, just that companies are still required to comply with court orders.
Speaking of "bullying," assault, "an intentional act by one person that creates an apprehension in another of an imminent harmful or offensive contact," [1] is already illegal. Sounds an awful lot like credible bullying. Why should this be legal online?
Great. Bullying should be illegal already, and internet bullies should be aggressively prosecuted.
This is currently a law enforcement blind spot, but that needs to change.
BTW, putting quotes around the world "bullying" isn't actually effective in mocking it as something actionable; it just communicates to us that you are perfectly ok with bullying.
The FCC regulates content that it deems "indecent" or "obscene" - legally nebulous terms. "Bullying" could cover incidents like Dan Savage redefining Santorum.
The FCC has been trying to get their hands on the internet for decades, and I see enforced net neutrality as their Trojan horse. It's possible I'm overly paranoid.
fwiw, we probably agree on the actual definition of bullying, and also that it should be illegal. I put it in quotes to indicate I'm using it imprecisely, not because I'm OK with what I believe to be legitimate bullying.
The worry is that "bullying" can be redefined to mean almost anything. A scathing critique of a bad business or politician could be construed as bullying.
We should also be careful about criminalizing bullies, since a large portion of them are young (and quite possibly bullied or abused themselves). It's a problem, and it needs more attention, but rushing to criminalize it seems hasty to me.
Not really. Blocking of illegal content is possible -- and can be (and, at times, has been) encouraged and even mandated by government -- even without protection of legal content. So, while the qualifier might suggest that such practices would not be curtailed by the neutrality, they don't provide the basis for more invasive monitoring and control than the absence of neutrality does, because the basis of that more invasive monitory and control already exists in the illegality of certain content, whether or not there is neutrality for legal content.
Why would the statement need to provide any basis? It's merely a carefully worded expression of a decision that's already been made. You will find even recent history rife with examples.
If he didn't put that in there, tons of idiots would go around saying how net neutrality will support all the crooks of the dark web, illegal filesharing websites, etc. Obviously that's ridiculous and not the case, but it would have really given net neutrality a bad image to the average person who probably has no idea what net neutrality is at all.
We've already got idiots let Ted Cruz tweeting that net neutrality is the "Obamacare of the internet."
You are reading too much into this. Obama is merely adding this phrase to protect himself from those that will intentionally try to twist his words. When you hear anything Obama says, you must remember that there are literally thousands of hacks and an entire media empire out there carefully examining his words and thinking how they can twist them or misrepresent them to make him look bad.
If he did not put that phrase in there, there would be a story on fox news saying "Obama supports child pornography".
Regarding having ISPs police users, I do not know why the government would do something like that. The government already tracks internet traffic all over the US thanks to the patriot law and you know how the government hates giving up its functions to private parties.
> You are reading too much into this. Obama is merely adding this phrase to protect himself from those that will intentionally try to twist his words.
Actually, much the same language has been in both the 2010 FCC Open Internet order and the draft for a new order earlier this year, its not something that was original in Obama's statement.
No. The part that should bother you has nothing whatsoever to do with this directly. It is found in hundreds and thousands of speeches, press conferences, government meetings and laws. They are called "lies". And, because we keep tolerating them the governing class, itself mostly immune and isolated from the very decisions they make and laws they pass, is emboldened.
Every election is full of lies. Party divisions do not matter. They lie to get elected and then do as they please. They lie to pass laws, and then do as they please. Of course, Obamacare is a favorite punching back, and rightly so. The whole business of "an average savings of $2,500 per family", "if you like your plan you can keep it" and "if you like your doctor you can keep'em. Period" should be grounds for millions of people revolting. My family is going to have to pay $14,000 per year next year for health insurance. If we go to the cheapest crap plan we can find that number goes down to $12,000 per year. We were paying $5,000 per year before Obamacare and had fantastic health insurance with great providers. Un-fucking-believable.
Have ZERO understanding how the Republicans are going to hold off on Anti-Net Neutrality. I am sure this is something that Libertarians will fight tooth and nail and well I would say over 12% of currently republicans labeled themselves as such. With 30 congressmen in the House Liberty Caucus things are not so easy for the G.O.P.
I feel that there is a strong likely hood that G.O.P. will have a switch for Net Neutrality once they see that this policy has such a strong vocal majority.
So you are for Government to change the Internet by making rules that only help a localized Monopoly?
I don't get how people don't see that this is a monopoly based on Government intervention???? Started with cable TV and now we are stuck with this in internet monopolies which are 100% anti-free market.
According to who? Common carrier is precisely the kind of regulation that free market grandfather Adam Smith supported in his writings. Land-based broadband ISPs do not currently exist in a competetive market, and likely cannot due to issues of redundancy in physical infrastructures. Common carrier regulation is an attempt to limit the effects of such monopoly power. It may be 'two wrongs making a right', but suggest an alternative.
Pro-neutrality libertarian here. I used to think my philosophy precluded net neutrality, then I looked into how these companies became entrenched- and it was by government support. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Exactly. It's what happened with banks. The government passes regulation after regulation, and pretty soon it's hard to tell the difference between the bankers and the regulators except for what kind of car they drive (now), and gets harder for new competition to enter the market, so banks consolidate and eventually become too big to fail, leading to obscene profits for very little risk.
Entrenched market players LOVE, LOVE, LOVE more regulation. All they have to do is hire more compliance officers and pass the cost on to us, while at the same time raising the cost of compliance for smaller and would-be competition.
Catchy, but inappropriate. If there were a free market way to reset the playing field, I'd certainly prefer that. But I've yet to hear one, and crony capitalists are a problem as much as statists.
The strongest argument against a legal framework for net neutrality is that it did not exist while the Internet was being built, and look how awesome the Internet turned out.
The second strongest argument is the comparison to the phone company. When was the last time a landline phone company was considered a fast-moving, cutting edge technology company?? Not for many decades. Every innovation in telephony service over the past 30 years has come from wireless or Internet telephony companies, both of whom are lightly regulated compared to landline phones.
Heavily regulated industries tend to slow down and become conservative; innovation flows around the regulations. You see it in transportation, telecomm, banking, power, etc.
I'm not saying these are winning arguments--the world is obviously different now than it was 10 or 20 years ago--but they are not easily dismissed either.
I'm glad the president is giving a hoot about this issue, because it's an issue I care deeply about and follow closely.
That said, I'm still not convinced a "no slow lanes" policy is possible. Peering is a huge part of the Internet, and without it, the Internet doesn't work. Paid peering is a private network owner's right to ask for, and it's every other person's right to deny.
Really? I wish he'd keep his mouth shut. The moment he makes his position known on anything, the Republican controlled congress makes it their holy crusade to block. Those guys are now in complete control of the legislative body that makes these rules.
If he REALLY wanted to help, he'd start supporting the opposite of everything he wants to do. He should be good at that, re: NSA, Drones, Gitmo, etc. "I will close down Gitmo! ... lol"
How do the peering different from how the power grid works? Isn't that system also made from private network owner, all needed to work collaborative in a common network?
Imagine a power grid where different sources paid different amounts for the last mile. Would it be right to deny the last mile to a new actor, say a new solar power plant, on the basis that its competing with existing coal power?
There aren't different "kinds" of electricity. Electricity you get anywhere is going to be exactly the same.
The Internet is completely different, and the whole point of peering is acknowledging that fact. Netflix and Comcast peer because Netflix has something Comcast can't get anywhere else.
The Internet isn't very much like a power grid at all, in fact. That's a terrible analogy.
Where I live, I can buy solar power, water power, nuclear power or generic power. The utility providers support many upstream suppliers, and the source of electricity is the defining attribute. It is also dictate where the power bill is sent from.
Also, Netflix is not paying money to Comcast because Netflix has something Comcast can't get anywhere else. Netflix is paying comcast because otherwise comcast is refusing their user access to netflix.
Obama's statement isn't quite as limp as the article title implied: "I am asking for an explicit ban on paid prioritization"
This isn't a request to "set up a committee to explore regulation ideas and form lobby groups from all stakeholders" - it sounds more like "I want to pass laws AND create an enforcement structure for those laws".
Ambitious and probably overly optimistic, but it's a good perspective from the top.
Well, the enforcement structure is already in place, AFAIK. This is just putting his finger on the scale as the FCC ponders the issues (and implying that if the FCC doesn't make the right choice by itself, it could be compelled by law).
Yeah - the general FCC structure is in place, but it sounds like the regulatory structure/principle is still being worked out. I suspect that it will be just another political football for a very long time, though...
The actual statement read fairly explicit and useful to me. I'm no expert though. Basically:
No blocking.
No throttling.
Increased transparency
No paid prioritization
Same rules apply to mobile internet
It's all subject to the caveat that the FCC is independent and they decide how and what exactly is implemented.
Those sound to me like the basic and less controversial components of net neutrality. It prevent disadvantaging specific sites, protocols or users if applied in a reasonable way.
Broadband ISPs haven't been regulated like common carriers for almost two decades. Meanwhile consumer access to the internet has been oppressed and stagnant? I don't see the evidence for that.
Certainly they aren't mutual exclusive. You'd get my full agreement there. And touche to 'symbiosis' of regulation and competition. I do hope that this is the route we are heading.
This sounds very George Orwell, like "Freedom is Slavery".
It's going to take a very strong argument to support the idea that freedom is enhanced by limiting freedom. Not that it's impossible; my glib statement plays fast-and-loose with "freedom", using the same word in one sentence to mean both the overall amount of freedom as well as in a microcosm. But even so, the apparent contradiction should make us think before jumping in.
Well, it depends if you consider monolithic monopolies or governments a greater threat to freedom.
In the case of US ISPs, most people simply have no choice and are locked into one company. This creates a difficult situation and allows ISPs to easily collude. You theoretically have freedom to switch to another company, but in practice it's not possible because most people would have to up and move their entire family.
The Roman republic was preserved so long in part because Roman law and tradition forbade the bearing of arms within the city, and the entry of armed legions from the provinces into Italy proper. The loss of Roman liberty corresponded directly with the progressive breakdown of those regulations, starting with Sulla marching into Rome, Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon, and continuing with Augustus' Praetorian Guard.
Sometimes liberty is best preserved by limiting the ability of the powerful to bring that power to bear. The alternative is "might makes right", or private tyranny.
Freedom can be enhanced by limiting freedom. In the US, you may not have a slave or be a slave. It is illegal, even if both parties are willing.
Why can't we decide? Because if we could, it would open the door to trickery and coercion. The fact that no slavery arrangement is legal keeps a lot of people from being tricked or coerced into one.
Hence, limiting freedom (of agreements) can enhance freedom generally (no slavery).
Similarly, you can't sell me a house made of popsicle sticks even if I'm informed. We want a market where houses below a certain level of quality just don't exist, because it's better for everyone.
It's possible that net neutrality is like this. "An internet connection where ComCastMovies.com works great but Netflix is severely throttled" would be a crappy product that Comcast is incentivized to sell, and consumers may be tricked (fine print) or coerced (no other options) into buying. It may be in the public interest to outlaw it.
We want a market where houses below a certain level of quality just don't exist, because it's better for everyone.
But are we sure that's true?
A couple months ago I recall seeing that one of the major wireless providers was planning a level of service that was (a) very cheap; (b) allowed unlimited access to Facebook and a couple of other major social apps; and (c) was very expensive for data usage outside that area. It would be marketed toward poorer people as a cheaper means of getting that basic connectivity.
One outcome of the arguments for net neutrality, and your argument in particular, is that there's no means for providing low-cost services designed for the less-rich. It's not obvious to me that setting a bar this high is a good thing for the lower economic rung in our society.
But those are artificial bottom-rung services. We all know that an internet connection is an internet connections, right? So restricting this bogus program to certain websites was an attempt to capture the consumer, nothing more. Its somewhat like offering the poor special-price moldy bread, deliberately poisoned to make them have to buy your medicine or whatever. There's no point to it, except evil.
Its somewhat like offering the poor special-price moldy bread, deliberately poisoned to make them have to buy your medicine
No, that's a completely unfair characterization. There's nothing "poisoned" about the lower level of service being contemplated here, it's just a lot less capable.
You seem to be putting yourself into the position of deciding for these hypothetical poor customers that if they can't have the A+ level of service for top dollars, then they shouldn't have anything at all. It's all or nothing.
If you think that we should limit things in this way, then let's be up-front about it. Admit from the beginning that the result will be that we're preventing low-cost plans, so the industry will be forbidden from selling plans designed for disadvantaged people.
I didn't make my self clear then. Its absolutely poisoned. They had to go to special trouble to disable browsing anything but the services they wanted you to see. Like putting on blinders. Or to use the food analogy, to destroy the food value of the bread so as to influence your subsequent behavior.
