Tell me - why isn’t that happening already? Why hasn’t Walmart.com tried to do this? Why aren’t ISP’s making money hand over fist by offering exclusive markets to various companies?
And if you’re really worried about this kind of corruption, why aren’t you advocating for the regulation of Google? It would be much easier for companies to direct traffic to their own site by getting google to ensure that their company gets preferential treatment in the algorithm for search ranking - an algorithm that is completely proprietary and opaque, by the way.
And since Google sells ads, and handles mail, and offers all kinds of services that compete with other providers that rely on Google for fair searches, shouldn’t they be your first concern? If not, how come?
If the problem you suggest isn’t actually happening, then is the principle that we should create regulations based on thought experiments? If I can conceive of a potential problem, that’s good enough to pass laws to prevent it?
And in fact there IS competition for ISPs in most major areas. At the very minimum there is usually a cable provider and a phone provider. In many areas there are already three or more providers.
Because the PR would be too bad at first. It’s easier to ease your way into it by starting like Comcast and filtering out stuff like torrents. Since most of that is piracy anyway, you won’t raise the ire of many laypeople. But if we start to get accustomed to the idea of ISPs being able to control which data goes in and out, it becomes a slippery slope.
I also suspect that while it may not yet be illegal for such a thing to happen, if they did something so brazen it would get quickly smacked down. It’d be too much too fast.
I could ask you the same question - if there’s nothing currently preventing companies from making these great latency and bandwidth sensitive applications, why isn’t this already being done?
Google is a private entity providing an optional service. It’s only become such a behemoth because it’s so good at what it does. If google started being huge dicks, people would flock to alternatives like Bing and yahoo. That’s why the internet is great.
The cost to entry for a search engine to compete with google may be high - but it’s all in the ideas. Implementation, information, etc. It’s not like digging up the physical infrastructure to lay new fiber to provide people with an alternate infrastructure - it’s simply giving them access to a service to search information.
The ISPs are practically closer to utilities in terms of being impractical to create seperate infrastructures for competing companies everywhere, providing a needed service, etc. If google becomes a dick, it’s a million times easier to say “ok, I’ll use bing” or some other engine that pops up due to demand for an alternative to google. It’s much, much harder to say “ok, Comcast is all I can access, and they’re dicks, so… uh… shitty satellite I guess”
Google can’t deny anyone access to anything. ISPs can. Again, google is only so powerful because it’s so good - if they abused their power, they would no longer be so good, and hence, so popular and powerful.
There isn’t such a limitation on ISPs because of the huge cost of entry into the infrastructure. Lots of people are just stuck with them.
Though the implications of how far it could go are potential, the actual act of filtering out traffic selectively isn’t potential. ISPs are actually starting to do it. So we really need to decide how we’re going to let this one shake out at this point.
DSL still has very limited reach. The quality of the service you get if you’re not very close to the telephone company is pretty horrible. Satellite is rife with technical limitations. I’m not convinced WiMax type stuff will ever be practical for normal internet usage. The reality is that a sizable chunk of the population really has no choice.
It’s not as if multiple competing companies were allowed to use the same infrastructure to provide alternate services. Then consumers would have a lot more practical choice about how they’re willing to get their traffic shaped. One ISP choice is all that tens of millions of people have, and the internet is almost a necesity these days, and having an ISP being able to have such harsh control over them is almost certainly clearly a net harm.
Irrelevant analogy. A cable TV system is selecting the content to fill a few dozen slots; ISPs are simply delivering what customers choose to accesss from an effectively unlimited number of sources.
Under net neutrality, if 1000x more people access Google than access some 911 conspiracy site, Google will consume about 1000x as much bandwidth. It perfectly accomodates the customer’s wishes, certainly better than some top-down dictate.
Government interference is why you have an internet. Period. The internet can’t run without some level of government interference. Aside from the fact that it was born as part of a government project to begin with, there’s the wee little problem of laying fiber and telco lines. This has actually been discussed earlier in the thread. Apparently you missed it, but you can just scroll up so I won’t rehash it here.
Bottom line, the internet exists because of the government. Asking for no government interference would be a disaster akin to declaring the entire highway system private. There are some things that private enterprise does much better… and some that it doesn’t. And sometimes, you need a little of both.
