The pro-liberty position would be to give the ISP's the liberty to discriminate amoung their customers as they see fit and for consumers to have the liberty to choose the ISP that best meets their criteria.
FCC flips off entire Web; wants to end Net Neutrality
- Thread starter Double A
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warpus
In pork I trust
"Liberty" does not belong in this debate at all.
civvver
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The problem I have here isn't business related, it's censorship. What's to prevent politician A from telling ISP company B, hey if you make all the fundraising sites for my opponents run really slow and block these negative blogs about me I'll pas through some regulation giving you a financial edge? I mean this crap happens enough already outside the internet.
Goodfella
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Well the liberty of ISPs to do what they want, no, but it's certainly about the liberty of consumers to access data equally or the liberty of a video sharing site to compete fairly with other sites.
GoodGame
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That sounds reasonable.
There might also be more states and cities that view the internet as something of a right, or at least a necessity, so they might curb extremes of market distribution.
Some sort of (corporate, not governmental) regulation had at one time been attempted in the past (and died due to being unpopular), but that was in the basis of how much data you would be downloading. Eg an account could dl something like 2 gigabytes (a pretty big deal back when internet speed was often low) a month.
But to regulate on account of actual content, is a thousand times worse, and a horrible precedent.
Let alone that it won't help the web if you are effectively to brand the main sites (eg youtube, google, fb etc) in one category and list them as options for access, and then the myriads of no-name sites as another category. It is pretty much a move which would make it impossible to change the status quo of current main sites, and is 10000% against the supposed spirit of having an internet in the first place.
But to regulate on account of actual content, is a thousand times worse, and a horrible precedent.
Let alone that it won't help the web if you are effectively to brand the main sites (eg youtube, google, fb etc) in one category and list them as options for access, and then the myriads of no-name sites as another category. It is pretty much a move which would make it impossible to change the status quo of current main sites, and is 10000% against the supposed spirit of having an internet in the first place.
Why does liberty not matter to a debate in America, exactly?
Letting Comcast buy and sell access without government regulation is "more liberty."
I'm really beginning to hate the term "liberty" because it always seems to be selectively applied. I'd really like to have the basic liberty of unhindered access, but apparently that liberty is worth less than the liberty for ISPs to screw me over.
Google defines liberty as:
the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one's way of life, behavior, or political views.
I think that's a pretty good definition. And hey Comcast is part of society. The government should include some measures to prevent rampant corrupt bullcrap if the people are unable to do it efficiently (which is why I'm libertarian - I feel like the government should only do things it's more efficient at than some other body).
the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one's way of life, behavior, or political views.
I think that's a pretty good definition. And hey Comcast is part of society. The government should include some measures to prevent rampant corrupt bullcrap if the people are unable to do it efficiently (which is why I'm libertarian - I feel like the government should only do things it's more efficient at than some other body).
I get where you're coming from Double A. But you're going to have difficulty being consistent if your argument boils down to Comcast is part of society. At what stage does a large corporation's market dominance allow government regulation? What if that regulation comes at the behest of well paid corporate interests who also seek to corner a certain market? (E.g. Netflix, Google, Microsoft)
I really don't have an easy solution or answer, other than maybe appoint some kind of committee with all kinds of countermeasures (term limits, either anonymity or very clear financial situation, no or little political background, must be incredibly sarcastic, etc). The committee would judge everything on a case-by-case basis. It'd be incredibly hard to implement, though, so it's probably just a pipe dream, but one-size-fits-all regulations are even worse.
Well, chalk this up to being one of the cases where government regulation IS required. Fairly ironic that it's the Internet needing the regulation (of preventing ISPs from selling last-mile performance), but no less ironic than the Internet effectively coming into existence because of the government trying to save money while doing something it arguably shouldn't have been doing in the first place (providing private universities with mainframes).
kramerfan86
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Comcast is a person too you fascists, remember the noble supreme court established that factoid.
Tahuti
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Corporate entities are government created entities. Government has a complete right to set the terms.
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