The lowest rung, the only rung, on the internet ladder is - a connection. Nothing costs more or less than that. The rest is an attempt to charge rent on property that isn't theirs. To mix the metaphors. They are a carrier; they don't provide web sites and its none of their blessed business which ones you visit using their precious phone.
>> We want a market where houses below a certain level of quality just don't exist, because it's better for everyone.
> But are we sure that's true?
It depends on how you calculate the cost of the low-quality thing. Take houses. If people could sell houses made of compressed dryer lint, some would. And some poor people would buy. And many of them would be horribly burned in fires.
What's the cost? It depends on how much responsibility we take in caring for them. Do we pay to treat their burns? Do we pay for their funerals? Do we pay to raise their children and give them counseling? What about the lost potential of all those people to contribute to the world? What about the value of life itself?
> One outcome of the arguments for net neutrality, and your argument in particular, is that there's no means for providing low-cost services designed for the less-rich. It's not obvious to me that setting a bar this high is a good thing for the lower economic rung in our society.
It's not obvious to me, either. But it seems like Facebook-only phones are a bit like dryer-lint houses. How much would it cost society to have its bottom ranks unable to read Wikipedia or look up medical conditions on MedLinePlus or comparison shop on Amazon?
And if such plans succeed, how long until we have to consider every ISP's plans with "features" such as "doesn't block category X" and "doesn't throttle site Y"?
Certainly a little. Though most of it was Bush era expansion of Clinton legacy. Obama has actually made some pretty interesting investments in the defensive and technological side of geopolitical cyber struggle.
Here, however, the ISP market is what we're talking about. Certainly the two topics are related. My hope also is that Snowden kickback has informed this Administration, as it finishes its second half of its final term, how the world and how Americans think about the internet.
It seems to me that introducing net neutrality law is a band-aid over what is really just monopolistic behaviour because last-mile providers don't have competition.
Why not fix the root cause? Force last-mile providers to provide transit to third party ISPs like they do in the UK, or otherwise regulate them specifically.
I don't see why rules should apply across the board to markets where there is healthy competition. There is no problem elsewhere, is there?
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but Obama is suggesting that we re-classify ISPs as utilities. That would force them to lease out their lines to competitors.
That's not going to happen. Comcast is one of Obama's - and the Democrats in general - closest corporate sponsors.
And were the Republicans to win the Presidency, I can't see them pushing for a formal classification either. They think Comcast is a private company competing in a market, when it's actually a government protected and sanctioned monopoly just like AT&T and Verizon.
What substantial government sanctioned monopoly does Comcast have? Can we point to something concrete rather than hand waving?
It's been illegal to grant monopoly franchises to cable companies since the mid 1990's. I don't know of a single market where Comcast is the only cable company because it has a sanctioned monopoly. There are a lot of places where Comcast has a de-facto monopoly because nobody else is willing to build high-speed service in a given area. But almost anywhere that's the case, it's because of telco-unfriendly regulations, not telco-friendly ones.
The people who rant about telcos can't get their story straight. They say Comcast has a legally protected monopoly, but then attack Verizon for not building fiber to the huge swath of places where the local governments are dying to get a competitor to the local telco. Their arguments are based on a false premise: that building fiber is profitable enough to justify the investment, and the government and telcos are getting in the way. The falsity of this premise is amply demonstrated when you look at places like New York, where the government has shoved the cable companies out of the way, but still has to drag Verizon kicking and screaming to build all this supposedly lucrative infrastructure.
There are .pdf's with the official agreement and some attempt at simplifying the info contained within on the page itself. I haven't read it yet myself, but I'm curious if it reflects the claims you make.
The franchise agreement you linked, for the city of Louisville, Colorado, exemplifies the claim I'm making.
Section 2.4 - franchise is non-exclusive.
Section 2.2(B) - non-discriminatory requirements to access rights of way.
Section 2.6 - city reserves right to grant other franchises, so long as if it does so on more favorable terms than the existing franchise, then the existing franchise can be modified.
The FAQ on the page you linked has the most interesting information, however:
> Comcast's Franchise with City of Louisville:
> Comcast - the nation's largest cable television provider - is currently the primary source of cable television services in Louisville, serving approximately 4,500 subscribers. They currently operate in Louisville under a non-exclusive franchise agreement [Footnote] effective since April 2006. The agreement allows Comcast to use the City's ROW in return for the payment of certain rental fees - known as franchise fees - and other benefits for Louisville and its residents.
> Footnote: Should another cable provider want to offer cable service in Louisville the City would offer that company the same franchise opportunity that Comcast now has. To date, no other service providers have asked for a franshise.
On the other hand, Obama does not need to worry about his own re-election and it seems like quite a few Democrats threw him under the bus in the past election.
His administration literally started the process that will ultimately be the end of the open internet in the next few years.
Now everybody is working on a national/regional "Internet", even the EU is going the first steps into this direction.
Him calling for open and free Internet is absolutely bizarre. Who knows, maybe he'll call tomorrow for the end of torture and drone executions without trial.
I never cease to be amazed at the naivety that exists around giving this government more power. This isn't some fluffy nice friendly government that has only our best interests at heart - this is a hyper violent, war mongering, murderous, intrusive, spiteful, extra-legal, Constitution ignoring monster. The military industrial complex has come home to roost - that is what is happening with the spying and police militarization - and now people think it's a great idea to just hand over more power to this government so they can further control the only widely accessible platform left to criticize them.
"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." Ronald Reagan
This just provides more impetus for us to get out ahead of the government and implement the next-generation communication technologies that make it impossible for anyone to spy on us.. of course, if that happens, there'll be further battles upstream .. as well as a few submarine battles we probably don't know we have to fight, already, as advocates of peace and communication - but nevertheless the time has never been as ripe as it is now for the new shit to drop.
Question is, how? What? These are the sorts of answers we have to find. A DHT over a P2P with no central control? It still seems so out of reach ..
I tend to agree. As an ISP owner, the problem is fundamentally the point to point technology involved along with lopsided peering agreements you can't avoid.
Torrents really expose these issues very well and it's the same sort of thing you see going on between Netflix and Comcast.
One solution is for consumers to have more choices. I recently read an article where some town I think in Colorado put in their Internet access by lighting up dark fiber they had. It use to be something the cable companies fought citing that municipalities could have a monopoly.
The other game changer is WiMAX and generally speaking, faster mobile data rates. If I no longer need my buried cable to get fast Internet coupled with the fact I can take my device with me, is a huge selling point.
But like cable companies, you can have traffic pile up on a cell tower but it seems easier to add more radios to a cell tower than it is to lay more fiber and/or coax.
Maybe the solution is to get rid of TCP/IP and use something different such that traffic can spray out like a torrent and be recollected from different route paths. For example, if you have Internet from two or more cable companies, there is no way to dynamically balance traffic between those two circuits between two parties. You have a default gateway and there isn't much more you can do with that at the end user level.
Huh? Is this the same President Obama that put Tom Wheeler in charge of the FCC? In case it isn't obvious (and since no-one else has mentioned it yet, I guess it's not), Tom Wheeler was a huge lobbyist for the very people who are trying to end net neutrality.
I don't get calling for X then performing actions that negate X.
No, Wheeler was not a "huge lobbyist" for "the very people" working against NN. He was the president of the NCTA from the late 70s to 1984, before cable had anything whatsoever to do with the Internet. His status as an anti-neutrality lobbyist is a powerful Internet meme that does not appear to be rooted in fact.
Look, I normally agree with almost everything you say, but this is just not true. Wheeler was at the NCTA until divestiture, then he saw the writing on the wall and went to CTIA and CWA. After CWA he worked for Core which is a very industry heavy VC.
Wheeler was a huge lobbyist for over 20 years, talks to Meredith at CTIA on a first-name basis and knows all of the people who run the telcos and their lobbying organizations. In some narrative, he's the perfect person to lead the FCC and in another, he's not.
My opinion is that, YES, he was a lobbyist and YES he is anti-neutrality because that was the position that made the most sense at the beginning of his tenure. I'm bullish that he'll come over to the Network Neutrality side (and gave indications in that direction at CTIA Super Mobility week this year) but I think there's a chance he'll do title 2 with lots of caveats that will make this, let's say, complicated.
You are right that memes aren't helpful, but Wheeler was actually the biggest lobbyist in the history of telecom, IMHO, so that much is quite true. Whether he is anti-neutrality now is up for debate, but when he took the office, well, I think there's little evidence to show he was in favor of neutrality then.
I take your point, that Wheeler was a lobbyist for network operators for most of his career. I think "cable company lobbyist" is still a particularly dumb way to sum him up, but can see why lobbying for telcos is also scary for someone arbitrating net neutrality.
Obama doesn't care about contradictions. He's just saying whatever he knows will get him support from credulous fools. That's how it always works. Politicians don't care about you. They don't care about the things you do.
Please don't do this on HN. We don't need to politicize the issue among technical people; we can simply discuss the pros and cons on their merits. I, personally, don't care about political parties at all (they're a distinction without a difference, IMO).
Sorry. To me, it looked like the issue had already been politicized, and I was just throwing in a quick sarcastic remark. Didn't think it would be taken too seriously. I get your point.
> Is this the same President Obama that put Tom Wheeler in charge of the FCC? In case it isn't obvious (and since no-one else has mentioned it yet, I guess it's not), Tom Wheeler was a huge lobbyist for the very people who are trying to end net neutrality.
Tom Wheeler has been one of the three members of the FCC supporting regulations promoting net neutrality. Yes, Tom Wheeler was the leader of a cable industry lobbying organization in the past.
> I don't get calling for X then performing actions that negate X.
I don't think the companies -- including cable companies -- that keep suing the FCC over Wheeler's pro-neutrality efforts would agree that appointing Tom Wheeler has been a way to negate net neutrality. I agree that his past work for them might have been a valid reason to be mildly skeptical of whether he would be a supporter of neutrality when the appointment was made (but given the distance between that role and both the appointment and any connection the cable industry had to the internet, only mild skepticism.) I don't think it makes any sense, though, to treat him as an enemy of neutrality on the basis of that when he has an actual record, at the FCC, of promoting regulations moving the status quo toward neutrality.
President Obama is a lame duck. His party just got tossed out of the Senate, relegating his political capital to basically 0. In the wake of this, he's decided to take maybe the most important economic issue of the next 20 years and politicize it.
Neither the red team nor the blue team could say they owned this issue, but one of the most divisive voices in politics just stuck the blue flag in it - at a time when he has less influence over policy than any other time in his presidency.
I would have preferred him to just keep his mouth shut.
He still has 2 years to work on legacy and narcissism[1], he still has the Executive Order power which he's shown a keen interest in using, "net neutrality" is low-hanging fruit for him to boost his popularity, and there's still enough tacit supporters in Congress to get supporting legislation thru. There's going to be a whole lotta bills reaching his desk that he won't like; now's the time to start trying to drive the agenda & process toward maximizing favorable ones so he doesn't end up with the "roadblock" label.
[1] - you don't get to that level of power without substantial self-confidence and the desire for general adulation.
Sure would be fucking nice if they (democrats and republicans) could not have to take opposing sides on fucking everything, but you're right. Since he's for it, they're going to rally against it. Really disappointing.
> Sure would be fucking nice if they (democrats and republicans) could not have to take opposing sides on fucking everything
There is a selection bias in the issues you speak of. Non-polarizing topics are handled swiftly, without much attention from the public spotlight. There is no point in discussing what's already agreed upon, and that's one of the more reasonable justifications of political polarization.
That said, the polarization is greater than would be optimal, so I do agree - it would be nice.
Agreed. Given the knee-jerk reaction of "Anything that Obama supports is bad", Ted Cruz is now tarring this as "Net Neutrality is the Obamacare of the Internet". I like how "Obamacare" has become the new Communism. A lot of people know hardly anything about it or what it's policies actually are, but it's baaaaad.
I like the Digg headline about this: Ted Cruz is the Uber for stupid metaphors.
> Ted Cruz is now tarring this as "Net Neutrality is the Obamacare of the Internet".
That is disastrous. If the Republicans unite against Net Neutrality just because Obama supports it, we could easily get a Republican president in the next election, and then the Internet in the U.S. will be doomed for a very long time.
I agree. Net Neutrality is a great opportunity for some bi-partisan problem solving. It'd be much better for the country if they could find common ground on this issue.
> If the Republicans unite against Net Neutrality just because Obama supports it
The Republicans have been generally against Net Neutrality since before Obama became President. (Bills on the issue first started being submitted in 2006.)
