I don't understand how people can see the complete disgrace that is SOPA, NDAA, and the myriad of other broken laws and think that getting the government more involved in the internet is a good thing. Especially when the problem doesn't exist yet, this preemptive regulation is dangerous. Instead of advocating net neutrality, lets wait till these horrible abuses happen and then decide if we want the government involved.
The Internet is already heavily regulated. Specifically, the problem with letting the "market" sort out net neutrality issues, is that most places have granted franchises to only one or two broadband providers. Since this effectively makes real competition illegal, there must be "balancing" regulations to prevent abuse of the customers.
Some ISPs already throttle certain protocols, and some were forging reset packets to drop connections they didn't want on their networks. Others are on record wanting to charge Youtube for each gigabyte of video they delivered to a customer. We can pass consumer-protection regulation now instead of waiting for ISPs to implement their stated plans.
I think it'd be better to advocate that we remove the government granted monopolies and handouts than try to add piles of red tape to the internet, and open it up for censorship and other controls by special interests.
You do know that without the "government granted monopolies and handouts" there never would have been an Internet in the first place, right? Even putting aside the research dollars, AT&T would have, among other things, happily strangled the (end user) modem in its cradle had they been allowed to.
In "many", yeah, but that's more a product of market forces than anything else. I happen to have negotiated one of these contracts from the municipal side, and we didn't have a monopoly, we played the companies against each other, because we were an attractive enough market to do so.
You're proposing more state/federal oversight to insure that municipalities don't give away monopoly rights?
What recourse do your constituents have if they have different criteria for picking an ISP than you did? Why remove the "market forces" in the first place?
Typically, monopolies are granted in exchange for running service to unprofitable customers, anyone who wouldn't normally be connected. So those consumers are pretty undeniably better off. If there isn't something like that in the offing, competent town leadership would presumably use their attractive market position to make cable companies compete to provide service.
Yeah, after we get a bunch of entrenched interests dependent on the practice, it'll be much easier to change things than if we had outlawed it to begin with.
If you're in favor of anti-trust regulation, you're in favor of net neutrality. The rest of your post is a red herring, all you need for SOPA is the commerce clause. If we posit that that's not going away, all fundamental questions of "more/less government" are really beside the point.
> lets wait till these horrible abuses happen and then decide if we want the government involved.
In other words, wait until the RIAA/MPAA/etc negotiate a functional equivalent of SOPA with the major ISPs and payment networks and then decide whether or not not legislation about it is needed? Doesn't sound that different from passing SOPA and seeing how it works out, does it?
