I think that's a fair argument. There's a lot of bad out there and not everyone wants to see it on a daily basis.
That's my whole frustration with the pro-neutrality argument. Lots of people just bandwagon on to "keep the internet free" without actually looking into the policy behind the slogan. I think that the more people look into this stuff, the more they will see some problems with the argument.
For example: If people just took the US Presidential campaign slogans without actually looking into their policies, my guess is that Hillary ("I'm with Her") would have had zero support, since her slogan sorta sounds like "I want her to be in charge", where Trump's slogan ("Make America Great Again") would probably have had even more support than it did, since on the surface, it looks like "I want to make this country as good as it can be" and who isn't behind making their own country awesome?
I can see the merit behind both sides, but from where I'm standing, I just don't think regulation of the internet will help.
On one hand ? There is some truth to be found in not allowing the government to regulate anything. The biggest problem is that too much power/influence/control has been consolidated in to so few. Ripe for abuse as there are no options for the consumer. You are just changing who beats you and not actually getting away from the abuse.
Competition. Establishing at least 3 options in any given area of service. It should in theory self regulate. If your business practices are too bad for the consumer. They will just change services. Will we see that. Doubt it. At least not for long while.
It's a good solution but how do we do that? Do we break up the large cable companies a la Sherman Antitrust Act? Normally, I'm against that sort of action, but it seems like there's too much collusion right now for it to self-regulate.
We would have to change laws and maybe even replace an entire government. Then fund and support directly the infrastructure and not in manner we are doing today
I honestly know too little about the situation in the US, but I believe there's been some talk on L1 News and The Tek in the past where there seems to be issues that competitors are not even allowed to lay their own wires if they wanted... I mean, what the hell? And if that isn't allowed, why is the wire not shared... it makes no sense.
Yeah, the problem there is that the big companies (AT&T is the one that comes to mind) lobby for state and municipalities to legislate against allowing any other entities to lay cable or provide the service. Not sure how they convinced them or what their reasoning is, but it's totally bullshit.
I believe the wires are AT&T's (or whoever) wires, so it's not like you can force them to share them, but the legislation against it is very anticompetitive and I'm that if it went to the SC, it would be shot down.
Would you say we need to bring down the bourgeoisie?
/s
That's the problem with the 2 party system. It's so fucked because anyone who doesn't toe the party line (for the most part) has absolutely zero chance of winning and that causes the Republic as a whole to suffer.
Actually Pretty serious about. My ideas evolve around civil service and academia/education. With it becoming mandatory that everyone serves in government at some level and becoming a working part of their education, at some point in their life. I am not referring to building armies, either. Imagine the first gen is going to be a mess I guess I could devote more time in laying out more structure.
Eh of course you can by having legislation for it, duh o.o
It's the same in germany. Most of the wires are built by German Telecom (there are other ofc), but every company that lays wires has to share them with competitors because they don't fully pay for the wires, they are government subsidised. And I think there was talk that technically there are subsidies in the US too, but that the companies just don't give a shit.
Also lobbying in general is just bullshit, just putting that out there.
Well "technically" it's not a 2 party system, just no other parties big enough.
@Freaksmacker Yeah, I'm going to respectfully disagree, I don't want to turn this into a discussion of libertarianism vs socialism/marxism/communism (not really sure where your ideas fall specifically, just that they're left). I've always believed that a small government is a good government.
In my opinion, that's basically the antithesis to modern Democracy (as a blanket term) since it's forcing private property to be publicly accessible by anyone. If I understand the US Constitution correctly (and I'd like to think I do), doing something like that in the US would be a constitutional violation. Other companies can lay their own wires on the same street or path, but no one can force the existing company to carry the other companies (or government's) signals.
Well, a lot of this goes way back since Telecom used to be a federal agency until the early 90s. But I guess going against the constitution is kinda hard in that matter. Still should be possible for everyone to lay their wires as they please. It would be somewhat stupid opening the street 10 times for 10 carriers, but that's a different topic.
In Germany a lot of this regulation is already taking place, and it hasn't been for the worse. The "Bundesnetzagentur" (Federal Infrastructure Agency) is constantly putting out goals to which the companies have to work with them. Until year X there has to be an amount of Y% broadband access with at least Z Mbps throughput. Now of course it's not perfect, but it hasn't really gotten worse over the years. Some rural areas still have Modem I guess but... eh, even they recognize that laying Fibre for a few kilometers for a single home is kinda ... meh.
Yes. some of it falls in different classes. Greatest enemy is apathy. If they can enforce a draft, to use you for cannon fodder than my proposal should be the lesser of two evils.
I totally agree that anyone who has the money/time to lay wires should be able to do so. It's a difficult line on how many times we're going to carve up the street to put more fiber in though, I totally agree. Which is part of the problem with the US' aging infrastructure.
Not sure if you're familiar with Docsis modems (what we use in the US) but they're pretty good. I get 250MBPS down and 80 up over my cable (RJ11) modem. That should be enough for quite a while in rural areas. Even if you get 1/4 that, it's still good. Obviously Fiber is nice, but there's a cost-benefit analysis to be had for it.
Maybe I'm missing your argument on selective service for government services. You mean to say that the fighting force must be entirely voluntary but what is involuntary is bureaucracy service?
yes, and maybe even part of the educational process. Some of the ideas revolve around academia taking a more active role. I have thought about this but in very broad general terms so ?
On that note though, since the wires are partly funded by the government they are not technically private property. Additionally to that, the state also still holds a huge part of the Telecom shares (since it used to be federal). It's the same with the railroads. The rails are owned by the state even though Die Bahn is a private company and services most of them. That has 2 advantages: a) the state can say that certain rural areas have to be services even though they may or may not be financially reasonable (because else those areas would be basically cut of from the rest of the world) and b) competitors can get into the market somewhat easy, they just need to apply for usage of those rails and be approved. The servicing of the rails is done by a subsidiary of the company though.
Yes, it's what cable companies use here too. I actually have a cable company/ISP since it's cheaper then having cable and a separate ISP (100Mbps down; ~8(?) up; could have more, too lazy to call them). If I'd need the upload I'd switch ISP though (also because vodafone sucks - they bought the cable company a few years back).
To me, that sounds a bit hypocritical. If you want people to be "drafted" into bureaucracy, making military service optional degrades the security of a sovereign nation. Not many want to sign up for the military at wartime, but during times of peace, it's an option.
If academia takes a more active role, how would you see that playing out?
That makes significantly more sense. I'd say it makes it acceptable, but I can't imagine how it would play out in the US.
That's the rough part. for docsis, they support good upstream, but they throttle your upload because they think that home users are "consumers" and not "producers". For the most part, that's true, but it still bothers me since I work from home and need to use an instance in the cluster whenever I'm doing bare metal work.
yeah same here. But to be fair, the "regular user" doesn't really need a lot of upload. Of course if you're content producer it's a different story.
Totally forgot they had this free 200mbit option thing going on... but yeah, as you can see the upstream isn't the greatest (ping is not actually representative, I have way better ping in games).
Pretty serious about. My ideas evolve around civil service and academia/education. With it becoming mandatory that everyone serves in government at some level and becoming a working part of their education, at some point in their life. I am not referring to building armies, either. Imagine the first gen is going to be a mess 