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The Trump administration is suing California to quash its new net neutrality law
The Trump administration said Sunday it will sue California in an effort to block what some experts have described as the toughest net neutrality law ever enacted in the United States, setting up a high-stakes legal showdown over the future of the Internet.
California on Sunday became the largest state to adopt its own rules requiring Internet providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon to treat all web traffic equally. Golden State legislators took the step of writing their law after the Federal Communications Commission scrapped nationwide protections last year, citing the regulatory burdens they had caused for the telecom industry.
Mere hours after California's proposal became law, however, senior Justice Department officials told The Washington Post they would take the state to court on grounds that the federal government, not state leaders, has the exclusive power to regulate net neutrality. DOJ officials stressed the FCC had been granted such authority from Congress to ensure that all 50 states don't seek to write their own, potentially conflicting, rules governing the web.
Also at Ars Technica, TechDirt, and Politico.
Previously: California Gov. Signs Nation’s Strictest Net Neutrality Rules Into Law
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @04:31PM (8 children)
The only person talking about magical ideas is you; you're talking to the straw man in your own head.
The Free Market is an iterative process; it doesn't require full disclosure, angels, or even competence. This is in stark contrast to the attempts at central planning by know-nothing, paper-pushing bureaucrats in government.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Tuesday October 02 2018, @05:12PM (1 child)
The Free Market likes plagues which make people buy expensive medical services. Since medical services have some of the highest profit margin, the Free Market will push for as much plague as possible, especially as traditional physical labor is reduced, making the sick computer worker the best overall thing for the economy. Collecting bodies in the street is not a profit-making endeavor, unless they are fresh enough to sell the organs, and snowplows can be used to keep the streets open for the Healthy Class.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @07:05PM
This pretty much describes the current US healthcare system, except obesity is even more profitable that plague. Its hard to sell someone plague, but high grain diets on the other hand....
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @07:47PM (3 children)
It most certainly does. Without full disclosure, market participants cannot make informed decisions.
"In contract theory and economics, information asymmetry deals with the study of decisions in transactions where one party has more or better information than the other. This asymmetry creates an imbalance of power in transactions, which can sometimes cause the transactions to go awry, a kind of market failure in the worst case."
IOW, you don't even understand the very philosophy you so vehemently support. A trait you share with every other "Free markets will always work best" advocate. To us adults, though, you sound no different than someone yelling, "Hammers are always the best tool."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @10:33PM (1 child)
You even quoted it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 03 2018, @12:02AM
IOW, it's okay you got fucked over, the next person can use that information to avoid it.
Yeah, that's a workable system for most people.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday October 02 2018, @11:01PM
I'm not speaking of insider trading.
The problem is that there is far too much information, and that investors tend to avail themselves of the same sources of information as most of the other investors do.
This lead to the very poorly-understood mini-recession of 2015-16, that economists only recently have unraveled: among other factors, cheap oil prices lead to petroleum equipment manufacturing being shut down because it couldn't be sold cheaply enough. That led to widespread unemployment in America's heartland, which itself led to that same place being the reason Trump got elected.
I am _completely_ convinced that I can accurately predict when the stock of a certain industry will rise or fall. That same information is readily available to anyone, however the nature of the stock market does not lead investors to pay any attention at all to the particular metric I refer to.
That I haven't already made a killing in stocks is because I've been spending all my money on hookers and blow [warplife.com].
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday October 02 2018, @08:41PM (1 child)
You've obviously never purchased a used car before. The seller is typically trying to do everything in their power to hide information from you in that situation, while you are trying to gather as much information as possible to use in your own negotiations with the seller.
Nobody has suggested that supernatural forces should be involved in the economy. And nobody has suggested that the government is omnipotent or omniscient either: The government can do a lot of useful things that don't require omniscience. For instance, "Hey, these waste chemicals that these 15 companies have been dumping into the river made the water so nasty that it caught fire, and also poisoned 500,000 people. So we're going to make those 15 companies stop dumping those chemicals and instead either treat them or store them somewhere."
I'm now quite certain you've never once had to deal with anything broken where you either lacked the expertise or the ability to fix it. For instance, you've never been stuck trying to fix a problem with a proprietary software system where the only information you can get from that system is "An error has occurred. Please contact your technical support team."
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @09:47PM
Indeed. One wonders what this guy would have made of the TVA [wikipedia.org] back in the 1930s. After all, the "Free Market" will cure everything!