The Government does not just help corporations. It also, frequently, hurts them. Overall, the majority of corporations would be better off if the Government mostly left them alone and stuck to the basics of maintaining law and order.
The Government also both helps, and hurts, everyday people, all the time. And again people would, overall, be better off if the Government did less. But that is no reason to be skeptical of the good will of the Government when it does something genuinely helpful. Even in most of the cases where Government is harmful, it means well.
I don't believe that. Most cases in which the government is harmful are caused by individuals putting their own interests above that of their constituencies. "The Government" is not an organism and it's a very common mistake to think of it (or a corporation) as one. It's a group of individuals many of whom have to be reelected to maintain their status.
Farm subsidies exist, even though every economist says they should not, because congressmen like the bucks passed to them by the agricultural lobbies, because those bucks help them get reelected. Etc.
For a real interesting read, pick up Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food. It explains how the interplay between government officials who meant well and ones clinging to power through corporate dollars degraded our country's diet to the point where it's significantly less healthy than that of indigenous tribes who eat nothing but red meat. It's neat how a government mandate to eat less meat instead became one to eat more carbs.
I agree with most of what you say. But consider again those cases where an individual legislator "puts his own interest first". In those cases, our system of government put officials in a situation where they have a conflict of interest. That is a flaw in our system of Government and should not be blamed on the malice of any individual. Whatever you do in a conflict of interest there was no single, clear path to follow, so no one can blame you too much, and if you choose the wrong path it's an understandable mistake.
If you don't want people to use power, don't give them power. It's not, individually, their fault.
I do not wish to defend out and out corruption, but that's relatively uncommon compared to simple conflicts of interest. Most people are selfish, and there's nothing wrong with that, and what's going wrong is asking them to make terrible choices between themselves and others.
Totally. Our lawmakers are given an incentive system that often puts their interests in direct opposition to ours. People over time will trend toward their own interests.
It's not so much that we cannot give them power (or want not to) as that we must do so while aligning their interests with ours. One example (and I'm not sure I support this) would be to force all campaigns to be government funded. Find every possible reason why lobbyists give money and stop it.
The more of a free market, and small government, we have, the less there is for lobbyists to buy, and the less decisions for politicians to make. Moving in that direction will at least lessen the problem. :)
That's kind of what I mean about power. For example, if there are people in charge of the economy -- with power over it -- that's a problem and people will want to pay them to use the power to their benefit. But there needn't be anyone with power of that sort.
The argument that torrent users degrade the network for other users is tenuous at best, and I wish someone would start calling people out on it.
If the ISP says I have a 6m/768k broadband line, then I should be able to saturate that limit to my heart's content, with whatever I want to download/upload. If it degrades the local network somehow, that is the ISP's fault, not mine, and my neighbors are free to be angry at the ISP for an unreliable connection.
What is the point of having a connection that you can't use to its potential? If torrent users really are degrading the network, then lower the speed caps for the given price tier, as you have obviously oversold capacity. Or, better yet, upgrade the network. Laying a guilt trip on people for 'using too much of something they paid for' is just retarded.
The argument that torrent users should be able to use all the bandwidth they've paid for is totally disconnected from ISP economics, and I wish someone would start calling people out on it. Wait, that's what I'm doing right now.
ISPs are built on statistical multiplexing. They pay something like $40/Mbps/month and resell that bandwidth for around one tenth that price. If ISPs had enough capacity to satisfy all their customers simultaneously, they have to increase prices or decrease speeds enormously. If 6M service suddenly cost $200/month, then any kind of multimedia on the Net dies immediately. Statistical multiplexing benefits almost all Internet users (whose traffic is bursty), so it's not going away.
Oh I realize how it works. It's the same reason my university parking department could oversell parking spaces. Not everyone is going to be on campus at once.
Thankfully not every user is using BitTorrent. But some are. If the statistical model assumes that no one will ever use all they are alloted, then the model is broken and needs to be re-calibrated. If this results in a price increase, at least that is transparent, rather than traffic shaping and individual throttling, which denies people something they paid for, and basically amounts to false advertising:
> "Speeds up to 150x faster than dialup![1]"
[1] But you can't actually take advantage of that rate, because it'd be rude to your neighbors.
