[Ed note: Some important context for this submission appears in this c|net article: Internet sites to protest Trump Admin's net neutrality plan
A group of activists and websites including Imgur, Mozilla, Pinterest, Reddit, GitHub, Etsy, BitTorrent and Pornhub are planning a campaign Tuesday to draw attention to an upcoming FCC vote that could radically reshape the way the internet works.
[...] Tuesday's campaign is the latest effort by activists to dissuade the FCC from repealing Obama-era rules that effectively classified internet service providers as utilities. The classification, known as Title II, forced companies like Verizon, AT&T and Comcast to treat all internet traffic equally. Last week, protesters marched outside Verizon stores around the US.
Earlier, a handful of tech trailblazers -- including Vint Cerf, a founding figure of the internet Steve Wozniak, a co-founder of Apple; and Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web -- posted an open letter on Tumblr criticizing the proposed repeal of net neutrality.
"The FCC's rushed and technically incorrect proposed order to abolish net neutrality protections without any replacement is an imminent threat to the Internet we worked so hard to create," the letter said. "It should be stopped."
Imagine if all sites defaulted to, say, dial-up or ISDN speeds unless they paid extra for full-speed internet. The large, incumbent sites on the net could easily absorb such costs. Smaller, new, or niche sites (such as SoylentNews) could not afford to pay for faster access. If this is not what you want, then contact the FCC and/or your elected representatives and let your view be heard.]
takyon writes:
Ajit Pai jokes with Verizon exec about him being a "puppet" FCC chair
On Thursday night in Washington, DC, net neutrality advocates gathered outside the annual Federal Communications Commission Chairman's Dinner to protest Chairman Ajit Pai's impending rollback of net neutrality rules.
Inside the dinner (also known as the "telecom prom") at the Washington Hilton, Pai entertained the audience with jokes about him being a puppet installed by Verizon to lead the FCC.
Pai was a Verizon associate general counsel from 2001 to 2003, and next week he will lead an FCC vote to eliminate net neutrality rules—just as Verizon and other ISPs have asked him to.
At the dinner, Pai played a satirical video that showed him planning his ascension to the FCC chairmanship with a Verizon executive in 2003. The Verizon executive was apparently Kathleen Grillo, a senior VP and deputy general counsel in the company's public policy and government affairs division.
The speech was apparently not supposed to be public, but Gizmodo obtained footage of Pai's remarks and the skit. You can watch it here.
The vote is currently scheduled for Thursday, Dec. 14. The FCC and Federal Trade Commission announced that they will work together to punish ISPs that don't keep their promises (assuming they make any).
Previously: Washington DC Braces for Net Neutrality Protests Later This Month
FCC Plans December Vote to Kill Net Neutrality Rules
FCC Will Reveal Vote to Repeal Net Neutrality This Week
Comcast Hints at Plans for Paid Fast Lanes after Net Neutrality Repeal
More than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments were Likely Faked
Related Stories
Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1937
Net neutrality advocates are planning two days of protest in Washington DC this month as they fight off plans to defang regulations meant to protect an open internet.
A coalition of activists, consumer groups and writers are calling on supporters to attend the next meeting of the Federal Communications Commission on 26 September in DC. The next day, the protest will move to Capitol Hill, where people will meet legislators to express their concerns about an FCC proposal to rewrite the rules governing the internet.
The FCC has received 22 million comments on "Restoring Internet Freedom", the regulator's proposal to dismantle net neutrality rules put in place in 2015. Opponents argue the rule changes, proposed by the FCC's Republican chairman Ajit Pai, will pave the way for a tiered internet where internet service providers (ISPs) will be free to pick and choose winners online by giving higher speeds to those they favor, or those willing or able to pay more.
The regulator has yet to process the comments, and is reviewing its proposals before a vote expected later this year.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission next month is planning a vote to kill Obama-era rules demanding fair treatment of web traffic and may decide to vacate the regulations altogether, according to people familiar with the plans.
The move would reignite a years-long debate that has seen Republicans and broadband providers seeking to eliminate the rules, while Democrats and technology companies support them. The regulations passed in 2015 bar broadband providers such as AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp. from interfering with web traffic sent by Google, Facebook Inc. and others.
[...] Pai plans to seek a vote in December, said two people who asked not to be identified because the matter hasn't been made public. As the head of a Republican majority, he is likely to win a vote on whatever he proposes.
