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GOP lawmakers shamed on billboards for trying to repeal net neutrality rules

• dovdovdov 9y ago
  omg, that disclosure. I felt like I'm in high school math class again. :)
• dominotw 9y ago
  how is not having net neutrality different from google and co censoring the internet on whim. Seems like the same set of people cheering google for censorship are afraid of censorship form ISPs.
  • lallysingh 9y ago
    Yes they're slightly close. But those sites can much more easily put up their own webserver than run their own network to each customer.
  • Mikhail_Edoshin 9y ago
    Net neutrality is vastly different; it's about filtering content in general and can be a good thing and a bad thing depending on a situation. E.g. when Russian government forces ISPs to block certain sites, it's obviously censorship, although it's achieved by filtering. But when a provider limits certain protocols (e.g. BitTorrent) over a narrow-band line, there may be sound technical reasons for this and the overall result may very well be to the advantage of the customers. Such filtering is commonplace in enterprises. The recent case of GoDaddy, Google, and Cloudflare is much closer to political censorship; there's no technical reason behind it.
    • s73ver_ 9y ago
      It's only censorship if you believe other entities are not also allowed freedom of speech and association.
      • CaptSpify 9y ago
        I'm not sure I follow what you are saying here. Censorship is only when your view and others are not allowed freedom of speech? I feel like I'm not parsing your sentence correctly.
        • s73ver_ 9y ago
          I'm saying it's only censorship if you don't believe that other groups also have freedom of speech and association too. In order for the domain name thing or the CloudFlare thing to be censorship, you have to believe that none of those entities are able to practice freedom of association, or the right to choose who they do business with.
          • Mikhail_Edoshin 9y ago
            I disagree. I think doing business should be based on business reasons; if Daily Stormer upholds their end of the contract, then Google/GoDaddy/etc. have no ethical business reason to terminate it. If they disagree with what Daily Stormer says, they are totally free to publish their own statement. The only ethical consequence of free speech could be another speech.
            • s73ver_ 9y ago
              And I believe that choosing not to do business is a form of speech. Also, doing business with Nazis (and I'm not throwing that term around lightly; the Daily Stormer identifies themselves as such) is, especially given recent events, considered bad for business. So I would say they have a business reason there too.
              • Mikhail_Edoshin 9y ago
                There indeed is such a reason, but it's unethical. It is basically being afraid that the mob will turn against you and thus hurt your business. Somehow nobody blames the mob. Doing business is a way of living in the modern society. Stopping doing business (including firing an employee over non-business reasons, a very popular measure in liberal circles) threatens your well-being and even life. If everyone stops doing business with a person, the person is very likely to die. This is very close to lynching and is a total opposite of justice.
  • db48x 9y ago
    If your message doesn't show up on one webpage, you can always publish it on another, or on a webpage of your own. If your ISP decides what webpages you are allowed to visit, that's basically it. If they don't want to let you contact any competing domain registrars, you won't be able to. I suppose technically that'll never happen; you could fall back to a dial-up ISP. After all, the phone company is not allowed to decide that you can't call their competitors. One tiny part of the Title 2 regulations that cover telecommunications forces them to allow all telephone subscribers to call all other telephone subscribers. It's telephone neutrality. Look up the whole MCI thing from a few decades ago.
    • dominotw 9y ago
      > If your message doesn't show up on one webpage, you can always publish it on another, or on a webpage of your own. Can I just say this then, If you can't access your website on ISP choose another ISP. Whats different about this argument? Also, thank you for answering instead of downvoting.
      • steveadoo 9y ago
        For many Americans(including me) there is only one ISP to "choose".
        • dominotw 9y ago
          Doesn't America have anti monopoly laws? Curious why those don't apply to ISPs . Isn't this an admission that 'net neutrality ' is a bandaid to the problem of ISP monopoly. Also, Philosophically you won't really care about net neutrality if you have ISP choice. correct?
          • ajmurmann 9y ago
            If nobody wants to dig and lay cable to offer services to a small town what are you gonna do? The US had very low population density so the cost of teaching small communities can be huge.
  • zebrafish 9y ago
    In regards to censorship, I agree with you. It seems that if your primary opposition to net neutrality is censorship, then you should be equally opposed to Google censoring anything. But in terms of technical effort and economics, these are not the same. It's much easier to write html and find someone to host it for you than it is to trench in municipalities and lay fiber across the country. Net neutrality restricts ISPs from having a competitive advantage in the content space.
