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President Obama has come out in support of reclassifying internet service as a utility, a move that would allow the Federal Communications Commission to enforce more robust regulations and protect net neutrality. "To put these protections in place, I'm asking the FCC to reclassifying internet service under Title II of a law known as the Telecommunications Act," Obama says in a statement this morning. "In plain English, I'm asking [the FCC] to recognize that for most Americans, the internet has become an essential part of everyday communication and everyday life."

http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/10/7185933/fcc-should-reclassify-internet-as-utility-obama-says


Might be a good move if it really protects net neutrality and is not a move to enforce more regulations.

Why don't they just create new bloody regulations for new technologies? This is just like what's been happening with Bitcoin except I seem to remember the internet was created first, politicians and bureaucrats really know nothing about technology do they?

I knew there were some pitfalls, this coming from Obama. Nice chew-down, Wilikon.

I knew there were some pitfalls, this coming from Obama. Nice chew-down, Wilikon.

Why don't they just create new bloody regulations for new technologies? This is just like what's been happening with Bitcoin except I seem to remember the internet was created first, politicians and bureaucrats really know nothing about technology do they?

Part of the reason is the legal precedent. When they were trying to create regulations for the internet the first time around, they essentially said that the internet functions differently than the phone lines, which is why it's governed differently. Essentially, the problem is they did create new regulations for the new technology, and the result is it makes charging for faster service permissible, which makes possible all manner of predatory abuses now that ISPs are part of major conglomerates with wide-ranging business interests. The uproar is that people now want them to treat ISPs like phone utility companies instead of treating the internet differently, to take away the power of ISPs to discriminate internet traffic and stifle competitors.

This is a technical problem that needs a technical solution not a political one or the internet will look the same from now on until 2116...

Why don't they just create new bloody regulations for new technologies? This is just like what's been happening with Bitcoin except I seem to remember the internet was created first, politicians and bureaucrats really know nothing about technology do they?

https://i.imgur.com/q1kBvTk.png



http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/lifestyle/general_lifestyle/november_2014/61_oppose_federal_regulation_of_the_internet

That's nice, but rather irrelevant.

See: 59% of Americans Oppose NSA Program (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/10/nsa-poll_n_5572153.html)
Or: 52% of Americans feel taxes are too high (http://www.gallup.com/poll/1714/Taxes.aspx)

Being in the majority of public opinion doesn't make it good policy. Further, it doesn't even suggest they understand the issue in the slightest. If you asked these same people if they wanted Comcast or Cox to have the power to slow down internet traffic to certain websites, you would not get 61% saying yes. It's all about the framing of the question, this one used the buzz word "government regulation." They sampled 1,000 people who may or may not be knowledgeable about the topic, framed the question as one about government regulation, and got this result. Meanwhile, the FCC site has over 4,000,000 comments asking the FCC to reclassify ISPs from people who are interested enough in the situation to educate themselves on the topic and then leave a comment on the FCC website on the matter. To me, the latter anecdote is far more significant than 1000 people who may not even understand the situation and are responding to the way the question is framed.

This should be an easy one for anyone who wants a free internet. It's not a government takeover of the internet. The legislation seeks to KEEP net-neutrality. The other choice is to let ISPs decide what you will see on the net and restrict your viewing to what is most profitable for them. Is that what you want? What if your ISP does not like bitcoin? Unlike now, it would be easy to cut you off from BTC sites and block ports related to wallets. If you are savvy you may be able to get around some restrictions, but you will always be in a struggle to see what you want. Do you really think big media has your interest at heart? I do not.

I don't know where you are getting your information. Net-neutrality is exactly the opposite of what you are saying.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality

... probably while you were still shitting your diapers.  It was essentially built into the protocols at the base level.  You really have no clue what you're talking about.

Net neutrality is how the Internet functioned [for] long...

You fucking Communists and Socialists.......

So the people should trust this government now, more than ever based on its great trusted track record?

You can do whatever you please. I'm backing the side that's the most right.

This is a fight between two evils.... Govt. With regulations and corruption or corporations with profit. Both are trying to take internet in their control. That's why decentralization is best...
They only good way in my opinion is that other big internet corporation go with the net neutrality, and people start to support them. But, half of the world is ignorant of this issue...