That makes little sense - what is the connection between Net Neutrality and Republicans winning in 2016? As issues go, this is a pretty minor one - economics, healthcare, immigration and foreign policy are way ahead. About 99% of the population don't even know what net neutrality is about, and of those who know what the words mean majority probably don't know enough about how ISPs and network interconnections work to make informed opinion about it (I have read a lot about it and I am still not sure if it's a good idea or not). Internet is not doomed either way, sky is not falling, please do not drink the Kool-Aid. As for Republicans, they are traditionally opposed to many measures expanding government regulatory power, so claiming they oppose it just because Obama is for it is plain wrong.
Amen. This will make the issue more political, even though Rs and more Friedman-minded Ds should be behind net neutrality. Now Rs will be driven toward the other side.
> In the wake of this, he's decided to take maybe the most important economic issue of the next 20 years and politicize it.
Obama campaigned on net neutrality and has been talking about it throughout his presidency. This is nothing new.
I don't disagree that it might have been better if he had said nothing - but I suspect the current antigovernment sentiment would have applied regardless of what Obama said.
You are saying that Obama is wrong because he is doing the right thing at a time when he will be defeats by forces that are willing to harm their constituents out of pure spite, and instead we should wait for those spiteful villains to decide to the right thing when it will serve their own selfish goals? That's sick.
It's pretty disingenuous to note his lobbying for cable companies in the 1970's and 1980's, before they even entered the Internet service business, while ignoring that his most recent connections are to Internet companies that ride on the infrastructure built by the telecoms.
Also, CTIA represents wireless carriers, which are under a different regulatory umbrella than telcos or cable. To the extent you can infer bias from Wheeler's work, the strongest inference is in favor of a bias towards Internet companies, not a bias towards telcos. Of course, I wouldn't characterize him as biased, but rather as someone with experience with the "full stack."
I don't think I fully understand the argument for net neutrality. I try to think about it from a few different perspectives:
Broadband intensive services like Netflix:
I think a problem that they face is that their connection is often slow, not only intentionally, but also because developing infrastructure is expensive. Why would an ISP bother building out the infrastructure if they can't extract a higher value from those that it most benefits (Netflix)? In fact, Netflix thinks it's worth it to pay Comcast directly. If that was not beneficial, I don't see why Netflix would have done so. Sure, they would probably prefer to get that service for free, but it must be mutually beneficial for both parties to go along. If Netflix were not allowed to make sure a deal with a company like Comcast, would that really benefit anyone?
Smaller Websites:
There is the risk that ISPs try extracting a toll but I think it may not be worth it a lot of the time for the ISP. I think this fear is overblown, although I could be wrong.
Consumers that don't use broadband extensive services:
Why should those consumers be subsidizing those that use broadband heavy services?
Consumers using broadband extensive services:
Why should Netflix not be allowed to help subsidize the cost of providing broadband? Why should this fall solely on the individual?
Government:
The obvious concerns of more governmental control of the internet.
I could imagine a scenario where Netflix was not allowed to pay Comcast directly for increased bandwidth. Instead, Netflix would spend that money to lobby politicians to force Comcast to build out their infrastructure. I don't see how that's a better scenario than currently exists.
I think a better solution to very little competition in ISPs would be to decrease the barriers it takes to compete. Further regulation would only increase the barriers.
Short Answer: Communications industries are different, and too important. The information they carry is, like journalism, a 4th estate to democracy. An econ101 approach to that industry breeds consolidated information empires that influence policy, society, and public discourse to the point of control.
Everything you just said about controlling policy, society, public discourse - applies to governments that show authoritarian tendencies, exactly as the US Government does these days.
Except with the government it's radically worse. They have the guns, and the legal 'right' (might) to spy on you and criminalize what you do if they see fit - or you know, use your porn habits to blackmail you as the NSA chief suggested doing. They also already substantially control education in countless ways.
So a violent central government that likes to murder innocent people by the thousands overseas, with a rising police state domestically with military weapons given to them by the Feds, and a mentality to wage perpetual war, and spy on all citizens and acquire all information they can in any way they can without any regard for the Constitution or privacy ... and you want to give them more power over the biggest free speech platform in world history - oh yeah, this is going to end real well.
Communications industries are different, and too important.
More important than shelter, food and energy? We draw a line as to what the government should provide/subsidize/control and what the private sector provides in those sectors.
The information they carry is, like journalism, a 4th estate to democracy.
If the 4th estate is a check on government, why would we want the government to decide what constituted it? Please don't conflate a first amendment issue with this conflict between content providers and ISPs.
Yes, similar to shelter, food, and energy in that they are fundamental infrastructure.
I'm sorry I wasn't more clear. You are right: the analogy breaks down on the level of mechanism of preservation.
I attempted to be more general. Specifically: Journalism is a check on public and private coercion, but the mechanism is free speech. Common Carrier regulation is a check on (largely) private coercion. The mechanism is monopoly prevention (originally monopoly rejection, via AT&T breakup).
Why would an ISP bother building out the infrastructure if
they can't extract a higher value from those that it most
benefits (Netflix)?
It's not only Netflix that benefits. It's also the consumer. Our family for instance watches almost all of their Video via Netflix, Amazon, and Youtube. We don't pay for a cable package. Saying it most benefits Netflix does a disservice to my family. I don't want Cable TV. I want Netflix. Comcast wants to deny me Netflix unless Netflix agrees to pay them more money.
Looking at it from my perspective. I'm paying Comcast for the ability to stream Netflix. They advertise to me as having the fastest speeds for streaming video. And yet when I request Netflix they refuse to do what's necessary to allow me to stream Netflix.
Consumers that don't use broadband extensive services: Why
should those consumers be subsidizing those that use
broadband heavy services?
Why Indeed? If Comcast want's to offer less broadband intensive plans they have every right to. If they want to charge me higher prices for a more broadband intensive plan then more power to them. The issue is that they degrade my service so they can extract a price from Netflix when I purchased the right to stream from Netflix from them.
I think a better solution to very little competition in
ISPs would be to decrease the barriers it takes to
compete. Further regulation would only increase the
barriers.
It's almost impossible to decrease those barriers without regulation. Running wires to every home is expensive and the first one there almost always wins. The reasons why broadband is a natural monopoly have been discussed in depth on this site. Those reasons have not changed.
The real crux of the problem here is that large ISP's like comcast are selling one thing to their consumers: a certain amount of bandwidth to any site on the internet and then purposely failing to deliver that bandwidth to the customer and blaming it on someone else.
Yes, running wires to homes is expensive. By making it less lucrative and tying the hands of those that build those wires, you're not exactly encouraging competition.
I'd imagine if ISPs abused this rent-seeking, companies like Netflix and Google would actually become interested in building out their own infrastructure. However Netflix would be less inclined to do so if it were not able to favor their service over competitors.
One decision is to treat ISPs like a public utility which is where I think the US is heading. In my experience, though, services brought to me by the government are often lack-luster.
> Why would an ISP bother building out the infrastructure if they can't extract a higher value from those that it most benefits (Netflix)?
Netflix is not getting the benefit, the end user is. That is the demand side of things. They can and do charge more for higher bandwidth, and Netflix will require more than the national average to reliably stream at 1080p. Netflix only exists to fill that need, and the ISP exists to fill that users bandwidth need. It is not Netflix's direct need.
> it must be mutually beneficial for both parties to go along.
It is. Netflix makes more profit off working Internet from Comcast than they lose paying the bribe. But we lose, the consumers, because Netflix is getting a fast lane now, and sets a precedent that ISPs can hold ransom their bandwidth from anyone.
> I think this fear is overblown, although I could be wrong.
It takes no effort on their part to set up their routing to have everyone in a slow lane unless you pay the fee, and they have no motivation not to, because when smaller websites are slow, users stop visiting them, they don't drop their ISP over it.
> Why should those consumers be subsidizing those that use broadband heavy services?
They should not / aren't. At least in terms of month to month server upkeep. In terms of infrastructure wire, you pay the same taxes that maintain the roads if you drive a hundred miles a year as the guy who drives ten thousand miles a month. Previous models have showed that the overhead of calculating physical infrastructure usage (ie, power) is hard, and unless the per-unit volume is valuable enough it is not worth the bureaucracy.
> Why should Netflix not be allowed to help subsidize the cost of providing broadband? Why should this fall solely on the individual?
Because they are not subsidizing at all. End user will pay the same for Internet regardless of how much money content providers throw at ISPs because the vast majority are in monopoly positions and can do whatever they want up until the point users just drop service all together.
> I don't see how that's a better scenario than currently exists.
If it were the case that ISPs were the underdog here, because compelled by legislation to spend their private earnings to build cable that they cannot dictate price on and must lease compulsively, then you would have an argument.
But current ISPs have the opposite. They inherited their infrastructure from public works and other telecom companies, where the laying of cable was heavily subsidized by taxpayer money, and in some cases (verizon) they were given money to invest in infrastructure that they then ran away with and faced no consequences.
> decrease the barriers it takes to compete.
There are only three ways to do this.
One, you have "wire lanes" where anyone can run wire across the nation. This means starting an ISP no longer has the insurmountable mountain of regulation surrounding breaking ground, and you can just buy fiber, run it, and hook up each end user that wants it on an individual basis from the street corner.
The downside is you end up with tons of redundant infrastructure investments, and wire itself is mad pricey. This means that the industry as a whole is inefficient, due to the redundancy. The good news would be that with laying cable being an actual option, entrenched players would have a motivation to lease what they have at reasonable rates to avoid someone else investing heavily in competing in the infrastructure.
But it is also completely infeasible. There is no way to set up New York City or rural Arkansas in a way to just let anyone lay fiber cable. The investment alone in getting to that point vastly eclipses the costs of just laying a public fiber channel owned the state that anyone can hook up to.
Option two is compulsory leasing, which is what Title 2 is in effect. If nobody can lay wire and actually compete with entrenched interests, you cannot have price competition on the rental rates of ...
You make a lot of valid points. I guess in general I don't believe that a government can somehow prevent a certain type of commercial transaction and somehow create value. The obvious counterexample that comes to mind, and that you alluded to, is that of ransom. However, I think that's a bit of a stretch and makes light of actual violence.
One thing that stuck out to me though:
> If it were the case that ISPs were the underdog here, because compelled by legislation to spend their private earnings to build cable that they cannot dictate price on and must lease compulsively, then you would have an argument.
I feel that opinions of issues are heavily influenced by the actors involved. Amazon vs Hachette being a key example. No one likes Comcast, nor do I, but I don't think that choosing sides based on the beneficiaries is the right way to go about things. I don't think you can argue that a person or group (corporation) took a benefit in the past and is now beholden to the person that dispensed that benefit. That's especially true if the decision makers and owners (stockholders) are a dynamic group.
>The downside is you end up with tons of redundant infrastructure investments, and wire itself is mad pricey
I normally discount this argument as it is often used as a justification of centralized control. Besides, one can argue that most commercial activities are redundant; from advertising to the endless variety of consumer goods available to people in the US. I do concede that this likely won't work in a lot of places as the technology currently exists. My hope is that some new technology can come about and change the economics materially. And I think that a light regulatory environment would best help foster this technology and encourage new entrants.
Dunno who is downvoting you, this is a sound debate. You are not trolling and it is abuse of the downvote button.
> I feel that opinions of issues are heavily influenced by the actors involved.
It is not so much individual commercial actors than ISP's in general having power. If they were being exploited through regulatory abuse, then they would be in a defensible position. But none of the policy surrounding them harms them significantly more than it helps, in that most of their networks were built on taxpayer dollars and that is a key reason why nobody can compete with them without state funding of infrastructure.
> from advertising to the endless variety of consumer goods available to people in the US
I agree wholeheartedly advertising is one of the worst industries around, because it creates terrible returns on investment (the real productivity gain of advertising is more informing consumers about goods and services than using psychological manipulation to get people to spend money a certain way).
But non-structural goods and services (ie, bread, or housing) has per unit per person utility. Common infrastructure like roads does not behave in the same "here are X units of good and Y units of buyer, and the market will adjust to make sure those numbers stay close to each other regardless of the number of competitors". With networking, power lines, roads, sewage systems, transit systems, etc - they all have the upfront opportunity costs, say the factory, but their marginal costs are nothing compared to them. Additionally, underutilized consumerate goods can just be shelved until sold. With bandwidth and power, unused power gets rerouted to inefficient storage mechanisms or just burns up on the wire. Unused electrical potential on the lines is just overbuilding without need, because maybe your wattage requirements in a region do not match the wires used (though this is rarely a thing, it is more often under-estimated). But there are no units to sell, and lost potential in the now is gone forever. If you build a highway that nobody drives on the investment was wasted, in the same way building a toy factory that never sells a toy is a waste, but for the highway the marginal cost of a driver on it (basically just wear on the road surface) is pennies, and the highway cost billions, whereas the toy factory cost millions and a million toys will sell for ten million.
