The Internet as we know it is facing a serious threat. There’s a debate heating up in Washington, DC on something called “net neutrality” – and it’s a debate that’s so important Google is asking you to get involved. We’re asking you to take action to protect Internet freedom.
In the next few days, the House of Representatives is going to vote on a bill that would fundamentally alter the Internet. That bill, and one that may come up for a key vote in the Senate in the next few weeks, would give the big phone and cable companies the power to pick and choose what you will be able to see and do on the Internet.
Today the Internet is an information highway where anybody – no matter how large or small, how traditional or unconventional – has equal access. But the phone and cable monopolies, who control almost all Internet access, want the power to choose who gets access to high-speed lanes and whose content gets seen first and fastest. They want to build a two-tiered system and block the on-ramps for those who can’t pay.
Creativity, innovation and a free and open marketplace are all at stake in this fight. Please call your representative (202-224-3121) and let your voice be heard.
Thanks for your time, your concern and your support.
Eric Schmidt, CEO
Notice that the ‘Decider’, the ‘Hammer’, the primary sponsor of this bill, Whitacre of SBC/ AT&T etc are all from Texas. Wheelin’ & Dealin’ with your rights, freedom and wallet– the Texas way.
Many of you based on dis-inforamation would sell your souls to the Devil, the govt can rarely do ANYTHING right, and yet you would allow them to control and manipulate the businesses that hold the keys and pipes to the Internet, some of you just don’t get it at all, probably never will..
This is Google’s and Ebay’s and several other companies idea by using the Govt and legislation to manipulate broadbad companies to try and provide a level playing field irregardless of whether its really fair or not. Anyone’s access should be based on how much one pays to get that access not for some govt entity to tell me or you or any company what I should get or what’s “fair”
All I can say it I went with ClearWire. Screw the cable and phone companies. I’m tired of dealing with them and all their extra fees. Next on he list is Vonage. I’ll be glad when I have no more land lines connected to my house.
Wake up peeps, its You vs. the State, not Liberal vs. Conservative, and especially not Demorats vs Republicons, they are fake divisions designed to play off of each other…. i.e. Nixon opened the doors to Communist China, and Clinton got NAFTA passed. Think about it. Oh yea, someone did make an interesting prediction concerning the North American economy… I’m guessing the new currency will be called the “Aero”, replacing the dollar they are now destroying on purpose. Just ask Gates or Buffet who, over the past year, have cashed in their dollars for Euros, they know what’s coming,
Some Democrats are Republicans. Look at Lieberman. He should have left the party a long time ago.
Again— this government needs to spend less time debating what goes on inside my bedroom, my pants and my internet, and more time debating this stupid goddamned war.
k
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c109:2:./temp/~c109VPETcw::
if anyone wants to actually look at the bill itself theres the link. I was surprised to see a few protections for consumers, but I still ardently loathe this legislation.
It is a retarded, ANTI-consumer initiative by some major corporations (i.e., Google, Amazon, etc.) interested in fleecing other major corporations (i.e., telcos, etc.), to the detriment of consumers. Telcos have every right to charge whatever they want to whoever they want for services they offer through their pipes. As it turns out, that position is also PRO-consumer. Allowing broadband providers to recoup their investment as they see fit will result in more broadband investment and thus, better–and ultimately cheaper–broadband. The feds could do one thing to help though–eliminate busybody local “community” regulators from the process, preventing the locals from granting monopoly licenses to their favorite cable providers or telephone companies. Other than that, the federal government is the problem on this issue, not the solution. Frankly, it is amazing how naive most MDN readers are, how easily so-called “idealists” are manipulated into supporting some greedy corporations’ agenda and shooting themselves (i.e., consumers) in the foot in the bargain.
More Econ 101 for the masses, and let’s make it mandatory!
Kate
Amen, Kate – there’s way too much blustering here and not a lot of grounded arguments. People talk about the net as if it were a discovery – like fire or electricity – that would exist freely for everyone without the evil telcos. This is not true – the net exists because people work every day to make it exist and make it accessible.
The net will be more free in the end without hobbling the people and companies who bring it to your door. HR 5252 is certainly no perfect piece of legislation, but any alleviation to the current patchwork quilt of franchising whorehouses should be welcomed by the consumer, who will benefit from a more competitive, healthier list of providers. It is axiomatic that the market makes better decisions and provides better services when it is unencumbered by a faceless committee of civil servants sloganeering about things like “net neutrality”.
