Does anyone have a simple definition for net neutrality, and what do you think the law should be regarding net neutrality?
There should be no laws regulating the internet or any other activity that doesn’t involve fraud, theft or violence.
Net neutrality is the principle that there should not be reserved bandwidth for higher value transmissions over the internet. It is similar to the opposition to high-occupancy toll lanes.
The law should be that you have the right to pay more for better access for your traffic.
The law should be that you have the right to pay more for better access for your traffic.
I wouldn’t use the word right, as that tends to imply somebody has a duty to provide it for you. Same with justice, for that matter. You are at liberty to procure it, if you can find someone who will provide it.
bump since this is now an even more current topic.
Do you guys think supports of net neutrality simply don’t understand what it does, or what? When I type it into YouTube, all I get is (1) celebrities praising it, (2) pictures of the mean CEOs ‘ruining democracy’, (3) and links to www.savetheinternet.com. I wish there were more videos like Nielsio just put up on the December Low Content thread.
The one good argument I’ve heard is here. He explains that he can at least see the appeal of net neutrality since the government has created this oligopoly of cable/internet providers.
That’s not a good argument for it. That’s an argument for ending internet provider licensing (and for government owning the streets too).
Isn’t that oligopoly the entire reason people are wanting the government to enforce net neutrality, though? Like when he said, “In America, we don’t have a free market for internet access. In my little suburb in Long Island, if you want high-speed internet access, you have to go with either Cablevision or FiOS. That’s it because you can’t enter the market.” What I took from the video is that there’s no need for the government to try to enforce net neutrality because we can simplify the problem by forcing the government to cease handing out ISP licenses. Unless I’m completely misinterpreting net neutrality, which I truthfully might be.
the damndest problem is that sometimes a new regulation can actually partially help (and even this partial help is in theory, usually not in reality) to undo the damage done by another regulation. the regulations that make the telecoms such an oligopoly could in theory be counteracted to a degree by net neutrality legislation. this makes it exceedingly hard for libertarians to make FINALLY convincing arguments against net neutrality laws. this is how the government manages to get what it wants from ALL parties.
here is the formula:
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make a law that fucks up situation A, to serve a certain group’s interests
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make a new law to appease the opposing group, instead of repealing the original law (thus averting the wrath of the first special interest group)
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even if the new law somehow results in a net benefit at first (and even then ONLY because it partially UNDID the bad effects of the previous law), expand it so that it grows into a monstrosity that benefits no one except government and its friends
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go back and forth like this in accelerating fashion until everything is utterly fucked to shit and the leviathan has heaps and heaps more power than ever before
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the correct answer to net neutrality is to scrap all the regulations that give telecoms their monopolies. there is your net neutrality. that is how to argue this with anyone concerned about the internet.
first win the name game: refuse to call it ‘net neutrality’; instead call it what it really is: “trying to enforce fair and open competition in telecommunications while keeping in place all the regulations that PREVENT fair and open competition in the telecommunications industry”. ditch the regs and the net would tend toward neutrality. it is the same principle with all legislation; repealing laws is always a more effective way to achieve whatever objective some new proposed law is meant to achieve. don’t make minimum wage laws to help people earn living wages; instead lower corporate taxes. and so on.
Yeah, that does suck. It’s kind of like what we were talking about on a previous thread regarding whether you’d have to repeal the government’s power to license physicians before taking away Medicaid/Medicare since a lot of people are dependent on them because of the high healthcare costs. It’s like you can’t take away Medicaid/Medicare yet without causing riots due to some previous legislation that has made it harder for people to obtain good healthcare (kind of).
So far I haven’t seen any problems with net neutrality, though, so I’m not sure why it’s being brought up at the moment. Then again, I don’t run a website, so I might not realize. Have websites/companies been complaining about the oligopoly doing things like purposefully making certain websites run slower, or is that another government-created problem/distraction?
the antidote to all this is to always think and talk about new laws as not the new law itself, but the entire state apparatus before the new law vs. the entire state apparatus after the new law. then it becomes much clearer that the problem that needs fixing may be elsewhere, and eventually it becomes clear that the solution is to always repeal a law, and finally to repeal all of the state’s boneheaded laws.
So what exactly is broken with the internets to justify any law, rule or regulation?
I have no idea. I don’t even understand why this came up right now. I don’t recall there being millions of consumers who complained to the government. I’m perfectly happy with my internet provider.
There is a good article written a few years ago on this topic here:
It’s just an excuse to regulate. It’s pure, 100% mumbo-jumbo. I challenge any proponent of net neutrality to give a clear, concise definition of what the term even encompasses. They cannot. The technical problem of even defining net neutrality is insurmountable. Hopefully, this will impede the regulatory process to a halt.
The regulators have indicated that they are responding to reports that carriers like Comcast have restricted bandwidth on peer-to-peer filesharing. But this is precisely what the regulators ultimately want to control. It won’t be too difficult to rein in DNS-based web traffic since they have a root-of-power in ICANN where they can shut down domains (witness the recent muscle-flexing of the FBI “shutting down” certain file-sharing-related web domains) but if it’s left to the free market, the ISPs will never be able to effectively shut down file-sharing since file-sharers will simply switch to whichever ISP permits file-sharing, creating a profit-niche. Hence, the regulators need an excuse to regulate bandwidth allocation precisely so they can control file-sharing at the ISP level. They simply need to declare certain file-sharing protocols or software to be in violation of the DMCA and then they can issue an order to the ISPs to cut off all bandwidth to those protocols/software, using the same technological mechanisms by which the ISPs supposedly implement “net neutrality.”
Net neutrality is just a cover for an attempt to grab power at the ISP level.
Clayton -