I don’t think you all realize how many layers of administration are needed to keep the internet running as-is. The Root DNS Servers are a good example, but aside from that you need to worry about whois registries, ASN allocation, and dozens of RFCs to follow. The last is probably the only thing I would trust ‘private enterprise’ to follow reasonably well.
That’s really a load of crap. The government’s role in the existence of the internet as it exists today is trivial. Yes, the internet got its start from the old ARPAnet, but there were plenty of other private networks springing up. CompuServe, The Well, BBS’s that were rapidly evolving into ISPS in their own right using protocols like Fidonet. Had the Arpanet not been there, we’d still have an internet today.
In the 1980’s, my business ran a public BBS that had 32 phone lines connected to it. We were part of a communications backbone that allowed file and mail transfer between other similar BBS’s. We had online chat, message boards like this one, online multiplayer games, international E-mail that could be sent to CompuServe addresses or internet addresses. One of the products I wrote and sold on the market was a Google-like full text document retrieval system which used Rich Text for markup (and eventually, HTML).
Just before the internet broke out, we had contracted to be connected to the CompuServe network, which allowed full-time unlimited connections to our servers from anywhere else on that network - and it had nothing to do with government or the Internet. Had the internet not existed, I’m sure that a network like CompuServe or AOL or one of the other commercial data networks would have grown and eventually taken over the role the internet plays now. The internet just got there first.
Saying that the government is responsible for the internet is like saying the government is responsible for the creation of Federal Express because the first airmail service was run by the government.
In addition, the internet as it exists today is much, much more than just the underlying network. The real value created in the internet (and most of the complexity) is in the millions of privately created web sites, blogs, forums, and other value-added services, almost all created with private capital and without any government control or approval. And almost everyone pays for their internet connection through private ISPs, paying market-driven rates. The government does not finance the internet (other than some local governments), nor does it exert regulatory control over it (yet) in any meaningful sense.
What the internet really is, is a perfect example of how free markets create spontaneous order and how self-regulation actually works when people are free to deal with each other without barriers. Adam Smith’s invisible hand is all over the Internet.
Tell me - did governments create the Flash protocol? Javascript? AJAX, PHP, ASP, or other server technologies? How about other browser standards? Perhaps security certificates? HTML 3, 4, or 5? How about the various standards that allow cross-site logins like OpenID? Paypal? SOAP?
I’ve been a member of several standards groups. I’ve worked on standards for automation, machine control, data transfer, and others. Not a single one had any involvement from government or academia. All were driven by businesses who saw the need for interoperability and open standards.
All of these have been driven by the free market, along with hundreds of other major and minor standards. I remember back in the day when people were calling for regulation of the internet, and they claimed that without government control, the internet would be a huge mishmash of incompatible standards and nothing would work. Then they claimed that Microsoft would dominate, and their browser would reign supreme forever more because they controlled the code base and could limit competitors. Remember that? How’s IE doing these days?
You can always dream up a scenario where some malevolent force takes over control. You can always describe some scenario where evil ISPs start controlling the data that moves through the internet for their own profit. All you have to do is ignore the same market forces that have allowed the internet to work so well to date without government control.
Sam, I’d love to counter you point by point, but since your entire post completely missed the point of what I was saying, I wouldn’t know where to begin. Though it being 2 am might have something to do with it.
AFAIK, CompuServe was “killed” by AOL and then the internet did likewise to AOL. Price was the driver on this (Monthly fees instead of hourly) and in this case it was the government issue technology and standards that got used by other companies that saw that models like the one CompuServe and AOL used turned to be inefficient or costly.
In the current discussion I would say that if CompuServe and AOL where the ones calling the shots then companies like YouTube would not have appeared.
Well, that is just part of the history, do we just assume that the meddling government improved the situation only when it removing restrictions?
The whole history was that several scandals with mail contracts by private air shipping companies in the early chaotic growth in the 1930’s drove the government to take control of air mail, of course government was not the permanent solution, air mail contracts reverted to private companies along with government regulations by 1938.
It took a new generation of entrepreneurs to demonstrate to government that they could finally do it better with less regulation. But in relation to this discussion I say that market forces are not a panacea, government has helped also in this process and companies with better mousetraps still appear under regulations. (Then they can lobby to change the rules)
I can’t understand why free market people could possibly want to the net not to be neutral. Neutrality is required for a free market. The Internet, as it exists now, is a free market. It should be the free market person’s dream. So, if something comes along that could jeapardize that, they should be against it.
