A California net neutrality bill that could have been the strictest such law in the country was dramatically scaled back yesterday after state lawmakers caved to demands from AT&T and cable lobbyists.
While the California Senate approved the bill with all of its core parts intact last month, a State Assembly committee’s Democratic leadership yesterday removed key provisions.
“What happened today was outrageous,” Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), the bill author, said. “These hostile amendments eviscerate the bill and leave us with a net neutrality bill in name only.”
Corruption works.
Not in the land of freedom where fool words are not censored but dangerous guns are regulated, and perfect democracy were complete parts of the population are not prevented to vote just on their name.
Edited 2018-06-22 04:37 UTC
You do realize that this is an argument for letting the market sort out the issue?
The “free” market will undoubtedly solve the issue. Just like the Microsoft case in the 90s. Or the Oracle case in the 00s.
In all the cases you mentioned the free market did work. Firefox broke IE’s monopoly, Android/iOS broke the Windows monopoly.
In any event these events don’t negate that it is a argument against government interference.
Edited 2018-06-22 08:49 UTC
Why Microsoft had to add a browser selection carousel at OS first startup, if not to promote alternatives to IE because *normal* people were unaware about but “Optimized for IE6” ?
In which way Android/iOS *replaced* my home/office computers and led to Microsoft bankruptcy ? Never found tablets to be particularly convenient for writing documentation of editing pictures.
It isn’t a zero sum game.
Android/Chrome books gives people an alternative computing platform. So do online services (even though they have their own problems). 10-15 years ago there wasn’t any real alternatives (not even Apple tbh).
Also a lot more software is portable now that 10 years ago. As a developer I can pretty much develop whatever I want on any platform, in any language.
Edited 2018-06-22 12:01 UTC
I remember a time when PC were the underdogs, and there were Atari, Amiga, Sinclair, Acorn, Apple, Fujitsu, … computers around that offered *real* alternatives.
But Microsoft dominance, and not for its inherent merits, killed them all. Remember BeOS that was prevent by Microsoft from OEM installation on Fujitsu computers ?
Please, look around with a more open mind. Don’t just cherry pick the facts that validate your points.
Edited 2018-06-22 12:29 UTC
Maybe you should take your own advice.
Edited 2018-06-22 14:31 UTC
No problem about my advice. Access to corporate offices granted Microsoft a revenue stream the other companies could only have dreamt of, for sure. And Microsoft not porting their office software to other operating system also made them struggle to stay relevant. The fact that document file format were not open made it relatively easy for Microsoft to push their office suite as a de facto standard.
Why should Microsoft port their software or make it an open standard? It is their software they can do whatever they like. Personally I wouldn’t bother porting my software to some 3rd party OS, which my existing customers aren’t using.
I’ve noticed this type of conversation with other ideologues. You list a bunch of facts of why something isn’t as straightforward as they claim it is, and then they say “well what about this bad thing they did over here”, ignoring the overall point.
All those companies made bad business decisions which led directly to their failure, sure Microsoft didn’t play nice and it didn’t help. But these companies screwed themselves with bad business decisions well before hand.
The fact of the matter is that you have more choice of what software to use then ever before. That is not because the EU and their fines, it is because companies produced viable alternatives to Microsoft products that people wanted to use.
Replace “viable” by “good enough” and/or “cheaper”. If LibreOffice wasn’t free, I wouldn’t use it because it is so much bug ridden. But alas Office is too, so I chose the lesser of a burden.
You kinda proved my point. Lets talk about one problem while ignoring all the nuance.
There are alternatives to office. Yes if you have massive spreadsheets with loads of VBA logic you are stuck using MS office. However the regular consumer has plenty of choice as they won’t need loads of Macro support. My friend from University actually runs a business in Germany selling something similar to Google Docs.
Though Amiga, Atari, Sinclair, Acorn were pretty much dead before MS Office took over. And BeOS x86 was too late…
Countries with the fastest, cheapest, and most reliable internet connections are all countries where ISPs are heavily regulated. Regulation isn’t the problem; corruption is.
I’m sorry, but facts are non-negotiable.
I didn’t say I agreed with it. I am in the UK (however your choice is basically Virgin or BT. All the lines are owned by BT).
However corruption in cases like gives people that are making a libertarian argument more ammunition.
Edited 2018-06-22 11:41 UTC
Not quite. BT only owns the telephone lines. Virgin has laid its own cable structure from scratch.
It really doesn’t matter which ISP you choose, you are still choosing between BT and Virgin. Yes the ISP you connect to isn’t BT, but it is one BT’s lines. I was on 4mb/s until they finally put in Fibre last year.
The only difference in pricing tends to be how they put together bundles and the level of customer support.
Lot easier to build a nationwide network in a country like Taiwan, Belgium, Netherlands, etc. than it is in a place like the US. Look at population densities in places like Montana, North Dakota, Alaska, etc. There is no money to be made in providing service to all of Montana. In reality, the companies are subsidizing the users in Montana by charging a higher price than they need to in places like NYC and Chicago.
People in places like Montana, North Dakota, Alaska, etc. hardly influence (mediocre…) internet connection stats precisely because there’s so little of them…
Anyway, look at population densities in places like Norway – half the population density of the US… and universally better and less expensive internet connections, both in population centers and in the wilderness.
Spain is a large country. There are only really two ISPs, one cable and the other on traditional phone lines and internet is extremely expensive and slow compared to the UK.
So it is in a similar situation to the USA with only a handful of ISPs and there is only Movistar and Ono (there wasn’t Orange in my area when I lived in Spain).
So I don’t think your thesis is complete.
This is one of the main reasons why in many countries, law makers and political parties are not allow to receive money from private parties or, at least, those “donations” are heavily regulated and minimized.
Before everyone goes out yelling about “corruption”, there is certainly something else going on here.
Consider: The committee is 7 Democrats and 3 GOP. All 7 democrats and 1 GOP voted for the changes. The other 2 GOP voted no.
That, obviously, doesn’t fit the narrative.
Then there was the line in the article about Santiago (Chairmen of the committee) at AT&T was a top donor.
AT&T donated $8,800, along with a lot of other donors. His total donations was $845,000. So, AT&T is just ~1% of that. Even more curious, Facebook gave him $7,400.
So, now, for “$1,100” this guy sold out Facebook for AT&T (since we can imagine that Facebook would be in favor of this).
So, anyway, the idea that these guys are “bought and paid for” doesn’t quite hold water. Lobbying is much more complicated than simply stuffed $100 bills in to manilla envelopes and surreptitiously sliding them underneath tables over coffee.