Net Neutrality Is Dead and Munchkins Are Dancing In the Street

We are the FCC, sir. WE are omneepeetent!

 

Hooray! Net Neutrality is repealed. The Democrats are wailing that the Internet is doomed because businesses that provide goods and services on the Web will not be heavily regulated by the federal government for "the good of the people."

Oh, frabjous day!  The truth is Net Neutrality had nothing to do with neutrality. It had everything to do with power. It's a battle over who controls the Internet - the users and innovators who made it a powerful economic engine or the government which has been trying to figure out how to control and tax the Internet since it got out of hand thirty years ago. People argue that without NN and FCC control, the Internet will be controlled by big corporations like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Centurylink, Comcast, Xfinity and such. Trouble is, every one of those "evil" big corporations SUPPORTED Net Neutrality and spent lots of money trying to get it passed. 

 

Why do you suppose that is? Okay, I'll tell you, young Padawan. It's because the Democrat sponsored bill made the Net into a public utility and gave the FCC regulatory increased powers over who does what on the World Wide Web. Now there would be fewer folk that Big Digital needs to bribe in order to get their way. Without NN, customers decide whether or not they use these digital behemoths' products. If the product sucks, they can go elsewhere to obtain service. With NN, you just grease the right government officials with lobbying dollars and voila! You get whatever "regulation" you want.

Why not make the Internet a public utility? Won't that upset Big Digital? Not so much! AT&T was much happier when the phone system was a "public utility" regulated by the FCC. You see government regulators LOVE big corporations. The more big corporations, the less work the FCC has to do. All those independent little entrepreneurs clog the system with essential paperwork. Big corporations love government regulation because it protects their monopoly. This way the FCC can control the amount of paperwork so as to exert the maximum power with the minimum effort.

And without efficient government paperwork, government bureaucrats either don't have any work to do or they have too much. The trouble with the Internet is that the government has historically little power to censor, control and tax those who do business there. It wound up being the digital Wild West. So, of course Democrats on the FCC board wanted Net Neutrality so badly. 

 

Three reasons:

1. It gave them power to tax Internet users and to control what people say about the government.
2. It gave them an excuse to hire more people and there's nothing bureaucrats love more than more minions. It gives them the illusion of greatness to have lots of hired servants.
3. It furthers the goal of centralization of power in the hands of government.

Don't forget what condition the phone company was in before deregulation. Remember "Ernestine the telephone operator" - the old Lily Tomlin comedy routine? Lily got laughs from Ernestine's bullying of customers. I remember one line where the customer said "You can't do that!" She snorted derisively and said, "We are the phone company. We are omneepeetent!"

It was funny, but not far from truth. Within a year of deregulation, we went from $1 plus per minute long distance to Sprint's ground-breaking ten cents a minute long distance. Mobile phones went from a car trunk full of equipment, $200 a month service charges and a year's waiting list to buying cell phones in Walmart for a hundred bucks and paying $20 a month for service within the space of a couple of years.

The phone system still hasn't shed all the taxes leftover from when it was a "public utility". Do we really want to make the Internet into "Ma Bell"? Apparently at least some of us do not. Thank goodness for them.

Ding dong, Net Neutrality's dead, and this Munchkin is hap, hap, happy about it!

© 2017 by Tom King

If you like your ISP you can keep your ISP..............yup!

With the seizing of regulatory power over the Internet by the FCC yesterday, America has received the promise that the white knights over there in the guv-ment are a gonna tame the evil corporate Cable Company beasts and save us all from massive unfairness.

They will do so by turning these wild savage corporate beasts into nice tame and friendly little "public utilities". How has that EVER worked out to the advantage of consumers. Right now, if my ISP jacks around with me and gives me crappy service, I just go buy my service elsewhere. Let the free market sort it out. Haven't we learned from hard experience that the more the feds try to run things, the less competition there will is, the worse the service and the slower they become at solving problems. And innovation just disappears. When phone service was regulated about the only innovation we had during the first 80 years or so was automatic dial-up and push button phones that imitated rotary phones so we wouldn't have to do that dialing thing. Mobile phones required a limo-sized vehicle to carry them around in, huge deposits and year-long waiting lists. Long distance calls could easily run five to six dollars a minute. When the giant government regulation supported phone company was deregulated, long distance rates dropped to 10 cents a minute in practically no time, you could carry a mobile phone in your pocket and customer service reps began to treat you with respect.

