Vote for Net Neutrality

[ChinRey]

7 minutes ago, Pamela Galli said:

States are filing a case against them based on the fake comments that were received.

That's only to be expected. As I said, the decision is final and it will stand for months and months to come...

[Pamela Galli]

 Yes that is to be expected when the KGB runs one’s country. 

[Phil Deakins]

I have a few minutes to twiddle my thumbs before I go out, so I just thought I'd expand on this.

 

On 13/12/2017 at 3:46 PM, Prokofy Neva said:

British citizens voted the Labour Party out of office after years of its stranglehold on power because socialism wasn't working. And liberals came to power and got a bashing, then conservatives but the bottom line now is the Labour Party is in a shambles, my God, look at Jeremy Corbyn.

It's become clear that Prokofy is a very strong anti-socialist, and it seems to be that she swallows all the anti-socialist propaganda, which is undoubtedly the reason why she wrote that. She started off correctly in that the Labour party was voted out of office after years of being in power. But she was wrong that it was because socialism wasn't working. That wasn't true. At that time, the Labour party wasn't socialist. They were wearing the Conservative Party's clothes, which they did in an attempt to get elected, and it succeeded.

The next bit she wrote was also wrong. She said that the Liberals came to power, but they didn't. The Conservatives did, and they've been in office ever since. The Liberals haven't been in power since very early in the last century - roughy 100 years. Later in the last century, the Liberal party merged with a new party, the two together are called the Liberal Democrats,  but they haven't been in power either.

In the UK, we don't change the flavour of government every few years like the US changes the flavour of its president. Parties usually stay for quite a while, covering several general elections, which occur every 5 years or sometimes a little less than 5 years. It wasn't that socialism wasn't working here. We haven't had a socialist government for a very long time. We've had what amounts to Conservative A and Conservative B (Labour party) governments for decades. The changes come simply because the country fancies a change after many years of one party.

Jeremy Corbyn is a soclailist, but, as far as I know the propaganda that Prok posted about him is just that - anti-socialist propaganda that she's swallowed. I have to assume that, because she's declined to show any evidence.

 

Edited December 17, 2017 by Phil Deakins

[Klytyna]

3 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

In the UK, we don't change the flavour of government every few years like the US changes the flavour of its president

Late 70's, the Great Tyrant, Empress Thatcher the Mad, comes to power, by claiming that 1.5 million unemployed in a country of 60 million people was "too high" and promising to do something about it.

First term in office she does indeed do something abpout unemployment, she introduced reaganite un-economics, and drove unemployment up by nearly 200 %, leading to the creation of a new slang expression for the out of work, "Maggies Millions"...

Wins second term by bribing a tiny percentage of upper-middle class swing voters with unsustainable tax cuts for the well above average earners, knowing that traditional Hereditary Voting patterns will ensure the majority of votes simply won't matter.

After 10 years on the throne, HER OWN party deposed her, and entered a bitter feud to pick a new leader, finally settling on a compromise candidate most Torys didn't care enough about to hate, King John the Extremely Dull, who managed to hang on for another 8 years, before being ousted by Tony the Traitor, and his New Liar Party, a Tory-Lite organisation made up of opportunists who FINALLY figured out that actual politics didnt matter in elections, as long as you find a way to bribe the 5% of the population whose votes actually count.

The New Liar party was eventually ousted by Duke Dave and his Conservanazis, with the aid of Nick the *ick, leader of the Limp Democrats, a pseudo political party created by the amalgamation of the dying remnants of the Liberal party (tory -lite) with the Social Democrats (Tory wets hiding in the Old Labour party where Thatcher couldnt sack them).

The Con-Dem Alliance lasted just long enough to nauseate everyone and cement another over long Reign of Ecconomic Terror by snobby upper middle class types with Old School Ties and no damn clue.

Britain hasn't had a Socialist Government since 1979...

18 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

The changes come simply because the country fancies a change after many years of one party.

Actually, they happen when the other party thinks up a suitably cool way to bribe the 5% of Non Hereditary Swing voters who actually decide elections here.

Typical results of voting in a British Seat between 1979 and 2005...