This is a fight between two evils.... Govt. With regulations and corruption or corporations with profit. Both are trying to take internet in their control. That's why decentralization is best...
They only good way in my opinion is that other big internet corporation go with the net neutrality, and people start to support them. But, half of the world is ignorant of this issue...

You can do whatever you please. I'm backing the side that's the most right.

This is a fight between two evils.... Govt. With regulations and corruption or corporations with profit. Both are trying to take internet in their control. That's why decentralization is best...
They only good way in my opinion is that other big internet corporation go with the net neutrality, and people start to support them. But, half of the world is ignorant of this issue...

I have nothing against people with a belief they cannot prove with science either.

"My side is the most right"    :D ;D :D

When I read "0bama wants to control the World Wide Web internet", I wonder how people from belgium or South Africa feel about that change in their life  :D

when I read "Obama wants to control the World Wide Web", I wonder why people spin the situation into something it's not. The answer of course is because they're being intentionally dishonest or ignorant. The FCC rules will affect people in Belgium or South Africa in no way. But doubtful that matters much in an internet debate, because you've identified your boogeyman and all non-facts must be deployed in order to stop him!

When I read "0bama wants to control the World Wide Web internet", I wonder how people from belgium or South Africa feel about that change in their life  :D

0bama is a dud

Those who want Obama's 'net neutrality' bullshit, will end up with this:

http://www.coindesk.com/day-reckoning-dark-markets-hundreds-illicit-domains/
http://media.coindesk.com/2014/11/Silk-Road-2-b.jpg

(Also, on the very slim chance he posted anything worth reading, let me know. It's possible I was too fast with my ignore button, but based on the quality of the first post of his I read, I kinda doubt it.)

Haha, don't worry. You didn't miss anything. More socialist this, socialist that. Never mind that net neutrality has been how the internet has worked ever since it came into being. No, now that the FCC might change the classification to keep net neutrality in the wake of the court case that invalidated the original rule, all of a sudden NOW it's 'fucking socialism.' Hilarious how far up your ass you have to have your head to ignore the facts. Probably Ted Cruz posting under his internet screen name.

It is going to be hilarious to watch you and your fellow comrades here become skeletons of your former selves in the coming Gulags.

You are actually wishing and fighting for that outcome for yourself.

No little retarded grasshopper, you are fostering the takeover by corporations in cahoots with government corruption (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=854407.msg9548547#msg9548547).

...

You are apparently too retarded to understand that "net neutrality" existed as a natural result of the free market and Obama is preaching that we need government to sustain or implement (regulate) the concept, which is a fucking lie and how they will actually destroy the concept.

Those who are bitching about not having net access in their communities are either wanting some subsidy from the government to drive service to their uneconomic rural location or their community is already suffering from lack of competition due to over regulation and regulatory capture by the vested interests. The free market did not fail to provide "net neutrality". Adding more government regulation only makes it worse!

You pontificate about shit which you don't know about, because ... well let the progenitor of the term "open source" explain it to you:

Those who can’t build, talk (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3514)


Eric like myself (http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/about.html#acknowledgements) was actually active in building the internet:

• Eminent Domains: The First Time I Changed History (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2539)
• World Without Web (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3335)
• A world without “ESR” (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2433)
• Eric's GIF code in nearly every open source software in the world (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4886&cpage=1#comment-397822). He reminisced about it (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4304).
• He also did work on libpng that nearly every open source software uses (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=285)
• Android development pulls hot chicks. Who knew? (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3554&cpage=1#comment-316633)
• Emacs git conversion is done (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6524) at one month from his 57th birthday.
• An Open Letter to Chris Dodd (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4155)
  
  
  Quote from: Eric Raymond
  I’m talking about the actual engineers who built the Internet and keep it running, who write the software you rely on every day of your life in the 21st century.
  
  I’m one of those engineers – you rely on my code every time you use a browser or a smartphone or a game console. I’m not exactly a leader among them as you would understand the term, because we don’t have those and don’t want them. But I am a well-known philosopher/elder of the tribe (I’ll name two others later in this letter), and also one of our few public spokespersons. In the late 1990s I helped found the open-source software movement.

I don't think very many people really understand what net neutrality means nor the potential consequences of imposing net neutrality rules on ISPs.

