Nancy Pelosi, Ron Paul join SOPA opposition
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I suspect some other reason for her stance on this (can't fathom what, though).
It's unclear how motivated her constituents are against it, but it seems likely that all that letter writing may be paying off. In extreme cases, sitting members can be vulnerable to losing their nomination within the party (eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Lieberman#2006_Senate_elect...).
Edit: Downvotes? I'm not from the US - what did I get wrong?
Making matters worse, voters tend to want conflicting things. For example, in general they want more government programs and also lower taxes.
Making matters even more difficult, what voters say they want and what they actually want can be different stories. Schwarzenegger got elected on the premise that he was going to do certain things. He tried to do those things. He was shut down by everyone- including directly by the voters.
Do you have a citation on this? I recently read Freakonomics where the authors claimed to be able to prove this theory false, but I didn't look up their numbers.
But that only work when their constituents are insuffiently motivated to actively target them to remove them from power.
Members are quite vulnerable to losing their party nomination as it takes less votes than at an election. That was how the tea party got members elected (although usually that wasn't against sitting members)
That isn't praise, I personally don't like the guy's politics much. But clearly he pays attention to the needs of the large employers in his district. I think it's on target to point out that many of the large employers in her district oppose SOPA. That probably does have some influence on her stance.
It is true laws that are good for your employer can be good for you, because you of course have a vested interest in your employer. But I think many people feel it should be the other way- i.e. representatives shouldn't be looking out for business and hoping to cover the voters, they should be looking out for the voters, who will do the worrying about their employers. The way you illustrate, the power dynamic is in favor of business. Some crazy people feel it should be in favor of voters.
How to explain the widespread practice of earmarking, then?
The first two deliver the third.
Pork (bits added to bill that affect something in their electorate) affects the second and third, and was probably delivered as the result of a contribution from a lobbyist who was retained by a corporate.
I cannot recommend Larry Lessig's latest book enough to US voters.
So, like she says, "we need to find another way". They'll come up with a new bill that is either less objectionable or one that hides the objectionable parts more clearly... and then they'll pass it when nobody's paying attention.
He has principles. Off-topic but to the people who so often say, "I agree with him but I'm not going to support him because he can't win," I say, "Where are -your- princples?"
Neither do I identify myself as republican, nor do I support this bill in anyway but these are the types of sweeping statements that make it difficult to have any sort of rational conversation.
(Frankly, I think this whole topic seems like exactly the type of thing that shouldn't be on HN. I flagged it for whatever that's worth)
I would hope that if our legislative system is so divided that they can't agree on legislation relating to budgets or healthcare, they won't agree on this legislation either.
Not that its a good thing for the legislation system to be so ineffective, but it would seem truly ironic if they agree on something that will hurt the economy, but not on things that will help the economy.
Sigh; I live in a country where tomatoes are considered a vegetable.
There is way more money lined up to support it vs. oppose it, so I suspect going into an election season, a lot of congresspeople will support it for financial reasons.
Fortunately last couple of years US has government gridlock and that helps. A lot.
I hope gridlock in government would help again and SOPA bill would fail.
Saying gridlock in government is a good thing is like saying gridlock in Google's management was a good thing. We need government and we need effective government.
Sure there are some useful gems in legal system, but most of the laws are more of a burden.
Yes, we need government, but we need smaller government and smaller government is more efficient.
Government gridlock reduces government and makes it more efficient. Really useful bills still can go through gridlock, but amount of legal junk is significantly decreased.
Less legal junk output results in improving economy. You can actually see that unemployment rate started to improve in 2011 - the year when Republicans took over Congress while Obama (Democrat) still holds President office.
http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=z1ebjpgk2654c1_&...
Comparing US Government with Google is not correct, because US Government is much bigger and is pure monopoly, while Google functions in competitive environment.
They are there to represent who put them there, their campaign donors (after Feingold and Grayson were defeated in 2010, there are now no congress-critters that refrain from corporate funding).
Their funders by-and-large want this bill to be passed. Whether it's the BSA or RIAA or Big Religion, everyone of those anti-Internet folks is thrilled to see the freedom aspect of the Internet being small enough to drown in a bathtub.
I have a sinking feeling this bill will pass.
IP stuff, by contrast, isn't something that legislators have strong pre-existing opinions on and its not a partisan issue. And because it doesn't really spend any new money there it can be neatly separated from the overwhelming complexity of the US federal budget and people's intense partisan positions on things like taxation.
SOPA was designed to fail. It was designed, however, to help pass a less evil version of it in the future, by leaving the impression we have to defend content creators, but not this much.
Wanna bet?
No doubt the SOPA writers know this.
I don't hear much about Obama vetoes, does he just sign everything that hits his desk like Bush?
How do people feel about Ron Paul's standpoint on Net Neutrality?
It doesn't feel productive.
More broadly: http://www.tnr.com/article/94477/ron-paul-distorted-libertar...
Not a big deal, IMO.
Ummmm, no. Markets are segregated and each municipality grants a franchise to a specific company. Most markets in the USA have one cable company, one phone company, plus maybe some wireless and satellite coverage.
ISPs have been given billions of dollars in federal subsidies. Also, there are strings attached to every one of those dollars.
The FCC and FTC have pretty restrictive regulations regarding spectrum usage, how much power you can push over phone lines, etc.
There is a lot of regulation on the internet in the USA, which is why we can't let the market settle the Net Neutrality issue.
Interesting; I wasn't aware of this. I know that the original network design grew out of a DARPA project, but I wasn't aware of any significant federal regulatory involvement since the internet became open to general, non-government use in the '80s. Do you have any references you could point to that might provide more detail?
From a libaralist perspectiv I would argue it like this. The packages you send on the net are your property, the ISP is not allowed to look into it just like I don't want my letters to be opend and treated diffrently if somebody thinks what I wrote is not to importend. The ISP is only allowed to look at the header.
This is a good model for everybody. ISP can offer for example a flatrate that is not to fast and offer some high speed threwput witch you could use for VoIP.
I think he has a fairly pro-Net-Neutrality standpoint, which is to say that he opposes legislation that nominally intends to preserve net neutrality while, in practical terms, actually would create a significant threat to the same.