Thirty-five different teabagger groups wrote the FCC to ask them to abolish net neutrality:
These proposed regulations would permit the FCC to dictate how the networks that serve as the backbone of the Internet are managed, thereby removing incentives for further investment and opening the door for price setting or future regulatory action. It could also remove the ability for parents and ISPs to prevent inappropriate material from entering the home. This regulatory “reclassification” would effectively turn innovative private Internet services into a public utility.
Unlike these teabaggers, I dream of the day that Internet services become a public utility. And saying that the FCC would prevent parents from installing siteblocker software is getting into death panel levels of fear and stupidity.
It’s also interesting to read the analysis of the TechCrunch writer who unearthed this turd, because he doesn’t get that teabaggers oppose net neutrality mainly because Obama is for it. That’s as much as you really need to know about any teabagger emission.
Omnes Omnibus
Not as dumb as Gohmert, but dumb.
4tehlulz
>teabagger emission
This has to be a euphemism for something.
ed drone
@4tehlulz:
What’s the name of this blog? A ‘Teabagger Emission’ is the same, except with a ‘lower reputation.’
Ed
eric k
explain to me how the Tea Parties are grass roots citizens frustrated with government spending and not just fronts for standard corporate republican interests again…
Omnes Omnibus
Check out the comments.
jl
From the link:
“Net Neutrality is an affront to free speech? Did I wake up in Bizarro World?”
No, the writer woke up in ‘up is down’ world, which constitutes the majority of the Tb*gg*r universe.
From the Tb*gg*r manifesto:
“These proposed regulations would [do awful suff], removing incentives for further investment and opening the door for price setting”
That is truly ‘up is downism’, and Economics of Industrial Organization 101 fail.
I don’t think that the b*gg*rs hate neutrality because Obama says he support it. I think some corporate astroturf polcy flack, told the coporate/astrofurf liaison and communications flack, told the regional t*b*gg*r flunkies to do this. But I am not sure, it is just an educated guess.
Tonal Crow
@eric k: Because shut up, that’s why.
Omnes Omnibus
@eric k: … [crickets] … [tumbleweed] … [more crickets]. QED.
4tehlulz
@Omnes Omnibus: KEEP THE GOVERNMENT OUT OF THE INTERNET
that it builtJ sub D
Those are generally called nightmares.
A Hermit
Shouldn’t be surprised. After all these are the people who want to keep the government out of their Medicare….;-)
Redshift
Trusting the Free Market Fairies will always result in what’s best for all of us (not what’s most profitable), and government regulation of corporations is no different from government regulation of individuals, so it must be an attack on our freedom!
The thing that always gets me about these know-nothings is that they worship the free market but have no idea how it actually works.
Omnes Omnibus
@4tehlulz: Regulation inhibits freedom. Let’s have a new regulatory structure that privileges the largest corporations. Yeah, that will fix everything.
beltane
@eric k: Because prostrating oneself at the feet of the rich and powerful is the American way. I will say that the teabaggers are the ugliest lapdogs I’ve ever seen.
GambitRF
The comments are really, really depressing at the start, and then it seems like over time the initial wave of teabaggers die down and sane people start to outnumber them. I do love how many people are convinced that the telecoms always have to watch out for the consumer’s best interest because otherwise some random guy could start JoeBob’s Interwebs Emporium and immediately compete with AT&T.
jl
@GambitRF: if only the intertubes were a truck!
Tonal Crow
@GambitRF:
Ja. And pollution regulation is unnecessary because anyone who’s harmed by pollution can sue the polluters. These people live in an Ayn Rand novel.
kdaug
Agreed. The internet should be a publicly-owned utility, like roads, since we paid for it in the first place. This is a classic double-dip – we paid to build it, now we pay to use it.
QDC
So, I made the mistake of reading the comments, and some of them seem convinced that ISP monopolies are the result of local government grants. I generally don’t look to teabaggers for informed opinion on much of anything, but I’m curious about the actual economics of high speed internet.