With network wire the same thing applies. Underutilization means wasted potential, where the wire and infrastructure around it was incredibly expensive but the per-unit costs of electricity transporting packets over it is negligible. This means unlike unsold toys, any second the wire is underutilized is wasted productivity and potential.
The factory owner does care if hes manufacturing at capacity, but the market is much more fluid for toys and per-unit volume goods than it is for infrastructure.
> And I think that a light regulatory environment would best help foster this technology and encourage new entrants.
There are a lot of ways a regulation free market could solve our current networking mess. The biggest one would be that without "ownership" of wireless spectrum, you would have many more channels to broadcast on with radio technology, and could have radios that slide along much greater spectrum bands to find a compromise between bandwidth (high frequency) and range (penetration, mostly, at lower frequencies). You can balance usage more appropriately, and most everything from the 1mhz to 100ghz band is usable to some degree intelecommunications - the lower end is extremely low bandwidth, and the higher end has extremely short range, but in between you have a lot of potential value that is completely absent from the market as it is dedicated to private companies or one telecom provider.
In such a market it would not be about last mile probably, because the wireless technology would be so good. It makes a lot more sense to have one router with 100gbit bandwidth for a suburb than gigabit ethernet to a hundr...
Netflix pays for its bandwidth, like any internet service.
If Netflix were to offer some ridiculous streaming option like 50k video, customers simply wouldn't be able to stream it because the customer is only paying its ISP for 10mbit or whatever. If the customer really wants this 50k video, it will have to pay the ISP to upgrade.
In this way, the ISP is making its money off of Netflix already.
Yes, let's give the government control to dictate how we may use the most powerful system for free-speech and keeping governments/corporations in check that has ever existed in all of human history. Despite the US government's insistence and profound ability to commandeer the internet for military/spying uses, I'm sure this time they will act in our best interests...
And I know the control Obama's saying he wants the FCC to exert over the internet does not yet appear directly tied to the NSA, but after the past year of Snowden revelations I just want the government to keep the hell as far away from technology as possible. Because the only way this policy becomes politically feasible is when there's a way net neutrality could somehow be perverted to weaken the internet's ability to shine light on corruption.
It was always inevitable that the US Government would crawl all over the Internet when it comes to regulation and controlling free speech. Such a thing cannot be allowed to continue to exist in the era of the rising police state. They'll leave the veneer in place.
is this a joke? net neutrality has nothing to do with the NSA, or government control of the internet. Its regulation of a utility, to prevent a monopoly.
Effective regulation requires trust. And the federal government has destroyed that trust with regards to the internet. Completely and irreversibly. My point stands.
Not to mention that given a little time these problems will work themselves out anyway (eg google fiber, municipal broadband, etc). The only reason you have to put your faith in ham-handed federal involvement is an irrational fear of corporations and a lack of patience.
The thing the fans of net neutrality don't seem to believe, is the notion that as the US Government gets more entrenched into regulating the Internet, they will regulate content as well. And that's exactly what will happen. It would take a complete lack of understanding of the modern US Government (say the last 40 years) to think they won't regulate content. They abuse every power they're granted to an extreme, in an ever widening spiral.
I appreciate the premise behind net neutrality, but all governments are not the same; if you give two different governments the same power, they'll use it differently. This is an extraordinarily abusive government, that just loves to silence people, they cannot be trusted to be hands off when it comes to controlling free speech online. It's best to keep them far away from such powers.
I'm not sure if you're ill-informed or being willfully ignorant, but making sure content is not policed is precisely why net neutrality is so necessary. This is much closer to Carterphone and not at all like FISA.
Erm, this is the guy who brought us all those horrible things Snowden exposed. This is also the guy is notorious for reneging on all his promises. I do _not_ want him anywhere near the internet.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 316 ms ] threadOr is he supporting full net neutrality because that would give the government much more control over the Internet?
Either way I don't think he's doing this because "he cares". Whatever his angle/hidden agenda, it's probably a bad one for us.
Last week, Obama said, "To the two-thirds of voters who chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you, too" - http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/obama-tells-gop-br-my-mand...
It could be a way to make Democrats relevant again, by being the party they're supposed to be. They just lost big by playing it safe, they might as well push something progressive.
It's not like they could loose any worse.
I understand politicians often have ulterior motives but from the information provided, this is exactly what the majority of citizens were asking him (and the FCC) to do.
I'd never trust a guy who signs secret kill lists, even targeting US citizens without having a trial. He even publicly joked about this, which is sign of insanity to me.
And then there's the case of a jailed journalist from Jemen (who reported about a drone bombardment in Jemen), where he personally called the president of Jemen to prevent him from releasing the journalist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdulelah_Haider_Shaye
When you have no trust in an authority, it's perfectly reasonable to question good news and be paranoid about true intentions.
Even this morning, I saw this video referenced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G790p0LcgbI
It's an Obamacare architect admitting that they lied to obscure the tax/redistribution ramifications of the law. His direct message is that a lack of transparency is a weapon to get legislation passed.
And we should trust these people? Take them at their word? Why?
So its a story either way, either he has new owners paying him to say this kind of stuff (who is paying for this point of view?), or the guys who do pay him are going to be really angry that he's being a loose cannon. Either way the reaction will be interesting to watch.
My guess: He's bringing this up to drive a wedge between tech donors (pro-neutrality) and Republicans (anti-neutrality) in 2016.
This already seems to be working, with Ted Cruz calling Net Neutrality the "Obamacare of the Internet". Cruz knows he doesn't need tech sector money to get re-elected or to run in 2016.
http://www.fcc.gov/rulemaking/10-127
It has been argued previously that the FCC lacks the authority to reclassify Title II common carrier, and that such a reclassification could actually be damaging
http://www.mayerbrown.com/files/Publication/b3dde165-879d-41...
Especially in light of last week FBI/NSA/DHS undermining TOR and killing its utility for any dissidents and free speech in authoritarian states. Under his watch the surveillance state has expanded and has become downright creepy
25 years after the fall of the Berlin wall we should be saying "Ich bin ein Ost-Berliner" :( The Stasi would be proud of the surveillance state that western countries have created with Obama at the helm.
edit: Oh i see the cult of personality is still strong in this one, downvoted in under a minute.
And I suspect the reason you're being downvoted in the first place is that the TC post is about net neutrality and not government spying. While the two are connected (they both involve the internet, after all) they're different topics. If we refuse net neutrality until we also disband the NSA then we'll just lose on two counts.
No, of course it doesn't.
And, no, there's nothing wrong with complaining about the downvotes as there' heck of a lot of knee-jerk downvoting happening on HN. Almost as much as righteous preaching about proper HN "etiquette", but not as damaging in the long run.
That sort of complaining lowers the tone of the discussion and adds nothing.
Plus 8 times out of 10, just wait a minute and you'll get voted back up.
Forced compliance, as in "You are a utility and all such utilities must comply with NSA/CIA/FBI/ABC requirements"
Maybe they will be brand it under some title like "Internet Bill of Rights" and watch as people don't read the fine print.
All I know is, if I waited for the regulated utility known as the phone company to have provided me with faster internet, let alone a good phone connection during a thunderstorm, it would never have happened without competition.
We have that now, without net neutrality.
The feds have had free access to everything for a long time, what you're likely to see after utility conversion is the local cops demanding access to all ebay/CL traffic for an entire city to track down stolen property fences or similar actions. Give me a list of everyone in my district who ever bought lockpicks or lockpicking stuff.
Yes there could be unwanted side-effects of such a classification, we have to cross that bridge when we get to it.
Essentially, we cannot create more competition at the broadband utility level but we can prevent monopoly power from begetting more monopoly power. Common carrier is regulation purposed towards facilitating a free market.
What will ultimately happen, is the government will regulate the Internet so tightly, it will become extremely difficult, time consuming, and costly to create a start-up (while the technology cost will continue to fall). This process will not be fought by the existing tech giants, because they will think they benefit from it by limiting competition with artificial barriers. It's the exact same thing that has played out in every other major segment of the economy, and it's exactly what is about to happen to the Internet. These days will be viewed as the unregulated wild west, when you could spend $50 and create a start-up without hardly a concern.
For comparison, the electricity company can't restrict your wattage just because you are a business.
Meanwhile, in the passing of those six years the US has continued to fall further behind on fixed broadband speeds and ISP competitiveness.
He deserves criticism and his motives deserve criticism, but I'm just happy that he decided to support it after all.
An internet where all traffic is closely monitored, recorded and data-mined is not free and open in my books.
The internet was never a private place and it will never be.
Edit: It's important that we don't loose the freedom and openness. That's what the discussion is all about. Not about the lack of privacy.
However, I totally agree with you when you're concerned about the diminishing privacy. I think the advance of technology is the key factor for this. Agencies are as ruthless as always and use this new technologies.
Most people are totally fine to tell Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc. everything about their private lifes in exchange to ... distraction. Think of all the health shit ... they gonna make furtunes selling our data to the pharma and insurrance industry.
You'll find that what Bush started, Obama has drastically developed, distributed, and expanded.
Under Bush we had increasing levels of surveillance which were undesirable, but the veneer that it was still all about terrorism could at least be believed. Now, we know it's targeted specifically at us for the purposes of exploitation and domination of us.
The great thing about hyperbole is that it rebuts itself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intellige...
What about parallel construction, putatively started to help with terrorists but now usually used in drug investigations in order to sidestep civil rights safeguards?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
Not if you were paying attention to any of the players involved before 9/11. Or even after for that matter.
That 9/11 was used as a pretext for things the people involved wanted for other reasons and had been seeking for years (in some cases decades) without any connection to terrorism was pretty obvious. These were in some cases the very same people that were openly upset while serving in the Ford Administration against the legislative constraints that were placed in the wake of abuses by Nixon.
It was never believably about terrorism, it was always about restoring overwhelming executive power.
I agree with you when you say that it was never about terrorism but rather increasing executive power, though. There certainly was a trend toward increased surveillance for many years before, but the entrance of surveillance into the new world-dominating media of the internet is a story in and of itself, I think.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/09/29/new-documents-...
I'm sorry but that's not good enough for me.
I am an ideologue, not a partisan. I'll complain about it when a Democrat steps over the line just as quickly as I'll complain about it when a Republican steps over the line.
It was legalized (both retroactively, covering events that had occurred prior to the act, and prospectively by broadening the allowed surveillance under the law) through the FISA Amendment Act of 2008, signed by George W. Bush on July 10, 2008.
Its true that Obama signed the bill passed by Congress extending parts of the FISA Amendments Act that were scheduled to expire in 2012 for five additional years. But that just kept it legal, it didn't legalize it.
The most important thing to understand is that the ability of the executive to influence the direction of the government is limited. The reasons for this are several, but I will try to elucidate a few here.
First, it is commonly believed that because of the ability to hire/fire people the President can more or less do whatever he wants in regards to the direction of various governmental agencies. This true to an extent, but to a much more limited extent than is commonly believed. The President can nominate candidates for various positions, but these positions must be approved by Congress. Since President Obama has had a Congress whose primary tactic is to oppose everything the president wants, regardless of merits, this has severely limited his ability to get policies in place that he has otherwise wanted. This applies both to agencies like the FCC (the current chairman was Obama's third choice, IIRC; the other two were filibustered), as well as the judiciary.
Second, the government itself is made up largely of agencies which are outside of the ability of the democracy to affect. This includes the military, the intelligence agencies, and the federal law enforcement agencies. (You could arguably include the Federal Reserve here, as well.) These are what Lofgren[1] calls the "Deep State". They are almost completely unaffected by elections, especially of Democratic presidents, and seek ever to increase their power and funding. Efforts to rein them in are rarely, if ever, successful.
Third, the current state of affairs re: intelligence gathering, etc., began in earnest with the passage of the National Security Act of 1947.[2]
So while it may be convenient to blame Obama for the current state of government, it is overly simplistic. It has nothing to do with any cult of personality, but rather a simple recognition of the current realities of political power and the various players.
[1] http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/anatomy-of-the-deep-state/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Act_of_1947
President Obama was inaugurated January 20, 2009. At that time, his Democratic party controlled both houses of Congress decisively[1]. It was not until 2011 that his party lost the house. And in fact, his party still retains the Senate but will lose it in January 2015. But it is only the Senate that approves appointments and his party has controlled it the entire time he has been President. And if you look at the make up of his cabinet, you will see that he has been able to fill it with people that are reviled by the opposing party [2]. To say that he hasn't gotten his way on the vast majority of cabinet appointments just isn't true.
Second, the government itself is made up largely of agencies which are outside of the ability of the democracy to affect. This includes the military
The President is the Commander in Chief of the military. He exercises complete authority over them. [3] All the heads of the other agencies you listed are appointed by the President including the Federal Reserve.