But, no. They’re too caught up in their declaration that big business is good, and government bad. All free markets only exist because of some form of government. There has to be an agreement amongst society not to regulate that market. The default state is not that everything is freely chosen. The default state is that the person who is bigger than you tells you what to do.
If you truly value personal freedom, then you must shun those who want to take it away–even when those people are normally “the good guys.”
Neutrality is not required for a free market. The internet infrastructure is not a commons; it is paid for by private citizens looking to make a profit. They should be free to make decisions regarding how they want to sell their bandwidth - and other people should be free to compete against them if what they’re doing doesn’t serve the public or some part of the public. This is the mechanism that has driven innovation, cost reduction, and improvements in quality in every other major industry.
If you want a better internet, you need to promote policies that allow investment and profit. And it’s not outlandish to speculate about future products that simply may require bandwidth priority for physical reasons. Net neutrality could kill a lot of potentially compelling applications.
The ISPs are being squeezed. The cable companies are facing increasing competition for their entertainment in the form of the internet, they’re at risk of losing their own profit models because high value viewership of a TV show is being translated into low-value data transmission. High value telephone service is losing to Skype, cell phones, and texting.
I’m no fan of the big ISPs. They all play the game of getting government to protect or subsidize them and give them monopolies or oligopolies in major areas, and they use that power to screw consumers. But the real danger of net neutrality is that it will tighten the binds between the big ISPs and the government. Most of them are actually in favor of the net neutrality bill - do you think they’re doing that for political principle? They know a good deal when they see it.
We’re in danger of ultimately turning the internet infrastructure into yet another regulated quasi-public industry. That hasn’t worked so well in the past.
The right solution here is to keep the market free, allow ISP’s to sell their bandwidth any way they want, but only as changes are made which increase competition. Ultimately what we really want is a free internet where there is plenty of competition for bandwidth service, whether that means extending wireless availability, or making regulations allowing for the selling of ‘dark fiber’ rights by auction or through some other means.
This is already happening. Google is opening up its own high speed fiber optic network. Google has a vested interest in net neutrality. If other ISPs start doing things that people don’t like such as throttling competing content, Google will simply build out in that city and kill them in the marketplace.
I think the people want net neutrality to a certain degree, and so do I. And that’s exactly why, in a competitive market, ISPs would provide a neutral playing field. But they need to reserve the right to make changes in service to provide for innovation, Quality of Service, or new products and services. They’ll have to judge whether their customers will value the new service enough to tolerate some priority packet management.
And finally, we don’t even know if this is a problem. this is legislation aimed at interfering in a market to prevent problems that are largely theoretical. We don’t even know if the current market would tolerate it if the ISPs tried to really censor content. You shouldn’t pass laws to prevent problems that haven’t even been demonstrated to exist.
In a perfect world, Sam, you’d be right and all of this would be unnecessary. Unfortunately, the real world has already proven your assertions wrong. Multiple times now, most notably with the Comcast Bittorrent issue that has been brought up multiple times in the first page, the major ISPs have proven to be a resistive force in adopting new technologies even in the face of consumer demand. If you’ve been on the net and paying attention to this sort of thing as long as you claim, then you know it’s been going on in one form or another for over a decade.
The fact of the matter is, without some sort of guaranteed Neutrality most ISPs will most definitely not encourage the growth and development of new technologies and innovation. This isn’t theoretical, it’s been proven over and over in the past with how the various major internet powers(Google usually being an exception) have fought tooth and nail whenever something game-changing comes along. The fact that many large ISPs are also media companies compounds this problem, as they’re more likely to intentionally cripple any technology that threatens one of their other income streams.
This isn’t a hypothetical. It’s already happened in minor ways, and the same behavior has been seen, sometimes from the same companies, many many times in the past in other industries. Yes, Net Neutrality is a bit more proactive than things have been in the past… and that’s a good thing. Learning from history is a good thing. What’s more, it’s not like they’re being punished in any way… and the whole point of the bill is to encourage innovation and small business, so the fact that you’re arguing against it with strawmen is more a symptom of your reflexive partisanship than anything else. Not that I expect this to take, because I’m really just rehashing the same arguments that have been made multiple times before in the thread which have been studiously ignored, but I gotta try.
I’m fully aware of the issue with throttling Bittorrent traffic. But it’s not clear that this is even a net neutrality issue.
