Oh Goody - Net Neutrality is Back

 

Here we go again. President Trump put a stop to this nonsense when he was in the Oval Office, but now we've got Obama II and worse.. Net Neutrality, which is like communism in its equal sharing of misery, is back again and worse than before. This is the third iteration of the old net neutrality scheme. This legislation they are trying to push (and heaven help us if it gets bipartisan support), is supposed to give everyone equal access to the Internet by prohibiting those nasty big corporate Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from giving preferential treatment, special rates or reserved high bandwidth access to big websites that use a lot of bandwidth like Netflix, Hulu, or Facebook.

Sounds great. Equality for all, right?

Well, the problem is that if ISPs have to provide the same speeds for everyone and the same access, the websites we all use and love are likely to wind up running slower. Streaming services will pause in the middle of your move and often because your neighbors are sucking as much data out of the Internet as Netflix and Hulu so the providers which are using massive bandwidth to service customers won't have as much because Bob who lives down the street in his Mom's basement and spends his time surfing porn sites is sucking data and spewing it out at the same speed as Amazon and Facebook. So even if you get access to all that mythical super high speed Internet the evil corporations won't let you have, the sites you are trying to get faster access to, might very well run slower because the nasty evil corporations have to share resources, not fairly, but the same for all. 

It's no way to run Internet services effectively. Imagine freeways without HOV lanes during the morning and afternoon rush hours. It's the same thing.

The poison pill in all of this (if a less efficient Internet isn't toxic enough) is that little bit of lagniappe that gets stuck into every new law that Democrats and politicians want to pass. The new law would make the Internet a "public utility" regulated by the FCC and open the door to further free speech suppression, a way to tax our use of the Internet, and slower speed for everybody! What could go wrong with the government in charge.

Remember federally regulated public utilities? Remember the phone company back when a long distance call could cost you a dollar a minute and it took you two years, a trunk full of expensive equipment and an expensive car phone monthly payment to get a "mobile" phone? You know when there was only one choice for phone service - Ma Bell or in rare cases some podunk phone company if you happened to live in an area Bell wasn't interested in. That's the kind of stuff we're going to get if you make the net a public utility. There's a reason Facebook, Google, Youtube, Instagram and Twitter don't want to be declared a public utility. They want to be a "platform" which doesn't have the liability or government meddling as if they are declared a public utility or a publisher.

When are we going to learn our lesson?  Making the Internet a public utility on the heels of Barak Obama's attempt to turn over significant control of the Internet to an international organization, is really a bad idea. Here's why:

1. Net Neutrality is a one-size-fits-all solution. It's like mandating that only one flavor of ice cream be sold. There's no room for people to pay for extra premium flavors or for ice cream parlors to develop ice cream sundaes or banana splits or anything new or better. Forcing a one-size-fits-all solution on the Internet and giving control to the federal government, keeps companies from testing new ideas or developing new business models and products that people want. It stifles innovation.
2. Net neutrality is all about the government picking winners and losers while pretending to be just “leveling the playing field.” The government is notoriously poor at planning economies and making decisions about what works best for business. 
3. The technology behind the Internet moves too fast. The biggest trouble with the government regulating the Internet is one of speed. A contractor friend used to say that the government "...measures it with a micrometer, marks it with a piece of chalk and cuts it with an axe!"  I would add that they have to do a multi-million dollar feasibility study first. By the time the government figures out how it all ought to be done, what it will take to do it, the solution is outdated and the technology the feds based their decision on is obsolete.
4. The government can't write regulations that anticipate the way technology will change. Given it can take a bill three years to go through congress, it will likely be aimed in the wrong direction. It's take the FCC more than a decade and they still haven't passed net neutrality. Who believes the government can regulate the Wild West show that is the Internet with any success.  
5. Putting the government in charge of the web stifles competition. Since deregulation of the telephone business and electricity utilities created competition. When people could pay for cut-rate or premium services and choose from several different companies, the quality of service improved dramatically. Net Neutrality is going the opposite direction.
6. Net Neutrality is being sold as a way to protect free speech - instead it's more about regulating speech and stifling what the government considers "disinformation".. How is giving the government the power to control what is being said on the Internet going to protect free speech. It's from the government that we have to protect free speech.
7. There are already anti-trust laws. If the government would just enforce them and make sure consumers can choose among methods of service and ISPs, then customers are put in charge of who provides their Internet service. Instead of the government, consumers get to pick winners and losers among ISPs and websites. They do so with their dollars and spending time on the net.
8. 
   We don't need the the government to meddle in something that is already working better than virtually any other sector of the economy. Even Barak Obama and the Democrats couldn't kill the Internet during our extended recession.

