Meanwhile, here's how American Commitment spins the Sunlight Foundation report: 'CONSERVATIVES OPPOSED TO INTERNET REGULATION WON FCC COMMENT PERIOD BY LANDSLIDE.'
“We’re pleased that the Sunlight Foundation is finally confirming that American Commitment and Americans opposed to regulation of the Internet won the FCC comment period. Better late than never,” said Phil Kerpen, president of American Commitment.
Note how they say they 'won' the comment period, as if each letter or email counted as a vote and the FCC is obliged to treat the input quantitatively rather than qualitatively. This sort of lobbying is a win-win for the advocacy organizations that engage in it (across the political spectrum): either the government does what they want and they declare victory, or the government does not in which case they fulminate about 'the will of the people' being thwarted and do another round of fundraising/PR on the back of that. You can make quite a nice living running a 'nonprofit' like this - $175k/year is a decent salary for booking adverts using donors' money.
It's hard to reconcile the widespread success of this blatantly and openly manipulative horseshit, with the claim that America is a self-governing nation by the people.
It's interesting reading some of the form letters in opposition. Here's an excerpt.
Regulating the Internet would be a job killer. All those who are employed as tech support, companies that make and deploy servers, routers, coax and fiber-optic cable will suffer job losses if the FCC chases billions of dollars of investments away by regulating Internet services as if they were a public utility. Every time Washington bureaucrats have grabbed massive new powers for themselves, they have created economic and human wreckage in their wake. Obamacare regulations on the healthcare system have cost millions of Americans their health insurance, and raised the cost of insurance and deductibles to millions more.
That's just an outright lie. Here's a rhetorical question. If a DDoS is classified as an attack because the client consuming server resources doesn't actually care about the resource, then what is flooding a comment board with identically wrong and manipulative letters?
None of that is a lie, it's just looking at particular pieces of the overall issue. Obamacare has cost a lot of people their (existing, non-ACA compliant) plans, and it has raised the cost of insurance for other people. That's inevitable with the ACA: covering people with pre-existing conditions, etc, means some people will pay more (particularly younger people). I think the ACA is a good thing, by the way, but I'm not deluded enough to believe that you can cover more of the sickest people without paying more money.
The point about telecom jobs isn't a lie either. What was the impact of local-loop unbundling, which made investment into DSL unattractive, on DSL installers? The mechanics of the telecom industry aren't any different than that of Silicon Valley: people aren't going to spend a bunch of money hiring people to build things unless there is a potential for a big payout at the end. Companies like Verizon are already under the gun from investors for the billions they spent deploying fiber. Making it less attractive to be in the business of building infrastructure isn't going to increase the amount of investment and jobs in the sector.
Now, you could argue that Title II might nonetheless be beneficial on the net, but it's not a lie to point out the things that could be hurt by the Title II regulations.
I think you hit the nail slightly off center with, "...people aren't going to spend a bunch of money hiring people to build things unless there is a potential for a big payout at the end." Verizon and all other ISPs will make money and lots of it, period. Whether or not they make insane profits or more insane profits is what investors are looking at. Also, in regards to building infrastructure they already play games when reporting how much they've spent upgrading and maintaining infrastructure. Why would they do that? Because they know that the total amount is so ridiculously small when compared with their profits that they'll be laughed at if they try to make it a reason against regulation.
I'm not sure what numbers you're looking at. The ISP business isn't that profitable. The biggest pure cable companies are TWC, Cox, and Charter. Cox is privately-held, so we don't have information about their finances, but Charter is losing money. TWC has almost 3x the revenue of Facebook, but only marginally higher net income.[1] Moreover, the pure ISP business is even less profitable. Both TWC and Charter would be $1-2 billion per year in the red if you eliminated their video programming revenues and associated costs. Verizon's FiOS is apparently profitable on an operating basis, but there is question whether the company will be able to recoup its capital costs: http://ipcarrier.blogspot.com/2014/05/would-verizon-recover-...
[1] It's very profitable when your users generate your content for free, and you can shift tax liability overseas.
Agreed, actually. None of that was an outright lie. I spoke impulsively.
It's a lie in the sense that it takes all the benefits out of the fact. The ACA will cost many people more money, especially if they were not paying for any health insurance to begin with, but it will also help many more than those that will have to pay more be healthier. Same with telecoms: regulating last-mile networks as a dumb pipe isn't going to magically take all the profits out of consumer internet service. Verizon has been using their utility privilege (public right of way and private property allowance) in rolling out FiOS since their regulated landline falls under Title II, but their broadband falls under Title I, yet both run over the exact same wire. Moreover, cellular voice was put under Title II in 1993 with forbearance from regulations that applied to landline service, and that industry is not struggling to keep it's doors open, nor is it encumbered from some draconian price cap. Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act already gives the FCC the capability to impose price caps on broadband providers to encourage network infrastructure growth as a means to an end, not as the end. The only harm that could come about from Title II to the carriers is the interconnect methods (peering), but when the FCC drafted reclassification in 2010, Section 251 was noticeably absent, and there has been no mention of that from the FCC since.
I'm confused at why you are being downvoted. This is a reasonable response explaining the comments covered by the parent post. You aren't even arguing for or against! Ridiculous.