Bittorrent falls into a real gray area. ISP’s claim that they had to throttle Bittorrent for QoS reasons. I find this credible. The existing infrastructure for cable modems relies on local routers situated within neighborhoods. These routers can be completely swamped if they are unlucky enough to be in an area with a number of heavy bittorrent users. I’ve suffered from that myself - until our ISP started throttling bittorrent packets, our internet usage was definitely affected. So is throttling bittorrent a violation of Net Neutrality guidelines? Or is it QoS management?
And what happens if an ISP isn’t allowed to throttle traffic that is swamping its network? Well, what happened with bittorrent is illutratuve. First, my own IP stopped throttling it due to market pressure - it turns out that bittorrent users tend also to be opinion makers, bloggers, and participants in forums, and they raised a fuss. In addition, they developed techniques to mask the content of their packets. Eventually, the ISPs around here gave up trying to throttle it, and simply imposed bandwidth caps on everyone.
The typical worrisome scenario for net neutrality is that an ISP may be paid by someone to throttle or degrade a competitor’s data, or that it might get involved in the content creation business and have a conflict of interest with other content creators and degrade their service to the ISP’s benefit. This is not what was happening with bittorrent traffic - it was a case where a new usage model on the internet simply overran an infrastructure designed for heavy bandwidth sharing on the assumption that most of the time when people are connected to the internet they actually aren’t sending and receiving much data. The ISPs were forced to respond to keep their networks working smoothly.
Huh. That’s strange, because my ISP is constantly upgrading its network. When I first got my cable modem, I was getting 5mb down and 128 kbps upload speed. Now I get 20mb down and 1mb up.
My telco provider started with relatively slow ADSL, and has upgraded its network numerous times and is now offering competitive speeds to cable modems, plus it has moved into IPTV, VOIP, and other technologies. My cable provider has been providing numerous new plans. We have no net neutrality regulations. Why in the world would businesses want to improve their products and adapt to changing technology? It’s a mystery!
There have also been numerous competitors springing up. I already mentioned Google. WiMax and other wireless startups have tried their hand in the market. Satellite internet is available, and some startups are even looking at balloons and orbiting remotely piloted vehicles as transponders to provide high-speed, low latency internet connections to entire cities without needing an existing infrastructure.
And there’s the answer to your mystery - even if ISPs currently have a technical monopoly or limited competition in an area, they generally behave competitively because they know there are a dozen competing technologies waiting in the wings for them to screw up and seriously piss off their subscribers.
Hell, I only pay $30/mo for 6GB 3G access for my iPad. 3G isn’t as fast as cable, but the upcoming 4G standard can go as fast as 100 mbps in some applications - faster than cable modems. And 4g networks can easily be built out cost-effectively so long as there is enough demand for it.
We’re also seeing evolution on the client side. Leo Laporte uses a rig for remote video transmission that involves six different wireless and wired routers, which connect to multiple providers to increase bandwidth and supply redundancy. Given enough demand, you could see services which allow you to remain connected to your cable ISP, but supplement it with lower-cost, lower-speed secondary providers to make sure all data gets through.
The point is that we haven’t really seen the kind of problems net neutrality is intended to prevent - not in a serious way at least. And we can already see many technologies waiting in the wings ready to eat into the market shares of the big ISPs if they get out of line. Many areas already have plenty of competition in the ISP space. The problem we’re trying to address really only exists in those cities were the ISPs have monopolies or near monopolies. Let’s address that particular problem, instead of saddling the internet with government regulation.
I think your claim is misplaced. It hasn’t really been the ISPs fighting against change - it’s the content providers. The major networks, record companies, movie studios and other content providers are constantly fighting technological change, because they can’t find a business model that allows them to maintain their profit levels in the internet economy. They’re also hamstrung by existing legal agreements with distributors, radio stations, movie theaters, local television, and governments which make it hard for them to change.
It’s not the ISPs pushing garbage like the DMCA - it’s the content producers. They’re also the ones who have the biggest influence in Washington - and they like net neutrality because it slows down the acceleration of internet technologies, forces ISPs to cap their data limits, and makes it harder for people to download content or pay for high quality HD streaming video and other services that cut into their current business models.