Party A - 35 % Hereditary votes that ignore events, politics and reality + 5% Bribed Upper Middle Class Swing voters

Party B - 35 % Hereditary votes that ignore events, politics, and reality

Limp Democrats - 15-20% Hereditary Votes and/or Students

Mad people, Hippies and Yogic Flyers - 5-10%

...

Of course, now we have UKIP in the equation, so the 'Mad People' quota has increased noticably, in terms of votes, mainly by stealing votes from the Conservanazis.
 

[Pixieplumb Flanagan]

Hello necro  looks like we won, net neutrality is a thing again (in the US).  sorry not sorry, prok

[Fionalein]

1 minute ago, Pixieplumb Flanagan said:

Hello necro  looks like we won, net neutrality is a thing again (in the US).  sorry not sorry, prok

Hurray, congrats, do you have links? Or a hint what to look for?

Edited May 16, 2018 by Fionalein

[LittleMe Jewell]

20 minutes ago, Pixieplumb Flanagan said:

Hello necro  looks like we won, net neutrality is a thing again (in the US).  sorry not sorry, prok

Not yet. While the current effort will get past the Senate, it is expected to not get past the House.  Unless that measure gets past the Senate, House and gets Presidential signature, the FCC ruling will still take effect.  The current actions in the Senate are primarily designed to raise awareness of the issue again and try to make it a primary focus of the mid-term elections.  

Edited May 16, 2018 by LittleMe Jewell

[Kyrah Abattoir]

There is no use replying to Prokofy, he doesn't know what he is talking about and doesn't understand the implications, he just sees "socialism" and it triggers a pavlovian reaction.

Supposedly there was an action today but somehow there was no signal sent to my website to participate so I'm not sure what is going on.

[Callum Meriman]

6 hours ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

Unless that measure gets past the Senate, House and gets Presidential signature...

Can the kindergartener-in-chief even write yet?

[ChinRey]

3 hours ago, Callum Meriman said:

Can the kindergartener-in-chief even write yet?

Oh yes. With both thumbs even.

[ThorinII]

10 hours ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

Not yet. While the current effort will get past the Senate, it is expected to not get past the House.  Unless that measure gets past the Senate, House and gets Presidential signature, the FCC ruling will still take effect.  The current actions in the Senate are primarily designed to raise awareness of the issue again and try to make it a primary focus of the mid-term elections.  

According to an email I got, from FightForTheFuture.org, the Senate voted on this subject today.

Quote

We won! The U.S. Senate just voted to overturn the FCC’s repeal of net neutrality!

Even better, your work helped win the votes of TWO undecided senators who swung our way at the last minute, giving us a 52-47 margin and huge momentum. That’s game-changing.

Now the fight moves to the House of Representatives—and with the FCC scheduled to end net neutrality on June 11th unless Congress stops them, the stakes are higher than ever.

[...]

The key to winning in the Senate was mobilizing so much grassroots pressure that it was impossible for undecided senators to ignore us. And that will be even more true in the House of Representatives, where every member is already looking ahead to November and trying to figure out how to keep their seats in what is predicted to be an incredibly close election.

 

Edited May 17, 2018 by ThorinII

[Kyrah Abattoir]

They will come back at it again and again tho, it's never over until a law is written so clearly that amending it is almost impossible. The companies that became giants thanks to net neutrality now see it as a threat.

Edited May 17, 2018 by Kyrah Abattoir

[LittleMe Jewell]

On 5/17/2018 at 12:15 AM, ThorinII said:

According to an email I got, from FightForTheFuture.org, the Senate voted on this subject today.

 

Yes and the Senate passed it.  However, if the same measure does not pass the House and then get Presidential signature, then we do not have Net Neutrality back - and there is a very limited time frame for it to happen.  The likelihood of it getting through the House is still extremely low.  The mid-term elections may change things enough to resurrect it again.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

senate is not the final word,  has to pass the house, where it will likely die,  if it does not, and hits tan boys desk, it will be vetoed and than fcc still get's their way and they will get their way.  places like I live in the us are so red, that even mentioning doing what other states are doing are looked at like I just committed treason of the highest levels. 

[Prokofy Neva]

It's very good that this ill-advised socialistic proposition will be voted down, because it's not just about the issue itself, but about the manner in which the lobbyists for it go about their "advocacy" -- bullying, flashmobs, stalking, harassment of officials in person, shouting down debate, etc.

