by 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And, as I said in the beginning, net neutrality is good, but having it repealed for a year or two won't cause lasting damage.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.
WE ARE ALL FLOATING IN THE WINDS OF TIME. BUT YOUR CANDLE WILL FLICKER FOR SOME TIME BEFORE IT GOES OUT -- A LITTLE REWARD FOR A LIFE WELL LIVED. FOR I CAN SEE THE BALANCE AND YOU HAVE LEFT THE WORLD MUCH BETTER THAN YOU FOUND IT, AND IF YOU ASK ME, said Death, NOBODY COULD DO ANY BETTER THAN THAT...