[...] The agency declined to comment on the timing of a vote. "We don't have anything to report at this point," said Tina Pelkey, a spokeswoman for the commission.
The FCC will reveal vote to repeal net neutrality this week
The new rules are expected to be announced on Wednesday, whilst most Americans are distracted by getting home to loved ones for Thanksgiving.
This will then be followed by a vote on 10 December, which would see the 2015 rules designed to protect the internet being torn down.
[...] The important point, as we've said before, is that once the genie is out of the bottle, getting it back in is almost impossible and for our readers outside the US, don't think this doesn't affect you - everything that passes through US servers will be affected in some way and will knock on to you.
For years, Comcast has been promising that it won't violate the principles of net neutrality, regardless of whether the government imposes any net neutrality rules. That meant that Comcast wouldn't block or throttle lawful Internet traffic and that it wouldn't create fast lanes in order to collect tolls from Web companies that want priority access over the Comcast network.
This was one of the ways in which Comcast argued that the Federal Communications Commission should not reclassify broadband providers as common carriers, a designation that forces ISPs to treat customers fairly in other ways. The Title II common carrier classification that makes net neutrality rules enforceable isn't necessary because ISPs won't violate net neutrality principles anyway, Comcast and other ISPs have claimed.
But with Republican Ajit Pai now in charge at the Federal Communications Commission, Comcast's stance has changed. While the company still says it won't block or throttle Internet content, it has dropped its promise about not instituting paid prioritization.
I used natural language processing techniques to analyze net neutrality comments submitted to the FCC from April-October 2017, and the results were disturbing.
NY Attorney General Schneiderman estimated that hundreds of thousands of Americans' identities were stolen and used in spam campaigns that support repealing net neutrality. My research found at least 1.3 million fake pro-repeal comments, with suspicions about many more. In fact, the sum of fake pro-repeal comments in the proceeding may number in the millions. In this post, I will point out one particularly egregious spambot submission, make the case that there are likely many more pro-repeal spambots yet to be confirmed, and estimate the public position on net neutrality in the "organic" public submissions.
The author's key findings:
- One pro-repeal spam campaign used mail-merge to disguise 1.3 million comments as unique grassroots submissions.
- There were likely multiple other campaigns aimed at injecting what may total several million pro-repeal comments into the system.
- It's highly likely that more than 99% of the truly unique comments³ were in favor of keeping net neutrality.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by WizardFusion on Tuesday December 12 2017, @01:05PM (20 children)
Only in the US. The rest of the modern world already have net-neutrality ingrained in law and can't be changed.
It's only in the US where your system is so fucked, you might as well nuke it from orbit and start again.
"Land of the free". Don't make to laugh.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 12 2017, @01:27PM (14 children)
Going by nations that actually have net neutrality installed in law, you have a strange definition of "the modern world".
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 12 2017, @07:19PM (2 children)
You don't think the countries in the EU are "the modern world?" WizardFusion's definition of "the modern world" seems perfectly normal to me. Perhaps you should turn off Faux News before it rots what little of your brain is left.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 12 2017, @08:03PM
I think TMB has managed to effectively turn his brain into wetware, it now operates on strict function calls and static globals: GLOBAL Taxes = 'theft', etc.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 12 2017, @10:55PM
It would. There are nearly two hundred countries in the actual modern world and you're basing your definition on a dozen or so. You don't see a problem with that?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Tuesday December 12 2017, @09:20PM (10 children)
Something tells me you've never been to Europe. Because Europeans live with more modern conveniences than most US citizens.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 12 2017, @11:01PM (7 children)
Oh, we're going by "stuff and things" rather than respect for and protection of fundamental human rights? Call me old fashioned then.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Wednesday December 13 2017, @03:18AM (3 children)
The EU Conventions on Human Rights actually protect a number of rights that the Bill of Rights doesn't. For instance, member governments cannot execute anybody. Of course, that goes the other way too: I'm guessing the one you're upset about is that there's no constitutional right to carry guns, but the flip side of that is that you usually don't have any reason to in Europe because few other people are packing heat, and the Europeans generally consider the US to be a bit backwards precisely because so many are carrying guns.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday December 13 2017, @03:45AM (2 children)
I was actually thinking speech but yes, Europe has an exceedingly long history of disarming its populace for the express purpose of making them easier to subjugate.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday December 13 2017, @07:26PM (1 child)
Article 10 of the EU Convention on Human Rights specifically grants the freedom of speech and expression.