Can someone explain to me what the barriers to entry are in the ISP space? Where I live, there are two cable companies operating, and both provide high speed internet. Did the new cable company actually lay entirely new cable?
FormerSwingVoter
Yes. Because nothing has done more harm to the American way of life than running water and electricity.
Pangloss
@jl: It is not a truck.
Pangloss
@FormerSwingVoter: Remember what happened when Enron got control of the electricity grid?
kdaug
@Pangloss: It’s a series of tubes. (Too soon?)
Omnes Omnibus
@Pangloss: More like a series of tubes.
Fax Paladin
Here’s the Code Red for me:
Why do I get the quite strong feeling that they consider “inappropriate” to include, let’s say, “Muslim”?
Redshift
@GambitRF: The small number of times I’ve gotten into conversations with libertarians, their understanding of business always seems to start with “assume that startup costs and other barriers to entry don’t exist…” I think it was Krugman who said that when someone justifies their argument with “it’s Econ 101,” you can assume they know nothing about Econ 102 and beyond.
(I actually knew a guy back in the early 90s who was a member of some Internet group called “People for the Ethical Defense of Microsoft” or some such, who sincerely believed that Microsoft couldn’t have monopoly power in any area, because if they tried to constrain or overcharge people in any way, someone else would start up a competing business and take away their customers.)
Tonal Crow
@Fax Paladin: More to the point, they consider “inappropriate” to include anything to the left of Hannity. But I suspect that an expert troll could get them cheering wildly for an al Qaeda sermon by replacing “Mohammed” and “Allah” with “Jesus” and making a few other minor adjustments.
scav
@Fax Paladin: you mean, prevent material from showing up like Apple?
(shhh. I think I caught whatever got into svensker earlier.)
Jeff Darcy
I dislike and disrespect teabaggers as much as anyone. I see the snake on the “Don’t Tread On Me” flag they like to fly, and I think it’s fitting that they have chosen a venomous primitive creature – often associated with evil – as their symbol. They might oppose network neutrality for the wrong reasons, they might misunderstand or exaggerate many of its effects . . . but exactly the same is true of may who *support* network neutrality.
NN, as codified in actual proposals before the FCC and/or Congress, often *does* conflict with bandwidth providers’ right to allocate their own resources and set their own prices for access to those resources. Some proposals would even deny them the right to do traffic shaping for the purpose of preserving baseline service for good old Mom and Dad. Without traffic shaping, a carelessly directed burst of traffic from a big content provider can take out a few routers and disrupt millions of home users’ internet experience, but the content provider doesn’t care because those aren’t *their* customers. Letting their traffic be slowed by traffic shaping, though, does affect their customers and is considered far worse. Google et al don’t want their packets slowed down, and they don’t want to pay a premium based on the load they create or the damage they can cause either, so a few million spent on pro-NN lobbying is a great deal . . . for them. Not for anybody else.
Disagree? Fine. Let’s argue about what the consequences of specific NN proposals would actually be, let’s argue about the issues of rights and public goods that are at stake, but let’s not stoop to attacking anyone who disagrees with us as shills. Some anti-NN folks are shills for bandwidth providers, and some pro-NN folks are shills for the content providers. This is Big Business against Big Business, not Big Business against The Little Guy. I thought anybody who had actually followed this debate already knew that, but apparently well-poisoning is a hobby that’s hard to give up.
Wile E. Quixote
Did you know that:
The words “race car” spelled backwards still spell “race car”?
“Eat” is the only word that, if you take the 1st letter and move it to the last, spells its past tense, “ate”?
And if you rearrange the letters in “so-called tea party Republicans,” and add just a few more letters, it spells:
“Shut the fuck up you free-loading, progress-blocking, benefit-grabbing, resource-sucking, violent, hypocritical douche bags, and deal with the fact that you nearly wrecked the country under Bush and that our president is black.”