The manner in which you go about having a social movement indeed matters, because it affects the nature of the society that will come after you win. And that's why these people should not win -- they are authoritarians disguising their oppression with "Better World" rhetoric.

And that's after you get past the initial tactics of pretending this issue is "too technical" for ordinary people to understand, or that people like me "can't understand" anything about it and further nonsense. It's a technocratic nightmare, really.

BTW "Fight for the Future" is a spin-off of other groups in which Mitch Kapor, a founder and board member of Second Life, was involved. Basically, this is an interest group trying to get its way, and it has nothing to do with concerns that people who play Second Life might face more costs or slower speeds. It's about power, and who gets to run the Internet and the government.

 

[Prokofy Neva]

On 5/19/2018 at 7:50 PM, bigmoe Whitfield said:

senate is not the final word,  has to pass the house, where it will likely die,  if it does not, and hits tan boys desk, it will be vetoed and than fcc still get's their way and they will get their way.  places like I live in the us are so red, that even mentioning doing what other states are doing are looked at like I just committed treason of the highest levels. 

Gosh, you know just like...Obama got his way!

And that's why this should be decided by Congress not as a vote about a process, but a vote about the issue itself. It would still lose, but will have more legitimacy. Of course, Silicon Valley doesn't want to give Congress legitimacy because they hate democracy.

[Qie Niangao]

Net neutrality is doomed until US residents see what its repeal actually does to them. And that'll take a while because the first effects will be insidious. "Zero-rating" for example is a sugar-sweet deal for consumers -- at first. But repealling the regulation without a legislative replacement invites monopolies to block innovative content from ever competing with the incumbents' private label subscriptions. That's why the telecom/cable monopolies have been buying and merging with content producers as fast as they can, flooding congress (and state legislatures) with "lobbying" money, and successfully installing the most despicable shill ever to head the FCC.

[Callum Meriman]

On 5/17/2018 at 5:54 AM, Kyrah Abattoir said:

There is no use replying to Prokofy...he just sees "socialism" and it triggers a pavlovian reaction.

 

3 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

It's very good that this ill-advised socialistic proposition will be voted down

quod erat demonstrandum

[Kyrah Abattoir]

5 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

Net neutrality is doomed until US residents see what its repeal actually does to them. And that'll take a while because the first effects will be insidious. "Zero-rating" for example is a sugar-sweet deal for consumers -- at first. But repealling the regulation without a legislative replacement invites monopolies to block innovative content from ever competing with the incumbents' private label subscriptions. That's why the telecom/cable monopolies have been buying and merging with content producers as fast as they can, flooding congress (and state legislatures) with "lobbying" money, and successfully installing the most despicable shill ever to head the FCC.

From my perspective one of the biggest issues of net neutrality is the idea there is "data" and "data".

There shouldn't be a world where an ISP can hold their customers hostage to hurt another company. It would be a return to the telecom days where the company gets to rip off everyone:

• Hey Internet user you better pay me well if you want to access Amazon.
• Hey Amazon, you better pay me well if you want to access my Internet users.

Those companies became big because everyone was treated the same way: "You pay by the Mb/s that is transiting on my network, I don't care where it come from or where it goes."

And now that they are in a dominant position they don't want others to get the same treatment.

 

Edited May 22, 2018 by Kyrah Abattoir

[Prokofy Neva]

3 hours ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

From my perspective one of the biggest issues of net neutrality is the idea there is "data" and "data".

There shouldn't be a world where an ISP can hold their customers hostage to hurt another company. It would be a return to the telecom days where the company gets to rip off everyone:

• Hey Internet user you better pay me well if you want to access Amazon.
• Hey Amazon, you better pay me well if you want to access my Internet users.

Those companies became big because everyone was treated the same way: "You pay by the Mb/s that is transiting on my network, I don't care where it come from or where it goes."

And now that they are in a dominant position they don't want others to get the same treatment.

 

My telephone company just pushed an ad to me asking if I'd like to pay more and get faster Internet speeds. Good for them! This is America. This is free enterprise. This is normal. What's *not* normal is overregulation by the state and socialism trying to "redistribute" goods and services it didn't create. No, "you didn't build that". The companies did. They pay taxes for roads. It's not the other way around. FIRST come people who create businesses with ideas and PAY TAXES, then the government builds roads.  This is why Elizabeth Warren is an idiot. It's not like the government has to be supreme and build roads first before any one can do anything. A lot of the transportation and infrastructure in the US for example began as private companies.