  • ajmurmann 9y ago
    To me it's less about censorship than companies offering services over there internet having to pay tolls to ISPs. This will only make it easier for incumbent companies to defend the market against competitors will can't afford the tolls and thus can't reach their customers.
  • dboreham 9y ago
    Net Neutrality isn't about censorship. It's about the distribution of power and hence profit in the emerging new order for communications, media and entertainment distribution. ISPs want to maintain their current cable tv business model where they get to charge the customer for their connection, and also charge the content provider for carrying their content to said user. That business model is contrary to the historical Internet Service model where the customer pays a fee that's supposed to cover the cost of all the traffic they transit regardless of where it originated.
  • jessaustin 9y ago
    The difference is one of degree (...perhaps "layer" is a better word?), not of kind. There probably is a principled way to draw a line between the two situations, but I haven't seen it. Many people are distracted by the greater empathy they feel for Google than for Comcast.
  • benlorenzetti 9y ago
    In my mind there is actually no contradiction here. Net neutrality is undeniably a way for the federal government to pressure ISPs when their opinions differ. Such as on information requests and wiretapping.
• jjazwiecki 9y ago
  If we have learned literally nothing else over the past 20 years it is that incoming shame bounces off like 99.95% of these people
  • heymijo 9y ago
    You may have been misled by the title. This is effective marketing to us, the constituents, not the lawmaker. There was a big thread yesterday based on a survey that most people don't even know what net-neutrality is. This is a net neutrality billboard that anyone can understand.
• sizzzzlerz 9y ago
  I like the advert but it has a huge grammatical error. It is fundamentally impossible to shame a GOP politician even down to the molecular level.
  • mrfusion 9y ago
    I don't see it?
    • zimpenfish 9y ago
      Me either but that's almost certainly because it isn't an actual grammatical error but a personal language peeve that has no basis in reality.
    • zentiggr 9y ago
      Parent is implying that the Republicans will do anything for their lobbyists, they can't be shamed out of it. I partly agree, I'd love to see a grassroots drive to vote out incumbents, focused on the longest tenure first. Make the f*ing lobbyists keep having to pay over and over for the same support, as a very least result. Maybe even eventually get people who are worth leaving in office for a while.
• maxxxxx 9y ago
  While I agree that these people are idiots (especially Paul Ryan) I am starting to get a bad feeling about public shaming. It seems a very non-constructive way of political discourse.
  • alyandon 9y ago
    That's eventually what you get when your elected representatives blindly adhere to party dogma instead of listening to their constituents and exercising a modicum of critical thinking.
  • innocentoldguy 9y ago
    Paul Ryan is an idiot, but so is every other member of Congress, on both sides of the fence.
    • maxxxxx 9y ago
      Sorry, he is in the 1% of idiots. Even in Congress.
      • innocentoldguy 9y ago
        I don't recall stacking them up by percentage, ranking them from dumb to dumbest, or inferring any such ranking.
  • abawany 9y ago
    I feel that with gerrymandering and all of the democracy anti-patterns that have been developed in the US, shaming is the only source left for an increasingly disempowered electorate.
• benlorenzetti 9y ago
  These sort of things always bother me when I am on the other side. They are just for galvanizing those who already agree. This is the biggest problem in our political discourse, no one ever attempt to have a discussion that changes minds. In this case I am opposed to net neutrality and things like this, the fcc bot comments, and a "study" showing 75% of the electorate "doesn't understand" do nothing but make me want to entrench my beliefs further.
  • hellogoodbyeeee 9y ago
    How are you opposed to net neutrality? All it does is aim to keep anyone from controlling the pipes that connect the internet. My favorite way of thinking about NN is to compare it to toll roads. Without NN, you could end up with a situation where Honda buys a toll road and then charges more for people to drive Toyotas on their road. Or they could reserve the left hand "passing" lane for only people in Hondas. In the same way, Comcast could slow down your connection speeds when you try to connect to Netflix or charge you additionally to connect to Netflix's domain.