IMO this is one example as to when it is good to have lobbyists that can educate the public as to what the effect of net neutrality are from both points of view

Net neutrality: what’s a libertarian to do? (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=617)
Posted on 2008-11-13 by Eric Raymond   

One of my commenters asked, rather plaintively:


Your confusion is entirely reasonable. I’ve hung out with network-neutrality activists and tried to give them what I thought was useful advice. Their political fixations didn’t permit them to hear me. Here’s a summary of the issues and one libertarian’s take on them.

Here’s where it starts: the wire-line telcos want to use their control of the copper and fiber that runs to your house to double-dip, not only charging consumers for bandwidth but also hitting up large content providers (Google, Amazon, etc.) for quality-of-service fees. There’s another question that gets folded into the debate, too: under what circumstances the telcos can legitimately traffic-shape, e.g. by blocking or slowing the protocols used for p2p filesharing.

It is not clear that the regulatory regime under which the telcos operate allows them to do either thing. They haven’t tried to implement double-dipping yet, and they’re traffic-shaping by stealth and lying about it when they get caught. What they want is a political green light to do both.

Let it be clear from the outset that the telcos are putting their case for being allowed to do these things with breathtaking hypocrisy. They honk about how awful it is that regulation keeps them from setting their own terms, blithely ignoring the fact that their last-mile monopoly is entirely a creature of regulation. In effect, Theodore Vail and the old Bell System bribed the Feds to steal the last mile out from under the public’s nose between 1878 and 1920; the wireline telcos have been squatting on that unnatural monopoly ever since as if they actually had some legitimate property right to it.

But the telcos’ crimes aren’t merely historical. They have repeatedly bargained for the right to exclude competitors from their networks on the grounds that if the regulators would let them do that, they’d be able to generate enough capital to deploy broadband everywhere. That promise has been repeatedly, egregiously broken. Instead, they’ve creamed off that monopoly rent as profit or used it to cross-subsidize competition in businesses with higher rates of return. (Oh, and of course, to bribe legislators and buy regulators.)

Mistake #1 for libertarians to avoid is falling for the telcos’ “we’re pro-free market” bullshit. They’re anything but; what they really want is a politically sheltered monopoly in which they have captured the regulators and created business conditions that fetter everyone but them.

OK, so if the telcos are such villainous scum, the pro-network-neutrality activists must be the heroes of this story, right?

Unfortunately, no.

Your typical network-neutrality activist is a good-government left-liberal who is instinctively hostile to market-based approaches. These people think, rather, that if they can somehow come up with the right regulatory formula, they can jawbone the government into making the telcos play nice. They’re ideologically incapable of questioning the assumption that bandwidth is a scarce “public good” that has to be regulated. They don’t get it that complicated regulations favor the incumbent who can afford to darken the sky with lawyers, and they really don’t get it about outright regulatory capture, a game at which the telcos are past masters.

I’ve spent endless hours trying to point out to these people that their assumptions are fundamentally wrong, and that the only way to break the telco monopoly is to break the scarcity assumptions it’s based on. That the telecoms regulatorium, far from being what holds the telcos in check, is actually their instrument of control. And that the only battle that actually matters is the one to carve out enough unlicensed spectrum so we can use technologies like ad-hoc networking with UWB to end-run the whole mess until it collapses under its own weight.

They don’t get it. They refuse to get it. I’ve been on a mailing list for something called the “Open Infrastructure Alliance” that consisted of three network engineers and a couple dozen “organizers”; the engineers (even the non-libertarian engineers) all patiently trying to explain why the political attack is a non-starter, and the organizers endlessly rehashing political strategies anyway. Because, well, that’s all they know how to do.

In short, the “network neutrality” crowd is mainly composed of well-meaning fools blinded by their own statism, and consequently serving mainly as useful idiots for the telcos’ program of ever-more labyrinthine and manipulable regulation. If I were a telco executive, I’d be on my knees every night thanking my god(s) for this “opposition”. Mistake #2 for any libertarian to avoid is backing these clowns.

So, what are libertarians to do?