So companies ALREADY do this without any law because it's NORMAL. I can choose whether to just keep my already quite fast FIOS or go even more fast.

You know, like I can choose to get a blazing fast computer rig with an expensive graphics card -- really the issue for SL "speed" -- or not, depending on my budget and means.

Nobody is "holding hostage" anyone -- they are offering various levels of speed, the way other things in life work -- if I use more electricity, I pay a higher bill. Yes, broadband is a limited resource that COSTS MONEY.

My cell phone company will slow down my connection if I use up all the paid-for bytes by the end of the month. So if I happened to use my phone to play YouTubes or whatever and use up the resources, it will top off and slow down my connection. And so what? I'm not a teenager or a child. I don't need to have my YouTube "right now" while out on the street doing errands. I can come home and look at them on my desk top. And so on.

Techies pitch all kinds of amazingly fake stories around this, like little old ladies who only go on the Internet on Sundays to download a Bible -- and suddenly, they can't, it's too slow. Ridiculous.

Telecoms have a right to exist and are a rightful and necessary part of the ecosystem -- Google is always trying to kill them off as they see them as a competitor for their MONOPOLISTIC goals. So why are we helping Google do that? Google merely wants other people to pay for the last mile on their AD BUSINESS from which they make BILLIONS. Why are we contorting legislation and other businesses to help Google? It's not like the value-add from Google is really so great, given everything -- about their products, their politics, even the way the search functions.

No, there is no reason to fall for this complete hysterical illusion of "net neutrality" just like there's no reason to fall for the illusion of Communism.

Businesses charging more is ok; it's done all the time everywhere else -- if I get more land in SL, I pay for more tier. And PS -- there isn't even any evidence that the current practices of a Verizon or Comcast in fact slow the Internet down in some meaningful way.

PS a lot of the agida around this topic comes from Google, and is very much geocentric to San Francisco, where for various reasons, most people only have the choice of Comcast. Not the rest of the country's problem. Fix it, Google without imposing a solution on all of us. We have choices in New York City and elsewhere, even in the sticks. And quite frankly IT DOESN"T MATTER. The Internet works well enough without having to cripple capitalism, suppress innovation, kill jobs etc. because Prof. Timothy Wu has a theory he wants to impose on reality. Non pasaran!

PPS as for "kneejerk reactions and socialism," the real issue here is that vast swatches of young people and Silicon Valley types in particular default to socialist and even communist ideologies without even realizing that's what they are. They haven't been educated at all to the realities of the system that in fact gave them much of what they have. It's insane.

Edited May 22, 2018 by Prokofy Neva

[Fionalein]

The big Internet giant you mentioned actually profits from a lack of net neutrality... do your homework and come back ranting after that Prokofy...

[Coffee Pancake]

I'm starting to think prok voted for Cheeto-in-chief .... on purpose.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

3 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

<Rant>

Completely brainwashed.

And you just confirmed what I said, you pay by the data packet, not based on who you are,  where that packet comes from, what it contains, where it goes or who it goes to.

The question isn't whether you get a fast or slow internet, the question is wheter your 10Mb/s internet connection will give you 10Mb/s of youtube or a measly 5Kb/s because your ISP has a paid agreement to give priority to users who go on Netflix.

Edited May 22, 2018 by Kyrah Abattoir

[Paul Hexem]

1 hour ago, CoffeeDujour said:

I'm starting to think prok voted for Cheeto-in-chief .... on purpose.

[Pixieplumb Flanagan]

If people are determined to see the current state of the US as superior to nations like Norway, Denmark, Germany and so on, well, they've chosen the pill they want.  It's sad, silly, stubborn and pathetic but they have the right to make that choice.  I'm deeply saddened by what's happened to a country so brimming with natural beauty and amazing people, but also very grateful that whatever our current situation (in the UK) we are a million times better off, and SO much safer than we would be there.  Of course there are countries facing greater challenges, but I never expected the US to nosedive quite so spectacularly and pointlessly. smh.