How about let's keep the revenuers from meddling with our very successful business tool. Vote no on Net Neutrality. As Admiral Ackbar so eleoquently put it, "It's a trap!"

© 2017 by Tom King

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics*: Just Say "NO" on "Equal Access to the Internet"

© The Hacker News

They are doing a survey on SurveyMonkey asking the deceptively simple question "Should everyone have equal access to the Internet?"

Instinctively one wants to answer yes. It all sounds very liberty, equality and fraternity (the motto, by the way, of the French Revolution).

I'm sure that the survey will show Americans overwhelmingly support Internet equality. It is, after all, rigged to do so. Any day now we'll see a headline saying 85% of Americans support Internet Equality. What the survey doesn't say is that, by equal access, the proponents of the legislation behind this survey mean government control over private enterprise on the web. Under this so-called Internet Equality Act, Internet providers could be forced to block large users of bandwidth from paying extra to insure their content is unaffected during peak use time. Streaming video providers and media sites like, oh, I don't know.....Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, PJTV and other pesky conservative media could be seriously damaged through site slowdowns. In addition, denial of service attacks would be much easier to carry off.

What's even more troubliing is that if so-called "Internet Neutrality" laws go through, we would be giving to the FCC the same sort of hunting license this administration is handing the IRS through Obamacare.  We would open the door to government agencies selectively blocking or at the very least slowing down the sites of opposing opinion content providers to unwatchable levels, especially if they are at odds with the current administration, given that the administration runs agencies like the FCC and IRS.

Before you guys on the left start hopping up and down, remember this. It doesn't look too good for you in this upcoming election and if, horror of horrors, a Republican were to get into power with a Republican congress............well, what's sauce for the goose! If you like your Huffington Post, you may not be able to keep your Huffington Post if the next election goes against you.

I said, "NO" to the question on the survey because the strength of the Internet is that it is perhaps the last free enterprise zone in the world save the black market. Let private enterprise handle it. If you don't like the way your provider doles out access to its customers, the solution is simple. Get another one. If I were a leftist, I'd start my own Internet provider and provide preferential access to liberal content providers. I'd probably go broke doing that, but President Obama would probably save me with some nice grants or government contracts like he gave Solyndra. At least I'd be able to retire with a nice fat golden parachute after I went bankrupt.

*"There are lies, damned lies and statistics." - Benjamin Disraeli, British Parliamentarian

© 2014 by Tom King

Mark Zuckerberg and The End the World

What are the odds that Facebook will

bring about the Zombie Apocalypse?

(c) 2012 by Tom King

I love all the pundits that are busily predicting the end of Facebook with a note of sadistic glee in their word processors. Yeah, the IPO didn’t go as well as everyone hoped (presumably including the inimitable Mr. Zuckerberg). So what? Why should Facebook’s hiccups make so many intellectual snooty persons happy?

I think it’s all the ordinary raggedy humans on Facebook that bug them - all those ignorant masses trolling around on Facebook telling their friends all about themselves. Here we have a publishing engine that allows people to present themselves in a deceptively attractive online format, their ruminations completely unedited and uncensored. And all these untrammeled thoughts and ideas, pictures and art just flow through Facebook’s pipes like either some sort of gigantic sewer system or like the vascular system of some amazingly vast unpredictable fun beast.

Which you see it as, rather depends on whether you are a regular raggedy human being or one of the legions of self-appointed arbiters of taste and culture who think that information flowing to and from “the masses” ought to pass through them to be cleaned up and made presentable first.