We can start by remembering a simple truth: The only substantive threat to the telco monopoly is bandwidth that has been removed from the reach of both the telcos and their political catspaws in the regulatorium. Keep your eye on that ball; the telcos know it’s the important one and will try to distract you from it, while the “network neutrality” crowd doesn’t know it and wastes most of its energy self-defeatingly wrestling with the telcos over how to re-slice the existing pie.

Go active whenever there’s a political debate about “unlicensed spectrum”. More of it is good. Oppose any efforts to make UWB (or any other technology that doesn’t cause destructive interference) require a license anywhere on the spectrum. If you are capable, contribute to the development of mesh networking, especially wireless mesh networking.

Oh, and buy an Android phone. As I noted in my immediately previous post, Google is our ally in this.

UPDATE: I’ve summarized the history of the Bell System’s theft of the last mile here.

Why Android matters (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=614)
Posted on 2008-11-12 by Eric Raymond

...   

I’m going to start with the relatively far future, like five or even possibly ten years out, because I’m pretty sure my projections for it are very similar to Sergei and Larry’s and that they are what is actually driving Google’s corporate strategy.

Cellphone descendants are going to eat the PC...

...

Now. You are Google. You make your money by selling ads on the most successful search engine in the world. One of your strategic imperatives is therefore this: you cannot allow anyone to operate a technological or regulatory chokepoint between you and people doing searches, otherwise they’ll stunt your earnings growth and siphon off your revenues. That’s why you ran a politico-financial hack on the Federal auction of radio spectrum to ensure a certain minimum level of openness. And that’s why you are [Google is], very quietly, the single most determined and effective advocate of network neutrality. [note Eric is referring to free market driven "net neutrality" not the political lie "net neutrality" which is actually the way to end "net neutrality"]

Now, combine these two visions and you’ll understand why Google is doing Android. Their goal is to create the business conditions that will maximize their ad revenue not just two years out but ten years out. Those business conditions are, basically, an Internet that is as friction-free, cheap, and difficult to lock down as the underlying technology can make it.

Under this strategy, Android wins in multiple ways. In the longer term, it gives Google a strong shot at defining the next generation of dominant computing platforms in such a way that nothing but customer demand will be able to control those platforms.

In the shorter term, it outflanks the Baby Bells. As web traffic shifts to Googlephones (and things like them), telco efforts to double-dip carriage charges by extracting quality-of-service fees from Google and other content providers will become both technologically more difficult and politically impossible. By depriving them of the ability to lock in customers to gated and proprietary services, Android will hammer both the wire-line and wireless telcos into being nothing but low-margin bit-haulage providers, exactly where Google wants them. (A leading indicator will be the collapse of the blatant absurdity that is the ring-tones market, doomed when anyone can hook MP3s of their choosing to phone events.)

As bad as this sounds for the telcos, Microsoft gets outflanked and screwed far worse...

...

One of the coolest things about this chain of dominoes is that Google itself doesn’t have to win or end up with control of anything for the future to play out as described. It’s not even necessary that Android itself be the eventual dominant cellphone platform. All they have to do is force the competitive conditions so that whatever does end up dominating is as open as Android is. Given that one of the largest handset makers is already being forced to open source their stack for other reasons (Nokia figured out that they can’t afford to hire enough developers to do all their device ports in-house) this outcome seems certain.

For the open-source community, it’s all good. The things Google needs to do with Android for selfish business-strategic reasons are exactly what we want, too. This isn’t an accident, because we’re both pulling in the direction of reducing the effects of market friction, transaction costs, and asymmetries of power and information. If Google didn’t exist, the open-source community would need to invent it.

Oh. Wait. We did invent them. Where do you suppose Sergei and Larry came from? Why do you suppose they’ve been running Summer of Code and hiring a noticeable fraction of the most capable open-source developers on the planet? Well, here’s a flare-lit clue: before those two guys [Sergei and Larry Page] were famous, they sent me fan mail once.

That’s why I think those two know exactly what they’re doing. And that, if it’s true that their business strategy requires them to be open source’s ally, I think I can be allowed a guess that they chose their business strategy so that would be true. “Don’t be evil”; they’re not angels, but they’re trying.

And, from where I sit? All I can say is this: Bwahahaha. The sinister master plan for world domination – it is working!

