angrymnk wrote:
Question the First: Do you feel the markets are free?
Question the Second: Do you think markets are efficient?
Question the Third: Do you think people are rational?
Question the Fourth: Do you think people are ******* coated bastards?
Question the Fifth: Do you think current set of ISP/content (yes ISP slash content ) are oligopolies?
Question the Sixth: Why do you think oligopolies will not @#%^ with you unless they are tightly regulated?
angrymnk wrote:
Are they absolutes?
Questions one through five are absolute questions. They allow only for a yes or no answer. A non absolute question would be more like "How efficient do you believe the US market is?", or "How rational do you think people are?".
Get it?
Oh, and the sixth question is what's known as a "complex question fallacy" since the question itself makes an assumption that the answerer must accept before answering (ie: "when did you stop beating your wife?"). So equally invalid. If you want to know what I think, ask me what I think. Don't play 20 questions.
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Are they really? Compared to your opening my post was barely a couple of questions aiming to establish whether you know what you are talking about. I am not being cute. I am cute. But I am not being cute.
Yeah, you are. You may not be aware of it (cause god knows tons of people just use this sort of technique because that's what they see others use and they think it's effective or something), but you are playing "debate tricks" rather than engaging in an honest discussion of the issue.
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Allow me to quote from your previous post which led me to believe that you are a firm believer in the religion of the free market.
Why? I
am a firm believer in free markets (and it isn't about religion. Again, stop playing debate games).. There's no question about that. My issue is that you keep dancing around the specifics of a discussion of this particular market in favor of making clever comments. It's kinda annoying. Actually, no. It's incredibly annoying. If you feel strongly about a position on this issue, then actually state your position and provide solid support for it. If you disagree with my position, then present solid arguments against what I've posted. You're not doing that though.
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If the incredibly successful free-market model used as an argument does not point to a person who is a little too enamored with the concept I am not sure what does.
It's not about being enamored or not. It's about what I believe. If you disagree, instead of saying 'OMG. You're just enamored with that concept", why not actually say why you disagree. If you think I'm wrong, say why. You aren't doing that. You're just declaring the fact that I hold a position to mean I'm "religious" or "enamored" about my position and then moving on. Um... So what? You could counter any position with that BS. OMG! You believe that gravity makes objects with mass fall towards each other? Well, you're just enamored with your religious assumptions about this so called "law of gravity".
See how that's not really an argument?
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1) If it was a problem that could be addressed by the existing legislation, or litigation, we would not be having this discussion.
Of course we would. You're ignoring the possibility that there might be a motivation out there for those who favor greater government regulation to do so even when such regulation isn't really needed. The mere fact that someone proposes legislation doesn't prove that legislation is needed.
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HOWEVER, the ISPs in question effectively managed to block most of the offending legislation,
The fact that they blocked the legislation doesn't mean that the legislation was good, or needed. Please tell me you understand that? Pretty please?
If someone tries to pass legislation forcing you to walk on your hands all day long, and it gets blocked, does that mean that the legislation was good and should have been passed? No, it doesn't. Therefore the fact that ISPs have been able to block net neutrality legislation to this point doesn't tell us a damn thing about whether the net neutrality legislation is good or bad. See how that works? So why do you mention this?
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...and bound most customers to agreements in which they simply cannot sue ( I don't remember anymore if CA was still an exception to that ).
Huh? This is the US. You can
always sue. Whether you succeed or not is a whole different matter. You know who else "binds you to a contract"? Um.... Every business you buy a product from. Again, you are making irrelevant statements which tell us nothing about whether net neutrality laws are needed. You're talking about every single thing except what the proposed laws do and whether you think that's good or bad.
Even if I agreed that the ISPs were the most evil and powerful companies in the world and abused that power regularly, that would not mean I agreed with net neutrality as a good law to counter that. You need to argue *for* the proposed law. Simply arguing that ISPs are mean isn't good enough (and you aren't actually arguing that so much as just declaring it).
If we lived in 1930s Germany, would the fact that this up and coming **** regime and this Hitler guy were bad scary people mean that we should pass a law requiring everyone to shot themselves in the head? No. See, you have to look at the proposed law and see if it's a good thing. You can't just say "This thing over there is bad, so pass this law that maybe has nothing at all to do with that, and don't bother looking at it, cause look! Squirrel!!!".
That's just dumb. Argue *for* net neutrality if you think it's good legislation.
