Wednesday, June 15, 2016

A Terrible Decision on Net Neutrality

Federal regulators can strictly oversee the internet to ensure that content flows freely to consumers, a court ruled Tuesday in a major victory for President Obama and other supporters of the concept known as of net neutrality.

The 2-to-1 decision from a three-judge panel at the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit came in a case about rules applying to the doctrine known as net neutrality, which prohibit broadband providers from blocking, slowing or selling faster delivery of legal content passing through their networks to Americans’ computers and mobile devices.

Net neutrality regulation is pure evil.

 -RW

4 comments:

  1. I stick by what wrote before. Net neutrality is the patch for the government creating an effective cartel condition with its regulation. Without an underlying free market a lack of net neutrality would be a disaster for many, including libertarian websites.

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  2. You always know that a regulation or policy is bad if it contains an upspin word in it like "neutrality", "care", "choice" or "freedom".

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  3. Understand that the internet was created by DARPA, and was previously called ARPAnet, in order to survive a nuclear attack. Also know that all of the domain name resolution is controlled by ICANN's policy development processes, and currently has oversight by The United States Department of Commerce. The internet is no free market. Also, TCP/IP, the protocols that support internet communication were developed to facilitate US Government communication. There were competing protocols (Novell Netware, Banyan Vines, etc.) that were pushed out of the market due to US Government contracts requiring the use of TCP/IP. TCP/IP is inherently insecure, unencrypted, and easily manipulated, and again, not a free-market solution.

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  4. TCP/IP was created by the USG and it networked some colleges, agencies and military computers. To hook up to it you had to sign a promise not to perform commercial activity over it. I know because I had an early ISP and signed. Quickly UUNET, Sprint and other companies started setting private IP networks by leasing bare lines form telco's hooking up cisco routers and networking with each other. It quickly became larger than ARPAnet and soon having a gateway to ARPAnet was irrelevant. So the USG set a standard, such as if it required use of metric in everything it used. Soon US bolts and stuff would settle on metric.

    domain resolution is not controlled by anyone. ICANN/Commerce run some nameservers called the root nameservers and you computer has a configuration file somewhere that goes to these root servers first. I could set up my own root nameserver and if the ICANN ones became oppressive people could start using mine. Using the ICANN roots is a matter of convenience and makes it one Internet instead of fractious networks. My nameservers could delegate com net and all existing TLD's over to ICANN roots and then I could add additional extensions that would resolve in addition. There is no single point of failure for the Internet. Even routing of packets is done by routers talking to each other not by a central authority.

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