Kate:
The net exists because of a government initiative – popularly known as DARPA-funded ARPANET. The ever-hated Al Gore took the lead in 1988 funding the high speed nodes that became the precursors to what we use to day, as well as later allowing private, commerical interests on it, and keeping it largely unregulated so as to help them make a buck from the opportunities it afforded. Later, the telecos (who inherited almost the entire setup from the the British JANET & U.S. NSFNET programs) got plenty of tax breaks in this country to upgrade their ‘pipes’.
Most of the story can be found here:
http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml
And yet now you think these same beneficiaries of the public teat should be able to make the internet their own private pay-to-playground? Our taxes made the net, not Verizon or AT&T et al … therefore the government has every right – in fact, a duty – to make sure we don’t get fleeced for helping these companies become the communications powerhouses they are today.
Oh, and I absolutely love this statement: “The feds could do one thing to help though–eliminate busybody local “community” regulators from the process, preventing the locals from granting monopoly licenses to their favorite cable providers or telephone companies.”
Kind of off topic Kate, but it does show you really are a special kind of fool. For your edification, it’s the cable providers and telecos – your freemarket champions – that spend millions to lobby the government, at all levels, to ENSURE their anti-free market monopolies stay intact. The federal government had a few bills in pending in Congress in the 90s that were intended to break those monopolies. I’ll give you 3 guesses which party scuttled the project, and the first two don’t have to count.
BTW – for the record, I’m an Independent (perhaps another kind of fool). Basically I believe in gun ownership, progressive taxation, & free markets for consumer goods. However, I also realize that a sizable portion of those who run the larger for-profit conglomerates would sell their own mothers into slavery if it meant making a buck – because that’s just what they do, nothing personal. Pardon me for not wanting to be inadvertantly victimized by the mentality fostered by that quirk of the system though. You see, no matter how great it is at making refrigerators affordable, if any economic system doesn’t ultimately serve the humans who invented it, I feel it needs to be checked. Call me crazy.
Speaking of crazy, what I find most amusing are the capitalist groupies, all dreaming of the day they will be so rich as to not have to concern themselves with their fellow man in the least. Who ironically hate the government with all the righteous passion they can muster, but who couldn’t survive a day in a world without it, because they’re nowhere near as rugged as they think they are. And who have never & would never turn down their own chance at the public trough, whatever form that might take.
People like Ann Coulter. And, maybe, even you Kate.
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“if any economic system doesn’t ultimately serve the humans who invented it, I feel it needs to be checked.”
should read, “if any economic system at some point doesn’t serve the humans who invented it, I feel it needs to be checked at that point.”
from Odyssey67
“…a sizable portion of those who run the larger for-profit conglomerates would sell their own mothers into slavery if it meant making a buck…”
Where’d you get that ridiculous idea? Do you think that providers should only be “not-for-profit”? Why the tone of moral superiority over people you don’t know?
“…, if any economic system doesn’t ultimately serve the humans who invented it, I feel it needs to be checked. Call me crazy.”
OK – you’re crazy. Anyone who doesn’t see the obvious superiority of capitalism for both the immediate and long-term prosperity of its people needs to compare results with other economic models. I know it’s cool these days to bash capitalism. It’s also foolish. Capitalism has “served the humans who invented it” rather well.
Sounds like you’ve got a lot of repressed anger, man.
bah says: “Where’d you get that ridiculous idea? Do you think that providers should only be “not-for-profit”? Why the tone of moral superiority over people you don’t know?”
Where? From the “ridiculous” premise that profit making corporations exist for the sole purpose of making profit. They do nothing else, and those leading them serve that master above all else. I purposely used an exaggerated example to drive that point home. Get a clue.
As for moral superiority; I – like all thinking, well-adjusted humans – am morally superior to a corporation, simply because I have morals. By definition, corporations are amoral, b/c morality isn’t necessary for their modus operandi.
“Anyone who doesn’t see the obvious superiority of capitalism for both the immediate and long-term prosperity of its people needs to compare results with other economic models. I know it’s cool these days to bash capitalism. It’s also foolish. Capitalism has “served the humans who invented it” rather well.”
Capitalism is superior for marshalling resources to provide consumer goods and services in a competitive, and demand elastic environment. If competition diminishes, or consumer demand is inelastic (meaning people have no choice but to use the good or service), capitalism begins to fail as a system that serves the population as a whole. Absent any outside regulation, it becomes a haven for oligopic or monopolistc behavior, which invariably leads to higher prices and less innovation. How dramatic this failure of the system is, is in direct proportion to how extreme the anti-competitive/inelastic consumer environment is.