Your comment is typical of the current rhetoric surrounding attempting to "debunk" the thought that the President has substantial power. The fact is the President does have substantial power and saying otherwise is merely attempting to excuse the performance of Obama that so many people are disappointed with.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_State...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_the_United_States
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander-in-chief#United_State...
EDIT: Came to my attention that Democrats did have a exactly 60 seats in the Senate for a brief period before Ted Kennedy passed away and his seat was won by Scott Brown in 2009. However, the point still stands that there was a very brief period over a span of 5 years where control of Congress was even possible for Democrats.
Other than that, I guess you don't follow the news much. Harry Reid changed the Senate Rules in 2013 to disallow filibusters of appointments.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/senate-poised-to-limi...
This [1] shows a breakdown that includes filibusters of nominations.
To further refute your point, the appointment relevant to the discussion, Wheeler, assumed office after the rule change[2].
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/11/21/us/politics/se...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Wheeler
These holds have been common practice and they are very rarely publicized.
Which lead to Republican senators using another procedural technique (refusing unanimous consent) to slow down appointments.[1] This means appointments were delayed for days, and even weeks, after which time the same obstructing senators often voted for the appointee anyways.
It's disingenuous to claim that appointments would go through scot free after Reid altered Senate procedures.
1: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/21/senate-filibuster-r...
Reid was pro at changing the rules to prevent opposing views, people need to understand just how much of the problems in th Senate were his doing and his doing alone. Mister Nuclear just got nuked by the electorate
Untrue. Fillibuster rules were only changed in late 2013, after years of being unable to even get votes on nominees.
No they passed the bill with 60 votes during the only time they actually had a supermajority. There were no rules changes needed or required. ACA was passed and signed before changes were made in the reconciliation process.
Not quite. The Democrats had 60 Senate seats for a very brief period before Scott Brown took over Ted Kennedy's seat when he passed away. The main ACA bill in the senate was passed with 60 votes the normal way. A second bill that was to modify that bill was passed with reconciliation as a way to get members of the House to drop their version of ACA, accept the currently passed Senate version, and then modify that to appease some of the concerns of various congresspeople.
> Reid was pro at changing the rules to prevent opposing views, people need to understand just how much of the problems in th Senate were his doing and his doing alone. Mister Nuclear just got nuked by the electorate
I so very much hate the 'going nuclear' talk. Filibuster breaks at 60 votes is a shit idea in the first place, plus changing it only in one case for appointments is hardly shaking up the political order at large. In fact, the reluctance to do it for all types of votes shows how conservative leadership for the dems were being.
This is irrelevant, since the minority party can filibuster any nominations, and they have used done so extensively throughout Obama's tenure. In this regard, the party with the majority simply does not matter.
> The President is the Commander in Chief of the military. He exercises complete authority over them.
Again, I believe that this is an overly simplistic view of the Presidency. There are political realities around what Presidents can and cannot realistically do that contradict the "ultimate power" view of the Executive branch.
> All the heads of the other agencies you listed are appointed by the President including the Federal Reserve.
With Senate approval, and where no filibusters have been threatened or executed. And remember, there have been more filibusters during Obama's tenure than at any other time in history.
> The fact is the President does have substantial power and saying otherwise is merely attempting to excuse the performance of Obama that so many people are disappointed with.
Not at all. I am disappointed in the American government itself. I have never voted for Obama, and am merely stating my thoughts as an amateur observer. But if there is ever going to be any positive change in limiting Federal power viz. the military, intelligence agencies, or LEO, then clarity of causality is important.
No, he doesn't. The Constitution specifically limits the President's ability to make war and wage military campaigns. He has a great deal of authority but even the US' current adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq are backed by Congress' approval through passed laws.
> At that time, his Democratic party controlled both houses of Congress decisively.
This displays a lack of insight around the Democratic party. Senator Lieberman was nominally a Democrat but he voted more often with the Republicans in the last few years of his career in the Senate. So-called "blue dog Democrats" are more conservative than you might think; that's why we got such grand bargains as the "Cornhusker Kickback" during the PPACA debates.
In reality, the President's party firmly controlled roughly 51-54 votes in the Senate with the remainder of the "majority" part of the coalition as a result of them simply not being as good a fit with the Republicans. That has arguably been one of the Democrats' greatest weaknesses: the Republican party has demonstrated its ability to move in lockstep even when some members disagree. The Democrats have not.
[EDIT: Well, he couldn't literally call anyone into the Oval Office today, since he's in Beijing, but a phone call would work just as well.]
They are reviled because they spend a lot of time demonizing them because this is politics.
No, he doesn't. The Congress has quite expansive (nearly plenary) power over the military (and to a lesser extent, the militia) expressly in the Constitution. The one limit on that power in the Constitution is that the Congress can't adopt a law giving the supreme command of the military (or the militia, when called into federal service) under the rules they adopt to anyone but the President -- that's what the designation of the President as Commander-in-Chief means.
And why do these common beliefs exist?
This is false. The president can change interpretations of law (this is how E.O. 13233 was couched), but cannot pass a new law on his own. This is in Articles I and II of the Constitution.
In time of war or crisis, people will allow generous interpretations of the President's role to interpret the law, but time catches up.
Obviously Health Care (i.e., ACA) caused huge debate and negotiation with Congress.
The Iraq War resolution (the 2002 one) was a different situation in which Congress passed a wishy-washy resolution that was, in typical fashion, over-extended by the Bush administration. But Congress went along.
The practical distinction may vanish when the other branches do not effectively check the executive when it exceeds its Constitutional power, but that's not inherent in the President heading the Executive branch -- the same is equally true of excesses in other branches, though the unitary nature of the executive provides less of an intra-branch check on abuses by the President than exists for any actor in the legislative or judicial branches (though collective excesses, such as -- as a purely hypothetical example -- the Supreme Court intruding into Congress' Constitutional role in judging the propriety of Presidential electoral votes including the process by which they are assigned -- can still occur and be problematic if left unchecked by the other branches.)
While I'm happy Obama is supporting net neutrality, I don't find him blameless.
[1] You didn't explicitly say that Obama really desired to reign in this "deep state," just that any attempt to do so would be difficult. If you did not mean that, I apologize.
Basically, any president which seeks to limit the existing power of government institutions will run into institutional resistance.
It's a signature away from ending. And Obama can forward any issues to the DoJ. If he wanted to end the NSA spying program he could simply have Holder charge those involved.
Obama is always powerless whenever people want him to do something he doesn't want to do, but to summarily try, convict, and execute a US child is apparently within his power.
Compared to most other parliamentary democracies the president in USA is nearly a dictator. So Obama has exceptionally broad abilities in that direction.
Sources: I live in one.
Obama has been at work long and hard to make that the case. Since he has been unable to build any relationship with the Congress, and even holding majorities in both Houses his legislation and nominations had hard time going through, he has taken the decision to leverage his regulatory powers to circumvent the Congress as much as possible. It is not something that just happened - it is a deliberate policy which Obama chose. Of course, not him first - many presidents did the same, and some - like FDR - went a lot further than Obama ever did - but Obama is among those who believes in the Deep State and uses and intends to use it to the fullest extent possible. So if there is to be effort to rein them in, Obama is not your guy - he is the opposite of your guy. Of course, the blame does not lie solely or even primarily with Obama - it started long before him and undoubtedly won't end when he retires. But he is contributing as much as he is able to the raise of the power of the regulatory agencies and their ability to conduct policy completely independently of the Congress.
Spoken like someone with little sense of historical perspective. Or understanding of the DDR.
... or the German citizens killed by the Stasi...
Do you really think the only difference between the Stasi and the NSA is the technology available?
I can understand if you're saying you fear the NSA's power grab because of similarities with the Stasi. I have trouble believing that you think there is literally no difference between the Stasi and the current NSA, given their body of work has significant differences.
Arguing about the niceties of barbaric practices is fruitless anyway, but we can argue about the size of the weapons wielded by the barbarians.
However, your tone and word choice, along with the hyperbole of your statements, serve to weaken your point.
The Stasi created a culture of fear in the populace of the nation they were supposed to protect. They used the citizenry against itself; fathers doubting children, wives were suspicious of neighbors.
German citizens and residents found sufficiently undesirable were imprisoned or executed by the Stasi.
While the US has committed some terrible acts abroad in the name of anti-terrorism, I still contend there is a significant difference between the current NSA and the Stasi.
It's similar to how I object when people equate the US internment of their Japanese residents with the Nazi Final Solution. Similarities, sure. Both awful, sure. But there is a difference between immorally and illegally imprisoning people based on race for a few years and trying to wipe an entire race from the face of the planet in a systematic and sick environment.
Anyone who conflates arguments like that sound like they're shouting with an agenda, and it only serves to weaken what would be, in a more measured tone, a strong argument.
It outdoes the DDR by a factor of two with regard to those they imprison, as well the DDR stopped executing anyone in 1987, as of last year the US still executes minors.
I do however take issue with the ad hominem attack on the President. It's not necessary, nor constructive, to lay down a blanket criticism like "[he's] an utmost failure."
The "surveillance state" does exist, but it's a global phenomenon. In the US, at least, it's something that we're actively fighting, and the government is not shutting down dissenting opinions. The same cannot be said for countries like China, where the government's control depends heavily on the citizenry not questioning it.
Are we really, thought? At least at any meaningful scale? A handful of geeks on HN, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and Slashdot isn't much of a resistance. Do you perceive that people who care about this issue have mobilized in sufficient quantity and enthusiasm to do something meaningful, like influence election outcomes?
It's good that at least some of us care, but just chattering with each other here probably isn't going to accomplish much.
According to Snowden's documents, several mass collection programs shut down under his watch (including email header collection), and no new mass collection programs were added.
Would you prefer Obama to call for a closed internet?
You are confusing different things. Just because someone might be wrong with a lot of things doesn't mean he's not allowed to be right with something else.
As other's said: The world wide wrongdoing by the secret agencies is no invention of Obama. Not even an invention of the US. I'm German and even the BND did whatever it could to gain for it's purpose useful information. They did under governments of all kind of political orientation.
And then you're confusing things again. The downvotes most likely come from your indifferentiated opinion about net neutrality and spying activities. Not from your dislike of Obama.
> I am not American (feel free to ignore my opinion)
Why did you post it?
Theres some interesting things to discuss regarding the validity of obamas actions but that doesnt seem to be the best way to start that debate ;)
Translated: "If you disagree with me, you're a stooge for the cult of personality."
What an effective way to make your position to be unassailable!
I see all kinds of American apologists in this thread, but the fact is that regardless of what it inherited, this particular administration has of its own volition pursued an aggressive anti-freedom and anti-privacy agenda both on behalf of its own intelligence agencies, its tech industry and its copyright exploitation industry.
The fact that this president dares to call for a free and open internet disgusts me.
> If a consumer requests access to a website or service, and the content is legal, your ISP should not be permitted to block it.
Specifically "and the content is legal" is what raises a flag for me. I've seen similar phrases in nearly everything I've read coming from any government official regarding net neutrality.
If this phrasing makes it into eventual laws regarding net neutrality, it seems to me that it could easily require inspection of all traffic by ISPs to ensure the legality of traffic.
Also, they both require the same technology to be automated and possible. The main constraint for the latter is computational power.
Yet that regulation cannot exist without this Right.
And the regulation is required to limit the abuse this Right can bestow on users.
This is a tricky one, because the right and the law are both mutually exclusive and mutually inclusive.
On the other hand, besides the ACLU and maybe a few people organizing over the internet, there will be no money spent in lobbying to tighten up definitions and improve privacy.
So there, it's a 'pretty massive stretch' but by no means it's an unexpected thing.
If you've got a huge wallet you could run your own physical infrastructure but it would be hugely expensive for anything more than a small userbase [1]. If you went that way you'd make peering agreements with your closest internet backbone providers to hook into the rest of the internet (backbone providers being even bigger ISPs than those mentioned earlier, the ISP's ISP if you like)
[1] It has been done in the past: http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/how-to-start-your-own...
Its not a requirement that ISPs block unlawful content, its a prohibition on blocking lawful content. A strong enough prohibition on blocking lawful content (e.g., one which provides consequences whenever lawful content is blocked, even if the intent was to block unlawful content and the lawful content just got caught up in the net) actually reduces the incentive for ISPs to attempt to identify and block unlawful content, since attempting to do so but making a misidentification in the process can result in penalties.
In fact, I'd argue that a no-blocking-lawful-content rule combined with a safe harbor provisions preventing ISPs from being liable for transmission of unlawful content by customers so long as the ISP wasn't actively involved in soliciting or promoting the specific illegal content is probably a good protection against ISP-initiated snooping, since it eliminates any liability-based incentive for it.