Isn’t that interesting?
Pangloss
@kdaug: Tangled-up tubes.
QDC
@Redshift:
It’s the combination of blithe invocations of extremely naive economics in the defense of market principles, coupled with a relentless resort to the slippery slope fallacy that defines glibertarianism:
To wit: If you are dissatisfied with Comcast you should switch to one of the other providers that will rush in (always “rush in”) to compete. If we implement net neutrality regulations, then government will certainly end up restricting political speech. Also, the regulations will be implemented by pencil pushing bureaucrats with red tape bought with your tax dollars. Don’t tread on me.
Omnes Omnibus
@Wile E. Quixote: I find your views intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
J.W. Hamner
@kdaug:
I agree it should be like roads, but I favor congestion pricing there too.
My problem with “public utility” is coverage… we only have 60% broadband coverage right now… and it’s pretty substandard relative to other Western nations.
I think impoving the quality of the nationwide broadband network is more likely if telecoms can make more money off of it, than if we need 60 votes in the Senate.
I don’t particularly care if other multi-billion dollar internet companies like Amazon no longer get a free ride.
Sentient Puddle
@Redshift: I remember when I was in Econ 101 myself and learned about the idea of perfect competition. It really made me disillusioned about most of all microeconomic theory I ever learned. Why the hell do people believe in this? The required conditions very rarely hold for anything, and even inasmuch as they can hold, the market will soon shift to a state where nobody makes a profit. Which is kind of a big deal, I would think…
These sorts of problems in the model are so glaringly obvious to me that if someone tried to come up to me and try that “assume no startup costs…” bullshit, I would think that they didn’t even pass Econ 101.
Morbo
Wait, I thought the teabaggers weren’t the same old social conservatives we’ve been stuck with for 30 years?
Bubblegum Tate
Oh great–that means their blatherings will be treated as Very Serious Arguments from Very Serious People by our vaunted media.
jl
@Jeff Darcy: I do not claim to know much about the technical details internet traffic, but from my half informed layman’s perspective I have worried about the same issues you raise. I did not know the official term for managing large loads, or surge of packets that have to sent to deliver a product was ‘shaping’.
My (again, admittedly layman’s) opinion is that lack of control of ‘shaping’ would be minor inconvenience relative to no net neutrality policy at all, and it could be ameliorated thought increased bandwidth. And I think there is good evidence that ATT and other big corporations do not foresee increasing capacity of the network as their first recourse when there are capacity constraints. They see pricing and discrimination as their first recourse.
I don’t regret making fun of the teabaggers’ letter. If their letter contained something sensible, as did your comment, my response would have been different.
But their letter said what were IMVHO, were stupid things, and I understood it to oppose any net neutrality policy at all, which I think reasonably can be interpreted as being shills for one preferred set of big corporations.
Anyone please correct me if I misunderstand anything about how these tubes work.
J sub D
@kdaug:
Is the sky blue on your world?
Chad N Freude
@Pangloss: You mean like when California sold electric power to Enron who then sold it back to California at a profit?
Chad N Freude
@Fax Paladin: I really like the idea of ISPs deciding what is inappropriate material for my home. Relieves me of the responsibility.
J.W. Hamner
@Jeff Darcy:
“Exactly” to everything you said, but especially this. I don’t know why I’m supposed to think that Google, Amazon, and Apple have my best interests in mind… more than Verizon, Comcast, and AT&T.
It seems like this exact dust-up over a Google-Verizon alliance should prove that the only “principles” in play are the business interests of the multi-billion dollar corporations involved.
kdaug
@Jeff Darcy:
Fine, agreed, 100%.
Nationalize the cable/fiber-optic infrastructure.
kdaug
@J.W. Hamner:
Exactly. The companies (Google, YouTube, Amazon) who generate the most traffic pay the most taxes. But part of everyone’s taxes go to building and maintaining broadband (kinda like the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 30’s).
kdaug
@J sub D:
What is this “sky” thing?
