Members of congress who voted to reverse FCC web browsing privacy rule
theverge.com
theverge.com
Democrats are beholden to Wall St, Hollywood/music (see: RIAA), and special-interest groups. Silicon Valley also seems to be getting better at influencing Democrats.
It definitely is lopsided, and Republicans are clearly more anti-consumer, but no national politician survives by betraying big donors.
To your point, Wall St. donates to Democrats but it seems to have very limited effect compared to Republicans.
This is wrong. Was Dodd Frank reduced in scope and severity from its first drafting? Yes. Does that amount to watering it down to meaninglessness? No. The bits that stuck have bite. Some bits had, in my opinion, more bite than merit.
They were just as happy to sell you out when they voted for the ACA (which is working for now, but will eventually fuck over a lot of middle class Americans who aren't getting insurance through their employer).
Any narrative that the Democrats have health insurers as their patrons and Republicans do not needs to account for facts of history like this one:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Equity_and_Access_Ref...
(The argument that both parties would have loved the individual mandate, and merely fought over it for political points as a show for voters, is at least consistent with objective history.)
Think about it this way: the attention of voters is limited and expensive. Therefore communicating with them is a costly commodity. Right now it is controlled by media organizations, and the only way for politicians to pay that cost is (1) out of their own pockets (if they're independently wealthy), (2) out of corporate pockets, or (3) out of the pockets of excited and motivated party partisans.
Most people don't like (1) for obvious reasons -- it's easy to bash the rich as being elitist and out of touch. (3) has a chicken-and-egg problem of how a politician can reach people if they don't have any money initially to bootstrap the process. It also leads to politicians saying really controversial and divisive things to get the base excited -- the base's interests don't always align with the general electorate's.
So either we actually enact strong campaign finance reform (good luck getting that past the Supreme Court), we stop electing politicians that took corporate money, or we have robust public funding for elections so politicians don't need corporate money.
See https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/mar/16/conservativ...
Ignoring differences of degree like that is a sure way to end up in a terrible situation: "it's bad anyhow, who cares if it gets worse?"
There’s also the example of a number of the pro-Leave campaigns in the EU referendum receiving donations from unknown donors, then all spending it with the same strategic communications company behind Ted Cruz’s primary and Trump’s presidential campaigns [1]. In this cases, the sums involved were of the order of millions of pounds — a bit more significant.
1: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great...
This is because election spending in the UK is limited by the Electoral Commission. Also the spending must be published.
For the record, the magic number is £30k per seat contested on "campaign spending" (to promote the national party), and another about £10-16k of "candidate spending" (to promote a particular candidate) depending on the size of the constituency.
https://fullfact.org/law/election-spending-rules-conservativ...
(Not that I'm suggesting the UK is perfect; simply that there is a nevertheless a huge difference)
Whether the punishment is enough or not I don't know, maybe, maybe not, but we are better than the US on this, the US does not have any requirements/legislation about it, let alone levy fines on parties for going over them.
True. But is anyone else surprised how cheap a congressman is? 30k and you can have private phone calls, dinners, etc. You don't need a large international corporation to shell out 30k - hell, some of the congressmen are cheaper than 5k.
If Alison Hartson can also win against the military industry complex and intelligence community-backed Dianne Feinstein in the upcoming Senate election in California, I think it will show a real reversal from politicians winning with corporate money alone and a trend that people and sick and tired of this type of politicians.
But if you really want to solve this corporate money problem, you can. Just ban all corporate donations and limit individual donations to less than $500 per politician per year. Donations above $1,000 still seem to incentivize politicians to hold "fundraisers" with rich people and cocktail parties, instead of actually appealing to the masses.
The "money vote" needs to be "equal and universal" just like the actual vote. Right now it's way skewed in favor of rich people and companies.
The FBI would also need to launch automatic investigations against any politicians that are found to have >$10,000 donated (in total) to her or him that isn't coming from such <$500 individual donations. For instance, the fact that the latest Supreme Court Justice was backed by $25 million "dark money" is a spit in the face of democracy. He should have been investigated immediately over that by the FBI/an anti-corruption agency.
You can't excuse this type of behavior with "well, they need the money to win!" anymore. It's destroying whatever is left of US' democracy, and it's regular people that will have to suffer the consequences for that. Winning isn't important anymore when the winners are also the "baddies."
