<html><body bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><div><br></div><div>The free market is a an unattainable ideal. Like pure communism, the human element just won't support it.</div><div><br></div><div>I don't think you can separate government from economics, and both are guaranteed to be at least a bit messy.</div><div><br></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.296875); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); "><blockquote type="cite"><div><div class="gmail_quote"><div>saw Al Franken as a sponsor, thought to myself "has this guy ever had a serious thought on anything, </div></div></div></blockquote></span><div><br></div><div>-2 points, for biased assertion while trying to make a logical argument.</div><div><br></div><div>J</div><div><br>Sent from my iPod.<div>...because my other device is a BB Storm.<br><div><br><div><br></div></div></div></div><div><br>On Aug 20, 2010, at 2:15 AM, Harry Penner <<a href="mailto:hpenner@gmail.com">hpenner@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br><br></div><div></div><blockquote type="cite"><div><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 4:40 PM, Robert Nesius <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:nesius@gmail.com"><a href="mailto:nesius@gmail.com">nesius@gmail.com</a></a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
Hi Harry, <br>You assert that all regulation is designed to restrict choices. But, is that really true? Some regulation is designed to guarantee we have choices because without choice "free markets" devolve into abusive monopolies. <br>
<br></blockquote><div>Really? I can't name an actual monopoly in the last century that wasn't mandated or at least hugely facilitated by government regulation. Can you? If so, let's look at what prevented the choice. No offense, but I suspect you're taking "free markets result in monopolies or at least in a menu of nothing but bad choices" as an unexamined premise. And without that premise, doesn't the prospect of bureaucrats making more rules for you become much less attractive?<br>
<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">I did ask for examples, but I wasn't clear enough. I wanted examples related to the topic of Net Neutrality that backed your position of reticence with respect to endorsing regulation enforcing net neutrality. <br>
<div class="im">
<br><i>your reaction, for instance, was too quick to take the time to give
examples or demonstrate any in-depth knowledge of the issue, which is
exactly what you criticized me for -- rather than thinking it through.</i><br><br></div>I did criticize you, but here's the deal. You expressed an opinion and position first, but it was practically content-free. You framed your position with generalizations, not facts or chains of logic based on the issue of net neutrality at all. You were went straight to "free marketeering/anti-regulation" and didn't even suggest as to why that is relevant. I wasn't flaming your position, I was challenging you to give me something other than rhetoric to consider and think about in the context of Net Neutrality. I'm still waiting. Give me more to think about and consider and I'll think about it. <br>
<br>If you're just afraid of big-government/regulation on principle - nothing less and nothing more - okay then. I get it. <br></blockquote><div><br>Here's what happened: I saw "<a href="http://savetheinternet.com"><a href="http://savetheinternet.com">savetheinternet.com</a></a>", thought to myself "somebody's got delusions of grandeur!", followed the URL and saw Al Franken as a sponsor, thought to myself "has this guy ever had a serious thought on anything, especially on tech stuff I care about?", saw that the page gave a very slanted view of the net neutrality debate, and thought to myself "I sure hope nobody takes this seriously; just for grins maybe I'll remind my fellow TCLUGers to look before they leap on this, because they make it sound like a no-brainer but it probably isn't the right thing to do". So I posted a message reminding you all to think hard before letting the likes of these clowns redefine the traffic rules for the Internet.<br>
<br>Yes, I am very skeptical of big government, as any sane person is. And skeptical of the good most regulation does. So nothing less and not *much* more... I've spent the last 5 years auditing tech, not producing it, so I'm not claiming any special knowledge.<br>
<br>But I'm also a fellow Internet user who has worked for and with content providers (as most people on this list probably have), and I'm not comfortable with the idea of anybody telling me or my ISP what must or must not be prioritized. Would it be nice to have video prioritized? Sure, sometimes. Would it be nice not to have BitTorrent de-prioritized? Sure, sometimes. Admins of large networks make those kinds of decisions all the time. Should those decisions be made at the ISP level? Probably not. But maybe I'm in a situation where I'm administering a very large network and I *want* all kinds of crap filtered at the ISP level. Or maybe I'm just a guy at home and I don't. Why shouldn't I have a choice? Seems to me not *all* ISPs are going to do the wrong thing just because they *can*. If there are enough people who want minimal packet inspection and minimal traffic shaping on their Internet feed, there's probably going to be somebody who will continue to offer it. Maybe that forces all of us who care about that kind of stuff off Comcast and back onto DSL, using somebody like VISI or IPHouse who still cater to the tech-savvy crowd. Maybe it costs a couple bucks more per month. Or on the other hand maybe I can't get anything but )!