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Internet Freedom Is Actively Dissolving in America
- nickthemagicman 11y agoI'm so glad the free market is working so well for Health Care and the Internet.
- humanrebar 11y agoWhy do you think either are free markets? They're both heavily regulated.
- shmerl 11y agoWhat's worse, many of them are monopolies (which is also a non free market). However they are far from sufficiently regulated (which monopolies should be). Otherwise data caps rip off would have been illegal to begin with.
- dredmorbius 11y agoThe question isn't free markets, but effective ones which serve society. Effective regulation is what makes markets. Economists far more generally speak of competitive markets, which carry numerous requirements, of which neither healthcare nor Internet / communications generally satisfy. Which is how they came to be regulated in the first place.
- DanielBMarkham 11y agoI think the language itself here is a problem. Effective regulation is what makes markets. More specifically, free and open markets work wonders -- but dominant players seek unfair advantage to eliminate the free and open market almost as soon as it starts working. Some regulation is required to keep the market free and open to all participants, especially as leading players actively change the rules as they gather more resources. But the critical point is that those same players are far more likely to use regulation itself as an unfair advantage as they are anything else. Government is the biggest stick in the room, after all. So yes, free and open markets work, and yes, regulation is required to keep them working. But regulations do not make markets any more than speed limits create the interstate trucking system.
- dawnbreez 11y agoBecause making healthcare mandatory by law is a free market, and so is having local monopolies on internet access. You sound an awful lot like the people who ask for tighter gun laws after a shooting in a gun-free zone.
- nyae 11y agoPlease don't make that argument about gun-free zones. In what world can we expect a person bent on mass homicide to respect municipal ordinance? Shooter: "Oh this sign says no guns? Darn, guess I'll abandon my murder spree then." You're not serious right? Or maybe you just haven't yet explained what you really meant?
- jabgrabdthrow 11y agoThe analogy is roughly, 1) gov. makes law 2) markets acts opposite way as law intended 3) consumer requests more laws. "The no gun zone law didn't work, let's make the no gun zone bigger" vs "The local ISP monopoly law backfired, let's let the government invent more rules for ISPs"
- dawnbreez 11y agoWe're on the same page. I was poking fun at the parent comment for exactly what you're poking fun at me for.
- jabgrabdthrow 11y agoOddly those are my two of my three go-to examples of government intervention fucking the consumer...
- pdkl95 11y ago> Hillary Clinton actively campaigned at Saturday’s debate for a “Manhattan-like project” to break encryption. Fight this now, tech industry. It doesn't matter how stupid the idea is; those are fighting words.
- javajosh 11y agoI don't get it; why doesn't it matter how stupid the idea is? If she wanted to have a Manhattan project for perpetual motion machines it would be harmless, right? (And from a Keynsian standpoint it would be better than harmless since she'd be injecting money into the economy, having physicists and engineers doing the equivalent of digging trenches and filling them in.)
- jlangenauer 11y agoBecause the idea could ultimately be backed by the force of violence in the state. E.g. You will use weak encyption in your product, or we will take your money, your company or even your freedom.
- existencebox 11y agoThis is a candidate to ostensibly lead a world superpower over the next 4-8 years. Simply having the mindset of desiring to ban or hamstring encryption (or build perpetual motion machines) is indicative of far greater issues (likely in that domain, which we as tech-citizens should be aware of and active against) than merely chasing dragons would imply.
- pdkl95 11y agoThe #1 problem when technical people consider politics and law: they expect it to follow any sense of logic. That is a threat to the tech industry, as part of the ongoing campaign to paint tech companies as "selfish and unreasonable" or even "aiding terrorists" in the public eye. At no point is any kind of "Manhattan project" actually intended. That's just a clever talking point used to frame encryption for the general public. The long-term message for tech companies is "stop challenging our power and authority". Encryption represents a power shift, which is something the people used to having that power cannot allow. Their traditional weapon is the power to control the framing of any topic. The end game isn't breaking encryption. If the tech industry doesn't submit to the demands for a backdoor, the tech industry will be declared the enemy. If the economy related to the internet and encryption crashed (which can always be accomplished with punitive regulation), the power situation is improved form the perspective of traditional politicians. If they want to survive in anything like their current form, internet corporations should be fighting this hard to counter the framing in the public eye. Spending a few hundred million (or even a few billion) spent on media campaigns to make people want encryption is preferable to being forced to implement backdoors and watching entire markets dry up.
- javajosh 11y ago>Broadband access is declining, data caps are becoming commonplace, surveillance is increasing, and encryption is under attack. One of these is not like the others. Broadband access is hardly a freedom thing; data caps aren't either. And attacking encryption is troubling, but can't ultimately happen without wholesale outlawing of general computing devices. Which leaves surveillance. But even then, it's not really about surveillance so much as it is surveillance by people you don't like. Usually large organizations - government that scrubs your data for evidence of threat and may send goons to your house; companies that broker your info and inject data into your brain for cash. Not sure what to do about surveillance, since by definition large organizations with lots of money control politics through campaign contributions, and pretty clearly they see surveillance as a critical part of their immune system (which is actually kind of strange since they've done quite well without ubiquitous electronic surveillance for a long time).
- njorth 11y agoBroadband access is very much a freedom thing if Comcast is your only option. I live in one of America's wealthiest cities and the undisputed tech capital of the east coast, yet finding a decent ISP is difficult bordering on impossible. There's exactly one good ISP in my city called netBlazr, but they don't service my neighborhood. So we get Comcast instead: bandwidth rates approaching a tenth of advertised speeds, outright throttling for certain services, cheap hardware with limited firmware, ubiquitous surveillance, and no legal recourse at all. Freedom.
- eli_gottlieb 11y agoUhhh... we get RCN over here in Somerville...
- njorth 11y agoRCN's on my radar for sure, but XMission is the standard against which I'm comparing services. What assurance is there that RCN won't pull any bullshit like blocking SMTP or throttling Tor?
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- awqrre 11y agoThe Government sees the Internet as a treat to the Government itself... this is not about terrorism.
- kaonashi 11y agoI doubt Teh Government sees anything with a single point of view.
- lectrick 11y agoCan we get around provider monopoly fees with some sort of new wireless option? perhaps a new cell provider that isn't actually a cell provider, it's just a wireless data pipe provider that calls itself a cell provider to fit within the existing FCC regulatory scheme (and to easily switch to it from existing cellphones?) Could that be a startup?
- CaptSpify 11y agoIs your proposal anything different from wireless mesh-networks? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network