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You see, my successful free market friend, when a company becomes big, it becomes powerful. It can sometimes become too powerful; especially if there is no competition to keep it in check ( or sufficient regulation ). As it stands right now, there are only several real choices of ISPs and they seem pretty powerful since they can convince the legislative bodies (and retards like you ) that it is actually good for the customer.
And again, that doesn't constitute a legitimate argument in support of net neutrality legislation. See, there's this big gap in your logic where you don't show how condition A requires response B (and that's ignoring the fact that you also haven't proven condition A even exists).
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In your defense, I do not blame you. I blame the US education system. I does not teach critical thinking; at all.
Um... You think I'm the one failing at critical thinking here? That's hysterical.
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2) Ok, so what do you propose? I don't agree with you, so please do prepare something better than: let the free markets reign supreme..
Propose for what? Look. If an ISP is abusing its position with regard to content services, then I have no problem with passage of laws prohibiting that, or ensuring that customers can sue if such things are done. But that can be handled at the local and state levels pretty easy, and isn't really specific to network businesses. The problem is that the proposed net neutrality legislation goes far far beyond simply protecting consumers from abusive practices though. It proposes to require that networks treat all uses of their product equally regardless of the amount being paid.
That's an absurd requirement. It is precisely like telling a retail outlet that they must charge the same price for the Louis Vuitton bag as the cheap knockoff brand. And those who support it do so under the mistaken assumption that if they do this, then stores will be forced to sell them the Louis Vuitton bag for cheap knockoff prices. But what will really happen is that the stores will either stop carrying the Louis Vuitton bags and only carry the cheap ones *or* they'll increase the costs on everything to Louis Vuitton level. So either everyone loses or the "poor folk" lose (cause now all purses are priced out of their reach, not just the fancy high cost brands).
Same thing here. Net neutrality attempts to require that network providers must treat all packets equally regardless of type or source/destination. And the idiots who support it think that this means that they'll get higher speeds for the current low prices they're paying are just as wrong as the minimum wage earner thinking they'll be able to buy a fancy bag for bargain prices. It simply wont work. What will happen is that either all network traffic will get slower in order to accommodate the requirements *or* (more likely), ISPs will dramatically increase their prices in order to allow for the fact that they must provide just as much bandwidth to the guy paying for basic internet as the company paying for their international wan network. Which will mean that most people will no longer be able to afford *any* network connection.
So you're trading the situation today where if you pay bargain price, you get bargain performance while those who pay more get high performance (OMG! That's so unfair, right?), for a situation where everyone pays high performance prices and gets high performance. But of course, if you can't afford the high performance price, you get nothing at all. Wow! That's such a great idea. Oh wait. It's not.
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As for your ending paragraph, I will end with a question again.. why do you think ,since the internet was soooo free ( it wasn't.. but lets say I buy into your idiocy here), the ISPs in question only decided to go at those changes now? Wait, a bonus question, do you think FCC can regulate teh interwebz? If not, why not?
What changes? I'll repeat my earlier point: The false assumption here is that the ISPs are trying to change the internet to allow them greater power/control. That's simply false. There is no change on their side. They've always had that amount of power and control. Always. Yet, abuses have been few and far between and the benefits to the masses in terms of service to cost has been incredibly good. The "change" is net neutrality. I find it really interesting how consistently those who argue net neutrality first convince people that it's the ISPs trying to change things, and they're just fighting to "keep the internet free!". In fact, it's the other way around.
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If you break the interwebz by implementing it, how comes it managed to work before it ( because you know .. common carrier and bla bla bla )?
Um.... That's the point. It worked before. Nothing's changed. The net neutrality folks are the ones who want to change it. And they lie to you to make you think that the ISPs are the ones trying to change the system that "worked before". That's the point. Once you realize that the ISPs haven't changed how they do things at all, you realize that this whole thing isn't about protecting the freedom of internet users, but is a power grab by the government.
If oligarchy is bad because just a small number of companies have a large amount of control, isn't sole control by the government infinitely worse? I mean, you can't sue the government. It's not bound by the laws of some other higher power. It's far far more likely to abuse the power than a collection of ISPs and backbone providers, who are obligated to provide a service to their customers in order to make money, and bound by (reasonable) regulation on their industry. Why change a system that's worked so well up to now? What is motivating this? Does anyone actually honestly think that the internet is "broken" right now?