AT&T defends Verizon-Google mobile exemption from net neutrality - Page 2

Don't get me started. The only place you can find a true "free market" is at a garage sale or flea market, the idea that financial markets were completely "hands off" by the government is preposterous.

Not true. No one in a society is truly free. Everything you do affects the society, and everything the society does might impact you. We have rights for people to own things, but we do regulate how those things can be used. You can own a gun, but you can't kill people unless it's self defense.

Large corporations are private, but are asked not to discriminate by society. There are also regulations on food farms, which are private but are asked to adhere to certain food safety guidelines.

Finally remember this: everyone (US citizens) gets to vote in the government, only select few get to vote in a corporation. I would like to have government have some say over what goes on then none at all.

"Society" is an abstraction borne of multiple individuals. Individuals have rights; "society" does not. Objective laws ensure that one's right to swing his fists ends where the noses of other individuals begin. Have a nice day.

I can undertand my post was completely unvarnished in terms of encouraging corporations to obey the fundamental restrictions placed on them by our freedoms. Which include freemcommunications and a lack of corporate censorship. If they can't uphold this basic duty, the government has sovereign powers to correct them. As was done to ATT long ago. This is actually good for business. A fair and neutral communications system is probably essential to any modern economy..... And culture.

I continue to maintain the radio spectrum of our air should not be sold -- for all time -- to businesses that aren't loyal to the public welfare. Instead maybe the spectrum can be subject to state or federal property tax, so it isn't used as a barrier to competition. Price compeition is important for these things. My bottom line is we can't have 3 companies first monopolizing spectrum, then censoring content. Thats not free market and there are strong US legal remedies to make the industry conform to the market's rules.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,[1] promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Wrong. There are a number of people fighting for net neutrality in D.C. Al Franken is leading the charge in the Senate. I encourage everyone to sign his petition and call your Senators and Representatives.

http://alfranken.com/

Just enter your address here and it'll tell you who your reps are and provide contact info:
http://www.contactingthecongress.org/

Get your facts straight. It went from 1 Pie to 12 Pies. The money continues to pour into the Telcos, each year for tax subsidies that add up tens of billions per year. Or do you think when T-Mobile paid ~ $16 Billion for a portion of spectrum they had the cash on hand for that investment?

MaBell breaking up created zero new competition. It legalized 12 regional monopolies. If you can't figure that out either you were a thought in your mother's mind or you were too young to realize Reagan conned everyone, or perhaps you suck off the teet of the Reagan Revolution?

We went from 12 regional Bells down to three Bells. Verizon is dumping much of their local phone services when it costs too much for them to service [Frontier anyone?] and are taking that cash to build out FiOS in high density [high price point] regions, piggy backing LTE on those fiber back ends. When Frontier screws up they will sell off large chunks back to Verizon.

Rinse and repeat.

When I can choose, without any early cancellation fee, from AT&T as my Fiber provider, or Verizon, or Qwest or my local Municipality, then I have Competition. Until then, I've got a licensed Oligopoly giving me a dry run back slide.

I think a network delivering 3.6 million TB/month would be an incredibly complicated thing, especially a mobile one. The engineers will need all their skill to make it work. They will need to be making decisions purely on a technical basis, not on some regulation handed down from Washington.

Anyway how does it help Apple to set a precedent that it is perfectly ok to take over the work of another, and set the terms of it's use? They would surely be bitten by such a precedent in the (most likely near) future.

Complete BS. There's a lesson to be learned here:

Once upon a time fiber optics were limited to much slower speeds. Increased demand for bandwidth created innovation and drove down costs: 100Mbit/sec, 1000Mbit/sec, 10000Mbit/sec. Eventually prices got so low the idea of doing FTTH was viable. This happened because applications were free to use bandwidth and create demand. What AT&T, Verizon and Google are purposing is to curb the demand by controlling what the medium can be used for. There are already emerging wireless advancements besides 4G -- such as QAM1024 modulation which effectively quadruples bandwidth in the same channel space. 5G and 6G technologies, ridding on much larger spectrum allocations, are going to be massively faster than anything we have today. Well -- they would have been. Now when it comes time to do an upgrade they'll just turn the dial down on COMPETING VIDEO SERVICE, or ILLEGAL FILES, and 5G, 6G evolution will be pushed further into the future to save telcos money. Google, for whatever screwed up anti-competitive reason, thinks this is just fine. Shame on them.

