
Obama pledges Net neutrality laws if elected president (2007) - bpierre
http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/obama-pledges-net-neutrality-laws-if-elected-president/
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notdonspaulding
If you want to know what kind of person you'll end up with _after_ you elect
someone to office, pay attention to the negative propaganda coming from their
opponent _before_ they are elected. That's my new method for evaluating who I
support.

(If you tried to raise any concern about Obama's motives or ability to carry
through on his promises in 2007 you were labeled a backwards, change-hating
racist, either literally or at least tacitly in the minds of his supporters.)

Why is his stance on net neutrality even newsworthy when he's presiding over a
security state that is in the middle of ripping the 4th Amendment to shreds?

~~~
zht
there was quite a bit of negative propaganda that implied that he was a secret
socialist muslim antichrist non-American from Kenya.

obviously you shouldn't pay attention to the worst of what's levied against
someone, but where do you draw the line?

His opponents (i.e. Republicans) thought that net neutrality is government
meddling in the free market. How would we have predicted this in this case?

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homulilly
Obama, like most politicians Obama likes to lie, a lot. That said I don't
completely blame him on this since it's not his jurisdiction. Could he have
done more to support net neutrality? of course, but it's not something that
was directly under his control. Obama has broken a lot of other promises over
far more serious things that were directly in his control so this is a drop in
the bucket in my opinion.

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xahrepap
This is what really bothers me about presidential elections. The candidate
goes around making promises they KNOW they don't have the ability to follow
through on. This works because most voters don't realize what the president
can and cannot do.

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mikeash
I'd say that it goes beyond "this works". It's actively _required_ for
Presidential candidates to make promises they can't conceivably keep, because
the voting public greatly overestimates the President's power and they
_demand_ it.

This doesn't excuse deliberately impossible promise-making, of course. But it
means that whoever gets elected is going to have a bunch of impossible
promises on his record, because anyone who doesn't make them won't win.

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collyw
So democracy comes down to "pick the one with the lies you like the most".

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rainmaking
I would rephrase that as "Pick the one who will, by your best guess, cause the
least damage". Leviathan is, and has always been, a matter of the least
possible evil.

Case in point, I'm pretty sure Mitt Romney would have waltzed into a cave in
Afghanistan and set off an atomic bomb. He was _that_ obnoxious _. At least
Obama seems to be half decent at getting_ less* impressionable young minds
soul-searching for their vocation to find "Kill Americans" the obvious choice.

So Obama it was, drones and all.

* Yes, their were no Atomic Bombs in Afghanistan, but let's not let the facts get in the way of a good story.

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tptacek
This is the worst kind of HN political story: the kind in which technology is
a fig leaf for a discussion whose only substantive content can be about the
nature of campaign promises. In other words: pure, distilled politics.

I flagged this and hope others do too.

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rainmaking
I disagree. This is about breaking a very particular kind of campaign promise,
namely one that directly affects the interests of Hacker News readers as a
group. In other words, we already are political, simply by existing. The
article doesn't go beyond that kind of politicalness.

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dragonwriter
> This is about breaking a very particular kind of campaign promise

Except insofar as the promise can have been read to be an implicit promise to
assume dictatorial powers and impose laws on net neutrality by fiat over the
resistance of Congress, I'm not sure how its about breaking a promise. Obama
_did_ seek net neutrality laws in his first year in office, and his appointees
to the FCC have _repeatedly_ instituted net neutrality regulations, only to
have them turned back by the courts. And are, by their own statements,
preparing to do so again.

Yeah, there's anonymous-sourced rumors that the new draft would expressly
allow something that most people would see as contrary to net neutrality --
rumors that the FCC Chair has expressly denied. The actual proposal will be up
for public review in a short period, and we'll all be able to intelligently
discuss its actual contents rather than reacting to rumor then.

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tokenizer
My question to Americans is this: Can you trust elected officials to make due
on their promises they make when they run?

~~~
andrewljohnson
Not to say politicians don't lie (Obama included), but they also change their
minds.

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sunnybythesea
now that's something a politician would say

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mpyne
Sounds like something Keynes would say too. And anyone else who is able to
change their answers when the inputs change...

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dragonwriter
And, in fact, Obama _did_ push Net neutrality laws in office, and the FCC
under Obama has passed net neutrality regulations several times (only to be
reversed by the courts) and is, per their Chair's statement, getting ready to
do so _again_.

The only indication of any "reversal" is unsubstantiated reports by anonymous
sources about the specific content of the draft that was to be circulated that
have been denied emphatically by the FCC Chair.

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sehugg
It's probably easiest just to redefine "net neutrality" to mean "whatever the
FCC comes up with" which seems to be their current strategy.

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wdr1
I really, really, really hope Net Neutrality is brought up in just a few weeks
when Obama hosts a fund-raiser at Y Combinator.

[http://www.scribd.com/doc/219461164/Obama-YC-
invite](http://www.scribd.com/doc/219461164/Obama-YC-invite)

That said, I'm doubtful.

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rainmaking
We ought to let that slide since he totally delivered in lots of other areas
like closing Guantanamo, getting out of Afghanistan, and repealing the (Lock-
up-a-)Patriot Act.