    • benlorenzetti 9y ago
      Good analogy; I think I can work within it. It is entirely appropriate to limit the speed and size of large trucks (high bandwidth users) on roadways or charge them more. The ISPs need to be able to do this sort of economizing to help maintain everybody's min service guarantees and to a apply market force to the bloating of popular websites. With regard to the censorship argument (only allowing Honda cars), I agree that a democratic government entity needs to have power here as roadways and the fiber under them are natural monopolies (why dig up a street twice?). But it seems fairly clear that the appropriate regulating body is at the size of the city which administers the land on which the distribution network is built--NOT the Feds. No city would allow something like that (only X brand cars allowed) to stand, the FCC is overkill. I think there is a real economic and business case for ISPs discriminating based on bandwidth requirements. You have to throttle streaming and prioritize phone packets because they need stronger latency guarantees. Basically its a market, which suggest the ISPs are going to be doing this, whether its against the rules or not. If you make something so logical against the rules, it basically becomes another "look the other way" law; providing the federal government with a legal club with which to beat companies it is not pleased with, perhaps when an ISP refuses to comply with an inappropriate information request. I am concerned about censorship mostly by the Feds, less so by private utilities, and less still by city halls.
• MichaelBurge 9y ago
  One advantage of repealing all net neutrality and letting Comcast milk the Netflixes of the world is that it'll encourage big population centers like San Francisco or New York to seize the fiber with eminent domain and give it to e.g. the local electric company to run. Or at least apply their own local net neutrality standards to the regional Comcast branch. I've always thought that was a better solution than involving the feds anyways. Why do people from California need to beg senators from Alabama to stop Comcast from screwing with their local fiber? The last mile connection seems to be the only important one anyways: It would be feasible for someone like Netflix to hook together all the big cities themselves, but they can't dig up all the streets to lay their own fiber.
  • rayiner 9y ago
    What makes you think California would do better on its own? California is an infrastructure backwater, due to anti-development policies. If you live in the shadow of Comcast Center in Philly, you've probably got two fiber providers to chose from. If you live in San Francisco you probably don't have fiber at all. (Philadelphians also have pretty decent public transit, while San Franciscans have ... BART. I posit that those things are not unrelated.)
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • MichaelBurge 9y ago
      I don't think California specifically would be better off, for the reasons you describe. It was mostly intended to raise the question: "If nobody around the companies and people advocating for Net Neutrality actually wants it, why should a higher power intervene on their behalf?" The headline seems to give the impression that it's only federal Republicans blocking them, which if true would make you think they would prefer to have more local control. I haven't heard any net neutrality advocates give a good argument for that yet. I could imagine "It's easier to have one standard than 50, for each state", but we don't seem to currently have too many disparate Net Neutrality laws that need to be unified. Or "Even unenlightened rural areas deserve open internet" - but that's not convincing if the big tech cities don't even have it yet. I suppose there's, "It's easier to organize a nationwide campaign than to organize hundreds of local ones", but that makes it a matter of logistics not principle. Is that all there is to it? Are they currently forbidden by e.g. the FCC from passing local net neutrality laws?
• Balvarez 9y ago
  I'm not bothered by this at all Marsha blackburn's district is a gerrymandered mess. She supports some of the worst policies consistently. Repealing net neutrality will just allow ISP's to double dip when charging. First they charge you their customer, for the pipe, then they will charge someone like netflix for faster data, forcing netflix to pass those charges on to you. The ability of an ISP to downgrade services they don't like or that competes with them is too much. There is no discussion to have. I feel like net neutrality should be fought for at almost all cost. Marsha Blackburn doesn't care what her constituents believe...she got payed and her district is mostly safe.
• nitrogen 9y ago
  It's interesting that NN opponents seem to have more long-lasting motivation than NN advocates, judging from top level comments here vs. a year or two ago.
  • acdha 9y ago
    That comes back to money. Billion dollar companies have people on salary pushing opposition directly, astroturfing editorials and think-tank pieces, etc. and one of the big things they've been pushing are alternate definitions of what network neutrality means. A key part of this is the GOP's big shift towards ideological purity tests over the last 20 years. Party line messaging obedience is expected to a much higher degree now and since network neutrality was successfully politicized many people go along with the statements even though it's bad for them personally and violates the principles they believe in.
• ouid 9y ago
  If net neutrality goes away, the burden of prosecuting anti-competitive behavior lies with the FTC. God help us.