This is very interesting news, but I am scared that there will be a bit of a backlash against this post because of its political nature, on HN specifically.
How do people feel about Ron Paul's standpoint on Net Neutrality?
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.