Do I want the FCC to regulate it? Definitely not. If the US govt. wants to crack down on ISPs this way, I would prefer that they at least do it through congress. Giving government more power is in general a bad idea. When this power is given to unelected bodies like the FCC (in a system based on "rule by the people") its a recipe for disaster. We already know that government bureaucrats are not the smartest of the bunch when it comes to IT. Do you really want to give them even more power to regulate it in the hopes that they don't do something stupid? I would rather leave it to corporations which have at least some incentive to act rationally.
I have to disagree about regulation. Most people have 1, maybe 2 choices of broadband providers. Where natural monopolies are involved, the free market has no chance to set things right, and government regulation is a necessity.
If we all had 3 or more cable companies to choose from, I'd agree.
But the regulation is a double-edged sword. The simple act of regulating makes it harder for new competitors to enter the game.
Let's say someone wants to compete with WOW and Time Warner (the two cable broadband providers in my area), so they get a reasonably-fast connection (but much lower than their competitors, since they have few customers) and get as many new customers as possible. They advertise that they are just as fast as the competition most of the time (not during peak hours), but the price is $10 cheaper per month.
This new company starts doing well, and then the BT users start to increase in proportion as the tech-savvy individuals migrate to this newer service. Speeds go down as a result, and it turns out that something like 50-60% of the traffic is long-running BitTorrent transfers. Customers start complaining of slow speeds and other occasional issues. This new competitor has a few options:
1. Upgrade the infrastructure
2. Repackage the service
3. Throttle BT traffic
Option 1 is a no-go because the company has just started to turn a positive revenue, and by the time money is found and spent on upgrades (which will also take a significant amount of time), a large part of the customer base will have left, and the company's reputation will be poor as well.
Option 2 also has the danger of losing customers. In order to have the intended effect, existing customers will have to make the choice of paying more for the same speed (Why'd I switch, anyways?) or paying the same/less for a lower "guaranteed" speed. Again, this choice is a net lose, although if the company is lucky and can do 1 and 2 at the same time, they might stay in business, at the cost of killing their momentum/reputation.
Option 3 is clearly the simplest solution with the least backlash, except that because of FCC regulations, it's illegal. Instead of being allowed to (hopefully) temporarily throttle BitTorrent bandwidth as the company increases its customer base and its infrastructure, it is quite possibly forced out of business.
Bandwidth throttling is arguably fair anyways. Consider your OS: if there is a long-running process which will saturate bandwidth, any good OS will put it at a low priority, so that bursty activity (browsing, small downloads, SSH sessions) have a reasonable response time. So we are perfectly happy to throttle our own bandwidth when it benefits us, but it is not okay for the ISP to do the same exact thing, only on a larger scale?
This is not what Net Neutrality is about. Net Neutrality is about preventing content providers from creating deals with ISPs that lock out smaller content providers. It is not about protecting users' "rights" to saturate the network at full speed and kill everyone's bandwidth, especially when the reality is that a substantial amount of that traffic is illegal.
"necessary" is always in relation to a preferred outcome. In your usage, this happens to be optimal economic performance when it comes to ISP. Now, first of, note that government interference int the ISP business does not in any way guarantee that there will actually be any improvement after all, how many times have we seen the government screw up even the simplest of maneuvers. Regardless, let us set aside that point for now. Consider what we are getting and what we are giving up for it. We are getting a marginal improvement in the efficiency of bandwidth providers, an improvement that future technologies (ie. WiMAX, etc...) may give us in time anyway, and in exchange for it, we are giving the government (specifically the FCC) permission to interfere and pass arbitrary mandates on IT companies. How long before the FCC uses this newfound authority to pass a patently idiotic proposition. Is the gain in efficiency worth this risk? In the case of BT throttling (and indeed for mast cases), I think the answer is, by a very large margin, no.