Telecoms regulation considered harmful (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=266)
Posted on 2006-02-27 by Eric Raymond   

Doc Searls asked me to put the argument for total telecoms deregulation into a nutshell, then blog it so he could point at it. Here it is.

Telecoms regulation, to the extent it was ever justified, was justified on the basis of preventing or remedying market failures — such as, in particular, lack of market incentives to provide universal coverage.

The market failures in telecoms all derive from the high fixed-capital costs of conventional wirelines. These have two major effects: (1) incentives to provide service in rural areas are weak, because the amount of time required to amortize large fixed costs makes for poor discounted ROI; and (2) in higher-density areas, the last mile of wire is a natural monopoly/oligopoly.

New technologies are directly attacking this problem. Wi-Fi, wireless mesh networks, IP over powerlines, and cheap fenceline cable dramatically lower the fixed capital costs of last-mile service. The main things holding these technologies back are regulatory barriers (including, notably, not enough spectrum allocated to WiFi and UWB).

The right answer: deregulate everything, free the new technologies to go head-to-head against the wired last mile, and let the market sort it all out.

Un-ending the Internet (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=259)
Posted on 2006-02-07 by Eric Raymond   

Recently, The Nation ran an article,
The End of the
Internet, that viewed with alarm some efforts
by telephone companies to hack their governing regulations so they can
price-discriminate. Their plans include tiered pricing so a consumer’s
monthly rate could be tied to the amount of bandwidth actually used. They
also want to be able to offer preferred fast access to on-line services
that pay for the privilege — and the flip side of that could
be shutting down services like peer-to-peer networking that big media
companies dislike.

One of my regular visitors. David McCabe, asked me what a libertarian
would do about this. A fair question, representative of a large class
of problems about what you do to constrain monopolies already in place
without resorting to more regulation.

Here’s the answer I gave him:


David replied “Beautiful. Blog it.” Hence this screed…

The fundamental problem with the telecoms regime we have is that
the Baby Bells inherited from Mama Bell a monopoly lock on the last
mile (the cables running to end-users’ homes and businesses). More
backbone capacity would be easy and is in no way a natural monopoly,
especially given the huge overbuild of optical-fiber trunk lines
during the Internet boom of the 1990s. But the ‘last mile’, as long
as it’s wire lines, truly is a natural monopoly or oligopoly —
nobody wants more than one set of telephone poles per street, and
their capacity to carry wires is limited. That system doesn’t scale
up.

To a left-wing rag like The Nation, the answer is to
huff and puff about more regulation. But more regulation would do
nothing to attack the telcos’ real power position, which is the
physical constraints on the last mile. The truly pro-freedom anwer is
to enable the free market to take that power position away from
them.

Wireless mesh networking — flocks of cheap WiFi nodes that
automatically discover neighboring nodes and act as routers — is
the technology that can do that. With the right software, networks of
these can be self-configuring and self-repairing. It’s pure
libertarianism cast in silicon, a perfectly decentralist bottom-up
solution that could replace wirelines and the politico-economic
choke-point they imply.

The main thing holding wireless mesh networking back is the small
size of the bandwidth now allotted to it for spread-spectrum frequency
hopping. With enough volume, competition would drive the price of
these creatures to $20 or less per unit — low enough for
individuals and community organizations to spot them everywhere
there’s an electrical grid. Increments of capacity would be cheap,
too; with the right software, your WiFi card could aggregate the
bandwidth for as many nodes as there happen to be in radio range.

(And that software? Open source, of course. Mesh networking relies
on open source and open standards. Some of the node designs out there
are open hardware, too. The mesh network would be transparent, top
to bottom.)

Today, many people already leave their WiFi access points open for
their neighbors to use, even though DSL or cable costs real money,
because the incremental cost of being nice is negligible. At the
equilibrium price level of mesh networking, wireless free Internet
access would be ubiquitous everywhere except deep wilderness areas.

But the wireline backbone wouldn’t vanish, because mesh networking solves
the bandwidth problem at the expense of piling on latency (cumulative
routing and retransmission delays). Large communications users
would still find it useful to be hooked up to long-haul fiber networks
in order to hold down the amount of latency added by multiple hops over the
mesh. The whole system would self-equilibrate, seeking the most
efficient mix of free and pay networking.

