The Politics Thread (PLAY NICELY!)

All the rest I can understand how you'd come to those conclusions, but it's pretty shameful for someone who works in tech not to actually understand the net neutrality bill. You very clearly haven't read it nor do you understand the contextual market and regulatory history. Atleast the tech execs who advocate NN know what's going on even though they don't say it directly.

Though I suppose it's easier to boil things into half baked, ideologically driven morality crusades. Not like such a person would ever think to respond to blatant racism with flippant political conspiracy jokes.

Or maybe he understands it fine, and is just capable of a non-partisan approach to policy evaluations?

I mean, once again. It's never you that's wrong, eh?

this is nuts! YOU're the new self-proclaimed tech expert? LISTEN to yourself talk for once.

I don't just work in the tech industry, I even worked for a local ISP for a few years.

Then you of all people should appreciate the difference between best practice concepts and actual legislative bills with their loopholes and exemptions. Did you know that under Obama's net neutrality laws, ISP's can already offer non-neutral plans?

It's not even clear that net neutrality is best practice in the interest of end users.

Yeah I know a free capitalistic "the strong eat the weak" market is better than everything
With that kind of market the local ISP I worked for would've never existed, as it was build on "the owners of all those cables are forced to allow access to them under this and that price"-legislation.

so this is why everyone else is wrong?


you have some doubts? it's not clear? isn't that like ....weak?

we better get rid of net neutrality because we never really tried without. (you know china and other dictatorships would beg to differ)

we better get rid of breathable air because we never tried without. It's not even clear that breathable air is best practice for end users.

what are you on about with this ideological drivel? Strong eat the weak.. god I could just as well go read marx. Don't you an original thought anywhere? You're like some zombie robot.

If a company wants to cut a deal with youtube and offer people specialised cheap plans that have unlimited access to youtube but nothing else and people choose to buy it, you have the balls to stand there with your high and mighty moral ego and tell consumers that they can't have that? Did you know you can already do this kind of thing under European "net neutrality" laws?

Also, your local ISP should never have existed. Go study the 2001 US telecom crash and the subsequent causal link to the dotcom crash. Bubbles form when you price fix resources below market.

Again, before you spout more of the same predictable ideological slogans, actually attempt to understand what is going on in the legislative environment over in the US or risk looking foolish.

"go and look up what people are doing in the US"

Well, they're not making up theoretical deals with YouTube that don't actually exist (closest you get is a cable deal for YouTube TV). If you're so up on being "right" and not being on an "ideological slogan", maybe offer some actual evidence for the things you speculate would be beneficial for consumers.

Not that a paid vector for a free streaming service available to anyone with an Internet connection is a good case for you, here. Just because consumers can and will buy it, does not make it fair for those consumers. Not unless you divide YouTube's worth by the worth of the Internet and offer that pricing for the package. And I doubt ISPs are charging one millionth of a regular Internet bundle for this magical special YouTube bundle

C'mon, you can be better than this with your terrible high horse attitude. At least capitalise Marx.

Yes I know that it is possible, which is a shame. Albeit a lot less worse than what the are planning in the US.
And yes I am telling customers they can't have that, because they don't want that. Unless, as Gorbels pointed our, that package is absurdly cheap. And something is telling me it won't be.
The whole problem with your completely unregulated free market utopia is that customers with little money end up being forced to "choose" stuff that is bad for them, but since there is no regulation that protects them they just have to accept a shitty deal or no deal at all.

That local ISP still exists and just made a contract to build up fiber glass connections to the rural area my parents live in. Should not have existed? My own internet is cheap and nice because of them, my parents internet will be cheap and nice because of them. And you tell me that is bad somehow? Sorry I don't agree with you

I am telling you that that ideology is used since over a decade here and works okay. If you want to call that a "slogan", well do it. Don't expect me to change my view just because you don't like how things work around here.

There certainly are genuine issues with things around here, but you've not managed to even point them out yet

If anything the main flaw I see with the German legislation is that it has caused so much competition that ISPs have caught themselves in a downward price spiral of who offers the cheapest flatrate and now realize that means finding the funds to actually put expensive new cables into the ground is hard. It also made some of the bigger ones dream of violating net neutrality, because that's a great way to extort more money from people in ways they typically can't follow as easily as a price hike on their monthly bill.