Tonal Crow
@kdaug: It’s not dysfunctional enough to require nationalization. It just needs well-thought-out regulation. At this point, with mobile and internet services having become necessary infrastructure, it’s probably time to treat them as full-blown public utilities.
J.W. Hamner
@kdaug:
I’m not sure what you mean. An internet tax based on usage? How is that “net neutrality”? Sounds like you just want it to be the government collecting the checks.
kdaug
@Tonal Crow:
No. The regulation paradigm has failed (see: MMS). Too easy for the regulators to be bought off, either by direct payments in the form of junkets, gifts, parties with hookers and blow, etc., or by promises of jobs in the industry after the terms are over.
The US government built it. We paid for it. We own it. Nationalize it.
Tonal Crow
@kdaug: Meh. Regulation of public utilities works pretty well. Most people get electricity, gas, and landline phone service from regulated privately-owned utilities, and water and sewer service from regulated publicly-owned utilities. And the vast majority of those people have next to no problems with the services they get from these utilities.
Also the government did not “buil[d]” the Internet. It pioneered its predecessor, ARPANET, as a defense project, and certainly provided significant help along the way. But private capital built most of the internet.
kdaug
@J.W. Hamner:
What I mean is that if (big if, admittedly) we were to nationalize the national broadband infrastructure, the companies who generated the most traffic would pay a heavier price in taxes to the govenment, in precisely the same way that it costs more for a large truck to get it’s registration tags than a sub-compact.
In Texas, anyway, it’s based on the weight of the vehicle, with the assumption that the heavier the vehicle, the more damage done to the road surface over time.
Same thing with the internet infrastructure – everyone pays a flat-fee portion of their taxes for broadband installation and general maintentence, but the high-volume users (read, the companies, not the consumers) pay a graduated tax on their usage of the public utility.
kdaug
@Tonal Crow:
Ah, but private capital would not have invented (or conceived of) the internet.
Witness CompuServe, AOL, et.al. The powers that be were more than happy to keep, maintain, and gate-keep their private networks. WWW was a threat they fought against, and they lost.
They’re back.
JITC
The only good thing that would come from the demise of net neutrality is that tea party idiots won’t be able to load their favorite blogs and forums to gloat because they won’t have enough cash to buy the bandwidth. Sadly, I won’t be able to bitch about it because my favorite sites will load just as slowly.
Jeff Darcy
kdaug:
You know what? I think that’s a reasonable and rational idea. If we believe that network access has become so important in modern society, and that the private sector can’t be trusted to provide it in a reliable and non-predatory manner, then maybe that should be our response. I believe one of the northern European countries already followed that reasoning to that conclusion, and I don’t fault them for it. I for one like that idea better than regulations that merely shift the allocation of profit from one set of private entities to another without benefiting (or while actually harming) the public.
Jeff Darcy
jl
You could be right. Nobody really knows what would happen without traffic shaping, but if I were running a network I’d be reluctant to try it. The problem is not so much the bandwidth as the routers (and to a lesser degree switches). You can lay all the fiber you want, and those packets still have to travel through a router at each of many steps. The capacities of a modern core router are tremendous, but so are the capacities of a modern server cluster such as those at Google or Facebook and the ratios keep getting worse. Like lasers converging, the traffic flows from a few big senders can still melt down anything where they cross.
Traffic shaping can help in two major ways. First, by operating at the edge, traffic shaping can deflect load sooner, so each dropped packet represents greater savings. Second, it’s much cheaper and easier to add more devices at the edge, so aggregate traffic-shaping capability increases at about the same rate as aggregate load. In other words, bigger routers can absorb finite load, while traffic shaping can deflect practically infinite load for lower cost. Even in scientific computing clusters, where all kinds of capacity are more plentiful, I’ve seen traffic shaping prove beneficial.