It sure is. Now run off and read up on the history of railroad regulation, and trucking regulation, and mail regulation, and telephone regulation, and airline regulation. In every case, ‘reasonable’ regulations meant to protect the consumer slowly led to more and more regulations, and once the activists who fought for the original legislation got bored and found new battles to find, the regulators were slowly captured by the industries they were supposed to protect the consumers against, and became tools for keeping down competition, keeping up high profits, and actually screwing the consumer.
All of these industries were eventually deregulated. In every case, the opponents of deregulation made the kind of case you’re making now - without government to regulate the industry it would prey on consumers, quality would degrade, small communities would lose access, etc. And in every case, once the regulations were pulled costs went down, quality went up, availability went up, and competition increased. That’s a fact.
First, you need to look up the definition of ‘partisanship’. I’m not a partisan. I don’t give a rat’s ass which political parties are on the respective sides of this debate.
Second, please explain to me how net neutrality regulation encourages innovation. To me, it sounds kind of like saying that imposing price caps on products spurs innovation because it requires businesses to find cheaper ways to do things - when in fact price caps simply reduce investment and create shortages of the things people want.
I haven’t ignored them - I’ve rebutted them. I’ve presented opposing arguments. Just repeating the same argument without answering the rebuttal doesn’t make you the winner. It just makes the thread more tedious.
The **whole **history says that the regulations appeared because it was a mess before government intervened.
While it still better for government to remove regulations when the situation improves it is still important that the government be ready to intervene again.
While I’m not Page Fault I have to say the same about your say so’s.
Regulations did not prevent an outfit like FedEx to appear, if anything, it showed me that some regulations are needed for a while and then they need to be removed when evidence is there that they are not needed.
sigh I can see I’m going to have to spell things out. Not because I think I’ll convince you, but because some poor fool may actually take what you’re saying as reasonable.
The proper response to Bittorrent’s new usage pattern was to upgrade capacity, or impose a tiered pricing that was more realistic of what capacity the network could actually handle. It seems this was the /last/ thing they tried. In this particular case, market forces did work, I will concede… for you. Others weren’t/aren’t so lucky and don’t have a choice of ISP, as has been noted many many times.
I’m not going to address this tonight because I have to get up early, and it’s a bit complicated. I will cede that you have some good points here, but your reasoning with cause and effect is a bit off. Not entirely, just a bit. I’ll note, however, that a lot of people here in the US don’t even have 3G coverage. Heck, I just spent last weekend in a place that got cell phone coverage three months ago, and they weren’t particularly out in the middle of nowhere. You overestimate how much ‘competition’ the ISPs have here.
This has, believe it or not, been tried. How do you propose we address that problem? Force companies to offer service in places they aren’t already offering? Offer stimulus funds for expanding fiber infrastructure? I live in a major major city, and I can’t even get fiber. I’m lucky enough to live right next to the DSLAM, so internet isn’t a problem for /me/ but it’s really a ridiculous situation here.
Many of the ISPs are content providers, which are very close to the content producers. Considering that Net Neutrality’s point is sort of to encourage the acceptance of new internet technologies, I’m baffled that you’d make this argument at all, nor see the tiny conflict of interest there.
No, it isn’t. In fact it’s provably wrong. I won’t cover every example, and indeed I’m not intimately familiar with all of them. Since my old roomie was on the phone and he’s an expert on railroads, I had him give me a quick rundown of regulation of the railroad industry in the US. While it is a fact that regulation was bad for the railways in many ways, that was due to overregulation… and it didn’t occur until quite some time. The railroad industry was almost entirely unregulated for 150 years, and there were some problems during regulation… and some problems during the unregulated years. When deregulation occurred, prices went WAY up for the consumer. Now, granted, this was because the railways had been almost bankrupted, but I think I’ve proven my point that this is an outright false statement. I’m sure many people here are familiar with the telephone system’s history and how your statement is downright wrong there, as well.
Net Neutrality has nothing to do with price caps, it’s about fair trade. Seriously, it’s all about giving everyone a fair shot and preventing the big guys from shutting out the small, innovative guys from the market. Since you seem to harp on innovation a lot, are you saying only the big guys can innovate?
No, you haven’t really. The only real argument I’ve seen you give is ‘these are all theoretical problems’ which is provably wrong by earlier examples, and you yourself have given an extreme fringe hypothetical situation as a counterargument: the QoS thing… which, again, would be a private line between parties, since there’s no way a company could guarantee an end user’s connection quality to that degree, under any system except a dedicated line. If it’s a dedicated line it isn’t being used by other carriers, and Net Neutrality doesn’t even apply.