What you're probably thinking of is the German efforts to make the Nazi Party and Nazi symbolism illegal. Even in that case, you're allowed to express the viewpoint that, say, all Jews should be murdered, you simply can't call yourself a national socialist or the SA nor be waving around swastikas and wearing brown shirts with armbands and such.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday December 13 2017, @07:56PM
I was actually thinking of "hate speech" laws in particular but they're not even close to the only exception. And the EU has only even been a thing for a fairly short time. How many more exceptions will be carved out in the next fifty years, even without the inevitable ramp-up in the use of the obviously designed-to-abuse term "hate speech"? Face it, you have no free speech.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 13 2017, @09:27AM (2 children)
You are arguing against the US and for Europe here right? I've seen many USians complain about their constitution being violated and not worth much anymore, next to that you have things like Guantanamo.
You know all those weapons that are banned for war? That's usually after the US has used them and the rest of the world slaps some sense into the US about how inhumane those weapons are.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday December 13 2017, @11:51AM
That was a joke, yes? Europe not only tells its subjects what they can say but then disarms them so they have no means of redress. They've been doing it for thousands of years with no signs of ever stopping.
I think you'll find that Germany is the primary culprit there. Isn't Germany in Europe?
Even a shat-upon U.S. Constitution is better than what Europeans have. Except Poland. I'm mostly cool with Poland.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 13 2017, @10:23PM
"That's usually after the US has used them and the rest of the world slaps some sense into the US"
whines some sense into us maybe. nobody's slapping shit, motherfucker.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 13 2017, @12:53AM
I'm calling bullshit. Your dwellings are rabbit hutches compared to our housing. Your cars are dinky, rattly things too, what we would consider someone's first car.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday December 13 2017, @04:48PM
Ohh..., like having to pay to use the restroom?
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Funny) by stretch611 on Tuesday December 12 2017, @01:43PM (1 child)
tbh, we only need one nuke... It just needs to be aimed at Washington DC on the rare days that congress is in session.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday December 12 2017, @09:22PM
No, that's not what you need to destroy. Zombies can only be destroyed by attacking the head, and the head of that beast isn't in Washington DC, it's in the Hamptons and southern Connecticut.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Funny) by turgid on Tuesday December 12 2017, @01:57PM
But established corporations have a God-given right to bleed everyone else dry otherwise COMMIES!!!!!!!
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 12 2017, @02:22PM
Proof?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Gaaark on Tuesday December 12 2017, @10:40PM
Unfortunately, Canada is becoming more American every day: we are fighting for net-neutrality at this moment....
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 12 2017, @01:29PM
I think Steve Earle already said it [youtube.com] better than I could. Well not better than I could say it but better than I could sing it at least.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 12 2017, @02:35PM (6 children)
Net Neutrality is what enables a free market in online services.
Pai is nothing more than a puppet who is bought by his rent seeking masters. In other words (sadly), a Republican. Republicans only support BIG businesses that PAY them.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 12 2017, @02:39PM (4 children)
I'll add to my post that like any game, capitalism requires rules to keep people from using fraud and extortion against their competition.
The free market isn't free (gratis).
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 12 2017, @03:11PM (3 children)
i always wondered by republicans were religous. seems that its the obey authority thing that attracts conservatives?
can't have people with their own ideas breaking the power structure i guess. i mean look what happens when a religion loses its monopoly. at least people aren't so fervent about their choice of ISP. then again many people have no choice. there is just One, and that One is presently hoping for legislation to ensure that all bow down before it and legally prevent other ISPs from being options. You can't whisper a prayer to another ISP in hopes of qos improvements on your ping latency. if anything they will read your payload and mark you as bulk suitable for 'management related shaping'.
Of course, one can refuse it all.. but being an internet athiest means you miss on a whole lot more than being a religious one.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by meustrus on Tuesday December 12 2017, @04:25PM (2 children)
Republicans are religious for historical reasons having to do with the wild times in the 50s-60s. A lot of it was birth control. Liberals, led by secular academics, wanted to reduce human suffering by reducing unwanted pregnancies. They wanted to free our sexual urges from their biological shackles.
But the Christian religion especially taught a cohesive ideology that is meant to protect us from the biological consequences of sex. If those consequences go away, then the reasons behind the ideology become invalid. It threatens tradition.
