- Joined
- Nov 28, 2011
- Messages
- 23,282
- Reaction score
- 18,292
- Gender
- Undisclosed
- Political Leaning
- Other
Except for legislating it, and basically having a solid grip on ICAAN, etc etc.The government funded the development of the Internet technologies, and then kept it's hands off it.
By the way -- doesn't your description of this history pretty much refute your own claims that government can't be trusted? How does it make sense to describe governments as inexorably overreaching, when they literally leave it alone for a few decades? It just doesn't compute.
It looks to me like you are confusing "treating all traffic as equal" and "government censorship of content."All of the things that you mention are ancillary to the core issue here, which is the delivery, or lack there of, of content, which really is something that the government should keep out of, and let the private sector handle it. It's been doing pretty well so far.
Net neutrality, yet again, has NOTHING to do with censoring content. The only thing it does is prevent ISPs from abusing their monopoly position. And yeah... they pretty much are monopolies, as we can see with the mergers of the already-big companies (again, Comcast and Time-Warner).
Nice theory, too bad it doesn't match reality. There isn't much choice in broadband ISPs these days, and we'll have one less choice if the Comcast-Time Warner merger goes through. Even customers in NYC, a big urban region, have few options for broadband. Most of the companies they can choose from (Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner, etc) have conflicts of interest with services like Netflix or Vonage.Well at least we can agree on that point, but between the two, let me choose between businesses I deal with. No such choice with government, so much more limited government's involvement the better, if you ask me.
Oh, and we can choose our elected officials, who in turn determine what bureaucracies like the FCC can do.
LolThe fairness doctrine was pushing onto the market what the market didn't want, distorting the market. Something that the government shouldn't be doing, but yet does far, far, far too often on nearly every front and impacting every industry.
No, the Fairness Doctrine wasn't "distorting the market." Not even close.
The spectrum is a public good. The government licenses it to specific entities, in exchange for certain requirements. The Fairness Doctrine required broadcasters to actually treat it as a public good, and spend a small amount of time discussing topics of public interest in a balanced way. Stations didn't have to devote their networks 24/7 to the topic; they could have other programs that expressed any point of view they wanted. It's no different than the CTA.
By now, we have a pretty good idea.Until we know the details of the business deal that resolved the conflict we don't know anything...
Slow Comcast speeds were costing Netflix customers - Aug. 29, 2014
The inside story of how Netflix came to pay Comcast for internet traffic – Quartz
There is no question that Comcast strangled them, and redirected their own customers to complain to Netflix, who caved.
What "eats me alive" is that it was an egregious example of a monopolist with a conflict of interest, that abused its position, a ****ty solution that favored a corporate behemoth at the expense of a nimble, newer, non-monopolistic competitor.The end result was posted in the graph earlier, the content was delivered to the end users. Problem solved, and it didn't take government involvement. Must eat you up alive that it didn't.
I don't mind at all when companies are able to sort things out on their own, without screwing the customers in the process. That isn't what happened here. Hence the problem, and the need for regulation, especially since next time the company who gets the shaft might not be able to afford the ransom.