I may get some of the particulars wrong but i dont think it matters to the point im focusing on at the moment. What spawned this thread was a repeal of the NN rules that were imposed by the FCC in a manner you described above. Those rules could have been enacted by Congress and gotten us to the same place we were pre-repeal and post 2015. Or, Congress could have explicitly delegated authority to the FCC to do what they did.
My question is that if Congress used one of these methods to impose NN, would that change your assessment of NN? I’m trying to separate the procedural aspects, how NN came to pass, with the substance of NN itself independent of how it came to pass. My original understanding of your argument was that it was based on the substance of NN - the normative approach as you say. This had nothing at all to do with how it came to pass. But in the latest line of posts you shifted to procedural matters. So I’m trying to determine if the objection you have is based on the substance, i.e. deviation from the normative approach, or on the form, i.e. how the FTC imposed NN.
You are using the phrase “net neutrality,” without really defining what it is. Do you understand what I mean when I refer to the FCC’s use of “forbearance,” which I have mentioned several times in this discussion?
There are a set of rules that are applicable to ISPs by virtue of their reclassification under Title II that the FCC has said, in effect, “We won’t enforce these rules,” and another set of rules they have enacted and enforced. I am beginning to suspect that when you say “Net Neutrality,” you’re only talking about the latter.
Yes, I’m talking about the latter. But even if we include both the forbearance (which I agree with you is a terrible way to craft public policy) the question still holds. IOW, both the latter part of NN (rules the FCC has enacted and enforced) and the forbearance part could have been legislated by Congress. Would that change your assessment of either the enforcement or lack of enforcement parts?
I think the enforcement part is on balance a good thing. I think the forbearance part is dumb. I also think Congress should have acted, and can still act, and that the FCC did both on their own is problematic, but the mechanism by which we arrived at NN isn’t fatal to the efficacy of NN.
Yes, I’m talking about the latter. But even if we include both the forbearance (which I agree with you is a terrible way to craft public policy) the question still holds. IOW, both the latter part of NN (rules the FCC has enacted and enforced) and the forbearance part could have been legislated by Congress. Would that change your assessment of either the enforcement or lack of enforcement parts?
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Yes, it would. If Congress does it, it’s acceptable in a way that the FCC doing it is not, in my view.
So what’s your objection when you don’t like a future result? “I was okay with the end-run because I like the result, but this result I hate, so the process is invalid, suddenly!”
Was there something improper about the FCC’s original net neutrality rules? “End-run” kind of implies it, but in football an end run is a perfectly legal play.
Well no, I’m not talking about the process and haven’t at all in the thread. I think the process engaged by the FCC is poor. But for most of the thread my take is that it’s been a discussion of the principle of NN, whether that’s a good or bad thing, etc. So I can set aside the mechanism by which we got NN and discuss the merits or demerits of NN independent of the current particulars. That’s an interesting theoretical discussion to me.
Whether the FCC should have the authority to act unilaterally as it did is related, but less interesting, IMO. Are you willing and able to discuss NN independent of the current particulars of how it came to pass? If not, that’s fine - the mechanism is a legit line of discussion as well.
Other countries take the view that laying fibre to every home is the way forward: to build a national data communications infrastructure that a modern economy needs. Governments encourage this as much as they can by coaxing the Telcos. Many government have plans to save themselves a ton of money by delivering state services digitally. For that everyone has to have decent access. They push and shove, cajole, harry and even subsidise their Telcos to deliver. The recieved wisdom is the Internet access is an essential utility neccessary for economic growth. It is the railroad of our time.
But in the US the government hands control to incumbent Telcos and allows them to milk the consumers and undermine the most active companies in the digital economy. Where is the undertaking to rollout fibre networks? They will just sit on their existing networks, bleeding end users and sapping the growth of the new companies that will be so important to the future economy. Assuming that it just a delivery mechanism for Hollywood media streams is very shortsighted.
This sounds like a very bad deal indeed unless you are a bonus hungry Telco executive with the ear of the dealmaker in Chief. This threatens the US lead in technology by holding back its digital infrastructure. Other countries will press on with their plans while the US stalls.:smack:
Ad hominem arguments are just flawed logic that are not violations of the rules. However, when the only thing one posts is ad hominem attacks while providing no other actual points of discussion, it looks a lot as though one is simply posting personal attacks or engaging in stalking. If this continues, it will be a violation and a Warning will be issued.
No. Frank’s language did not compel the lenders to finance clearly default-prone borrowers. It also did nothing to “compel” lenders to bundle all their worst exposures into groups to be offered for speculators to bid on them in the hope of passing them off before they collapsed. That was the serious lack of regulation.
Especially how you have chosen to ignore all of the examples of abuses posted in this thread. Unless I missed it (correct me if I have), in all of you replies you have never once addressed the examples of abuse that led to NN.
Are you willing to admit that before NN, there were ISPs that used their power to restrict or eliminate customer access to legal resources on the internet?
I have said that the issue is the overbroad remedy applied to correct those abuses, not that such abuses never existed. This led to a discussion of the large reach of rules imposed by Title II and the FCC’s claim of “forbearance,” in not enforcing many of thise rules.
I’m not really sure how all those posts escaped your attention.
The mechanism, and its reversal, is what triggered my commentary. As a stand-alone, tabla rasa consideration of policy, I have no great objection to net neutrality rules. I have a huge objection to how they were imposed.
…perhaps if you had an objection to how the rules were imposed you could have included that in your OP. Then the debate could have focused around that instead of how the “bulk of criticisms [you] have heard in the public sphere rest of misunderstandings of the rule or of how traffic move across the Internet”.
So far as I can recall, not a single poster here has addressed the problems in the idea of forbearance, except in very general terms, notwithstanding the multiple mentions I’ve made of it.
It’s almost as if the bulk of posters here were sort of fuzzy on what the concept of forbearance was, or misunderstood what it meant, somehow. Which is, of course, impossible?
…forbearance wasn’t mentioned in the OP. The OP is what you wanted to debate right? I’ve just searched the thread. You’ve only mentioned forbearance nine times: the first time was post 544.
If forbearance was so essential to your argument you would have used it more than 10 times in thirteen pages and introduced it much earlier than page 11. Its almost as if the bulk of posters here are not mind readers. So what exactly is it you want to debate? Would you care to restate the OP?
Actually, I assumed – perhaps optimistically – that most posters here would not offer an opinion on an issue with which they were not familiar, especially given the OP’s alluding to misunderstandings of the rule.
Forbearance is not so much essential to my argument, either: it’s an exemplar of my argument, which more relates to reclassification under Title II. Which, again, I mentioned several times. It’s true I did not lay out the jot and tittle of this thesis in the original post, but my OP is not a long, precise and clearly delineated thesis.
It boggles the mind that you are now pointing to it and whining that you were fooled into believing it was a long, precise and clearly delineated thesis on something else.