Okay, let's break this down a bit. What you're saying is:
1. A private individual (or collection of private individuals; we don't know) spent $25m promoting their views about an important political issue of the day.
2. This is bad.
That's an interesting argument, but do keep in mind that you're describing is about as pure exercise of the first amendment as you're likely to find. The founders would recognise a wealthy, powerful individual using the best communication technology available to spread their views, possibly anonymously, because that's precisely what they did, and precisely what they aimed to protect. Even if you think it's a good idea not to let people have an unrestricted voice to speak about political topics (and I'm unconvinced, to say the least), that's super not going to happen in the US of all places.
> He should have been investigated immediately over that by the FBI/an anti-corruption agency.
Investigated for what? Unless you're imagining some sort of blatant, explicit quid pro quo, any law you're hoping to find a violation of would itself be ridiculously unconstitutional.
Campaign finance reform is a great idea, but you need to keep in mind that in the US you can restrict money donated to campaigns, but you can't restrict money spent speaking about political issues. (Which I think is probably for the best, given how many people would like to silence Greenpeace, the ACLU, pro-choice groups, the New York Times, etc., etc. Especially these days...)
They also used the best weapons available at the time and aimed to protect their ownership by individuals. That doesn't mean they either foresaw the development of nuclear weapons or would approve their ownership by individuals.
( If it is truly free, why bail out those deemed too large to fail? )
That was largely not a Republican nor free-market-supporting move if I recall correctly. While new and more innovative companies would likely take the bankrupt companies' place, there would be a harsh transition period in which blame would be placed on the Democratic leadership at the time.
Plus, regardless of partisanship, it's tough even for those who support free markets to knowingly thrust thousands of constituents into immediate unemployment, both morally and for re-elective purposes.
Some people genuinely believe free markets are the best thing for consumers.
I hope this is satirical. One could just as easily state that pro-regulation ideology is anti-competition ideology. The idea is to create a regulatory burden so large that only big companies can afford to comply, or lobby to get favorable regulations. "It's basically a religion... to align with the interest of" politicians and bureaucrats.
Your version breaks because there's no apparent win condition by doing that. The only possible gain politicians and bureaucrats have by bloating the system is continued employment... which is not guaranteed, and does not pay especially well (relative).
They're much better off getting lobbied and doing whatever corporations want, which is screw over your constituents.
Ok, so ISPs give money to all of Congress, and every single representative in the list is a Republican. Sounds like the vote happened along party lines, then? But does that not invalidate the article's entire thesis? Maybe if they listed the representatives who voted against the bill, and showed that there is a significant difference in contributions, it would support their thesis. But they don't do that.
A significant difference would not so much support their thesis as fail to support the negation of their thesis.
What articles such as this almost never consider is that donors might choose which politicians to donate to and how much to donate based on the publicly stated positions of the politician and the politician's party, that politician's past votes, and the general political philosophy of the politician and party.
If we banned all political donations, and put a limit on political spending by the candidates or on behalf of the candidates, switching to funding campaigns entirely out of public money, a bill like this would STILL be largely supported by Republicans and largely opposed by Democrats because of their philosophical differences.
What way if any will affect non US residents?
Your data has probably been sold a hundred time over already by US companies.
(Edit: Amazingly the four previous people who responded to you seem to have all gotten it wrong)
You yourself have probably given to a member of Congress because they did something rather than so that they will do something. I gave to a member of Congress because they spoke out for Gun control, not because I called them and told Them that if they speak out I will write them a check.
That’s what makes this kind of uncontextualized data pretty disheartening. You’re showing some correlations, conflating it with causation, and disaffecting the electorate (which, in turn makes the lobbyists more powerful)
Frankly, talking in extremes like that isn't likely to be helpful in deciding which regulatory agency should do what.
Wasn't there a ruling by the 9th Circuit that said the FTC does not have jurisdiction over common carriers, and so, at least in the 9th Circuit, this does not return to the 2014 status quo until after the FCC completes their killing of the 2015 Open Internet Order?
So go ahead and use a VPN, but it won't matter when you're throttled to 50 kb/s
> If you have to pay extra, fine, but let's be clear that the only changes are monetary ones,
Are you suggesting that they wouldn't throttle, they'd just block? I'm not sure how this is any better or changes the scenario; you still have to pay to use a service you currently can use just fine.
Blocking, throttling, the end result is the same; you are unable to use the service because the ISP has decided they deserve to be paid for your use of this service. Whether it's a work VPN or a VPN service, there would be no distinguishing.