The fact of the matter is most people don't understand a lot of the nuances behind the issue. They don't understand the telcos actually leverage various forms of local, state and federal regulation to reduce competition and they cry to the public about excessive government regulation when anybody threatens their duopoly benefits.
I don't see how this is different to all the pro net neutrality activism and lobbying going on, except that it's an opposition opinion.
It also seems to play on the narrative that people who are against expanding regulation are not rational individuals, they are instead reduced to mere tools controlled by a pair of Koch villains intent on destruction of earth and society to make themselves richer.
The Republican Party and to a greater extent, the Tea Party, have mobilized a mostly-white, mostly-male, mostly-middle-to-lower-class pool of voters who are in many cases irrational - voting against their better interests in the name of conviction, mostly based on race and religion. It's why there is constant saber-rattling about "wedge issues" like abortion and "takers" despite a significant portion of Tea Party voters being around or below the poverty line, or reliant on some degree of public assistance.
This army of people does often mobilize as a single unit, dictated to through the likes of Fox News. Talk about how black people want free "X" and you can get lots of people to fill out a form letter without trying.
We're a Republic for the very reason that it was known that en-masse, often times people are irrational and do go against their own benefit for ideology.
I don't see how this is different to a gullible online youth mobilized through videos and petitions. You just have to say evil corporations want to control and make you pay for things you want for free, devoid of details for people to make a rational decision with. This is from 2006: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOJnKgsWPGw
What we need is that people vote not for their own self-interests, but for the common good. Otherwise, we will destroy our civilization while we each fight for a bigger piece of the pie.
This is a laughable statement. Let me address each point directly.
During the last election, 33% of Hispanics voted for the Republican party[1]. 44% of women voted Republican[2]. And "mostly lower to middle class"? I though the Republican's were the party of the rich? Who do the rich vote for then?
I strongly suggest you take a more open-minded approach to politics.
I invite you to read the article I posted before commenting next time.
I also invite you to understand that 33% in politics is a huge minority. 67% of Hispanics voting Democrat, in an election, make the Democrats the clear winner of that particular demographic.
Finally, the "rich" are the top 10%, or 1%, or even 0.1% based on what particular income inequality chart you're looking at, leaving the entire bottom >=90% available for the demographics I mentioned.
I said the Republican and Tea Parties are predominantly white male. When you show me that minority amounts of women and minorities voted Republican, it only reinforces my point that the Republican and Tea Party bases are predominantly white and male.
Statistically speaking, that's a 12 point spread - 44% and 56%. Indeed, that's huge in politics. Most modern Presidential elections are won with 52-53% of the popular vote at best. [0]
Hispanics, as you noted, are over a 30 point spread.
So politically speaking, having only 44% of the female vote and still winning requires a very large (political) majority of voters voting Republican to be male. Add to that age, and again we're seeing clearly that old white men are the key demographic. [1]
It's not that you and I see percentages differently. It's the political significance of the margins that define the argument.
It's a strange statement, but you don't refute it well. It's strange because "mostly-white" and "mostly-middle-to-lower-class" describe the electorate.
"During the last election, 33% of Hispanics voted for the Republican party"
What percentage of voters were Hispanic?
"Who do the rich vote for then?"
Statistically, it doesn't matter. There aren't that many of "the rich".
...and believing things without a shred of evidence is called "faith." And neither "faith" nor "principals" is an inherently good thing by definition - in fact some people might call "principals" based on "faith" or "religion" or "race" or "gender" or "greed" or "lack of education" or any other reason "dumb."
Yeah, I agree with that statement. It doesn't really connect with your previous post which was just a mouth-foaming political attack without any real substance.
It is different because they are actively misleading people that do not understand the internet. They are using scare tactics and sensationalism by saying stuff like "net neutrallity is the obamacare of the internet".
In the age of zero cost "letter writing" why would anyone consider the count of letters received as a valid indicator of sentiment? There are other legitimate means to determine public opinion if that is what the FCC really wants to know. My fear is that they don't really care what the public thinks.
Framing the idea that ensuring private companies adhere to the status quo is somehow "bad" regulation which will destroy the fabric of the internet is really hilarious. While the decision hasn't been made yet, I would be absolutely amazed if pro-isp tiered rules are not implemented.
In what I'm sure is just a coincidence, the group bragging about 'winning' the comment period (who are a notorious Koch front group: http://i.imgur.com/YE4kpt1.png) just happened to have written a legal opinion to the FTC in support of the Comcast / TWC merger as well:
“We’re pleased that the Sunlight Foundation is finally confirming that American Commitment and Americans opposed to regulation of the Internet won the FCC comment period. Better late than never,” said Phil Kerpen, president of American Commitment.
http://www.americancommitment.org/content/conservatives-oppo...
Note how they say they 'won' the comment period, as if each letter or email counted as a vote and the FCC is obliged to treat the input quantitatively rather than qualitatively. This sort of lobbying is a win-win for the advocacy organizations that engage in it (across the political spectrum): either the government does what they want and they declare victory, or the government does not in which case they fulminate about 'the will of the people' being thwarted and do another round of fundraising/PR on the back of that. You can make quite a nice living running a 'nonprofit' like this - $175k/year is a decent salary for booking adverts using donors' money.
http://990s.foundationcenter.org/990_pdf_archive/452/4526005...