The one great thing central planners hate is too many different utility companies to regulate. When we deregulated the electricity delivery system and provided consumers with choices, the prices dropped quickly. All sorts of cool electricity plans were offered that saved us all money.

Why, by all the chocolate fondue fountains in Hollywood, do we want to regulate an industry that's already mostly deregulated. This cannot end well.

If the FCC wants to help, then investigate the ISPs that do all this evil stuff to consumers that you say they do on a case by case basis. The FCC needs no authority to do that. Any citizen could conduct such an investigation if they wanted to do the detective work. If they want to make these guys quit screwing customers, let the FCC give them a consumer rating index where they can mark their scores down for jerking customers around. For those that pinch off bandwidth, let everybody know it and give them a bad consumer service rating. When my bandwidth dropped during the evenings, I complained to Centurylink DSL. Next thing I know they boosted my badwidth by more than 50%. It still runs slower when all my neighbors are streaming NCIS at the same time as me, but I'm hearing from Centurylink that the company is investing in more fiber and if we're patient, we'll like the results. I'm willing to be patient in exchange for the promise of innovation.

This whole thing is a case of the feds offering to fix a temperary problem with a permanent regulatory solution that freezes the problem in place with a half-ass solution. The issue is that there is only so much bandwidth. If the ISPs don't have some freedom to juggle customers around a bit, the whole thing is going to lock up. You can't change the amount of existing bandwidth by merely passins a regulation that says give everybody the same bandwidth. To do that the ISPs would have to cut everyone back. There's only so much bandwidth. Unlike the president, real world Internet Service Providers can't crap bandwidth unicorns on command - at least not ones that will do anybody any good. 

If you don't let the ISP's juggle customer access speeds on the fly, you're just going to have to slow everyone down so that nobody is getting what they need. You can't tell an ISP provider, just to spend more money on fixing the problem without giving them a way to pay for it. All it means is that they cut other services and reduce everyone's bandwidth so that we're all equal, even if that means we're all stuck with inadequate bandwidth.

"So, just let them be satisfied with less of those nasty evil profits," say the manic-progressives on the picket lines. Just tell that to the stockholders and watch the Dow drop like a stone. And before you diss Verizon and Comcasts stockholders, you might want to check. You might just be one of those stockholders through your retirement plan, bank savings, money market accounts or savings accounts and not even know it.

Regulation is a sledgehammer tool and everything it touches is a spike to be smacked down. The providers are working hard to fix the problem you're talking about. Let's not tie the hands of the mechanic who is trying to fix our car. Do you want a temporary fix so you can drive while the right parts are coming or shall we all just sit in the garage and wait for the parts to arrive someday if the regulators don't decide that unless every car in the garage also gets the same part, the mechanic can't fix your individual car. After all, it wouldn't be fair.to the others if you had a newer carburetor than theirs.

Many non-cable ISP's, especially the independent ones are working to make wireless so good that you'll no longer need cable. There's talk of setting a geo-syncronous satellite overhead and beaming the Internet to you that way. When I don't have to pay $3000 to have a stupid cable run 500 yards to my house, I'm going with that ISP and Comcast be damned.

The cable companies are trying to figure out how to survive in a rapidly changing market. Consumers like me are sticking up antennas and plugging them into a hub that lets me switch between on-air stations, my computer's Internet connection, Hulu, Netflix, The Classic Movies streaming site, Youtube, Amazon Prime, two DVD players, a VCR and a hard drive full of movies I downloaded from Amazon. I'm happier than a dead pig in the sunshine and the cable TV guys get nada. I dont' think Net Neutrality bothers them at all. The cable companies would rather be public utilities. Their business gets protected that way and they don't have to work as hard to keep up with technology.