Plus, we've already seen such muscling from ISPs as they wanted cuts of service profits with regards to the Netflix throttling. Comcast decided "we deserve some payment from Netflix", and forced a contract to be made, all the while consumers were unable to use a service because Comcast decided that "oh, we deserve a cut here."
If VPN usage increased, I see no reason why the same wouldn't happen, regardless of the use. Since there's no singular entity to press on here (as was the case with Netflix), just press on the end-users by means of throttling, or cut it off all together.
We have plenty of historical evidence that ISPs will do whatever they want if they can get away with it, including throttling.
Note, Comcast actually does something like this already. If you get on their gigabit plan, their dumb monthly cap of 1 TB still applies, but you can pay more to remove that cap and go back to the unlimited it used to be.
What I'm missing is how the initial comment relates to the first, specifically they won't throttle or make any QOS changes because too many people use it. We've seen that Comcast in particular is more than happy to throttle services just because they can or want to, and in the case of Netflix, consumers didn't even have an option to pay more to make it work properly; Netflix just would be terrible for them no matter what.
What I'm saying was a response to the idea that people can somehow just use a VPN to circumvent any restrictions, which makes no sense to me. Usage reports will clearly show a high level of traffic going over VPN, and the response will just be to make this part of a new tier of service as well; to recoup the value lost by people bypassing tier/package service with a VPN, the price will be adjusted accordingly.
So I'm sorry, I guess I'm just being dense, but I'm not sure exactly why VPN services wouldn't be affected if VPNs became a means of circumventing the intended Tiering/Package offers.
Edit: Also, I'm sorry that someone is voting you down for a misunderstanding. I think that's inappropriate.
Some existential threats to countries:
* An equally or more powerful country declares war on the country. (Actually even an underdog can occasionally win, so the power criteria isn't strictly needed for a threat...) Similarly for a group of countries against another group of countries.
* Increased tensions within a country build up to a civil war. Survivable (USA) but still a threat.
* The US State Department doesn't like the country's leader(s)
* Country cannot produce as much as or more than it consumes. Side effects include mass starvation, coup attempts.
* Modern "acts of war" but not necessarily carried out by a war-declaring entity like another country. E.g. terrorist attacks on infrastructure. Probably worst (but least likely) threat is an EMP detonated about as high up as the ISS, if you wanted to affect a country the size of the continental US.
* Government bankruptcy.
* Mass disease (thankfully less of a threat given modern medicine and distribution)
I'll stop there...
You seem to have a very unusual concept of what makes an existential threat, and I think countries is an easier analogy to try and understand your reasoning.
> * An equally or more powerful country declares war on the country. (Actually even an underdog can occasionally win, so the power criteria isn't strictly needed for a threat...) Similarly for a group of countries against another group of countries.
What if the attacking country declared that its goal is to gain power over the country to exploit it economically, but let the country continue to exist (essentially colonialism)? Would you still consider that an existential threat?
> * Increased tensions within a country build up to a civil war. Survivable (USA) but still a threat.
What if the declared goal of all parties to the war would be to keep the country intact, just with different sets of rules? Would you still consider that an existential threat?
> * The US State Department doesn't like the country's leader(s)
How does that threaten the country existentially? That's just about who has power in the country, not about whether the country exists, isn't it?
> * Country cannot produce as much as or more than it consumes. Side effects include mass starvation, coup attempts.
But a country with a starving population is still a country, isn't it? And a country that had a coup is still a country, isn't it? So, why is this an existential threat to a country?
> * Modern "acts of war" but not necessarily carried out by a war-declaring entity like another country. E.g. terrorist attacks on infrastructure. Probably worst (but least likely) threat is an EMP detonated about as high up as the ISS, if you wanted to affect a country the size of the continental US.
But would that change that it's still a country? Why would you consider this an existential threat when the country still exists afterwards?!
> * Government bankruptcy.
How is that an existential threat for the country? It's just a bankrupt country then, isn't it?
> * Mass disease (thankfully less of a threat given modern medicine and distribution)
Wouldn't that just result in a country with a lot of ill and ultimately dead people? That doesn't make it not a country, does it? Why do you consider this an existential threat to the country, then?!
> I'll stop there...
Sure, I think I got the idea, but I really did not get your reasoning behind this. I don't really expect that you respond individually to each question above, that probably would be a huge waste of time ... my point is: Why would you consider any of that an existential threat to a country when the country in all cases almost certainly still exists afterwards?