&%! 3G at my house and Verizon is going to be one of the bad guys who do that kind of stuff and won't even give me an option to pay more for an uninspected/unshaped connection. [ASIDE: Heck, they won't even give me an unmetered connection no matter what I pay... But it was my choice to live in the sticks, and I knew the situation going in (well actually I didn't, but that was my fault), so I'm just living with the consequence of my own choice. When I first got here, I tried WildBlue satellite Internet and it REALLY stank: metered, restricted, and latency like you wouldn't believe. I chose the lesser of two evils -- a smaller cap and less reliability (3G instead of satellite), but much lower latency. That's how choice works. I realize those factors aren't the subject of the net neut debate, but I think it would have played out similarly if the issue had been content intervention instead of latency.]<br>
<br>The alternative, as I see it, is starting (or some might say continuing) ISPs down the path of TV or phone providers, where there's little or no choice. It seems to me that when you restrict providers in what they can provide, you ultimately and necessarily restrict consumers in what they can consume. In other words, by regulating the providers we regulate ourselves to some extent. Maybe that's OK with you but I'd prefer to take my chances among providers making varied choices than among providers where some bureaucrat has already made the choices for everyone.<br>
<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"><br>My understanding of Net Neutrality is that it preserves the separation of concerns between bandwidth providers and content providers. It means everyone's traffic between the content provider and my box is treated fairly, and that the service I'm consuming is not trumped by traffic from content providers with cozy deals with my bandwidth provider that I may not even be aware of. It also means that my bandwidth provider can't de-prioritize traffic from a competitor to one of their own services and force me to be vendor locked. That is to say - net neutrality preserves choice by preventing the people in control of distribution from deciding for me what my choices are going to be. <br>
<br>Which is to say, I really don't understand the free-market/anti-regulation objection to net-neutrality. Bandwidth is a commodity. Bandwidth providers are utilities. What is the basis of your objection to net-neutrality other than general paranoia and/or dogma? That is what I was looking for (and expecting) from your first post. :) <br>
<br></blockquote><div>I certainly understand your concern and agree that it's a legitimate issue. But making it illegal for ISPs to consider the content of the traffic can have costs as well. As the pipes become more congested, will VoIP still be feasible without prioritization? Sure, you can prioritize it on your own LAN and on your firewall, but if it gets treated the same as telnet once it hits the big pipes how will it sound in 2 years after every cell phone on earth is playing youtube videos of lolcats? One solution is to build bigger pipes, but will ISPs keep giving you unlimited data transfer for a flat fee if they have to double their capacity and can't tweak the traffic to increase perceived bandwidth?<br>
<br>Actions have reactions: maybe regulation solves the content discrimination problem, but it might directly cause or hasten other undesirable outcomes such as the end of (or an increase in the price of) unmetered home connections, or degrade VoIP performance (forcing people back onto POTS lines or onto cell phones where we are already seeing metered data), or make "free" Internet video conference calls suddenly expensive or impossible, or who knows what.<br>
<br>As I said in a couple other posts, I'm not saying regulation is bad per se, just that we owe it to ourselves to think hard about the consequences before we push for this or any regulation. There are a lot of smart people on the net; I've just gotta believe there must be some other way to deal with the problem.<br>
<br>And BTW I really appreciate the thoughtful tone of your message -- we may disagree, but it's nice to see we can do so peaceably (unlike most other places on the net). It's one of the reasons I love this list.<br>
<br>-Harry<br></div></div><br>
</div></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><div><span>_______________________________________________</span><br><span>TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota</span><br><span><a href="mailto:tclug-list@mn-linux.org">tclug-list@mn-linux.org</a></span><br><span><a href="http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list">http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list</a></span><br></div></blockquote></body></html>