The straw man argument about changing bandwidth, unfortunately, convinces people that we need to regulate. The problem is consumers think if you subscribe to 12mbs, the ISP should deliver 12mbps 24/7. The problem is that the company doesn't have enough bandwidth for that. At some times of day it drops to 4mbps for an hour or two simply because lots more people are using the Internet. I just shift my tasks that demand a lot of bandwidth to times when the net isn't so busy. I can live with that while Centurylink builds out its bandwidth in my neighborhood. We all share the Internet. You deal with some issues when you're building something that's never been done before.

I'm working on the AI voice for a device that acts as a computer companion and helps run your house. It has what they are calling an "emotion" chip. It will attempt to recognize your facial expressions and speech patterns and learn to respond to you appropriately. It's hugely complicated and it isn't happening fast enough for some of the company's investors who heard "emotion chip" and assumed we could find one in some scientist's abandoned laboratory, stick it in Data and have him weeping or telling jokes in a couple of minutes.

Our gains are made in fits and starts, just like the incredible gains we've made on the Internet. Regulating in the way the FCC wants to regulate merely stultifies development. The Internet has thrived because it is flexible. Plenty of attempts to add new capabilities or create new capacity have failed miserably and been abandoned. The current spate of heads-up display devices that pull stuff off the Internet and flash it in front of your face is a case in point. Some looks promising. Some is just intrusive and stupid. It will sort itself unless the FCC decides it needs to "fix" heads up display technology through regulation and then *poof* innovation ceases.

Let the industry sort itself out. In the meantime, at least yesterday, if we didn't like your ISP provider you could change your ISP provider.

© 2015 by Tom King

The FCC Takes Another Run At Net Neutering

Since telephone deregulation, Lily Tomlin's Ernestine
from the phone company sketch isn't funny anymore. The.
phone company now has competition and can no longer
bully customers like Ernestine did in the comedy sketches.

The FCC is at it again after they lost a lawsuit that threw out an attempts to create so-called Net Neutrality regulations. They're back with a 1930s style regulatory scheme that makes the Internet a public utility regulated heavily by the government - coming in February. Net Neutrality they're calling it. I call it Net Neutering.

In essence it gives us locked in rates, locked in connection speeds and ties the hands of Internet providers to regulate the delivery of Internet service as they see fit. If you grew up before the de-regulation of the telephone industry, you'll know what that means.

Prior to deregulation it cost you hundreds of dollars a month and a six to 12 month wait to get a car phone. After deregulation, within a few short years we were carrying cell phones in our pockets for a fraction of the cost. If you'd like an idea what pre-deregulation phone service was like (back when the government "regulated" phone service), get hold of one of Lily Tomlin's old skits about the phone company and you'll get an idea of where the Internet will be headed.  It's rather like communism - everyone equally misereable as government regulation suppresses the quality of Internet access for everyone. It's the old shared misery of communism/socialism all over again.

Think slowing down your streaming video on Hulu and Netflix to where it jerks and jumps so that Joe Blow can publish cat videos that jerk and jump in high def on his blog, just like the big guys. I can guarantee a major degradation across the board since competition between carriers will be virtually eliminated. So where will the motivation be to provide faster service? 

It's the old idea that if everyone is forced to be the same, suddenly, out of the goodness of our collective hearts, we all will strive to make everything better. It's kind of like thinking that if the boat sinks, the way to save lives is to have all the drowning people and all the swimming people clump together into one big mass and hope everyone decides to swim equally hard, only better because they have drowning people clinging to them and trying to climb on their heads.

One thing though: Internet customer service will probably be better - you'll be told they can't do anything about your probably because of government regulation in half the time it takes them to fix your problem now.

© Daily Tech

Won't it be a brave new world once the government controls the last free market on the planet? 

Yeah, right.

© 2015 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

Obama Claus is Comin' to Town

by Tom King
(with apologies to Gillespie Coots)

Oh, you better watch out

You better not rant

Better not complain

I'm telling you you can't

Cause Obama Claus is coming to town

They're making a list

Down at the FCC

They got Glenn, Rush and Hannity

Obama Claus is shutting them down

They watch you when you're surfing

The Internet at night

They know if you've been bad or good

And if your blog leans left or right!

O! You better watch out!

You better not write

Criticism of the Left

Or support for the Right

Obama Claus is coming to town

Obama Claus is coming to town

 

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