OTOH, it doesn't stop ISP-snooping-at-behest-of-government, but if you get a mechanism to do that, its going to be outside the context of net neutrality.
Additionally, I almost brought this up in my original post, but decided against it, but "lawful content" is another phrase I commonly see in the same discussions. IANAL, but my understanding is that unlawful != illegal. "Lawful" means the subject is specifically addressed and permitted by law, and "unlawful" is anything else. So traffic can be legal, but not lawful.
My biggest fear is that we in the tech community will rally behind a net neutrality law which sounds good in theory, but ends up a nightmare in practice. Phrases like "ISPs will not be able to filter lawful content" are nowhere close to "ISPs will not be able to filter traffic". I'd much prefer the latter in a net neutrality law.
I agree with GP that the issue of snooping is important but is an issue unrelated to net neutrality (other than that they both concern the internet).
[1] That is, an incentive greater than the pressure they've received in the past from law enforcement/the NSA/the CIA already.
Inasmuch as there is a distinction between "lawful" and "legal", but its pretty much the other way around. Both address conformity to the law, but "legal" focusses more on procedural, technical conformity. Something can be lawful (e.g., a contract for a non-prohibited purpose wherein non-prohibited performances are exchanged) but illegal (because, say, its a contract for a purposes for which the law requires certain procedures for registration, etc., of the contract, and these were not correctly completed.)
In the case of content in the US, an example might be commercial adult content where all the content standing on its own conformed to the law (so that it was lawful), but where the producers had not followed all the technical record-keeping requirements relating to such content (such that it was illegal.)
Yes, granted, those rights are often infringed upon, especially in tech.
Is there a country that is regulating Internet in existence that is doing anything that we'd consider positive?
It would also prohibit ISPs from modifying responses in situ - like inserting tracking beacons gifs into HTML responses or returning a custom search page (with associated ad revenue) when a DNS lookup fails.
Edit: So, with the 'if the content is legal' clause, Obama was probably referring to refusal to carry / illegal purpose court decisions. This can be applied only in very, very limited circumstances. A couple court decisions that are relevant:
* Nadel v NY Tel., 170 NYS2d 95 (1957); carrier suspected caller of using the telephone for illegal gambling transactions and terminated their service. Court ruled that service should be reinstated: the telephone company "is not at all qualified, in the absence of evidence of illegal use, to withhold from the petitioner, at will an essential and public utility."
* Shillitani v. Valentine, 53 NYS 2d 127 (1945); "a telephone company may not refuse to furnish service and facilities because of a mere suspicion or mere belief that they may be or are being used for an illegitimate end; more is required."
* People v. Brophy, 49 Cal.App.2d 15, at 33, 120 P2d 946, at 965; "public utilities and common carriers are not the censors of public or private morals, nor are they authorized or required to investigate or regulate the public or private conduct of those who seek service at their hands."
> If a consumer requests access to a website or service, and the content is legal, your ISP should not be permitted to block it.
This implies that ISPs would be permitted to block illegal content. How can they know traffic is legal without some form of traffic monitoring/inspection?
In addition, Title II would probably put internet traffic on the same level as wiretaps in terms of (non-DHS) data snooping. If anything, it would give internet users more protection for this sort of thing than they are granted now.
If the former, we have issues because IP addresses are transient. If the latter, we have issues because that would require deep packet inspection.
Title II combined with the 2nd amendment actually prevents things like The Great Firewall :)
I'm searching for an adequate source for this information but I'm failing to find anything to stand on its own. It's definitely been treated like common carrier for many years, but as for an official classification... I'm struggling to find one.
Well of course they are, to a limited degree. They are not the sole carrier - I sometimes find it hard to express or notice the plural distinction - of moral, but neither is the justice system, although it likes to paint itself that way. As can be shown:
They have to decide a proper course of action for themselves. It would just be nice if it was in accordance with the censorship of the law. OTOH, i find the result proper.>nor are they authorized or required to investigate or regulate the public or private conduct of those who seek service at their hands
Clearly not authorized, but morally, they might be required to regulate, therefore to investigate, if possible without violating privacy rights, which with automation can be ensured to a degree. Even if warranted by a judge, or done by the police, it meant massive overhead for the providers, too. So it would be nice if we can go on without all that hassle. Maybe it would require relaxing some laws, that require those investigations; Or moving on as society, as calling on moral draws in a bag of huge implications.
What if crack junkies buying crack on silkroad steal copper cables from the grid? The Telcos are indirectly affected by that, when the users get unsatisfied and directly they have to pay for replacement.
The users are directly affected and responsible, so in first degree it's their responsibility. (not as implied, the court's or w/e).
Edit: I am not defending any party, just assume that in current poisonous climate ANY action of ANY high position party official of ANY party will be stretched and twisted by the other side.
Inspection of traffic with the coming certificate pinning and https implementations will be very hard. And you always have VPN. At worst there will be overnet in which bittorrent will flow.
People, the world is cruel, savage, sadistic, perverse, and brutish without social agreement on fundamental principles. If the underlying concepts that the Constitution is based on are eroded further and further the way they have been for years now, we will, with guarantee, find ourselves in the same predicament as all other people who wake up one day and are dominated by a totalitarian regime.
Some may see that as hyperbole, but too often humans take privilege, safety, and security for granted and squander away what their ancestors had to pay with their lives and livelihoods for to achieve.
The internet works because of the underlying open, bidirectional, equally privileged connections. If the corps are starting to change that it must be stopped. The internet is one of humanities greatest achievements and we can't let greedy monopoly beuraucrats kill it.
>>> The internet works because of the underlying open, bidirectional, equally privileged connections.
This is very simplistic view which does not match what really happens on the net. There are a lot of barriers, firewalls, routing preferences, private bandwidth exchanges, etc. It still works reasonably well so far.
>>> The internet is one of humanities greatest achievements and we can't let greedy monopoly beuraucrats kill it.
You realize that "monopoly bureaucrats" is the very definition of the government? If you were ever scared of huge bureaucratic power that would take away the control from you and use it for its own purposes, the US federal government would fit this role ideally.
Natural monopolies are obvious when you think about it a little bit. When your entire ideology depends on them not existing them maybe it's time for a rethink.
This sounds plausible, but it isn't correct. Remember, first of all, that no politician has real access to who did and did not vote for him. He has access to polling data, which generally scrubs well enough to reduce people to demographics. Conveniently, we generally engage with our politics through the lens of demographics anyways. But demographics are effectively never 100% accurate: samples are only samples.
Second, votes matter to politicians only if they want to be re-elected. They also matter on ballot measures and propositions and so on, but those are generally not what people mean when they talk about politician-voter relationships. Obama, since 2012, has no real reason to care about who voted for him in 2012 because he's not going to get any votes in 2016. There are other reasons in play, yes, but electoral votes are irrelevant when a politician has no interest in retaining his seat at the next cycle.
Third, politicians care about public opinion. They balance this against other competing interests, to be sure, but public opinion is the reason most of them ran for office in the first place. Those competing interests run the gamut from commercial interests to legal interests to moral interests to realpolitik, and ultimately, their job is to reconcile every interest with every other interest. That's what a politician is. People are afraid of politicians because they do not understand or recognize the interests they have outside of public opinion.
Public opinion is not votes, because public opinion is not tied to the electoral cycle. It suffers from the same problem of votes--that it is polled and often reduced to demographics--but from a far smaller degree because public opinion is also expressed by individuals who are willing to identify themselves.
The problem with public opinion, though, is that it's extremely rare to get anything solid resembling 50%. Nowhere close to 50% of a population is generally willing to identify themselves, meaning such a thing will always come down to polling data.
The advantage that corporations have in influenceability isn't that 50% could walk away (which will basically never happen on solely moral grounds); it's that it can track their interests with far, far more precision. It can know if you stop spending money, and it can calculate exactly what effect that will have on its bottom line. A politician, on the other hand, cannot track your personal opinion, and even if he could, he cannot determine how that would play out against the myriad other priorities he must keep in mind, not least of which is the rest of his constituency's opinions.
A politician makes a marketer look like an engineer in comparison. And yeah. Improving this would basically be a privacy risk. So we're fucked.
That's not entirely true. Obama is not alone, there's a party around him, and what he does influences how this party is viewed and how others in the same party do on elections. However, if their base support is wide enough for being elected, there's no reason to feel any obligation to cater to people who are not part of that base.
>>> their job is to reconcile every interest with every other interest.
If it is so, most politicians do their job extremely poorly, as they are nowhere near every. In fact, it is very common to dismiss interests of opposing or unaffiliated groups completely, or even present them as evil for voicing such interests, let alone trying to get them recognized and respected.
>>> It can know if you stop spending money, and it can calculate exactly what effect that will have on its bottom line.
In theory, it could be possible if some corporation owned/had access to all the data, in practice, I don't think any big corporation does it on personal level. But on statistical level, it works the same way - the difference it, the market share is more fine-grained. So for the corporation offending each person is a direct loss, for a politician usually offending 20-30% of the population is no problem, provided all the others are OK with it.
Speaking of "bullying," assault, "an intentional act by one person that creates an apprehension in another of an imminent harmful or offensive contact," [1] is already illegal. Sounds an awful lot like credible bullying. Why should this be legal online?
[1] http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Verbal+assault
This is currently a law enforcement blind spot, but that needs to change.
BTW, putting quotes around the world "bullying" isn't actually effective in mocking it as something actionable; it just communicates to us that you are perfectly ok with bullying.
The FCC has been trying to get their hands on the internet for decades, and I see enforced net neutrality as their Trojan horse. It's possible I'm overly paranoid.
fwiw, we probably agree on the actual definition of bullying, and also that it should be illegal. I put it in quotes to indicate I'm using it imprecisely, not because I'm OK with what I believe to be legitimate bullying.
We should also be careful about criminalizing bullies, since a large portion of them are young (and quite possibly bullied or abused themselves). It's a problem, and it needs more attention, but rushing to criminalize it seems hasty to me.
Not all wrongful doings ought be illegal.
(I rarely side with Obama.)
In a purely-hypothetical dystopia it could be the basis of more invasive monitoring and control capabilities over network infrastructure.
If he didn't put that in there, tons of idiots would go around saying how net neutrality will support all the crooks of the dark web, illegal filesharing websites, etc. Obviously that's ridiculous and not the case, but it would have really given net neutrality a bad image to the average person who probably has no idea what net neutrality is at all.
We've already got idiots let Ted Cruz tweeting that net neutrality is the "Obamacare of the internet."
If he did not put that phrase in there, there would be a story on fox news saying "Obama supports child pornography".
Regarding having ISPs police users, I do not know why the government would do something like that. The government already tracks internet traffic all over the US thanks to the patriot law and you know how the government hates giving up its functions to private parties.
Edit: Which in retrospect is more likely to outrage the Republican base.
Actually, much the same language has been in both the 2010 FCC Open Internet order and the draft for a new order earlier this year, its not something that was original in Obama's statement.
Every election is full of lies. Party divisions do not matter. They lie to get elected and then do as they please. They lie to pass laws, and then do as they please. Of course, Obamacare is a favorite punching back, and rightly so. The whole business of "an average savings of $2,500 per family", "if you like your plan you can keep it" and "if you like your doctor you can keep'em. Period" should be grounds for millions of people revolting. My family is going to have to pay $14,000 per year next year for health insurance. If we go to the cheapest crap plan we can find that number goes down to $12,000 per year. We were paying $5,000 per year before Obamacare and had fantastic health insurance with great providers. Un-fucking-believable.
Someone just sent me this today:
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Frare.us%2Fstory...
So, in a nutshell: Worry about what lies you are being told.
I feel that there is a strong likely hood that G.O.P. will have a switch for Net Neutrality once they see that this policy has such a strong vocal majority.
I'm a libertarian, and I'm not necessarily pro-NN.
I don't get how people don't see that this is a monopoly based on Government intervention???? Started with cable TV and now we are stuck with this in internet monopolies which are 100% anti-free market.
Entrenched market players LOVE, LOVE, LOVE more regulation. All they have to do is hire more compliance officers and pass the cost on to us, while at the same time raising the cost of compliance for smaller and would-be competition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdLBzfFGFQU
The second strongest argument is the comparison to the phone company. When was the last time a landline phone company was considered a fast-moving, cutting edge technology company?? Not for many decades. Every innovation in telephony service over the past 30 years has come from wireless or Internet telephony companies, both of whom are lightly regulated compared to landline phones.
Heavily regulated industries tend to slow down and become conservative; innovation flows around the regulations. You see it in transportation, telecomm, banking, power, etc.
I'm not saying these are winning arguments--the world is obviously different now than it was 10 or 20 years ago--but they are not easily dismissed either.