This study claims Google will sucks 37 % of internet bandwidth by only paying a fraction of it's cost.
http://www.internetevolution.com/aut...&doc_id=168932

The biggest share of traffic comes from P2P and video/audio streaming.
I didn't find the the study which claimed that 75 % of internet bandwidth is consumed by video, butt let's assume these numbers are correct.
http://connectedplanetonline.com/acc...eloading-1205/

The bandwidth consumption of the mobile internet is growing at a rate that exceeds the the possible (technical) growth rate of the networks.
So bandwidth gets the limiting factor for Google's growth.
The solution is to assure as much as they can. That's what this discussion is about.

The carriers are pleased because they can count on some additional money they wouldn't get with the "traditional" model while being aware that without network management they will not meet the demand. This looks like a win-win situation for them. They can limit some heavy traffic demanding services and charging the big ones more accurate.

The problem is where this will lead to. Other big players will have to do the same deals to ensure the bandwidth for their customers. Apple, MS, Oracle, SAP etc. can't sit and wait until all bandwidth is allocated.

This might lead to a two-class society and a oligopoly of vendors of fast and reliable mobile internet services. The problem for the carriers is that they will get more and more dependent on those big service companies and they will face an even bigger pressure on prices as today, plus the risk to get absorbed by companies like Google. I think Google would like to have their own networks and they were officially thinking about buying frequencies or building fibre networks.

If this happens this will not be a win-win situation any more. The consumers will loose anyway.The current situation of paying more for more consumption seems to be more fair to me. If this means that I have to pay more for heavy use of video on wireless networks than I prefer this to the other scenario.

whatever the "gifts" from the telcos persuades them to do. Sometimes I wonder if congress and the federal agencies have secret price lists for how much corporations have to pay to get exemptions and favorable laws. The telcos have way more money than voters or consumers. We're no longer living in a democracy but in a plutocracy, which gives us the worst government money can buy.

According to whom? The goddess Ayn Rand?

The problem with you glibertarians is that you start off with some ridiculous assertion that you yell in everyones face as if it were engraved in stone tablets by the finger of god, and then you proceed to rant for page after page with all your wing nut theories that you derive from your wing nut assumptions. You are a child.

I haven't yelled at anyone. I haven't ranted either. I built an argument from a premise and defended it. What is your alternative?

We're all somebody's children.

Government guarantee of net neutrality rights will not, as some ideologically pure but entirely naive posters have absurdly suggested, result in communism or fascism*. The truth is that net neutrality is necessary for the maintenance of a healthy free society, and those who would oppose it are the enemies of a free society.

Communications has from the beginning of civilization been recognized as an essential function of maintaining a society. Monarchs, dictators and juntas have all been zealous in controlling communications to maintain their power. He who controls communication, controls the society. In a democracy, that means controlling communications for the benefit of the people, if control is to remain with the people. Maintaining a healthy democracy is a constant struggle against those who seek to undermine it for their own purposes.

And, as has been pointed out in this thread, the idea of corporations regulating themselves and acting for the benefit of the people has been shown, through history, to be on its face absurd. It never has and never will work. The only effective way to insure that the public is not harmed by private interests is with government intervention -- i.e., intervention by the representatives of the people.

In this instance, there is no difference in it's importance to a healthy democracy between wireline and wireless communication. Don't be fooled by interested parties and the naive who will tell you that these are fundamentally different technologies. They aren't. In the context of their importance to our society, to the health of our democracy, to the maintenance of our fundamental freedoms, they are exactly the same, ought to be treated exactly the same, and ought to be open on equal terms with anyone with a voice to be heard.

Some of the players who have weighed in against net neutrality ought not be surprising. Verizon and AT&T of course wish control this issue to their advantage, and at our expense. For anyone who viewed Google as an honest player, this demonstration of the eagerness with which it abandoned its professed principles ought to at least give you pause to think. So much for hollow promises of doing no evil and supporting net neutrality. What we get instead is a lot of doublespeak crafted to make people think they are doing exactly the opposite of what they are. Talk of openness and preserving net neutrality when in fact they are putting their every effort into killing it.


