Timeline for Net Neutrality and Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
15 events
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| Jul 12, 2017 at 11:46 | comment | added | Jerbot | @EricLloyd Oh, I'm not subtle about my toxic contempt. But don't confuse contempt for bloated, uncontrollable federal government with contempt for government in general. When a state or local government implements a bad idea, it can be fixed or abandoned. When the federal government implements a bad idea, it's a catastrophe. Bad ideas need to be able to fail, and the federal government offers the least opportunity for this, but the greatest consequences. | |
| Jul 12, 2017 at 5:58 | comment | added | Eric Lloyd | What most troubles me about this line of reasoning is the underlying subtle-yet-toxic contempt for government that has slowly pervaded the US body politic since the Reagan administration. Without some government oversight, a free market cannot be counted on to become or remain a fair market. The Net Neutrality issue is sure to prove to be a case in point. | |
| Jul 2, 2017 at 17:38 | comment | added | Jerbot | Bingo. Highfive. | |
| Jul 2, 2017 at 17:36 | comment | added | Shog9 Mod | As a philosophical point... The federal government was supposed to mainly be concerned with interstate trade. If we had more local companies working together with national interconnection providers, I'd be happy to see the feds concern themselves with the latter and stay the hell away from the former... But that ain't what we have. | |
| Jul 2, 2017 at 17:34 | comment | added | Jerbot | @Shog9 RE: local gov vs. big corp: A lot of that is due to the subsidized monopoly backing of the federal government. Though I agree with most who say we'll never know for sure. | |
| Jul 2, 2017 at 17:32 | comment | added | Jerbot | @Shog9 And I think I might disagree about the milkshake. Until it's brought down a notch, government at the federal level is out of control no matter who is in charge. People seeking power always spells aggravation for those who don't. Hence my insistence that local and state government should actually be higher authority than the federal government. Laboratory of the State and all. I think some smart men back in the day mentioned something about that. I think the Net Neutrality regs debate would be a drop in the bucket of their concerns over the FCC and what it has become. | |
| Jul 2, 2017 at 17:32 | comment | added | Shog9 Mod | There's something to that, but I kinda doubt we'll be seeing a Bell-sized break-up any time soon. In the meantime, I've watched local governments try to negotiate with national corporations, and it has generally ended with the locals getting a raw deal. All but the largest cities have vastly inferior resources to what a company like Comcast can bring to bear. | |
| Jul 2, 2017 at 17:08 | comment | added | Jerbot | My approach to most any nation-wide issue is to decentralize the solution. The problem with the FCC is that when the fix fixes it for everyone, there's no test/control comparison to see whether it even worked. There's also a suspicious correlation between the growth of our federal government, its unelected regulatory bodies, and the size of company monopolies. Put the control back closer to where the individual has effective say, and a lot of these problems get solved. Have the big government debate, but have it in smaller batches with more accountability. FCC+Net Neutrality isn't this. | |
| Jul 2, 2017 at 16:59 | comment | added | Shog9 Mod | Whether or not that's the case, that isn't what we have in practice. We don't drink a homogeneous "Gov't milkshake"; we get different people doing different things at different times. Hence the massively inconsistent approach to telecom over the past 40 years, wherein TPTB encourage competition for a while, then crush it; encourage consumer protection for a while, then call open season; encourage growth, then encourage decay. | |
| Jul 2, 2017 at 16:49 | comment | added | Jerbot | @Shog9 I don't know. As a whole, if you averaged all of our government and distilled it down, I think you'd end up with a pretty solid picture of an incompetent person gathering power around himself, while thinking he's doing the rest of humanity a big favor by doing so. | |
| Jul 2, 2017 at 16:42 | history | edited | Jerbot | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jul 2, 2017 at 16:42 | comment | added | Shog9 Mod | Be careful about anthropomorphizing "government"; leads to some really bizarre analogies. The actual history here, as you know, is bizarre enough. That said, real competition would be infinitely better than a handful of weakly-enforced rules... The danger right now is that we can quite easily end up with neither! | |
| Jul 2, 2017 at 16:41 | history | edited | Jerbot | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jul 2, 2017 at 16:27 | history | edited | Jerbot | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jul 2, 2017 at 16:00 | history | answered | Jerbot | CC BY-SA 3.0 |