On preview, I see GIGO brought up the history of regulation point as well. I would stress that I do believe that it is easily possible to apply too much regulation, or to keep regulations on for too long. The railway system is actually a good example of this. A happy medium has to be found, but it isn’t ‘complete noninterference,’ I’m sorry. That’s insane. Rampant deregulation is what got us into the financial mess we’re in right now, by most accounts(though that’s a different subject for a different thread, so we probably shouldn’t veer into that)
The problem is that the word “neutral” means different things to different people. Some people see “neutral” and think “non-partisan”, as in not taking sides, as in those people who want to revoke/prevent Rush Limbaugh’s ability to have a radio talk show. Some people see “neutral” and think “non-favored” which means more than simply not taking a side, it means that you completely ignore where the sides and boundaries are.
To me, net neutrality means that packets aren’t regulated by source – that something from Microsoft, Google, Facebook, or any other big company will receive the same priority as something from TitchyTinyCompany.com (not a real website).
But then there’s the side issue that some who advocate completely non-favored packet handling by source do favor giving higher priority to some types of content, like giving video a higher priority than text since if a website takes a second longer to load you don’t care all that much but if there’s a second lag in a video then it’s really noticeable. This idea of giving higher priority at all for any reason has scared some people who fear that it will just be the first step in a long series of steps to a “truly neutral internet, meaning a completely mandated non-partisan internet”, a la the “Overton Window”.
Sam Stone, both the broadband ISPs around here are in the telecom, and television business (charter, and verizon). Everything else is either too slow, or too high latency. They’d have a lot of economic incentive to block VOIP, and things like netflixs. They’re the only games in town for the foreseeable future.
Should people in these areas be denied access to VOIP, and media services such as netflixs, skype, Google voice, and whatever new game changing startup comes down the pipe?
I’m not sure if this has been mentioned already, but the “worrisome scenario[s]” are not just pie-in-the-sky concerns, but inevitable. As borne out by the current Comcast v. Level 3 dispute, still being argued.
I know that many ISPs are moving into the content business. And in my opinion, that’s where any kind of reform legislation should be aimed - perhaps existing anti-trust laws should be used to block things like Comcast’s proposed purchase of NBC.
I’m familiar with the Comcast vs Level3 dispute. There are valid points on both sides of that one. It gets into the difference between public content provider and data network, and whether ISP’s have a right to charge extra for people using the network for things like internal business traffic.
For example, let’s say Holiday Inn needs to transmit customer data between hotels. So it sets up a data center, and connects it to the internet. But it’s completely private, never intended for anyone to see other than other Holiday Inn businesses. So then other Holiday Inns connect to this server through Comcast to transmit daily customer data. It’s a private network riding on the public internet. Should Comcast be able to charge them extra for that service?
Typically, when businesses need this kind of communication they have to buy dedicated T1 lines or at least buy business access plans through their ISPs, for a significantly higher amount of money.
Net Neutrality really complicates this, and it’s one of the reasons why I believe that any net neutrality regulations passed now will just engender more and more regulations going forward. Because if ISPs are no longer allowed to discriminate, then businesses will start free-riding on their consumer networks. Then we’ll need another regulation determining whether or not you qualify as a business or a content delivery network. Next thing you know, there will be new form filing requirements for internet server operators certifying that they’re providing a public service or something. Then you’ll possibly see large ISPs who provide public servers and web hosting working with the government to give them exceptions, which will help freeze out independent servers and smaller ISPs by making it harder for people to set up web servers with them.
This is all hypothetical, but then, so are most of the fears being pushed as an excuse for net neutrality. But the history of regulated industries shows that this is exactly the kind of corruption that slowly sets in.
By Sam Stone
<Snip> That’s the real fear behind government regulation of the internet. Or at least, that’s one of the fears. Another is that it will eventually be hijacked and captured by the special interests once the activists get their way and move on. Another is that the regulation will create unintended consequences which will require more regulations, and once the government has its regulatory boot in the door of the internet, it will start to be slowly choked just like brick and mortar businesses have been choked by the myriad regulations that have piled on them over the last century.
[/QUOTE]
I think this is correct. The less the Govt. interferes with ANY business, the better. That’s all I have to add.
