Goodbye, net neutrality

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Re: Goodbye, net neutrality

Postby KleinerKiller » Sat Dec 09, 2017 10:01 am

Sorry to triple post, but holy fucking shitfuck. When I said in my earlier post that Pai might as well be shouting into a mic about his brazen corruption, I didn't think he'd actually do that.

At the FCC's annual gathering of the Federal Communications Bar Association, Pai made numerous "jokes" about him colluding with Verizon and being a bought-and-paid-for telecom shitweasel, then proceeded to show a skit proclaimed to be a "leaked video of the truth", which... fuck it, I'm just going to copy the transcript from the article because I have no capacity to summarize this.

The video is a skit that opens to 50 Cent’s “In Da Club” and takes place at “Verizon’s DC Office” in 2003, where Pai worked as an attorney before joining the FCC a few years later. A Verizon executive tells him: “As you know, the FCC is captured by the industry, but we think it’s not captured enough, so we have a plan.”

“What plan?” Pai asks.

“We want to brainwash and groom a Verizon puppet to install as FCC chairman,” the executive says. “Think ‘Manchurian Candidate.’”

“That sounds awesome,” Pai responds.


As a later correction in the article clarifies, the executive in the skit is in fact Kathy Grillo, the actual senior vice president of Verizon.

This... this is beyond the pale. This is a corporate mole with checks in both fists gleefully pissing in our mouths and giggling like a schoolgirl, reveling in the fact that beyond forcing the hands of Congress or praying for the judiciary branch to properly do its fucking job, we -- both the majority of U.S. citizens and numerous government officials -- have pretty much no recourse against him because the whole goddamn system is FUBAR.

Five days remain.
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Re: Goodbye, net neutrality

Postby A Combustible Lemon » Sat Dec 09, 2017 1:13 pm

Maybe if Net Neutrality proponents weren't legitimately calling him a paid verizon shill manchurian candidate for no fucking reason, he wouldn't feel the need to make fun of them.

When facebook was bringing internet.org to india, I participated in the net neutrality campaign to prevent facebook from controlling access to the internet for a billion poor people. I was a supporter of net neutrality when it was literally a net negative for India. I am not an opponent of net neutrality.

But this gigantic internet neutrality tantrum has to stop.
Free speech concerns:
Censorship doesn't matter when reddit, facebook and google, the gateways to the internet for 99% of people, censor content. When Patreon and Paypal, the only big solutions for independent monetization, block people from their service for completely made up reasons. When the actual fucking domain registrars feel happy to get rid of sites that aren't literally illegal to host.
Content censorship is here, and the chance that ISPs will participate in it despite not having done it in the past isn't some godawful SOPAesque nightmare. It's just slightly worse than the shitshow that's already present. If you're seriously arguing for a future in which Domain registrars are allowed to censor but ISPs aren't, you're not making a fact based argument, you're drawing a completely arbitrary line.
If public forum laws can be extended to include Google and Facebook, ISPs would be included in that de facto. That's a much better angle of attack there and is more bipartisan, since conservative fears of censorship are at an all time high.

Pricing
Exorbitant pricing doesn't matter at all when the ISPs are already a monopoly and can price their offerings as high as they like. If they can make fastlanes cheaper and still make more money, there's no reason why they're not charging non-fastlane prices already.
The argument seems to be predicated on the idea that consumers know how much internet access is worth, which is a terrible thing to base it on. The seller has a say in negotiation too.

If you've let them set up the phone lines and fibers themselves, you've already lost the argument on how much they should be allowed to use it. As I said before, nationalise the phone lines and stop taking a capitalistic approach to public utilities and you'd have a point. Appropriating what they've made after-the-fact is not somehow ethical just because you want it.
If fastlaning isn't allowed, what you're doing is not letting companies diversify or offset the risk they're taking to maintain their lines by bundling it with services they also sell. This is standard practice in tons of companies. the XBox and the Playstation 3 were sold at a loss because they also had a hand in game sales. Selling support is the only way Red Hat and Canonical make money. This sort of monetization scheme is coercive, but in a capitalist frame, it's really not an argument. Capitalism is based on this sort of unhealthy coercive relationship between all entities.