It's not that Christians were especially Republican. It's that the Democrats supported non-traditional policy coming from secular liberals, essentially pushing moral conservatives away.
Any Christian preacher you now hear hawking the free market is just a shill. Jesus' teachings are basically socialist, but on a personal and interpersonal level rather than a government level. But the one thing that connects them to current Republican rhetoric is hatred of government - which in Jesus' time was far more justified since they were living under a brutal, murderous occupation.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Freeman on Tuesday December 12 2017, @06:30PM (1 child)
And yet, Jesus said to give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unto God that which is God's. It was an eloquent response to a question meant to entrap Him. In essence, He supported being a good citizen. So long as that didn't involve going against God's will. So, a Christian in the South, being part of the Underground Railroad would be what God wanted. A Christian not paying their taxes isn't. He didn't have much to say on the issue of politics, but he did have quite a bit to say about Hypocrites. Which we seem to have plenty of in Congress. Definitely not a Christian quote, but "wretched hive of scum and villainy" comes to mind when thinking of Congress.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by meustrus on Tuesday December 12 2017, @06:49PM
Actually, saying to give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's was still a revolutionary answer. Part of the context is the money changers in the temple. Jesus effectively said that your Roman currency was no good to God, asserting that a good Jew must be primarily invested in the local Jewish economy in order to pay the requisite religious tributes. It is a rejection of the Roman economy and a statement that one cannot become Roman and still keep God's law; the two must be forever separate.
As for the hypocrites, you can't really apply what Jesus said to politicians. Local politics was dominated by murderous unelected state officials like Herod and Pilate (both left a Roman historical record far more brutal than the partial stories told in the Bible), so nobody needed to be told how evil they were. No, Jesus was speaking of the religious leaders who did such things as integrate themselves and the temple (the literal house of God) with occupying Rome. Leaders who used their power over Jews to deal with the (cruel and murderous, not to mention religiously unclean) Romans for personal benefit.
A more fitting target would be evangelical leaders. Pat Robertson and his ilk may profess the Second Coming, but just like the Pharisees before them would persecute and murder the literal son of God to maintain their political power if that's what it came to. By throwing their support behind liars, thieves, philanderers, and rapists, they may as well have done so. "Just as you have done to the least of these, you have done to me."
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 12 2017, @05:28PM
No, Pai is a sex trafficker. He's arranging to provide us to be fucked by ISPs.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday December 12 2017, @04:04PM
Should the Post Office be an ISP? Delivering information reliably and fairly is, after all, supposed to be the reason they are part of the government. Private entities were not trusted with such a delicate and vital function.
AT&T was allowed to monopolize telephony for decades; the Post Office never got into that business, and see what came of that. Telegraphs weren't much competition for AT&T. Who remembers the agonizingly slow 100 baud acoustic coupling modem, because at first AT&T had the power to forbid the use of a direct connection, the only reason that abomination was ever created? Trying to keep AT&T from finding out that you have and use modems, so that they wouldn't seize on that fact as an excuse to raise your rates? You couldn't even have a long cord for your handset without AT&T adding another monthly fee for that. (In the 1970s, one of my father's business trips took him to Canada and he brought back a long cord for the handset, which wasn't available in the US. He admonished us kids to keep quiet that we had it. With it, Mom could actually move around in the kitchen while on the phone.) A second phone on the line? Better turn that ringer off so Ma Bell doesn't detect it when they send that trickle of current down the line at 1am to detect how many ringers you have, and try to charge you extra if it's more than one. You want to upgrade from pulse to touch tone so that you can dial numbers 10 times faster? Oh, such luxury, now pay for it, every month! What's that, you want a phone with a wireless handset?!? Never! A redial button? Can't have that either, buzz off. There was a lot of hate for Ma Bell over their unreasonable greed and refusal to keep up with technology. They were the Ticket Bastard of those times. It is little wonder that the government finally broke them up in 1984.
The Post Office could treat IP packets with all the same protections that snail mail has. Then private ISPs such as Comcast can compete with the Post Office same as FedEx and UPS must. I suspect they'd back away from this anti-customer crap real fast, lest they go out of business.