* In fact, the ridiculous full on property rights based libertarianism espoused by one poster is exactly the thing that will inevitably lead to fascism, despite it's adherents telling us it is the one true path to freedom. The paradox of libertarianism where government does nothing but protect property rights is that as property will naturally become more and more concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the government becomes nothing but a tool of the corporatist interests that end up controlling it. Anyone worried about the slippery slope to fascism ought to be much more worried about the five conservatives on the US Supreme Court than anything else.

Me too, and this from someone using 40GB a month at one time and have kept my unlimited plan specifically in case i need to tether again in the future. Looking at everyone posting their average monthly usage most seem to be able to save money each month unless they were violating their contract.

Of course, this is a sliding scale and I would bet that most users will be using more data in a year than they do now, for various reasons. At least AT&T did three smart things that they should get some credit for:
[size=1][*]They let current users keep unlimited plans so long as their accounts are in good standing. I figure the high data users on AT&T probably got an iPhone a long time ago.[*]They made it 2GB (and not 1GB like I've seen for other countries) which should give nearly all a comfortable window seeing as how 300-400MB are the most common upper limits I've seen.[*]They let you adjust your capped data plan within that usage period if you do go over or if you want to save some extra money that month. (Personally, I'd put in a repeating calendar event into iCal that reminds me to check my data usage a day or two before my billing cycle is over. If I'm under 200MB then I call 611 and get it dropped, thus saving $10 more that month.)



I disagree. I think you are forgetting both the increase in data phones among consumers and the increase in the amount of data per each phone.

Oh, yeah! Deregulation! Don't fall far it. We know all too well how that old story goes!

So what is the justification for that assumption?

Ayn Rand didn't say all rights are property rights, that's a Libertarian position not an Objectivist one.

Initial ignorant posts on this thread really piss me off, and then people that actually get it finally started into the discussion...

The concept is artificial scarcity. The telcos for some strange reason insist on making it real scarcity.

Case in point: AT&T's Microcell(tm). The devices limited to 10 registered users, and does not support both hand-off and hand-on transfers to their towers. Imagine trying to use that for an office. For 50 people, you need five of the things, and you still run the risk that a user will be on the other side of the office and not have signal, because "their" cell is closest to their desk.

If the providers really wanted to deal with the problem, we would be seeing significant proliferation of micro and pico cells that expand their network for all of their customers. Design nice packages to mount to street lights, and make them feature rich enough so it is transparent from the user. Stick them in every restaurant, offer them to landlords as a way to differentiate their buildings... Maybe even be willing to sell them as CPE where an owner gets a kickback based on usage! In the last case, not only do they improve the level of service for the end-users, they leverage their wireline services to keep them from becoming obsolete.

The problem isn't insufficient spectrum, it is the desire to maintain large radius towers.

WIJG said that "all rights are property rights".

I'm asking for a justification for that statement. Why should anyone accept that assertion?

anonymouse, very eloquent speech. I could not agree more. Thank you!

I think where he is coming from is that Libertarians think you own your own body. Therefore rights such as the right not to be beaten or murdered can be subsumed under property rights. This seems a bit silly to me. I think individual rights is the highest category, and the right not to be beaten and the right to private property are separate categories under that.

Extremely well said. I could not possibly agree more!

A general principle of debate: whenever someone starts with absolutist rantings, they probably don't have a rational position to defend.

"those who oppose it are enemies of a free society"? Really? So the fact that someone might believe in property rights makes them an enemy of free society?

I can understand liking net neutrality. I can even understand some arguments where it is important. But there are also arguments on the other side. If telcos paid billions of dollars creating a network and other ISPs spent billions of dollars creating THEIR networks, why isn't taking away their rights to control their property 'unjust seizure' under the Constitution? They paid for one thing and are being forced to offer something else.

In another thread, you stated:

Why is it OK for the government to give licenses to the telcos and then later decide to unilaterally change the terms of those contracts?


Please stop with the "if you don't agree with me, you're a fascist" nonsense. There are arguments on both sides and it's a case of conflicting rights, so some mechanism has to be defined to deal with that.