Example: Health care. It is not only an inelastic good (i.e. everybody needs it), but it is also provided in an oligopic/monoplistic fashion (a few major providers with immense power over their own specific regions). The result is that health care prices in this country – with almost no countervailing government effort at reigning them in – are stratospheric, when compared to other advanced economies that do utilize government power to prevent that.
“Sounds like you’ve got a lot of repressed anger, man.”
Repressed? No. Crazy? …. well, at least I’m not repressed. But hey – you’d be angry too if you had to explain the obvious to people who are grown enough to know better. A lot.
My 2 ¥:
IMHO net neutrality is essential. The Internet will be an absolute mess without it. ISPs get pissed at companies like….let’s say…..iTMS because they have tens of thousands of their subscribers going to iTMS and purchasing/downloading music. This eats up bandwidth. What they want to do is charge iTMS (just an example) a fee for using up so much of their bandwidth. The same would go for Google as well. Your ISP wants compensation for it’s bandwidth usage (I cannot say their beef is without total merit). Some people’s ISPs already do something called packet-throttling. If you’re “tagged” as a heavy downloader, they start throttling you – slowing down your connection speed to save bandwidth. Not only that, but your download is not exactly a direct connection. The packets have to hop through the Internet to get to you. Well, the people at those “Hop Spots” that relay the data toward you (other ISPs) are also complaining about not being compensated for bandwidth usage. Everyone want’s a piece of the pie. Either web hosting costs are going to skyrocket, or the consumer is going to have to take up the slack in the form of higher access fees. I would bet on the latter. This may lead to LESS choice, contrary to what some believe. Anyone who believes any market can TRULY self-reguate forgets one thing: HUMAN NATURE. Capitalism will never be truly self-regulating – there will always be laws and rules applied to prevent the abuse thereof.
“…Where? From the “ridiculous” premise that profit making corporations exist for the sole purpose of making profit…”
The little kid down the street has a lemonade stand that ‘exists for the sole purpose of making a profit’. Would she sell her mother into slavery, too? Profits are the point of business. At least, successful ones.
“…health care prices in this country – with almost no countervailing government effort at reigning them in – are stratospheric, when compared to other advanced economies that do utilize government power to prevent that…”
Take a closer look at the health care systems you trumpet, my friend (I’m assuming UK or Canada – if I’m wrong, my bad), and they reveal themselves as far less than the medical wonders their proponents claim them to be. Average wait times for major surgeries, in particular, are so long as to be virtually unavailable, which accounts for the heavy traffic to the US for these procedures. The US health care system suffers far more from draconian malpractice legislation and rampant insurance fraud than it does from the inelastic nature of healthcare itself.
I’ll stop being obtuse here and agree that careful, highly scrutinized doses of socialism, like medicinal arsenic, can be successfully applied in areas not readily accessible for entrepreneurial efforts. I’m just not sure that internet access qualifies for this highly risky procedure. Better to err on the side of capitalism than to toss the internet forever into the abyss of politics.
Re: (“…a sizable portion of those who run the larger for-profit conglomerates would sell their own mothers into slavery if it meant making a buck…”
Where’d you get that ridiculous idea? Do you think that providers should only be “not-for-profit”? Why the tone of moral superiority over people you don’t know?)
Perhaps you should take a look at the Ford Corporation just as an example. In the 70s they released a car you might of heard of called the Pinto. Anyway, the good folks at Ford did some quick calculations, and decided that it would be cheaper to sustain lawsuits from fuel tank explosions than to install a stronger barrier between the fuel tank and the rear bumper for $11 dollars per car. So they let people burn to death in a horrific, grotesque fashion. For $11 dollars per car.
Corporations are in business to make money, not to safeguard the rights or even physical well-being of their consumers. I believe that is the point that the original poster was trying to make, and that you, in your ideological bluster (FREE MARKET $*#$*@$*&^~*&!) completely missed.
Sorry, should be: “might have heard of.”
Hey nuflux –
it’s you who’re missing the point. Your example about Ford is so simplistic. Ford released a dangerous model car – the Pinto – that was vulnerable to explosion when hit from the rear. Therefore, Ford’s decision to release the car anyway for short-term profit resulted in massive financial losses when their perfidy was revealed. So a concern for the ‘rights and well-being’ of Ford’s customers, as a lesson to fledgling capitalists, would have better served the company’s profits in the long run. That’s why, among the thousands of cars released since the seventies, so few have had dangerous safety problems.