That said, I'm still not convinced a "no slow lanes" policy is possible. Peering is a huge part of the Internet, and without it, the Internet doesn't work. Paid peering is a private network owner's right to ask for, and it's every other person's right to deny.
If he REALLY wanted to help, he'd start supporting the opposite of everything he wants to do. He should be good at that, re: NSA, Drones, Gitmo, etc. "I will close down Gitmo! ... lol"
Imagine a power grid where different sources paid different amounts for the last mile. Would it be right to deny the last mile to a new actor, say a new solar power plant, on the basis that its competing with existing coal power?
The Internet is completely different, and the whole point of peering is acknowledging that fact. Netflix and Comcast peer because Netflix has something Comcast can't get anywhere else.
The Internet isn't very much like a power grid at all, in fact. That's a terrible analogy.
Also, Netflix is not paying money to Comcast because Netflix has something Comcast can't get anywhere else. Netflix is paying comcast because otherwise comcast is refusing their user access to netflix.
This isn't a request to "set up a committee to explore regulation ideas and form lobby groups from all stakeholders" - it sounds more like "I want to pass laws AND create an enforcement structure for those laws".
Ambitious and probably overly optimistic, but it's a good perspective from the top.
Those sound to me like the basic and less controversial components of net neutrality. It prevent disadvantaging specific sites, protocols or users if applied in a reasonable way.
https://medium.com/@PresidentObama/my-plan-for-a-free-and-op...
Which reads more like the actual intent?
Edit: The two submissions got merged, so my comment is now outdated.
Regulation isn't the only solution.
However, if you want cable into your house you only have one option: Virgin Media. Since they paid for and created all the cable in the first place.
US ISPs have managed to fend off regulation and thus removed competition, resulting in monopolies or at most duopolies in most areas.
Competition and regulation are not opposites.
It's going to take a very strong argument to support the idea that freedom is enhanced by limiting freedom. Not that it's impossible; my glib statement plays fast-and-loose with "freedom", using the same word in one sentence to mean both the overall amount of freedom as well as in a microcosm. But even so, the apparent contradiction should make us think before jumping in.
In the case of US ISPs, most people simply have no choice and are locked into one company. This creates a difficult situation and allows ISPs to easily collude. You theoretically have freedom to switch to another company, but in practice it's not possible because most people would have to up and move their entire family.
Sometimes liberty is best preserved by limiting the ability of the powerful to bring that power to bear. The alternative is "might makes right", or private tyranny.
Why can't we decide? Because if we could, it would open the door to trickery and coercion. The fact that no slavery arrangement is legal keeps a lot of people from being tricked or coerced into one.
Hence, limiting freedom (of agreements) can enhance freedom generally (no slavery).
Similarly, you can't sell me a house made of popsicle sticks even if I'm informed. We want a market where houses below a certain level of quality just don't exist, because it's better for everyone.
It's possible that net neutrality is like this. "An internet connection where ComCastMovies.com works great but Netflix is severely throttled" would be a crappy product that Comcast is incentivized to sell, and consumers may be tricked (fine print) or coerced (no other options) into buying. It may be in the public interest to outlaw it.
But are we sure that's true?
A couple months ago I recall seeing that one of the major wireless providers was planning a level of service that was (a) very cheap; (b) allowed unlimited access to Facebook and a couple of other major social apps; and (c) was very expensive for data usage outside that area. It would be marketed toward poorer people as a cheaper means of getting that basic connectivity.
One outcome of the arguments for net neutrality, and your argument in particular, is that there's no means for providing low-cost services designed for the less-rich. It's not obvious to me that setting a bar this high is a good thing for the lower economic rung in our society.
No, that's a completely unfair characterization. There's nothing "poisoned" about the lower level of service being contemplated here, it's just a lot less capable.
You seem to be putting yourself into the position of deciding for these hypothetical poor customers that if they can't have the A+ level of service for top dollars, then they shouldn't have anything at all. It's all or nothing.
If you think that we should limit things in this way, then let's be up-front about it. Admit from the beginning that the result will be that we're preventing low-cost plans, so the industry will be forbidden from selling plans designed for disadvantaged people.
The lowest rung, the only rung, on the internet ladder is - a connection. Nothing costs more or less than that. The rest is an attempt to charge rent on property that isn't theirs. To mix the metaphors. They are a carrier; they don't provide web sites and its none of their blessed business which ones you visit using their precious phone.
> But are we sure that's true?
It depends on how you calculate the cost of the low-quality thing. Take houses. If people could sell houses made of compressed dryer lint, some would. And some poor people would buy. And many of them would be horribly burned in fires.
What's the cost? It depends on how much responsibility we take in caring for them. Do we pay to treat their burns? Do we pay for their funerals? Do we pay to raise their children and give them counseling? What about the lost potential of all those people to contribute to the world? What about the value of life itself?
> One outcome of the arguments for net neutrality, and your argument in particular, is that there's no means for providing low-cost services designed for the less-rich. It's not obvious to me that setting a bar this high is a good thing for the lower economic rung in our society.
It's not obvious to me, either. But it seems like Facebook-only phones are a bit like dryer-lint houses. How much would it cost society to have its bottom ranks unable to read Wikipedia or look up medical conditions on MedLinePlus or comparison shop on Amazon?
And if such plans succeed, how long until we have to consider every ISP's plans with "features" such as "doesn't block category X" and "doesn't throttle site Y"?
It was under his Presidency that NSA expanded their programs.
Here, however, the ISP market is what we're talking about. Certainly the two topics are related. My hope also is that Snowden kickback has informed this Administration, as it finishes its second half of its final term, how the world and how Americans think about the internet.
Why not fix the root cause? Force last-mile providers to provide transit to third party ISPs like they do in the UK, or otherwise regulate them specifically.
I don't see why rules should apply across the board to markets where there is healthy competition. There is no problem elsewhere, is there?
And were the Republicans to win the Presidency, I can't see them pushing for a formal classification either. They think Comcast is a private company competing in a market, when it's actually a government protected and sanctioned monopoly just like AT&T and Verizon.
It's been illegal to grant monopoly franchises to cable companies since the mid 1990's. I don't know of a single market where Comcast is the only cable company because it has a sanctioned monopoly. There are a lot of places where Comcast has a de-facto monopoly because nobody else is willing to build high-speed service in a given area. But almost anywhere that's the case, it's because of telco-unfriendly regulations, not telco-friendly ones.
The people who rant about telcos can't get their story straight. They say Comcast has a legally protected monopoly, but then attack Verizon for not building fiber to the huge swath of places where the local governments are dying to get a competitor to the local telco. Their arguments are based on a false premise: that building fiber is profitable enough to justify the investment, and the government and telcos are getting in the way. The falsity of this premise is amply demonstrated when you look at places like New York, where the government has shoved the cable companies out of the way, but still has to drag Verizon kicking and screaming to build all this supposedly lucrative infrastructure.
http://www.louisvilleco.gov/SERVICES/CityManagersOffice/Fran...
There are .pdf's with the official agreement and some attempt at simplifying the info contained within on the page itself. I haven't read it yet myself, but I'm curious if it reflects the claims you make.
Section 2.4 - franchise is non-exclusive.
Section 2.2(B) - non-discriminatory requirements to access rights of way.
Section 2.6 - city reserves right to grant other franchises, so long as if it does so on more favorable terms than the existing franchise, then the existing franchise can be modified.
The FAQ on the page you linked has the most interesting information, however:
> Comcast's Franchise with City of Louisville:
> Comcast - the nation's largest cable television provider - is currently the primary source of cable television services in Louisville, serving approximately 4,500 subscribers. They currently operate in Louisville under a non-exclusive franchise agreement [Footnote] effective since April 2006. The agreement allows Comcast to use the City's ROW in return for the payment of certain rental fees - known as franchise fees - and other benefits for Louisville and its residents.
> Footnote: Should another cable provider want to offer cable service in Louisville the City would offer that company the same franchise opportunity that Comcast now has. To date, no other service providers have asked for a franshise.
Now everybody is working on a national/regional "Internet", even the EU is going the first steps into this direction.
Him calling for open and free Internet is absolutely bizarre. Who knows, maybe he'll call tomorrow for the end of torture and drone executions without trial.
Does that work? Is that implementable and/or good? Isn't peering a pretty reasonable thing to do in a lot of cases?
Question is, how? What? These are the sorts of answers we have to find. A DHT over a P2P with no central control? It still seems so out of reach ..
Torrents really expose these issues very well and it's the same sort of thing you see going on between Netflix and Comcast.
One solution is for consumers to have more choices. I recently read an article where some town I think in Colorado put in their Internet access by lighting up dark fiber they had. It use to be something the cable companies fought citing that municipalities could have a monopoly.
The other game changer is WiMAX and generally speaking, faster mobile data rates. If I no longer need my buried cable to get fast Internet coupled with the fact I can take my device with me, is a huge selling point.
But like cable companies, you can have traffic pile up on a cell tower but it seems easier to add more radios to a cell tower than it is to lay more fiber and/or coax.
Maybe the solution is to get rid of TCP/IP and use something different such that traffic can spray out like a torrent and be recollected from different route paths. For example, if you have Internet from two or more cable companies, there is no way to dynamically balance traffic between those two circuits between two parties. You have a default gateway and there isn't much more you can do with that at the end user level.
I don't get calling for X then performing actions that negate X.
Edit: there's another front-page story to Bloomberg that actually explicitly mentions the Tom Wheeler connection: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-10/obama-calls-for-reg...
Wheeler was a huge lobbyist for over 20 years, talks to Meredith at CTIA on a first-name basis and knows all of the people who run the telcos and their lobbying organizations. In some narrative, he's the perfect person to lead the FCC and in another, he's not.
My opinion is that, YES, he was a lobbyist and YES he is anti-neutrality because that was the position that made the most sense at the beginning of his tenure. I'm bullish that he'll come over to the Network Neutrality side (and gave indications in that direction at CTIA Super Mobility week this year) but I think there's a chance he'll do title 2 with lots of caveats that will make this, let's say, complicated.
You are right that memes aren't helpful, but Wheeler was actually the biggest lobbyist in the history of telecom, IMHO, so that much is quite true. Whether he is anti-neutrality now is up for debate, but when he took the office, well, I think there's little evidence to show he was in favor of neutrality then.
Its a fundamentally political issue. It doesn't make sense to discuss "politicizing" it.
Tom Wheeler has been one of the three members of the FCC supporting regulations promoting net neutrality. Yes, Tom Wheeler was the leader of a cable industry lobbying organization in the past.
> I don't get calling for X then performing actions that negate X.
I don't think the companies -- including cable companies -- that keep suing the FCC over Wheeler's pro-neutrality efforts would agree that appointing Tom Wheeler has been a way to negate net neutrality. I agree that his past work for them might have been a valid reason to be mildly skeptical of whether he would be a supporter of neutrality when the appointment was made (but given the distance between that role and both the appointment and any connection the cable industry had to the internet, only mild skepticism.) I don't think it makes any sense, though, to treat him as an enemy of neutrality on the basis of that when he has an actual record, at the FCC, of promoting regulations moving the status quo toward neutrality.
President Obama is a lame duck. His party just got tossed out of the Senate, relegating his political capital to basically 0. In the wake of this, he's decided to take maybe the most important economic issue of the next 20 years and politicize it.
Neither the red team nor the blue team could say they owned this issue, but one of the most divisive voices in politics just stuck the blue flag in it - at a time when he has less influence over policy than any other time in his presidency.
I would have preferred him to just keep his mouth shut.
[1] - you don't get to that level of power without substantial self-confidence and the desire for general adulation.
Second, in-action on the part of any president is unacceptable. Presidencies are measured by the amount of positive change they can bring.
There is a selection bias in the issues you speak of. Non-polarizing topics are handled swiftly, without much attention from the public spotlight. There is no point in discussing what's already agreed upon, and that's one of the more reasonable justifications of political polarization.
That said, the polarization is greater than would be optimal, so I do agree - it would be nice.
I like the Digg headline about this: Ted Cruz is the Uber for stupid metaphors.
That is disastrous. If the Republicans unite against Net Neutrality just because Obama supports it, we could easily get a Republican president in the next election, and then the Internet in the U.S. will be doomed for a very long time.
The Republicans have been generally against Net Neutrality since before Obama became President. (Bills on the issue first started being submitted in 2006.)
Obama campaigned on net neutrality and has been talking about it throughout his presidency. This is nothing new.
I don't disagree that it might have been better if he had said nothing - but I suspect the current antigovernment sentiment would have applied regardless of what Obama said.