As usual, the best solution to the problems of regulation and
imperfect markets is not more politics and regulation, but less of it
— letting the free market work. Not that I expect The
Nation to figure this out soon, or ever; like all leftists,
they will almost certainly remain useful idiots for anyone, tyrant or
telco monopolist, who knows that political ‘solutions’ to market
problems always favor the powerful and politically connected over the
little people they are ostensibly designed to help.

Why I won’t be signing the “Declaration of Internet Freedom” as it is (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4438)
Posted on 2012-07-03 by Eric Raymond   

There’s been some buzz in the last few days about the Declaration of Internet Freedom penned by some prominent libertarians.

I wish I could sign on to this document. Actually, considering who appears on the list of signatories, I consider the fact that the composers didn’t involve me in drafting it to be a surprising mistake that I can only ascribe to a collective fit of absent-mindedness.

But, because neither I nor anyone else from the hacker tribe was involved, it has one very serious flaw.

Humility, yes, Rule of Law yes, Free Expression, yes, Innovation, Competition, Privacy…most of this document is good stuff, with exactly the sort of lucidity and bedrock concern for individual freedom that I expect from libertarians.

But it all goes pear-shaped on one sentence: “Open systems and networks aren’t always better for consumers.” This is a dreadful failure of vision and reasoning, one that is less forgivable here because libertarians – who understand why asymmetries of power and information are in general bad things – have very particular reasons to know better than this.

In the long run, open systems and networks are always better for consumers. Because, whatever other flaws they may have, they have one overriding virtue – they don’t create an asymmetrical power relationship in which the consumer is ever more controlled by the network provider. Statists, who accept and even love asymmetrical power relationships as long as the right sort of people are doing the oppressing, have some excuse within their terms of reference for failing to grasp the nasty second, third, and nth-order consequences of closed-system lock-in. Libertarians have no such excuse.

In the context of this Declaration, this defect is particularly sad because the composers could have avoided it without damage to any one of the other pro-market positions they wanted set forth. I actually agree that, as proposed in their next sentence, closed systems such as iOS should be free to compete against open systems such as Android; as the Declaration says, “let technologies evolve and intervene, if at all, only when an abuse of market power clearly harms consumers”. The proper libertarian stance in these contests is to tell government to butt out and then vote with your dollars for openness.

I am disappointed in the Declaration’s failure to get this crucial issue right. I hope there is still the option to amend it; and if not, that my objection and correction will reach as many people as the Declaration itself, and the two together will convey important lessons about what we must do to preserve and extend liberty.

I think I'll take my chances with Obama.
He is the smartest president of my lifetime and i trust him on this.  ;)

...

What happens when all nations are blanketed from stem to stern with surveillance?

Public utilities, acting on government orders, will be able to allot electricity in amounts and at times it wishes to. This is leading to an overarching plan for energy distribution to the entire population.

Claiming shortages and limited options, governments will essentially be redistributing wealth, in the form of energy, under a collectivist model.

National health insurance plans (such as Obamacare) offer another clue. Such plans have no logistical chance of operating unless every citizen is assigned a medical ID package, which is a de facto identity card. In the medical arena, this means cradle-to-grave tracking.

Surveillance inevitably leads to: placing every individual under systems of control. It isn’t just “we’re watching you” or “we’re stamping out dissent.” It’s “we’re directing your participation in life.”

As a security analyst in the private sector once told me, “When you can see what every employee is doing, when you have it all at your fingertips, you naturally move on to thinking about how you can control those patterns and flows of movement and activity. It’s irresistible. You look at your employees as pieces on a board. The only question is, what game do you want to play with them?”

Every such apparatus is ruled, from the top, by Central Planners. When it’s an entire nation, upper-echelon technocrats revel in the idea of blueprinting, mapping, charting, and regulating the flows of all goods and services and people, “for the common good.”

Water, food, medicine, land use, transportation—they all become items of a networked system that chooses who gets what and when, and who can travel where, and under what conditions.

This is the wet dream of technocrats. They believe they are saving the world, while playing a fascinating game of multidimensional chess.

As new technologies are discovered and come on line, the planners decide how they will be utilized and for whose benefit.

In order to implement such a far-reaching objective, with minimal resistance from the global population, manufactured crises are unleashed which persuade the masses that the planet is under threat and needs “the wise ones” to rescue it and us.

