Anyone see this article?

[Montana]

"Net Neutrality = Government Interference"

Of course it's government interference. The telecommunications industry is one of the most regulated industries in this country. It has an entire agency -- the FCC -- that exists solely to regulate it. The problem is that we have regulated ourselves into a corner.

I would also like to point out something very important: Network neutrality isn't about the content of the internet, it's about the objectivity of the wires. It is anti-regulation regulation. What it is, really, is saying to the phone company and the cable company that they aren't allowed to regulate the internet, because our regulation has created their duopoly and we don't want internet regulation but neither do we want internet regulation-by-proxy.

Tiering will come IMO. Tiering will be needed to prioritize voice traffic. Voice is very sensitive to delay, web traffic is not.

This is fairly well nonsense. The only thing that causes delay that prioritization would affect is insufficient capacity. The correct solution to that is to expand capacity, not to degrade traffic.

Where it will get interesting is IPV6 because encryption is built in, end to end. This is one reason I think it will be slow to be adopted. with encryption from end to end the government will have a hard time snooping.

End to end encryption is already available with IPv4 using SSL. The primary reason behind non-adoption (other than NSA conspiracies) is simply that encryption uses a nontrivial amount of CPU time, so people turn it off. Though the fact that you have to pay money for an SSL certificate certainly doesn't help.

 

[Brian4Liberty]

and competition for all

I keep getting the impression that people here don't know what net neutrality actually is. Yes, it's regulation, and it is a solution to a problem that only exists because there is insufficient competition in the market for internet access to avoid abusive monopolistic behavior on behalf of the providers.

Competition is always the key. The "Free Market" is meaningless without competition. Breaking up monopolies is good for everyone...

Regulating monopolies is like telling a criminal how much they can steal. Windfall or penalty taxing of monopolies is the government forming a criminal partnership with them.

Government "interference" isn't bad if they are prosecuting criminals. The problem is, most politicians want to partner with corporate criminals, instead of enforcing the laws that are already on the books.

Probable solution from Presidential candidate Hillarudy McThomney "hey, corporate criminal, better let us wet our beaks, or we'll force you to give us a bigger cut."

 

[jpa]

code development can take place anywhere around the world.
the only reason to argue for them is to drive prices down here.

not true for large commercial software. Training & cordination is usually needed for large complex codebases. MS Office has 2000+ developers and several million lines of code. Also it really helps to be near the designers, other developers where code is inter-dependant, usability testing, etc

I've managed a sub team from India, it only works well for certain types of projects. The time shift was a real pain (8-9PM meetings).

 

[Scribbler de Stebbing]

What it is, really, is saying to the phone company and the cable company that they aren't allowed to regulate the internet, because our regulation has created their duopoly and we don't want internet regulation but neither do we want internet regulation-by-proxy.

Legitimate government doesn't have the right to anti-regulate pseudo-non-regulation by cable or telecom companies. Cable and telecom companies are not government; I have nothing to fear from them; I can leave them if I wish. Government, on the other hand, has bigger guns than I do, so I want it as small and out of my life and the market as possible.

 

[Montana]

Competition is always the key. The "Free Market" is meaningless without competition. Breaking up monopolies is good for everyone...

So do that then. But until you do and competitors exist, we have government-created monopolies. Until that changes, it isn't a question of regulating the market or not, it's a question of telling the criminals how much they can steal or allowing them to steal as much as they like.

Legitimate government doesn't have the right to anti-regulate pseudo-non-regulation by cable or telecom companies. Cable and telecom companies are not government; I have nothing to fear from them; I can leave them if I wish. Government, on the other hand, has bigger guns than I do, so I want it as small and out of my life and the market as possible.

This is why Libertarians rarely get elected. Ideological purity rather than compromise in the right direction.

Here, how about this: Suppose they pass network neutrality legislation that only applies to providers that, because of government interference, have insufficient competition, for some well-defined meaning of insufficient competition. At this point you can go back to the struggle to remove that government interference from the market, and as soon as the free market is restored, the network neutrality legislation, now no longer necessary, no longer applies. You can't lose. Either you're correct in your assumption that you can quickly reestablish the competition that government has destroyed, and network neutrality ceases to apply, or you fail to do so, at least temporarily, and in the meantime you have a positive regulation to mitigate the effects of years of negative regulations.