Also "understand what is going on in the legislative environment in the US"?
They're overrun by evil people whose only goal is to enrich themselves. Captured agencies everywhere, moving as much money as quickly as possible into the hands of the donor class while holding position as long as possible be using the fact that enough of the population was brainwashed into believing somehow that's all a good thing.

Seeing all of these issues summed up in one post makes me more saddened by the mess my country is...

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You mean charging large tech companies instead of end consumers in order to fund infrastructure expansion? That's the dirty secret why google, netflix, facebook, reddit, youtube etc. are all in favour of "net neutrality" while they hypocritically practice content curation within their own ecosystems. And understandably so. The tech execs know it though they won't say it.

One of the very first things the FCC went after when they passed title II reclassifications (so called "net neutrality") was a small ISP called Madison River trying to offer exactly this kind of unlimited youtube data service. You have to understand, what's being repealed isn't remotely net neutrality in philosophy. Title II reclassification is simply a source of authority, under which the FCC reserved the right to clamp down on anyone without laying out clear guidelines about what they wanted from the ISP's. "We're going to have the power to regulate you hard because now you're a common carrier, but we won't tell you exactly what we want you to do to avoid us coming after you".

If they choose to buy it, they judged the value proposition to be worth the cost. They decided to buy a cheaper product offering less to spend the money they saved on other things they value more. I do wish the government would protect me from having to buy a second hand car. Why they can't just regulate me a brand new car is beyond me.

Again, what's ironic is that European net neutrality laws already allow ISP's to offer these kind of specialised products. They already have the power to be "evil content discriminators" picking who wins and who loses, but they don't because they judge no market demand for it.

First of all, realise that in the US context you are looking at the disease of government sanctioned monopoly rights to regional ISPs. Which in a humorous twist stems from public road monopoly. Your answer to this is to suppress one of the symptoms instead of curing the disease.

Second, never did i say it should or would be an "unregulated free market utopia". Again, you very clearly don't understand the US regulatory context. What is being repealed is the re-classification of ISP's under title II from information services to common carrier, which is not net neutrality at all. Title II is a very old bill from the early 1900's when command economics was all the rage. It has a bunch of regulations and obligations written specifically for the voice telecom industry at the time, many of which make no sense today when it comes to innovation in internet network infrastructure. Which is why infrastructure investment in the US, which usually increases, has decreased by something like 5% or roughly $4 billion ever since.

On repeal, the ISP's will once again be regulated by the Federal trade commission as they always have been. Did you know some large ISP's like Comcast actually support the ideas of open internet and net neutrality? They only oppose reclassification of their business under title II, which is what is being repealed.

If they had a good value proposition and a good business model to deliver, they didn't need the price fixing regulation. Go read up on the US telecom crash which was caused by regulatory price fixing below market, propping up an artificially inflated market. The "so much competition" and "downward spiral" is exactly what happened preceding the US telecom crash. Over saturation of suppliers due to artificial incentives will always have a rubber banding effect. Industries can't cheat reality forever.

I certainly have pointed them out. For one, Germany the paragon of net neutrality ironically has a rather strange penchant for censoring the internet. Open internet indeed.

As above, line for line the same bottoming out of artificially propped up business models leading to the telecom crash, and which ironically led to consolidation within the industry into the regional US ISP monopolies/duopolies today.

Repeating again. The US ISP's are not trying to extort end consumers. They are trying to extort big corporations e.g. Netflix, pay us more to create additional bandwidth or we will throttle you. This whole thing has always been a battle between silicon valley giants and the ISP's about who foots the bill to deliver data to end consumers.

I'm happy that we can atleast agree on one thing. The regulatory agencies are captured. It makes no sense to use these same agencies to regulate the internet.

A cheap YouTube package is not the same thing as a second hand car.

You're terrible at analogies @elodea, as usual.

A second hand car is still a car. It still does everything a car does in that it gets you from A to B on a certain amount of petrol. A cheap YouTube package is not a full Internet package. It does not grant you access to the same things, and you cannot do the same things with it.

To improve on your terrible analogy (it'll still be flawed though, because analogies suck in general), it's like comparing a new car purchase to a, uh . . . bicycle? But the bicycle only works on two roads out of the whole national road network and you're not allowed on any other road.

