Anybody taking the libertarian stance on Net Neutrality?

Community Tech Policy & News
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Yeah, I’m being “Murr, free market”, but I feel Big Cable screwing people is caused by the market being regulated. Think about it, if we had a free market, it would be like that story I heard years ago about small municipal ISPs popping up that provide a good service. If we had a free market, more of that stuff would happen.

Also, providing a service that makes sense like having a last mile CDN for commonly accessed content could be considered a “fast lane” and it makes sense because the ISP has to pay for electricity and rack space is limited and what if Sony wants to compete with that last mile CDN Cache rack space?

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Yeah I more or less agree with that. Most of the issues people have with it seems to be just what happens when there’s no competition.

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Yes. People at my work are taking the libertarian stance on Net Neutrality. It would be hilarious to watch if it didn’t have actual ramifications for me.

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It feels weird to me that the libertarian stance hints at the idea that an ISP is a better regulator than an objective, and neutral, body.

I D K, seems weird to me.

Wow, how the fuck does the OP help sabotage his own damn thread to the point that it gets locked. FFS, what is wrong with you?

…and the guy replying to me below: Without into going into details, I will just mention that your whole argument is based solely on the US market and governing body. I made no indication that my sole focus was the USA. You did this in an attempt to claim that because the USA governing body is corrupt, the most plausible solution would be to hand regulatory obligations over to private business. Seems Legit.

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Part of me thinks social media is more deserving of regulation against censorship and pro-dissent, but I know that will also open up a can of worms.

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The large US ISPs don’t really want competition, it’s more profitable for them to agree to stay out of each other’s hair so they can charge you more. And the main obstacle for WISPs and municipal networks is actually the large ISPs lobbying to block them.

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Yeah, Big Cable like to have it both ways. I feel Big Cable should either want it to be the wild west or have them regulated from being a Cable Mafia.

I prefer the former and that’s easier to achieve because any local legislation can be overwritten easily. (especially with State Rights) As a collective crowd fund, lobby a local representative that has your interests at heart and I think that would be easier to do in a red state because republicans are more likely being libertarian when it comes to businesses and most liberal libertarians are like “smoke weed everyday”.

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Personally, I believe that any corporation that pulls in billions of dollars a year needs to be regulated. Money equates to power a lot of times in the U.S. and the big ISP’s already spend millions of dollars each year at the state and federal levels to push government policy in their favor. When a company or corporation that is controlled by a few has the power to sway government policy that can affect millions then they need to be put under a microscope and watched closely.

At this point, there is no free and open market in the U.S. when it comes to broadband internet service from what I can tell. Over the past ten years, I’ve lived in 7 different states from North Carolina to California including large cities like Houston, TX and San Diego, CA. Usually, I’ve had only one or two options for broadband internet service and when I did have two options they didn’t compete at the same tier of service. It will continue to be that way if the large ISP’s are continually given free rein and allowed to shape gov’t policy.

So, we either regulate them or we start programs to help jump start small ISP’s so they can compete with the entrenched establishment before they can be bullied out of the market, shutdown because of right-of-way delays or a dozen other bureaucratic tricks that the big ISP’s use to keep smaller ones from establishing a foot hold in an area. Of course, any such program would come under heavy assault as soon as it was announced. All the big ISP’s would start throwing money at every lobbyist and representative they could lay their hands on to shut it down.

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The short answer is this cannot happen because the incumbent ISPs have huge sweetheart deals on state and municipal levels.

Getting federal, state, and county/municipal governing bodies to agree to deregulate is simply not going to happen, because such a thing is way too “anti business” in the current and near future mindset of the USA. America sucks big business dick and the general public encourages it

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I think a politician would rather take money from a collective donation of citizens. There would be less of a conflict of interest. In the words of Lex Luthor “Everybody needs money to be happy, the question is “How much?””. I think the local level is the easiest to go because it’s a lot easier to have your community lobby your representative than to have every community lobby every representative.

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Objective and neutral body… like the FCC? I’m sorry but they are anything but those things. I love how people think the answer is to regulate the corrupt with an even more easily corruptible government organization. The results will not be what you are looking for.

History has also shown that industry regulations favor the large monopolies over the small guys precisely because it is the big guys who have the deep pockets to pay the lawyers to ensure compliance and to buy politicians to change the rules in their favor. The small guys who can’t afford the lawyers then hope to get bought out to the big guys. They tend to play it so safe to avoid their business model being declared in violation and put out of business anyway. Innovation dies where it should be flourishing.

All this fight really seems moot anyway since large players like Google/Youtube, Reddit, etc. are right now practicing censorship to silence people they don’t like. They are doing all those things that the fear mongers have been warning would happen with the end of Net Neutrality but I don’t hear the same levels of outcry about that.

On the other hand, the internet has operated fine without Net Neutrality regulation up through 2015 and any incidents that did happen got resolved without government interference… but by all means the sky is falling.

