beerslurpy
member
So do you oppose or support a legislative solution?
Me? You know you're my main man, would do no such thing . I think I do largely see the merits of the points you're making--I think it's a matter of deciding which poison we want to swallow, a clumsy govt effort at keeping MCI/Verizon and ATT/BellSouth/SBC from getting an oversized say in what we see on the net, and just letting them duke it out the way we've largely done with other media outlets, and see what comes from it.Do you agree with me or are you ignoring me?
I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially...
They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.
It's a series of tubes.
And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
It being a potentially bad thing and "worse off than we were before 1982" aren't the same thing.
just don't think that we should be paying for the infrastructure AND the access... while at the same time getting less service.
Oh, wait... You've set up a business that depends on others supplying you with cheap access, and now you want legislation to protect you from higher broadband bills? But otherwise, you're all for the "free market"?
good bet.I would bet money that the end result of any such legislation will favor these big businesses over you or me.
#1 does not apply at the moment.
I just don't want them to build the pipes and tell me that I can't get on them because my competitor has an exclusive rights to it. or I can't view that site because it's in opposition to the political position of my provider.
Regardless, it ain't capitalism if you can't get on the playing field.
By the way... you put up a good argument.
I'm just not sure what to do, exactly. Something like Common Carrier laws, perhaps, could work, though I really want to avoid the 19th-century railroad model, at all costs! There's a lot of history behind this stuff.
The second they start regulating content, they open themselves up to a galaxy sized pile of liability for things that their customers do and say.
If their customers are in a legal grey area that turns out to be pitch black, they get held vicariously liable for the harm. Look at what happened with napster. Even plausible control over your users is enough to trigger liability.
The second they start regulating content, they open themselves up to a galaxy sized pile of liability for things that their customers do and say.
While AL Gore was taxing us to hard wire the schools, wireless broadband was in the works.
The city of Mountain View is on free wireless provided by Google, Portland is coming soon. the catch is that it's around 256k... if you want faster you pay
Even if they cant bar users from trading copyrighted material, they can shut down the servers. This would bring all their users into compliance with the law by denying them access to the service entirely.
And they cant be sued for creating the software because they didnt encourage anyone to break the law with it, just like no one encouraged anyone to pirate stuff in the 80s with high speed modems or rob people with legally produced guns. It's just another file transfer program like FTP.
If your carriers are picking and choosing which customers to give exclusive contracts to, they have a degree control over those customers. Those customers will know the likely criteria for picking one over the other and they will craft their behavior and policies to curry favor with the carriers. It is really that simple. And it is control.
It also isnt the illegality, ironically enough- remember that neither napster nor its users were charged with criminal infractions, they were hit with a civil suit by the record companies
Oh the horror. Someone quick get the government involved they are charging for premium service.