(1) the cash comes from private investors by way of corporate bonds. It doesn't come from taxes. These companies pay INTO the treasury. Many of them have been regulated even after '84 by State and municipal bodies.
(2) I'm 58. Reagan just finished what was started under Jimmy Carter. Carter was the biggest deregulator of the last 50 years (transportation--trucking, airlines (remember CAB fares?), and telecommunications in particular). I'm not interested in going back to the MaBell culture.
(3) I'm not familiar with the circumstances you claim with Verizon, but I would sell under those circumstances as well. They're a business, not a charity or the government.
(4) Leases work both ways. They work for the lessee and lessor. 1 year was my contract with ATT... still have them after 4.

Government is run by the same rules and the same people that run companies. It's role should be to set up a framework that requires competition. Competition is tamed by greasing the palms of politicians sitting on committees. They just did it again with the health care bill. If you had the money, you got a place at their table.

US Lobbying for Corporate favors totaled $168.4 Billion in 2009. Telcos were second only to Big Pharma. They aren't lobbying to get anything but preferred status and tax structures that give them discounts in which every other country in the world rightfully calls subsidies.

Here is an example from lowly 1995:

http://www.ctj.org/html/layoffs.htm

Those figures pale in comparison to today's structuring.

Anti-monopoly laws? These are good. Truth in advertising laws? Good. Minimum wage requirements? Good. Child labor laws? Good. The Equal Opportunity Act? Good.

These are just a fraction of a of fraction of all the regulations that protect you as a consumer, you as a worker and you as a business owner.

The goal with net neutrality is not to prevent corporations from leveraging their infrastructure investment for a profit, it's to prevent the most powerful players from simply usurping absolute control of the entire system.

Or in other words, to keep things the way they are now.

When you're dealing with libertarians, you're dealing with people who don't care about any of those things. They only care about "defending property rights". That's their only objective. Why? Because capitalism requires it. Why is capitalism good? Because it's based on property rights. And round and round you go.

So, you say government is the answer. Give government overwhelming control, because they are the only ones who could ever look for the benefit of the people. We should even prefer a proactive justice system that thinks and acts like government, i.e. total government control.

It's been tried multiple times before, and it does not work. Benevolent dictators aren't. Power corrupts, and government is the ultimate monopoly with no higher authority.

When politicians get into power, they forget all of their promises, which in many cases were not promises at all --only whatever people wanted to hear.

They don't cater to the people. They only listen to their internal voices and try to impose their own visions. That's why they often make misguided decisions that end up costing everyone.

On the other hand, private corporations live by their ability to satisfy the people's needs. Of course except when they aquire monopoly powers, but there are laws and many oversight mechanisms against that.

It is easier to spot wrongdoings in the private sector than in government.

As long as we maintain the rule of law, an effective justice system and limit the power of any single entity, we will be kept clear of problems.

Giving overwhelming power to those who write the law and let them in bed with those who apply the law is just plain nuts.

Note: I suggest that you look up the term "corporatism". It doesn't mean what you think, and has nothing to do with private corporations. Nazism was based on corporatism, which is more related to national unions than anything in the private sector.

It's a beautiful thing.

Museums and bandwidth are scarce.

Another general principle of debate is to actually understand what's been said. Nowhere did I say, imply, or even hint that property rights and net neutrality are in any way mutually exclusive.


The telcos were sold privileges to use radio spectrum for the public good. If they abuse those privileges, or if it is decided that the way they are using them isn't for the public good, then they could lose the right to use the radio frequency at all. I think it's a pretty good compromise for them to accept net neutrality and make money from passing Internet traffic over that spectrum. But, should they not comply with the public interest, their privilege to use that spectrum ought to be revoked. And notice, there is nothing involved here that they own, as they do not own the spectrum.


See above. Also, free flow of communications is too critical to the health of a democracy to ever allow it to be controlled by corporations for their own benefit. It undermines the very system that allowed those corporations to exist. While it may be a difficult point, a free society can never surrender to a threat, even if it allowed that threat to come into existence, and faced with a choice of contract law vs. freedom, there really is no choice at all. The right thing may sometimes be the lesser of two evils.

(Which, btw, does not in any way apply to the context from which the quote was taken>)


Well, since you've only read this nonsense into what I wrote, that won't be a difficult point for me to oblige you on.

Well, I can only say that I believe you are mistaken on all counts.