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Uh, municipal broadband stepping in to offer internet as a utility is exactly the opposite of the free market. It’s the people deciding to come together to create a utility for everyone to have access to. The problem isn’t too little competition. The problem is competition at all, because the internet should not be rolled out by for-profit entities who only seek to cash in on the infrastructure that’s already been rolled out without upgrading (that we already subsidize with tax dollars anyway because we already considered it a public good). A government run option would be democratically accountable to the will of the people (at least in theory, unlike private ISPs). It also wouldn’t have the same profit motive driving it into shit, because cable companies wouldn’t be the ones making money off of it. Regular people would be, so even if the government option runs a surplus then that just means there’s more money in the budget to roll out more infrastructure or put it towards other social goods. Not individuals pockets.

The solution is to nationalize the internet and make it a utility so that price gouging can’t happen and so that we can enforce equal service to all websites as a way to enforce free speech, otherwise free speech is infringed on by getting rid of NN because then only the rich get a voice. Otherwise the current model has no accountability and adding “more compeition” won’t work because eventually the competition loses and consolidates because that’s how capitalism works. It also doesn’t make sense for competitors to roll out something like the internet because then each company would have to roll out their own cables which is a massive waste of resources when one to each household will do.

People want to bitch about how corrupt the government is without seeing that the government is run by corporations and corporations are even less accountable to the public will. We need to establish movements that place the populace within reach of political discussions that gives them more control over their lives, not expect that small ISPs won’t just do the same thing big ISPs are doing now once the small ISPs become big contenders or get bought out.

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Ok, “municipal” is the wrong word, I’m thinking more among the lines of “crowd funded community pool”.

Having regulation that bans running is the exact opposite of a free market because the choice doesn’t exist. Yeah you could pay big cable or you could call up enough individuals in your community to pay for your own fibre lines. It’s all about choice.

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The government IS the crowd funded community pool. That’s literally the whole point of collecting taxes. If you just do it voluntarily outside of that, the only difference is now the money is controlled by that particular group of private individuals instead of an established corporation. i.e.: just another corporation. People can’t afford their own internet bills already anyway, where the hell are they getting this money to benevolently crowd fund a private option that they won’t see a dime from?

The community is fucking broke because we’re being robbed by corporations. If we could do this shit we would’ve done it already, but we can’t because we work all day for these corporations and they suck up the surplus wealth that we would use to do that. You’re not looking at logistics here.

EDIT: LMAO thread locked wow. No wonder political discussion is banned here. And people call us the snowflakes that can’t handle dissenting opinions…

Anyway, instead of feeding into the trolling that this thread devolved into (because we can actually have mature discussions when we try guys) I’ll end by editting my responses to various comments into this one.

Regulations would be enforced either privately or publically, whether the democratic state existed or not. Instead of mandates and protocols though to ensure quality access to the full spectrum internet a libertarian internet will be wrapped up with paywalls, ads and internet content packages (and yes, that includes local start-up ISPs who will be forced to exist in an already oligopolized ecosystem). Those will be the free market regulations: Whether you can afford access or not. Those without money will not be entitled to free speech, because in the eyes of the market, those without money have no demand for free speech or web presence. People who are lucky enough to have “cool” local ISPs will be the only benefactors while the rest of internet users suffer who have to deal with the mega-ISPs.

Also, there’s no incentive to take away bandwidth caps, even if you’re a start up. Literally none. Why would any business in their right mind cut into their own margins like that? The whole point of capitalism is to make more money, not less. Investors would take their money and run. Once they’ve established bandwidth caps, they’re not going away. Just because you’re getting together “small time” local investors doesn’t change that dynamic.

And yes. it isn’t surprising what-so-ever that a socialist would want to nationalize an industry to be run democratically and accountably. That’s kinda what we fight for. That’s how you ensure political representation, by expanding democracy to industry so that people are stakeholders too. Political decisions don’t just happen in washington. They happen when people work and try to access resources too, like the internet.

You probably got banned from those groups because going into a socialist group and posting “communism death tolls” is like posting flat-earther shit in a science subreddit and expecting people to take you seriously when all you’re doing is posting verifiably false propaganda and trolling. If your arguments are anything like your low-effort sanders meme, then you aren’t contributing to a conversation, you’re just there to patronize people.

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It depends on what the community needs. If the community funded telecom had a Netflix , Steam and PSN CDN on the last mile, they could save assloads on redundant bandwidth. You could tell them “Well, you could pay big cable and they will throttle netflix, Prime Video or you could pay us and we’ll never throttle netflix or Prime Video because we have the files here locally and everybody uses it along with unlimited Steam and PSN Downloads for less money, but the small catch is since we’re a small starup, we get limited bandwith and we have to ration it in the form of data caps, but they will increase in time after people pay for our service for a while”.

It sounds like a short term minor inconvenience in exchange for a more fair experience in the mid term, let alone the long term.

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Anarcho Capitalism and libertarian are not the same thing. This thread is dumb.

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I’m not in favour of regulation because it bans things that doesn’t violate the spirit of the regulation while violating the regulation, (like having a CDN for redundant bandwidth) or bans things that are misconstrued to violate the regulation.

It opens up a can of worms.

I don’t want to bring up a red herring, but a self-proclaimed Communist called me a nazi for sharing a Communism Death Toll Infograph and I was banned from the Social Media site where that was posted. Now there are countries with hate crime laws and if Big Government agreed with that Communist, I would be in serious trouble.

Regulation opens a can of worms.

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image

why am I not surprised

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Isn’t that an oxymoron… makes my head hurt.

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Socialism in a nutshell

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