But what do you expect from someone who equates "net neutrality" with telling Nazis to go away as "censorship" Admittedly that's only a guess, but that tends to be the main thing Germany censors compared to other countries.

It is always the end consumer who pays in the end. Where do you think companies get their money from?

Yep. As I explained the last time this came up, verizon has proven that the FCC needs Title II to enforce net neutrality. Verizon's lawyers argued "You can't force us to do this unless we're under title II" so they were put under title II. See here.
I can't find the original place where I last brought this up in this thread anymore, but it basically has me saying "Yep title II isn't all that great, but the ISPs asked for it".

False assumption, there are other reasons why people might buy something that free choice. It's called being forced to do something by whatever circumstances, it sucks, puts customers at a disadvantage vs large corporations and creates the need for regulations.

But they do. At least the Telekom does offer "Stream on" in Germany. Net neutrality defenders are not happy about it. I am not happy about it, but I don't think that that kind of product is the worst problem that can happen.

Oh I agree that the core problem the US has is that the corporate landscape has completely taken control of the government, wielding it's power to create a legal landscape that maximizes profits. A first step to cure this disease would be to stop them from doing so on at least some area. Net neutrality is such an area.

No it is the "you need this law to enforce net neutrality bill" according to Verizons lawyers. See what I wrote above.

This connection is completely arbitrary.

Did you know that Phillipp Morris has found that smoking cures cancer?

"You, the owner of the vast majority of telecom cables in Germany, have to provide access to those cables at competitive prices to your smaller competition". Not really an artifical incentive. Just fixes an imbalance caused by the fact that the Telekom originally was part of the state postal services.

Germany has a different view on how far "free speech" goes. We don't allow people to run around waving Nazi flags for one thing and we don't want to allow them to wave such flags in a digital world as well. Given our history we have good reason for this.
There are certain things and opinions that history has very very clearly proven to be completely wrong and unacceptable and I see no reason not to make lying about such historic facts a crime.

That's really just the ability to learn from past mistakes.

And who do you think will pay that increased cost for Netflix in the end?
It is the end user who needs that bandwidth anyway.

At this point it makes no sense to use the US Government for anything. Yet they're stuck with them for now.

omg whyyyyyyyy

Didn't we agree you'd at least write some explanation why a video you post is relevant? Or some opinion on it? Anything?

my opinion is pretty clear : "omg why" -> this is as bad as it could get.

the tvideo comments on Trumps recent recognisement of jerusalem as Israel's capital. trump basically placing a flaming poo bag on the middle east's dorstep and ringing the doorbell.


the other one (much rather debate that) is universal basic income. but I can't write it any bigger than the video tooltip.

I avoid writing down on politics, but since UBI goes more into economics, whatever, lets shoot.

A few premises to everything I'm about to write down;

-High-function automation is real and the bots are here for your job
-There are less jobs(as in branches) created by automation than those destroyed.
-The classic economics model of self-supplying demand applies far less when it comes to automation, due to the the lack of incentive for common workers to re-branch into a different career. (also the high cost and long time it takes)

-> The only widely recognized option for the tens of millions who are soon too loose their economic significance is freelancing (mostly remote freelancing and crowd sourcing)

In an ideal world i'd say basic human rights and freedom of information are great and all, but as you have already deduced, big-Corp "ain't got time for that sh!t". On the other hand, big-Corp has a lot of time for ensuring money flows in smoothly, and with as few middle men as possible. And than our favorite lovely ISPs kick in, demanding a piece of the cake. Hence, under fully renounced net neutrality, ISPs can turn into the prime taxing tool for big-Corp's freelancing and thus make a possible unemployment crisis even harder to take a hold of.

This means I see the future going one of two ways: Net Neutrality is brought down, and ISPs get far far greater leverage on big-Corp. (if they can also get a monopoly on the early AI management software, they become the JP Morgans of the 21st century). Alternatively, big-Corp realizes the economic danger and comes as the hero savior to lobby the bill's way out of the law set (already happening, led by giants such as Google and Facebook). Of course, this might happen at later stages, when other countries try to follow in the footsteps of the US in revoking Net Neutrality.

Take all of this with a huge grain of slat, as I am completely disregarding the power of the crowds and whatnot