Net neutrality is treating the symptom instead of the problem. It actually /is/ oppressive towards ISPs, no matter how ridiculous that may sound. The real solution should be taking over their risk as a government function because the internet is an important public utility, not blatantly regulating them out of popular pressure instead of ethical concerns.
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Re: Goodbye, net neutrality

Postby KleinerKiller » Sat Dec 09, 2017 6:35 pm

Even if by some miracle I agreed with most of that logic, Lemon, you have not made any argument about the process currently being undertaken: the open corruption, the refusal to respond to overwhelming backlash in any way except with regurgitated "facts" that all have to be fact-checked, the disappearing comments and refusal to accept others, the millions of anti-neutrality bots filling the FCC docket, the coincidental little legal loophole resultant from the upcoming AT&T court ruling. But yeah, "tantrum", sure.

This is a corrupted process and everyone knows it. Even if you agree with the repeal of net neutrality, I don't see how you can willfully turn a blind eye to that. Ajit Pai is an open stooge and he is not doing this for the benefit of anyone but his bosses.

Yes, the internet absolutely should be considered a public utility, should always have been, but it's almost certainly never going to be in our ultra-capitalist society, whether or not Pai and the Big Four get their way -- not as long as we're still prioritizing pure capitalism over the right of everyone to receive treatment at a hospital. So we're fighting to keep the next best thing in place, even if it's not perfect and even if it does stifle these multi-billion-dollar corporations which already functionally control a lot of places in the country by being the sole telecom providers. I'm frankly a lot more worried about the average citizen and people whose careers depend on free, equal, not-fastlaned access to the internet than I am about the ISPs.
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Re: Goodbye, net neutrality

Postby A Combustible Lemon » Sat Dec 09, 2017 7:05 pm

What corrupted process? The president directly stated that were he to be put in power, he would repeal net neutrality. Then he placed a previous FCC commissioner at the head of the committee with the explicit goal of heading the committee in repealing net neutrality. Then the man said that he would take comments on this, he wasn't holding a fucking plebiscite.
Then pro net neutrality agents started spamming the FCC with form letters, still pretending this was a vote, when the comments were stated from the very beginning to be about fact finding, and any comment would only be included if it included new information.
Then random garbage media sites "investigated" pro repeal comments and called them botted because, literally, they were sent through an API. You know, like the form letters in the previous sentence.

As for "obvious corruption". Following the money doesn't actually mean anything. Lobbyists pay both sides, it's safer for them that way. Removing net neutrality is an obvious conservative position. They're anti-regulation, they're anti federal-intervention in commerce, they're anti Obama. If Google or Netflix cared, and if their votes really were for sale, they'd pay them right back. It's obvious why they don't, and if you think it's because they're ethical, you haven't been following their stories at all. The money's just a perk, they weren't going to convince them otherwise anyway.
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Re: Goodbye, net neutrality

Postby Learned Nand » Sat Dec 09, 2017 7:54 pm

Two things:

First, I agree you with you that the core issue here is the unregulated monopoly that ISPs hold over the areas they serve. I don't know that that problem is necessarily best resolved by making internet a public utility, but that is a potential solution. Unfortunately, a solution to the underlying problem isn't really on the table at the moment, and the FCC will be voting to repeal the open internet rules in a few days, so I think it's reasonable that people are focusing on that. I don't know of anyone who argues a) that net neutrality is necessary but b) that ISP monopolies aren't a problem, and aren't the core problem that we need to address.

Second, you said:

If you're seriously arguing for a future in which Domain registrars are allowed to censor but ISPs aren't, you're not making a fact based argument, you're drawing a completely arbitrary line.


Without getting into an argument about whether domain registrars should censor (or whether anyone here is advocating such a thing), I think there is a non-arbitrary distinction between these two. If a domain registrar decides they don't like my website, I can generally go to another one. But if an ISP censors my website, then people living in areas exclusively served by that ISP will have no effective means of accessing the website. ISP censorship can leave no alternative means of communication, at least to a significant portion of one's audience.
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Re: Goodbye, net neutrality

Postby A Combustible Lemon » Sat Dec 09, 2017 8:46 pm

Domain Registrars have geographic monopolies, see the recent issues with Gab.ai retaining its .ai domain as a response to threats of being removed from the service for hosting a video of the Charlottesville murder.
Stormfront as well, as far as I know, no longer has a valid domain.

Secondly, I didn't say arguing for domain registrars to be allowed, I said "a future in which". I mean that if the private company exception to censorship is allowed, restricting only ISPs from making content based determinations is a clear double standard, emphasized by a bandaid solution that only solves the problem for ISPs and no one else. It's appropriating a major problem, censorship, to solve a minor one, internet pricing. I'm sure by itself internet pricing is a major problem, but relatively, censorship is waaaaaaaaaaaay more important.
As a communist-aligned person myself, this sort of dilution of the message and appropriation of important struggles has serious negative consequences down the line.