* National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) (from 1976 to 1984, becoming president in 1979)[1]
* Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA) (from 1992 to 2004, serving as CEO)[1]
[1] http://www.fcc.gov/leadership/tom-wheeler
It's pretty disingenuous to note his lobbying for cable companies in the 1970's and 1980's, before they even entered the Internet service business, while ignoring that his most recent connections are to Internet companies that ride on the infrastructure built by the telecoms.
Also, CTIA represents wireless carriers, which are under a different regulatory umbrella than telcos or cable. To the extent you can infer bias from Wheeler's work, the strongest inference is in favor of a bias towards Internet companies, not a bias towards telcos. Of course, I wouldn't characterize him as biased, but rather as someone with experience with the "full stack."
There is this other headline which came to my mind when I read the above headline: "Retroactive Amnesty for Telecoms".
https://www.eff.org/pages/case-against-retroactive-amnesty-t...
Broadband intensive services like Netflix: I think a problem that they face is that their connection is often slow, not only intentionally, but also because developing infrastructure is expensive. Why would an ISP bother building out the infrastructure if they can't extract a higher value from those that it most benefits (Netflix)? In fact, Netflix thinks it's worth it to pay Comcast directly. If that was not beneficial, I don't see why Netflix would have done so. Sure, they would probably prefer to get that service for free, but it must be mutually beneficial for both parties to go along. If Netflix were not allowed to make sure a deal with a company like Comcast, would that really benefit anyone?
Smaller Websites: There is the risk that ISPs try extracting a toll but I think it may not be worth it a lot of the time for the ISP. I think this fear is overblown, although I could be wrong.
Consumers that don't use broadband extensive services: Why should those consumers be subsidizing those that use broadband heavy services?
Consumers using broadband extensive services: Why should Netflix not be allowed to help subsidize the cost of providing broadband? Why should this fall solely on the individual?
Government: The obvious concerns of more governmental control of the internet.
I could imagine a scenario where Netflix was not allowed to pay Comcast directly for increased bandwidth. Instead, Netflix would spend that money to lobby politicians to force Comcast to build out their infrastructure. I don't see how that's a better scenario than currently exists.
I think a better solution to very little competition in ISPs would be to decrease the barriers it takes to compete. Further regulation would only increase the barriers.
Netflix paying Comcast: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/after-...
Starting an ISP is Really Hard: http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/04/one-big-reason-we-la...
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/books/review/Leonhardt-t.h...
Except with the government it's radically worse. They have the guns, and the legal 'right' (might) to spy on you and criminalize what you do if they see fit - or you know, use your porn habits to blackmail you as the NSA chief suggested doing. They also already substantially control education in countless ways.
So a violent central government that likes to murder innocent people by the thousands overseas, with a rising police state domestically with military weapons given to them by the Feds, and a mentality to wage perpetual war, and spy on all citizens and acquire all information they can in any way they can without any regard for the Constitution or privacy ... and you want to give them more power over the biggest free speech platform in world history - oh yeah, this is going to end real well.
More important than shelter, food and energy? We draw a line as to what the government should provide/subsidize/control and what the private sector provides in those sectors.
The information they carry is, like journalism, a 4th estate to democracy.
If the 4th estate is a check on government, why would we want the government to decide what constituted it? Please don't conflate a first amendment issue with this conflict between content providers and ISPs.
I'm sorry I wasn't more clear. You are right: the analogy breaks down on the level of mechanism of preservation.
I attempted to be more general. Specifically: Journalism is a check on public and private coercion, but the mechanism is free speech. Common Carrier regulation is a check on (largely) private coercion. The mechanism is monopoly prevention (originally monopoly rejection, via AT&T breakup).
Looking at it from my perspective. I'm paying Comcast for the ability to stream Netflix. They advertise to me as having the fastest speeds for streaming video. And yet when I request Netflix they refuse to do what's necessary to allow me to stream Netflix.
Why Indeed? If Comcast want's to offer less broadband intensive plans they have every right to. If they want to charge me higher prices for a more broadband intensive plan then more power to them. The issue is that they degrade my service so they can extract a price from Netflix when I purchased the right to stream from Netflix from them. It's almost impossible to decrease those barriers without regulation. Running wires to every home is expensive and the first one there almost always wins. The reasons why broadband is a natural monopoly have been discussed in depth on this site. Those reasons have not changed.The real crux of the problem here is that large ISP's like comcast are selling one thing to their consumers: a certain amount of bandwidth to any site on the internet and then purposely failing to deliver that bandwidth to the customer and blaming it on someone else.
I'd imagine if ISPs abused this rent-seeking, companies like Netflix and Google would actually become interested in building out their own infrastructure. However Netflix would be less inclined to do so if it were not able to favor their service over competitors.
One decision is to treat ISPs like a public utility which is where I think the US is heading. In my experience, though, services brought to me by the government are often lack-luster.
Google Fiber: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/nov/10/arkansas-fir...
Netflix is not getting the benefit, the end user is. That is the demand side of things. They can and do charge more for higher bandwidth, and Netflix will require more than the national average to reliably stream at 1080p. Netflix only exists to fill that need, and the ISP exists to fill that users bandwidth need. It is not Netflix's direct need.
> it must be mutually beneficial for both parties to go along.
It is. Netflix makes more profit off working Internet from Comcast than they lose paying the bribe. But we lose, the consumers, because Netflix is getting a fast lane now, and sets a precedent that ISPs can hold ransom their bandwidth from anyone.
> I think this fear is overblown, although I could be wrong.
It takes no effort on their part to set up their routing to have everyone in a slow lane unless you pay the fee, and they have no motivation not to, because when smaller websites are slow, users stop visiting them, they don't drop their ISP over it.
> Why should those consumers be subsidizing those that use broadband heavy services?
They should not / aren't. At least in terms of month to month server upkeep. In terms of infrastructure wire, you pay the same taxes that maintain the roads if you drive a hundred miles a year as the guy who drives ten thousand miles a month. Previous models have showed that the overhead of calculating physical infrastructure usage (ie, power) is hard, and unless the per-unit volume is valuable enough it is not worth the bureaucracy.
> Why should Netflix not be allowed to help subsidize the cost of providing broadband? Why should this fall solely on the individual?
Because they are not subsidizing at all. End user will pay the same for Internet regardless of how much money content providers throw at ISPs because the vast majority are in monopoly positions and can do whatever they want up until the point users just drop service all together.
> I don't see how that's a better scenario than currently exists.
If it were the case that ISPs were the underdog here, because compelled by legislation to spend their private earnings to build cable that they cannot dictate price on and must lease compulsively, then you would have an argument.
But current ISPs have the opposite. They inherited their infrastructure from public works and other telecom companies, where the laying of cable was heavily subsidized by taxpayer money, and in some cases (verizon) they were given money to invest in infrastructure that they then ran away with and faced no consequences.
> decrease the barriers it takes to compete.
There are only three ways to do this.
One, you have "wire lanes" where anyone can run wire across the nation. This means starting an ISP no longer has the insurmountable mountain of regulation surrounding breaking ground, and you can just buy fiber, run it, and hook up each end user that wants it on an individual basis from the street corner.
The downside is you end up with tons of redundant infrastructure investments, and wire itself is mad pricey. This means that the industry as a whole is inefficient, due to the redundancy. The good news would be that with laying cable being an actual option, entrenched players would have a motivation to lease what they have at reasonable rates to avoid someone else investing heavily in competing in the infrastructure.
But it is also completely infeasible. There is no way to set up New York City or rural Arkansas in a way to just let anyone lay fiber cable. The investment alone in getting to that point vastly eclipses the costs of just laying a public fiber channel owned the state that anyone can hook up to.
Option two is compulsory leasing, which is what Title 2 is in effect. If nobody can lay wire and actually compete with entrenched interests, you cannot have price competition on the rental rates of ...
One thing that stuck out to me though:
> If it were the case that ISPs were the underdog here, because compelled by legislation to spend their private earnings to build cable that they cannot dictate price on and must lease compulsively, then you would have an argument.
I feel that opinions of issues are heavily influenced by the actors involved. Amazon vs Hachette being a key example. No one likes Comcast, nor do I, but I don't think that choosing sides based on the beneficiaries is the right way to go about things. I don't think you can argue that a person or group (corporation) took a benefit in the past and is now beholden to the person that dispensed that benefit. That's especially true if the decision makers and owners (stockholders) are a dynamic group.
>The downside is you end up with tons of redundant infrastructure investments, and wire itself is mad pricey
I normally discount this argument as it is often used as a justification of centralized control. Besides, one can argue that most commercial activities are redundant; from advertising to the endless variety of consumer goods available to people in the US. I do concede that this likely won't work in a lot of places as the technology currently exists. My hope is that some new technology can come about and change the economics materially. And I think that a light regulatory environment would best help foster this technology and encourage new entrants.
Mesh networks anyone? http://www.wired.com/2014/01/its-time-to-take-mesh-networks-...
> I feel that opinions of issues are heavily influenced by the actors involved.
It is not so much individual commercial actors than ISP's in general having power. If they were being exploited through regulatory abuse, then they would be in a defensible position. But none of the policy surrounding them harms them significantly more than it helps, in that most of their networks were built on taxpayer dollars and that is a key reason why nobody can compete with them without state funding of infrastructure.
> from advertising to the endless variety of consumer goods available to people in the US
I agree wholeheartedly advertising is one of the worst industries around, because it creates terrible returns on investment (the real productivity gain of advertising is more informing consumers about goods and services than using psychological manipulation to get people to spend money a certain way).
But non-structural goods and services (ie, bread, or housing) has per unit per person utility. Common infrastructure like roads does not behave in the same "here are X units of good and Y units of buyer, and the market will adjust to make sure those numbers stay close to each other regardless of the number of competitors". With networking, power lines, roads, sewage systems, transit systems, etc - they all have the upfront opportunity costs, say the factory, but their marginal costs are nothing compared to them. Additionally, underutilized consumerate goods can just be shelved until sold. With bandwidth and power, unused power gets rerouted to inefficient storage mechanisms or just burns up on the wire. Unused electrical potential on the lines is just overbuilding without need, because maybe your wattage requirements in a region do not match the wires used (though this is rarely a thing, it is more often under-estimated). But there are no units to sell, and lost potential in the now is gone forever. If you build a highway that nobody drives on the investment was wasted, in the same way building a toy factory that never sells a toy is a waste, but for the highway the marginal cost of a driver on it (basically just wear on the road surface) is pennies, and the highway cost billions, whereas the toy factory cost millions and a million toys will sell for ten million.
With network wire the same thing applies. Underutilization means wasted potential, where the wire and infrastructure around it was incredibly expensive but the per-unit costs of electricity transporting packets over it is negligible. This means unlike unsold toys, any second the wire is underutilized is wasted productivity and potential.
The factory owner does care if hes manufacturing at capacity, but the market is much more fluid for toys and per-unit volume goods than it is for infrastructure.
> And I think that a light regulatory environment would best help foster this technology and encourage new entrants.
There are a lot of ways a regulation free market could solve our current networking mess. The biggest one would be that without "ownership" of wireless spectrum, you would have many more channels to broadcast on with radio technology, and could have radios that slide along much greater spectrum bands to find a compromise between bandwidth (high frequency) and range (penetration, mostly, at lower frequencies). You can balance usage more appropriately, and most everything from the 1mhz to 100ghz band is usable to some degree intelecommunications - the lower end is extremely low bandwidth, and the higher end has extremely short range, but in between you have a lot of potential value that is completely absent from the market as it is dedicated to private companies or one telecom provider.
In such a market it would not be about last mile probably, because the wireless technology would be so good. It makes a lot more sense to have one router with 100gbit bandwidth for a suburb than gigabit ethernet to a hundr...
If Netflix were to offer some ridiculous streaming option like 50k video, customers simply wouldn't be able to stream it because the customer is only paying its ISP for 10mbit or whatever. If the customer really wants this 50k video, it will have to pay the ISP to upgrade.
In this way, the ISP is making its money off of Netflix already.
And I know the control Obama's saying he wants the FCC to exert over the internet does not yet appear directly tied to the NSA, but after the past year of Snowden revelations I just want the government to keep the hell as far away from technology as possible. Because the only way this policy becomes politically feasible is when there's a way net neutrality could somehow be perverted to weaken the internet's ability to shine light on corruption.
Not to mention that given a little time these problems will work themselves out anyway (eg google fiber, municipal broadband, etc). The only reason you have to put your faith in ham-handed federal involvement is an irrational fear of corporations and a lack of patience.
2) I welcome Obama being well advised, but he remains the spy master of the world.
I appreciate the premise behind net neutrality, but all governments are not the same; if you give two different governments the same power, they'll use it differently. This is an extraordinarily abusive government, that just loves to silence people, they cannot be trusted to be hands off when it comes to controlling free speech online. It's best to keep them far away from such powers.