Meantime, it seems the only way to escape the ISP oligopoly is move. There are a few places in the US served by cooperative, member owned or public utility ISPs that survived all of the private ISPs attempts to kill them off. But that's not a practical solution.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by meustrus on Tuesday December 12 2017, @04:14PM (4 children)
There's one thing that bothers me about this whole thing because I don't have an explanation. Of course net neutrality is needed to keep the internet free and open, and to keep innovation alive.
But why do the big internet companies support it? Shouldn't Google and Netflix and the others be against net neutrality because a closed internet would cement their success by protecting them from disruptors?
Is the answer that the companies listed here - "Imgur, Mozilla, Pinterest, Reddit, GitHub, Etsy, BitTorrent and Pornhub" - are operating with much slimmer margins? That they may find their business models unsustainable if they had to pay taxes to the ISPs which corporations like Google, Netflix, Apple, Amazon, et al would have no trouble paying?
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 12 2017, @04:46PM
Because net neutrality isn't good for ALL big business, and Google, Netflix, etc would very likely be hurt by ISPs "managing" traffic.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Zinho on Tuesday December 12 2017, @05:08PM
The reason internet companies support common carrier status is that it provides a haven of protection against liability due to the content they carry. We recently carried a discussion about GoDaddy dropping a white supremacist site, [soylentnews.org] and the precarious position that puts them in - if they are going to enforce such filtering in one case, are they then liable if they fail to do so in another? This is especially true for sites with primarily community-submitted content; YouTube is under incredible burden to police its uploaded content for violation of copyright and various other laws. I'm sure they would greatly enjoy it if common carrier status could somehow be extended to the contents of their servers. Ditto for Pintrest, any BitTorrent site, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TheRaven on Tuesday December 12 2017, @05:51PM
No, because they are not protected from disruptors who collude with ISPs. For example, if a cable company decides to compete with Netflix by adding a $5/month fee to customers who use Netflix (if they want their Netflix streams to work), or a $1/month fee if they use the cable company's own streaming service, then that makes life difficult for Netflix. People might switch ISPs, but if they're in an area where the options are the cable company or an ADSL provider that doesn't offer fast enough connections to stream HD anyway, then it's a problem.
In Google's case, they're less likely to suffer from these problems in their current markets, but they're looking at future markets where they (or, rather, companies that they might buy) are the disruptor.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday December 13 2017, @04:39PM
Google is slowly backing away from their support of neutrality -- they used to be pretty strongly in favor, now they still claim to support it but don't actually put much effort behind it. They still claim to "do no evil" and they know how it would look if they started pushing against neutrality, and I suspect that's the main reason they still publicly support it. Back during the SOPA battle, Google put the information right on their homepage; but for net neutrality they haven't published anything more than a post on their corporate blog.
http://www.businessinsider.com/net-neutrality-google-facebook-amazon-fcc-ajit-pai-congress-2017-7 [businessinsider.com]
Netflix does have some reason to support it though as they're *already* a target. Part of their problem is that they're directly competing with most ISPs -- there's not many ISPs that don't offer at least TV service, and many have their own online streaming platforms as well. Both of those compete with Netflix, therefore it would be in the interests of the ISPs to degrade Netflix in order to boost their own services. When the potential "disrupters" are the ISPs themselves, you aren't going to get any advantage against them by throwing money at the ISPs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 12 2017, @04:14PM (4 children)
This is getting so ridiculous that I wouldn't be surprised if Pai is a NN "double agent", and specifically doing everything in such a half-cocked braindead irrational and illogical fashion, that the courts will be forced to smack these changes down so hard that no US politician will want to touch the NN rules for decades to come.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday December 12 2017, @08:29PM
You're not cynical enough. What we have here is the ruling class of vampires and Pai, their Renfield in the field of telecommunications, feeling like it's safe to stop even pretending to be on the side of people any longer. This is a giant Neronian "fuck you."
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Tuesday December 12 2017, @09:27PM (2 children)
Pai was until recently employed by Comcast to try to convince the FCC that net neutrality should go away. So if he's a "double agent", his real employers are morons.
As for the legality of those changes, net neutrality exists only in FCC regulation, so the courts can't say "no you can't do this". Congress could, but won't because the big push from all sides right now is
censoring the Internetcombating fake news, and eliminating net neutrality enables the government to work with private ISPs to do just that.The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 13 2017, @01:42AM
Lets look into this. What evidence do you have that tgis is the real plan?