We watch (and fight in) wars and more wars, each one exacerbated and even invented. We are presented with phony epidemics that are falsely promoted as scourges.

The only response, we are led to believe, is more humane control over the population.

On top of that, we are fed an unending stream of propaganda aimed at convincing us that “the great good for the greatest number” is the only humane and acceptable principle of existence. All prior systems of belief are outmoded. We know better now. We must be good and kind and generous to everyone at all times.

Under this quasi-religious banner, which has great emotional appeal, appears The Plan. Our leaders allocate and withhold on the basis of their greater knowledge. We comply. We willingly comply, because we are enlisted in a universal army of altruistic concern.

This is a classic bait and switch. We are taught to believe that service for the greater good is an unchallengeable goal and credo. And then, later, we find out it has been hijacked to institute more power over us, in every way.

The coordinated and networked surveillance of Earth and its people is fed into algorithms that spit out solutions. This much food will go here; that much water will go there; here there will be medical care; there medical care will be severely rationed. These people will be permitted to travel. Those people will be confined to their cities and towns.

Every essential of life—managed with on-off switches, and the consequences will play out.

An incredibly complex system of interlocking decisions will be hailed as messianic.

Surveillance; planning; control.

...

As I posited upthread, you want to be culled.

. . .

The fellow, as with any, desires a liberty he cannot know by his own limitation. You, having thus scoffed him, demonstrate equivalent failings.

No I am stating the facts. He wants to be culled and is actively fighting for that. This is evolution at work so he can get his wish.

Evolution makes no excuses for intent with ignorance.

Actually it's just that I am not afraid of people. I think they are mostly the same and I get along with everyone. I believe this helps me see people for who they are instead of who I thought they should be.
It may be comforting to see the world as black and white, good and evil, communists and 1776 patriots. Reality is never so simple, and you do yourself a disservice when you fail to take each person or event as a separate issue.

It is always the same story.

Moron: Some stuff is bad, we need rules !! (or some stuff is good, we want it!)

Intelligent person: Rules implies a ruler. Do you understand all the (bad) consequences of having a ruler ? And why would anyone claim the right to decide for other people ? We should keep the current system, eg negociate issues case by case. The winners & losers will emerge naturally. No need for violence.

Moron: No we want that stuff now !! Shut your mouth!

Eric S. Raymond's (the progenitor of the term "open source" in the infamous essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar") past writings about "net neutrality":

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. . .

When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html): the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”

These freedoms are vitally important. They are essential, not just for the individual users' sake, but for society as a whole because they promote social solidarity—that is, sharing and cooperation. They become even more important as our culture and life activities are increasingly digitized. In a world of digital sounds, images, and words, free software becomes increasingly essential for freedom in general.

Tens of millions of people around the world now use free software; the public schools of some regions of India and Spain now teach all students to use the free GNU/Linux operating system. Most of these users, however, have never heard of the ethical reasons for which we developed this system and built the free software community, because nowadays this system and community are more often spoken of as “open source”, attributing them to a different philosophy in which these freedoms are hardly mentioned.

. . .

I trust my government a million times more than I trust my ISP. That is the bottom line for me.  

As well,

...Nobody can take those freedoms away from us anymore; we have the internet. We have the way to migrate our software development out of the reach of any particular jurisdiction that goes idiotic. We have the code; they can’t take the code away from us...

user[name]18444, we no longer live in a resource scarcity paradigm (its only the peaking socialism, misallocation of resources with $227 trillion global debt that gives the illusion of resource scarcity) rather now in a knowledge paradigm (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355212.0). Wealth of knowledge is not uniformly distributed.

The point you are missing is that in a free market, you don’t need to trust your ISP as competition will provide you with options.

What you don’t believe or fail to understand is that regulatory capture of your government is precisely what stifles competition. This is what the quote from Eric S. Raymond about “asymmetric power” means.

So yes the monopolistic telcos are on their knees praying that you will trust the government more than the free market, because the more power you give to the government to regulate, the stronger their monopolies will become.

This has been proven over and over to always be the outcome in all of recorded human history. The mathematical reason was explained by Mancur Olson’s book, The Logic of Collective Action (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=984).