And, by the by, do you actually think non-profit, faceless government committees have no blood on their hands? Your mistrust of the marketplace surely doesn’t accompany a belief that civil service is championing your interests and safeguarding your person, does it? Really?
gorsh says: “Your example about Ford is so simplistic. Ford released a dangerous model car – the Pinto – that was vulnerable to explosion when hit from the rear. Therefore, Ford’s decision to release the car anyway for short-term profit resulted in massive financial losses when their perfidy was revealed. So a concern for the ‘rights and well-being’ of Ford’s customers, as a lesson to fledgling capitalists, would have better served the company’s profits in the long run. That’s why, among the thousands of cars released since the seventies, so few have had dangerous safety problems.”
Actually, you’re missing a very big component that makes your ‘fledgling capitalists learn a moral lesson’ narrative work at all; that Ford was successfully sued b/c the government passed laws – like Net Neutrality – that made what they did with the Pinto illegal. You take government regulation out of the picture, and the money that got paid out to those families vanishes. What would have been the ‘cost effective’ solution then? Probably exactly what the bean counters orignally thought – that the costs of fixing the product weren’t worth it. What would fledgling capitalists have taken away from that?
“And, by the by, do you actually think non-profit, faceless government committees have no blood on their hands? Your mistrust of the marketplace surely doesn’t accompany a belief that civil service is championing your interests and safeguarding your person, does it? Really?”
Really. See, a democratic government is – typically – more directly accountable to the people who elect it. Even when some special interest can spend a buttload getting their industry protected, that protection only lasts for as long as the politicians & parties in question feel their jobs & position aren’t at risk. Yes, businesses are accountable to customers too, but they are also accountable to shareholders in a much more direct way. Based on how a corporate charter works, as long as what they do is profitable for the shareholders, even if it isn’t pro-consumer, then that’s the motivator that wins out.
Plus I’d also point out that a corporations customer base – even if they were motivated to ‘revolt’ against something – can often be very small in relation to the damage done by some profitable activity the corp undertakes. For example, the companies that sold Dioxin-based products were poisoning the environment and affecting a number of people that dwarfed the number of people who actually bought and used the products. In that case, what are all of these non-customers being poisoned supposed to do? What real influence would they have in a strictly laissez-faire market? None of consequence. If not for government, and the moral – human – component it more directly brings to bear, we would be living in the protypical Hobbesian world – nasty, brutish, short.
In fact, we once did live in a world something like that, at the turn of the last century. The reason we have so many consumer-friendly protections today is largely b/c our grandparents unionized and protested and otherwise changed the system – through democratic means – to reign in the worst aspects of unrestrained capitalism.
A good read on the subject is Upton Sinclair’s the Jungle. Check it out for free here:
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Literature/Sinclair/TheJungle/
Look, I’m not saying government is all good, or that capitalism is all bad. My position is that people need to be very vigilent when government is involved in anything, and that when capitalism is dealing with relatively inconsequential consumer goods and services, it performs like a champ with minimal oversight. However, when entrusted with providing more crucial human needs, or required inputs to keep the overall economy humming (like the internet), it’s more like the fox providing feed to the hens. In the latter case, if you REALLY feel the fox can do the job better for some reason, you’d still better have a farmer with a big ol shotgun watching over him.
How’s that for an analogy?
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“Really. See, a democratic government is – typically – more directly accountable to the people who elect it.”
should have been “Really. What’s more “faceless”; a government committees or a corporate boardroom? See, a democratic government is – typically – more directly accountable to the people who elect it.”
“…How’s that for an analogy?”
Excellent and time-tested. Also, your points about the “worst aspects of unrestrained capitalism” are timely and well-taken. I disagree, however that american capitalism ever approached Tom Hobbes’ dark vision, even during the time of the poorly-named “robber barons” who built the nation’s infrastructure, albeit on the backs of what was little more than slave labor.
I think that you and I must come from different places – I was raised by a successful small businessman in a little Virginia town who interjected morality into every aspect of his business, and maybe I’m a little quicker to grant some of those characteristics to larger companies. To me, a corporation or company or firm or partnership is simply a group of men and women in business together, and their business practices reflect their personal practices and beliefs. I know the textbooks will ascribe all manner of evil transformative power to capitalism itself, but it’s only people who can make their lives nasty and brutish. A market is just a market.
It is the allure of power – the worst aspects of government – that seem far more dangerous than any market’s profit motive. Rarely (if ever) in history have markets caused mass murder, genocide, war, or racism. Governments, on the other hand…