Thirdly, the natural monopoly question has no solution outside of nationalization, as far as I can tell. Same as the hospital question, if the government provides a competing federal broadband service, similar to India's own BSNL, ISP rates would be far easier to regulate. Governments also have much better opportunities to obtain land for the infrastructure.
The government is what sold them the rights to the land in the first place, they should buy the infrastructure back and auction access to the ISPs back, similar to how the carrier spectrum is handled (here, atleast, I'm not sure how the US deals with spectrum allocation).

But without compensating the ISPs for development (I'm sure they've discounted them somehow, but I doubt enough to claim ownership), I'm not sure what moral right in a capitalist framework the government has to declare the internet a utility when they haven't built it. As I mentioned with the XBox and Redhat examples, the simple fact that there is a coercive element involved shouldn't disqualify them from capitalizing on it.

And, as I said in the beginning, net neutrality is good, but having it repealed for a year or two won't cause lasting damage. What will cause lasting damage is riling up the population to believe the FCC is the enemy of the people because they agree with the ISPs. Corporations have a right to be represented too, especially private corporations that are being regulated, and the ISPs did not want the internet reclassified, and they used their money into convincing the FCC that the internet should not have been reclassified.

Pro-net neutrality people are spending money trying to convince the FCC too, and the FCC, the three people involved, aren't listening.

This is where both sides' authorities end. The FCC has the final say on this question, and the idea that the ISPs aren't more affected by this decision than the people is ridiculous.

But there's this push to say that consumer concerns are the only things that matter in the current net neutrality protest, which is why I'd really rather they calm down and stick to asking for it politely instead of throwing around death threats and starting the internet equivalent of rallies, with a daily 10 minutes allocated to why to hate the FCC Commissioner.

You can't decide industry concerns with popular vote, the voting population has pretty much no knowledge of the matter. This is why lobbying and delegation exist in the first place, to inform representatives of the facts of a situation.
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Re: Goodbye, net neutrality

Postby KleinerKiller » Thu Dec 14, 2017 5:53 am

Potentially good news: apparently apparently 132 House Republicans didn't sign a letter this morning supporting the repeal tomorrow. Only 107 did. Maybe it means they just don't want to be associated with a policy they know is extremely unpopular with their constituents. Maybe it's indicative that they might take action. Who knows. *crosses fingers*

Other news: on the eve of his planned carnage, the subhuman fuck has responded the only way his ilk know how -- with dead memes and condescension. I continue to harbor a strong desire to stitch his mouth shut and fold him into a very small box.
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Re: Goodbye, net neutrality

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Thu Dec 14, 2017 6:26 pm

If you bother to be greedy, you don't deserve to live. Ajit Pai is greedy, so it doesn't deserve to live.
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Re: Goodbye, net neutrality

Postby KleinerKiller » Thu Dec 14, 2017 6:51 pm

Image
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Re: Goodbye, net neutrality

Postby Aquila89 » Thu Dec 14, 2017 7:04 pm

Deathclaw_Puncher wrote:If you bother to be greedy, you don't deserve to live. Ajit Pai is greedy, so it doesn't deserve to live.


Oh, do come on.
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Re: Goodbye, net neutrality

Postby KleinerKiller » Thu Dec 14, 2017 7:52 pm

The vote is over. It went as projected. Burn in hell, Pai.

Now we wait for the courts to take action, or Congress to step in, or lawsuits to stall the implementation, or anything, ANYTHING else. This is not the end. It cannot be the end. Keep protesting and doing everything you can.

Repeat: Burn in fucking hell, Pai.
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Re: Goodbye, net neutrality

Postby Marcuse » Thu Dec 14, 2017 8:55 pm

Deathclaw_Puncher wrote:If you bother to be greedy, you don't deserve to live. Ajit Pai is greedy, so it doesn't deserve to live.


Pretty sure we've had words about death threats before. Let's not condemn others to death for the crime of being perceived to be wrong about something.
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Re: Goodbye, net neutrality

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Thu Dec 14, 2017 9:04 pm

But......we're talking about the internet, here! The internet!
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Re: Goodbye, net neutrality

Postby ghijkmnop » Thu Dec 14, 2017 10:12 pm

Redacted
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Re: Goodbye, net neutrality

Postby jbobsully11 » Thu Dec 14, 2017 10:57 pm



But yeah, what Kleiner said. *continues signing petitions*
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