I don’t expect you to be able to wrap your mind around this, because the reason socialists are socialists is because they don’t have the IQ to reason rationally at this high level.

And evolution is at work (over and over throughout recorded human history since Mesopotamia) to cull the population of the low IQ fools (via the war, eugenics, genocide, rationing, and totalitarian megadeath that results from peaking socialism when it runs out of other people's resources to steal, ahem redistribute) so the human race can get smarter and advance knowledge. So sorry for you, you haven’t been able to grasp how to survive.

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Eric S Raymond worked hard to move to the term “open source” instead of Richard Stallman’s “free software”, because the latter is communism which is an abject failure.

The key difference between that Stallman and the FSF advocate the oxymoronic use of coercion (force) to maintain freedom (specifically the FSF GPL standard license forces some actions and limits other actions), thus it exhibits the loss of liberty that is the hallmark of Communism.

You can listen to Eric S. Raymond on this topic at the following video of a Java Users Group presentation where “viral contamination” means coercion in the GPL license:

http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2012/05/17/lessons-from-a-jug-talk-with-eric-esr-raymond/


Jump to the 9:15 min point in the video.

I do NOT trust my ISP or that the capitalist system we have in America will do anything except sell me out. What your saying about the free market sounds good, but communism also sounds good on paper. I have never in my life seen so called "competition" among media providers lead to anything but higher prices and shitty service.  That magic of the market stuff is BS unless you have a true free market. In which case you would need to have net-neutrality.

Kimosabe, get a clue of how the world really works (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=365141.msg9609690#msg9609690).

The internet (i.e. the free market which is why you have it today) is the only free press remaining in the USA.

You are an young idealistic liberal idiot with a functioning vocabulary and extremely discombobulated illogic (you put the cart before the horse w.r.t. internet and free media) because your political religion does not allow you to understand the logic of the asymmetric power of political capture and why collectives always fail in a heap of vested interests corruption. The ONLY way to avoid that is do not form collectives and enable the free market to prosper.

Hey what happened to your threat to put me on ignore?  ::)

Haha, idiot. He didn't respond to you. Hey, are you a programmer by chance? I don't think you mention it enough in your posts. Rather than let your "superior" logic skills do the talking for you, you have to keep pointing out to people you're a programmer to give your arguments artificial gravity. If you were really so damn smart, you wouldn't have to tell people how smart you are. You're really just rather sad.

Kimosabe, get a clue of how the world really works (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=365141.msg9609690#msg9609690).

The internet (i.e. the free market which is why you have it today) is the only free press remaining in the USA.

You are an young idealistic liberal idiot with a functioning vocabulary and extremely discombobulated illogic (you put the cart before the horse w.r.t. internet and free media) because your political religion does not allow you to understand the logic of the asymmetric power of political capture and why collectives always fail in a heap of vested interests corruption. The ONLY way to avoid that is do not form collectives and enable the free market to prosper.

Hey what happened to your threat to put me on ignore?  ::)

     Anarchism, the no-government system of socialism, has a double origin. It is an outgrowth of the two great movements of thought in the economic and the political fields which characterize the nineteenth century, and especially its second part. In common with all socialists, the anarchists hold that the private ownership of land, capital, and machinery has had its time; that it is condemned to disappear; and that all requisites for production must, and will, become the common property of society, and be managed in common by the producers of wealth. And in common with the most advanced representatives of political radicalism, they maintain that the ideal of the political organization of society is a condition of things where the functions of government are reduced to a minimum, and the individual recovers his full liberty of initiative and action for satisfying, by means of free groups and federations--freely constituted--all the infinitely varied needs of the human being.

     As regards socialism, most of the anarchists arrive at its ultimate conclusion, that is, at a complete negation of the wage-system and at communism. And with reference to political organization, by giving a further development to the above-mentioned part of the radical program, they arrive at the conclusion that the ultimate aim of society is the reduction of the functions of government to nil--that is, to a society without government, to anarchy. The anarchists maintain, moreover, that such being the ideal of social and political organization, they must not remit it to future centuries. but that only those changes in our social organization which are in accordance with the above double ideal, and constitute an approach to it, will have a chance of life and be beneficial for the commonwealth.

. . .