One good professor argued recently that Facebook and its social media compatriots, the smart phone, laptops, tablets, podcasts and eBooks threaten to make us all narcissistic slaves to cultural group think. He joins a tiresome procession of pundits who have predicted the end of civilization as we know it if some technology or other becomes widely adopted.

The telephone was supposed to make us slaves. And for a time, it did keep us hopping to answer the thing every time it rang. So, we invented the answering machine and voice mail so we didn’t have to get up from our movie or our book or our supper to answer its jangly summons. Email was supposed to chain us to our computers answering a vast flood of trivial communications. We invented the spam filter and learned to block obnoxious communicants the way we learned to throw out junk mail without reading it.

Now Facebook has changed our concept of friendship. Not to worry. Facebook and other social media have only freed us from geographical proximity as the end/all be/all basis of friendship. Facebook and its ilk have, instead, replaced geographic proximity as the primary determiner of friendships with social proximity through electronic connections. Facebook became as an expander of human relationships. With it and the modern array of tele-communications tools available, it is more than ever the kinship of ideas, beliefs and interests that form the basis for friendships. We may have 1200 Facebook friends, but we still effectively communicate within only a relatively small circle of active friendships.

We are no more slaves to the temptation to narcissism and groupthink than we ever were. Used to be we all accepted what the newspapers told us about the world. Later it was two or three radio networks, then pretty much it was Walter Cronkite on the six o’clock news. Now, you can find both sides of any story if you don't mind cruising around the cable news networks. You can even subscribe to a plethora of newsfeeds that send the news of the day in all its conflicting forms directly to your cell phone.

All this technology has NOT led to a melding of the minds or robot people with no will of their own. Au' contraire. The explosion in communication technology, far from drawing us all together, has confirmed us in our differences. Arguably better communication with our peers has led to near anarchy in places like the Middle East and to a looming civil war between the right and left in our own country. It’s not the smart phones that will destroy us. The technology itself is benign. If the world rings down to an end it will be because we surrender ourselves to the same old impulse to greed, lust and power that’s haunted the human race since time immemorial. It wasn’t cell phones that started the Crusades, the Holocaust, The Cultural “Revolution” or the Inquisition. If anything, improvements in communications technology have dragged such nastiness out from under its rock and killed it with light.

Let’s face it. Most of us realize our hundreds of "friends" on Facebook are just a network of acquaintances with no more influence over us than mere acquaintances ever have. Our circle of true friends still remains rather small - limited almost entirely by our inability to cope with more than a finite number of close relationships anyway. It's just that some of our new "friends" live halfway round the world. Thanks to social media, we are free to choose our friends these days unbound by the constraints of geography.

I think I’ll Skype my buddy, Martin, in Poland this weekend.

How cool is that?

Tom King
Puyallup, Washington
Now you know someone you can worry about if you ever hear that Mt. Ranier has blown up.

New Round in the Browser Wars?

Okay, what's going on. My Firefox Web Browser keeps crashing. They've sent me two updates in the past 24 hours and so far every time they do it gets better for a bit and then I get an XP update from Microsoft and right afterward, Firefox starts crashing again.


It's starting to look fishy.  I can't work because the website I sell stories to won't stay on-line, I keep losing my pages I pull up for research. The only thing I've successfully posted are some comments on Facebook and a weblog about how to get rid of doggie pee pee circles on your lawn.

I always suspected Microsoft changed some features of XP and Windows 2000 to deliberately disable WordPerfect, the primary competitor with Word. I had to give up WordPerfect finally and they were the best as far as word processors went back then.

I've always defended Microsoft, but they need to make sure when they do updates that they let software makers know well enough in advance to get updates out in a timely manner. The reason I chose Windows over Mac was the vast amount of software that was available because Windows made it easy for developers to write programs for Windows.  Please don't tell me Microsoft is trying to go proprietary with it's operating system.

I really don't want to have to learn how to use Linux.

I'm just sayin'

Tom King

P.S.  In the words of Gilda Radner's SNL character, Emily Litella, "Never mind."  Finally I took down removed Comcast's ID Guardian software and the problem went away.  The folks at Mozilla finally got back with me about a week after I finally figure it out and uninstalled this bloated and unnecessary piece of software. Live and learn. I really need a new computer - something with about 10 megs of RAM...