Isn’t it their prerogative to prefer pricing over capacity increase? They are private, profit-making entities, after all, and those routers are very expensive. Anti-discrimination and anti-trust laws are already in place. As long as their pricing doesn’t violate those laws, is there really anything so wrong with their offering different tiers of service as is already common in other industries?
Such blanket opposition seems silly to me as well. I’ve tried to think of a network neutrality policy/law that would have the right effects while remaining consistent with how the net really works. I haven’t been able to, but that doesn’t mean nobody can and if somebody showed me such a policy my attitude might change. As it is, though, I don’t think laws operating at this sort of technical level will work. Most of the worst problems network neutrality is supposed to address, such as bandwidth providers being able to “pick winners” among users/applications/destinations, are IMO best addressed at the business level. Laws requiring certain router behavior are a joke; those laws should address human behavior instead.
burnspbesq
@kdaug:
“Nationalize the cable/fiber-optic infrastructure.”
Under any valuation model that I would consider credible, that’s going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars. You do remember the part of the Constitution that says the government can’t take private property for public use without paying compensation to the owner, don’t you?
burnspbesq
@kdaug:
I call. Evidence please.
burnspbesq
@kdaug:
Unknown and unknowable.
Jeez, you’re really on a roll tonight. Next thing I expect to hear you say is that Barack Obama is a lesbian.
jl
@Jeff Darcy: Thanks for the response, it was very informative. It will prompt me to look into how other countries have handled the issue. If use of the internet is becoming significant enough economically, or communications to justify it, then I think some kind of public utility model is justified. What that should be is an open question.
RareSanity
@Jeff Darcy:
I know this response is late and I hope you see it.
Your premise is incorrect. Each individual customer is allocated a certain amount of bandwidth. It doesn’t matter what each customer does with that slice of bandwidth, they can never consumer more than what the ISP has allotted to them.
If I’m paying for 6Mbps (download) internet service, it doesn’t matter if I’m using that 6M for streaming YouTube, YouPorn or pirating music, I can never consume more than that peak value of 6M. Traffic shaping would allow the ISP to then manage how I use those 6M. The problem is that ISPs over promise, over charge and under deliver their advertised bandwidth numbers. No one ever consistently gets the bandwidth number advertised by an ISP, that’s why there is always an “upto” before the speed. But, to misdirect the cause of the problem, they blame “bandwidth hogs”. But, even if I used every “bit” of my 6M connection, I am using what I am paying for, so how am I a hog? However, because of bandwidth limiting, the ISP guarantees that I could not even attempt to exceed my allotted bandwidth.
Therefore, it is impossible for any one user to “take” bandwidth from another user, the ISP’s network will not allow it.
However, with “traffic shaping”, an ISP could chose to artificially limit how much of my 6M could be used, for say, Vonage voice calls. My phone calls suck, and lo and behold, here comes the ISP to offer their own VoIP service that mysteriously works perfectly.
J.W. Hamner
The refusal of mistermix to engage speaks volumes.
Chris
We just need to make sure that the teabaggers do not catch on to the truth: Comcast wants to merge with NBC, which is associated with MSNBC (see how they both are NBC), and Comcast is fighting Net Neutrality because it wants to be able to filter foxnews.com off the Internet once the merger goes through.
What do you mean “paranoid conspiracy”? Just ask Comcast, they’ll deny it, and that will be absolute proof!
Jeff Darcy
RareSanity: you are incorrect. Users are not allocated an actual share of bandwidth; read your contract. What most users are allocated is a maximum *possible* bandwidth. Actual bandwidth is shared between users at multiple levels, with no particular guarantee that any particular user will achieve any particular rate. Those who want a guarantee of *available* bandwidth have to get a commercial contract with an SLA, which costs much more and which is what many network-neutrality proposals would preclude.
If you’re interested in actually learning about the issue instead of merely repeating the same misinformation that I can get from network neutrality’s corporate sponsors, I already blogged more extensively about this four years ago.