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Wednesday December 13 2017, @03:40PM
He never worked for Comcast. He did some great work at Verizon. And now he's Making America Great Again. 🇺🇸
(Score: 5, Interesting) by requerdanos on Tuesday December 12 2017, @04:27PM (2 children)
I don't want to start a political discussion, and I have no more love for the "Democrats" than the "Republicans," but I want to share some observations about the current political climate in the United States.
The president, I believe, is being genuinely "for the people" in many ways, including this Net Neutrality push. The problem for ninety-nine percent of those people is that "the people" that Trump can actually see and relate to are megabusiness executives. This is understandable; you and I are probably also more able to relate to people who are more like ourselves.
So, since this Net Neutrality issue* is a problem for "the people" (meaning "the megabusiness executives"), the president's administration is pushing to remove the problem.
This isn't just a problem in the area of Net Neutrality, either, I don't think. Approximately ninety-nine percent of the people, including those who perhaps voted for the president in part because he was "for the people," are invisible to him. Sad!
-----
* John Oliver has three videos [wtdhpl.info] that do a superb job explaining the Net Neutrality issue.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 12 2017, @08:40PM (1 child)
There's another side here as well.
I'm very liberal, at least I always have been. But lately in my life I've been trying to start a business as a man who hasn't come from very much. And my god it is a nightmare. I used to always think republicans talking about regulations deterring entrepreneurship and competition were nonsense. I mean what's a few thousand dollars here and there for some rich guy starting a business? Well the thing is, it's not rich guys starting businesses - at least not rich in the sense I used to think of before stepping over onto the 'other side' myself. And since I've started hanging around different circles I've found this never really ends. I have no doubt that the huge number of rules and regulations for getting started with an ISP are indeed deterring smaller guys from getting started. Even if they might be a few notches higher on the food chain than you or I, they're nowhere near the level of Google. That Google level money is what it takes to compete is something that I see Trump (and Pai) as working to change. This is probably why the reactions from the telecoms have also been quite ambivalent. It seems like it could be handing them great wealth 'for free', but at the same time if Pai is correct and this does incentivize competition - this could be devastating for their margins and stranglehold on power. A few years ago I used to think the telecoms were just putting on a song and dance about their indecision regarding net neutrality. In reality, I think this explains things far more accurately. I could get into why regulation benefits them so much, but that's tangential.
Another example here. One part of Trump's tax plan will help ease the burden on "companies" with pass-through income. Again before stepping onto this side of the fence I'd have no idea what that means and again just assume - yip, another rich bro thing. In reality pass through income is what many small businesses rely on. And many of these small businesses net less than many software developers do. They're certainly not rich and often end up paying an absurd amount of tax due to things like the "self employment tax." Work for yourself? Congrats! Now you get an additional 14% tax tacked onto whatever income you manage to produce. Imagine you earn $30k one year and the government goes, "Oh hey - we'd like $4k from you now. Thanks." This is why taxes are such a heated issue!
So I do believe Trump is genuinely for the people. He's trying to help out the people not going places with things like increasing manufacturing and domestic jobs, but he's also razor sharp focused on helping make it easier for people that are trying to take things on their own and live their own little version of the American dream. It wasn't but a few years ago I was mocking the American Dream as being more accurately labeled the American Pipedream. Knowing what I know now - that's probably not fair. But it's so easy to get caught up on the cynicism and negativity of our interconnected lives today that makes everything seem like an "us versus them" game. But it's not. At least not on the scale most think. I'm certainly no megabusiness executive, and Trump's policies are directly targeted, at least in part, at helping people in my exact situation.
It's a shame life is so short. As you get to see and experience more of life, things start to look so differently. But it's somehow nothing that can ever be explained in words alone, so people are left to go through the same brutal process themselves over and over. And some never manage to escape that liminal phase.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Wednesday December 13 2017, @03:47PM
Thank you for your beautiful, beautiful support! We're doing the biggest Tax Cut this world has ever seen. But my taxes will go up tremendously. I don't mind. We're cutting the taxes on our middle class. It's going to make our economy EXPLODE. So I'll be making and KEEPING a lot more money. And so will you if you talk to your tax lawyer, if you have him set up your pass-through. MAGA! 🇺🇸
(Score: 2) by Bill Dimm on Tuesday December 12 2017, @04:27PM
This video [youtube.com] on net neutrality is pretty interesting (though the presentation style is a little strange and includes some obscenities).