For the sorts of existential threats I care about, you can read https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Existential-Risk... where the Thing at risk is the bright future of mankind.
Given that, I hope you'll see that everything I gave was a threat. Threats aren't certainties. Threats aren't themselves states that are isomorphic with or inevitably lead to non-existence. A war might be lost, and the nation as it was is conquered and absorbed into the winning nation. With this not-uncommon possibility, war is obviously an existential threat. But extinction isn't certain. What if the victor ends up mostly leaving the nation alone after (e.g. Israel vs its neighbors)? Or you might define that a country becoming a client-state still counts as continuity of existence (I don't) and that is not uncommon too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_sovereign_state... has a nice list of things that no longer exist, and some of these things we might both agree count as countries that no longer exist -- definitions are important -- as opposed to sovereign government changes within a stable geographical boundary, or country unions that fell apart with the individual members remaining. If you went through them and picked out the common threads between them (the list itself begins with "conflict, war, rebellion, annexation, or uprising", so consider things likely to lead to those for even more threat options) then those commonalities would probably count as common existential threats.
Edit: and given all that, I don't think net-bias is an existential threat to the internet. The internet -- definitions are important -- may cease to exist, but I don't think net-bias by ISPs would be a big reason why, and the scenarios I can picture the internet actually ceasing to exist seem to be able to happen just as probably with or without ISPs not upholding (or being forced to uphold) neutrality.
Well, yeah, but what does it mean for abstract things to exist in the first place?
> where the Thing at risk is the bright future of mankind.
But that is a very different thing from a country, isn't it? Couldn't countries continue to exist as totally dystopic entities?
> Given that, I hope you'll see that everything I gave was a threat.
Oh, sure those are threats, to something. But so is net bias, isn't it? But that doesn't automatically make it a threat to the country, does it?
> Threats aren't certainties. Threats aren't themselves states that are isomorphic with or inevitably lead to non-existence.
But a threat also isn't just anything that could possibly contribute to the demise of something in some minor manner under extremely unusual circumstances, in particular an existential one, right?
> A war might be lost, and the nation as it was is conquered and absorbed into the winning nation. With this not-uncommon possibility, war is obviously an existential threat.
Which is why I specifically asked about the case of a colonial war.
> Or you might define that a country becoming a client-state still counts as continuity of existence (I don't) and that is not uncommon too.
Why don't you? As I understood you, you wouldn't consider (the possibility of) a complete change of how the country is governed to be an existential threat, to the point that you apparently wouldn't consider the change to a dictatorship or monarchy an existential threat. What is it then that makes this an existential threat, when it seems that as far as the power structure is concerned, there wouldn't really be much of a difference whether you have a corrupt dictator or a governor from another country running your country?!
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_sovereign_state... has a nice list of things that no longer exist, and some of these things we might both agree count as countries that no longer exist -- definitions are important -- as opposed to sovereign government changes within a stable geographical boundary, or country unions that fell apart with the individual members remaining.
But do countries have to be sovereign? According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country, sovereignty is not a defining characteristic of a country.
> The internet -- definitions are important -- may cease to exist, but I don't think net-bias by ISPs would be a big reason why, and the scenarios I can picture the internet actually ceasing to exist seem to be able to happen just as probably with or without ISPs not upholding (or being forced to uphold) neutrality.
Well, yes, exactly, definitions are important, that is kindof my point, and as far as net bias being an existential threat to the internet is concerned, I think you are probably simply missing the point by using a definition of "the internet" that's not useful in the context. Just as it is not useful to assume that someone speaking of "existential threats to a country" means exclusively roads and buildings, it's not useful to assume that someone speaking of "existential threats to the internet" means exclusively cables and routers.
When people speak of "existential threats to a country", they usually mean some sort of power structure and societal structures and culture in addition to the geographic boundaries and what infrastructure can be found within it. The fact that you are now steering towards sovereignty as a relevant distinguisher between whether a country continues to exists or not suggests that you do as well, even though that is not part of the general definition of a country.
Similarly, for the internet, when people talk about net bias being an existential threat to the internet, noone means by that that the internet protocol will be dead without net neutrality. What everyone means is that it is going to change massively how the internet is going to be used, that many of the good effects that result from the power structure of a neutral internet will stop, to the point that it culturally wouldn't be recognizable to someone who only knew the neutral internet, notwithstanding the fact that IP packets will still be IP packets.