Your points on government are, I think, largely due to a misunderstanding of how government got into the mess it seems today, which is largely the result of a) corporate influence in government, and b) people running government who think government is bad and not only shouldn't do anything, but can't. Naturally, these kind of people are likely to have created a huge mess.

Your points on corporations are just entirely contrary to history. Private corporations, unfettered by regulation, have never acted in the public interest, and in fact have almost always acted contrary to it. I know it's a popular naive fantasy that "competition" will somehow set everything right, but that's all it really is: a fantasy with no basis in reality, human nature or history to support it.

Yes, I was referring to you in my remarks on how libertarianism is a philosophy that ultimately leads to government of the powerful, and less freedom for most everyone. That you didn't mention fascism is irrelevant to the fact. I'm guessing you made the remarks you did, and hold the views you do because you are unaware of the contradictions and problems inherent in them.


To you it may be a beautiful thing. To me all this "beauty" you refer to is mostly just mindless junk. And the proliferation of points of view you claim are mostly points of view that are without value: does anyone really find any value in what the Real Housewives of ________ think? Consolidation of media control is certainly not a good thing, by any standard but the most shallow.


Red herring.

Libertarians used to be a worthwhile bunch back in the day but no more. Present-day libertarians, objectivists, randroids, et al, are great with theories but show us one 1st world modern nation that is a lab for these thoeries and has made practical application of them. None exist because no sane society dare try them. The closest we come is Somalia. No pesky regulations in that place. And interestingly, not one of the randroids wants to move there.

Conversely, in just northern europe alone (as well as north of the us border), we see real-world examples of countries that have built admirable functioning societies on a semi-socialist frameworkincorporating principles of free markets regulated to produce the best possible social net good. No, I am not saying they're perfect. And like any living organism (which a society is), adjustments constantly need to be madesometimes in favor of commerce, sometimes in favor of the "the masses." And let's not forget the us had some pretty good decades after the new deal. That's a real-world expample no libertarian can match.

This is most inconvenient for objectivists and their ilk. Their theories actually only appeal to numbskulls, half-wits, teenagers, and raving idealogues, like the Paul family. They make a lot of noise but look up Paul's vote tally last time he ran for president. There were no more than few hundred thousand kooks that believe that crap enough to bother going to vote. Isn't that idiot that publishes "reason" against voting? Right. What's the point if all you can manage is protest vote that does not even cause a blip the radar?

Neo-liberal style libertarianism = FAIL!

I'm sorry, what exactly is AT&T saying that they have "limits" imposed on them to improve the speed of their network? Physical limits, you say? Well that's utter bullcrap, because AT&T could start giving out free WiFi hotspot devices to everyone who's a subscriber and therefore make its coverage exponentially better. I really have to doubt some of these flacks and their motives. They really seem hell bent on not investing as much and squeezing the most of the proverbial turnip.

You are referring to the other extreme, anarchy. I agree with you under those circumstances --in the absence of any legislative framework that includes an effective enforcement apparatus, private corporations and leadership figures usually run amuck, abusing the people left and right.

I believe in the rule of law, and the limitation of government to law enforcement and national defense.

And there is plenty of evidence that private enterprise and competition work wonders, unless you've been living under a rock in Somalia.

At the fall of the soviet empire and the tear down of the Berlin wall, we all witnessed, and there are plenty of testimonials, of the chaos and stagnation created by government rule, proving freedom, capitalism, competition and most importantly, justice and the rule of law, work wonders, sustaining a population previously deemed not possible, and under an unprecedented standard of living and individual rights, to boot.

Modern day rich, fat unions crack me up . They'd be the first to renege when faced with the realities of socialism.

Note: The huge mess the government is in today is not because of too much freedom, but the opposite, from 100 years of progressivism creeping in. The housing debacle is a clear example of government progressivism causing a crisis. I sincerely think that the Internet is in for a huge crisis if the government gets involved with ideologue regulations.

I was referring to exactly what you say you believe in. Although, given that you admit regulation is necessary, but say you don't believe in regulation, maybe that is some form of anarchy.

Law enforcement? But let me guess -- only enforcement of laws that involve property rights, correct? Because the ultimate goal of society, nay life itself, is to invent and defend property rights, correct?

100 years of progressivism? Seriously? Rightbecause you say so, it is true. Life was so much better during the gilded age.