How would that play out with VPNs? Well, if netflix users would be forced to a) pay for a vpn and b) pay for comcast to allow the vpn to be fast, or not to any of that and just go with comcasts video service. So netflix will want to pay comcast so that their users don't jump ship. Comcast might let them, but even that is not a given.
The real problem is not so much the lack of NN, it's the monopoly for the last mile. But without NN and no competition in the last mile service, we will have a problem.
[1] Or any other ISP who has a monopoly in a large enough segment of the market.
Basically your choice is to find someone who doesn't do this, and hope that the path from whatever service or site you're wanting doesn't go through the pipes of an ISP that does want to throttle on its way to you.
It's going to be a mess once this has ramped up to the full vision of the ISPs.
NN isn’t the issue — the issue is local governments that make deals with a single ISP to prevent competition. If ISP competition were possible, the NN becomes irrelevant because ISP’s want customers and customers would demand the services they want and shop around for an ISP that serves their need.
We should be complaining about the lack of ISP competition, not NN. Remember the days when long distance phone calls actually cost a lot of money? That was the result of a Bell monopoly.
Besides, this is a tangential issue; it's related in someway, but such competition doesn't help consumers when it comes to what their ISP can and cannot do. Even without city contracts, it's really expensive in the US to start an ISP; we've seen countless stories about ISP start-ups here on HN which show the difficulty of such a venture, and it's why we don't see more of it. Heck, Google with its deep pockets could not make it work even in cities that were happy to bend over backwards for them.
Even if we were to have more last mile ISPs, how does that help when the rest of the upstream is plagued with ISPs that are deprioritizing traffic based on their preferences? What good is it to have an ISP at the last mile in Seattle if the route to Seattle de-prioritizes this traffic?
Net Neutrality is equally important to the striking down of the city-wide contracts ISPs have managed to get. This was a state by state thing and the story was the same each time; the ISPs promised far more than they delivered to the states, and the states just ate the bill while the ISPs fought in court each and every time. I don't believe for a moment that the ISPs should be able to use our Tax Payer money to have laid cable like this then bend us over a barrel for it.
More competition would be great, but this alone doesn't solve the issue. How big of a price tag does a BenevolentISP have before it's an offer too good to refuse? Why even give them the power to use our money to screw us even further?
I guess you could theoretically eventually get them using the same stuff China uses to block VPNs via more advanced heuristics, though.
It will just be a cat and mouse game though.
Ending with people not taking the risk due to penalties. (ie. ISP blacklist of users who tried to circumvent the system)
without net neutrality, they can give you 2G speeds for everything and whitelist special sites. so you can only circumvent the speed limit if a whitelisted site gives you a vpn pipe and consequently foot the bill for you.... good luck with that.
my guess is that hacking of the network of the basic services, such as sites owned by their parent company or dns or anything that the ISP give at full speed because it is too much work to limit or business interests for you to access at full throttle... those things will have more holes poked at them than they will have corrupt employees selling privileged access :(
Natural monopolies like telecom need to be heavily regulated.
I'm a big fan of Lawrence Lessig's idea: https://vimeo.com/76349568 https://www.rootstrikers.org
How you'll get any group of morally bankrupt politicians to vote for such a statute is unfathomable. Canada had it briefly but the big parties nixed it as soon as they got into power. They didn't like the idea that 3rd and 4th tier parties could actually earn money from votes and actually start to chip away at this 2-party flip-flopping that we have every 8-12 years.
Its appears it's not your vote but money that influences outcomes on a day to day basis, so back to quasi feudalism dressed up. Adam smith spoke about this, anti-regulation propaganda is transparently self serving by entrenched interests. Markets are not magic, there is no invisible hand and there is no perfect information.
Markets are created by people and like everything else in civilized life they need rules and regulation and if you want to adhere to democratic principles and build progressive societies they need to reflect the wishes and interests of the people.
One day, GOP, this will haunt you.
Divine right was inconvertible by definition (after being defined by fiat). Throughout history, being on the losing side of a political conflict resulted in slavery or death. In a democracy, we have the privilege of trying again next year.
Change doesn't happen overnight. It happens when people refuse to give on their 99th loss and continue to apply all available pressure until the status quo finally cracks.
It's important to keep the vote competitive, the alternative is people stay at home because they think there is no point voting.