Obama pledges Net neutrality laws if elected president (2007) | Hacker News Reader

Obama pledges Net neutrality laws if elected president (2007)

cnet.com

75 pointsbpierre35 comments

If you want to know what kind of person you'll end up with after you elect someone to office, pay attention to the negative propaganda coming from their opponent before they are elected. That's my new method for evaluating who I support.

(If you tried to raise any concern about Obama's motives or ability to carry through on his promises in 2007 you were labeled a backwards, change-hating racist, either literally or at least tacitly in the minds of his supporters.)

Why is his stance on net neutrality even newsworthy when he's presiding over a security state that is in the middle of ripping the 4th Amendment to shreds?

maybe because his supporters want to disclaim any responsibility for voting for him, TWICE, or want to come up with myriad of excuses for him; after all he really meant it; so they can excuse voting for him, TWICE.

Its not like the leanings of people here isn't self evident, it is fun however to watch how fast they spin trying to prove their too smart to be gullible.

there was quite a bit of negative propaganda that implied that he was a secret socialist muslim antichrist non-American from Kenya.

obviously you shouldn't pay attention to the worst of what's levied against someone, but where do you draw the line?

His opponents (i.e. Republicans) thought that net neutrality is government meddling in the free market. How would we have predicted this in this case?

Obama, like most politicians Obama likes to lie, a lot. That said I don't completely blame him on this since it's not his jurisdiction. Could he have done more to support net neutrality? of course, but it's not something that was directly under his control. Obama has broken a lot of other promises over far more serious things that were directly in his control so this is a drop in the bucket in my opinion.

This is what really bothers me about presidential elections. The candidate goes around making promises they KNOW they don't have the ability to follow through on. This works because most voters don't realize what the president can and cannot do.

I'd say that it goes beyond "this works". It's actively required for Presidential candidates to make promises they can't conceivably keep, because the voting public greatly overestimates the President's power and they demand it.

This doesn't excuse deliberately impossible promise-making, of course. But it means that whoever gets elected is going to have a bunch of impossible promises on his record, because anyone who doesn't make them won't win.

So democracy comes down to "pick the one with the lies you like the most".

I would rephrase that as "Pick the one who will, by your best guess, cause the least damage". Leviathan is, and has always been, a matter of the least possible evil.

Case in point, I'm pretty sure Mitt Romney would have waltzed into a cave in Afghanistan and set off an atomic bomb. He was that obnoxious. At least Obama seems to be half decent at getting less* impressionable young minds soul-searching for their vocation to find "Kill Americans" the obvious choice.

So Obama it was, drones and all.

* Yes, their were no Atomic Bombs in Afghanistan, but let's not let the facts get in the way of a good story.

This is the worst kind of HN political story: the kind in which technology is a fig leaf for a discussion whose only substantive content can be about the nature of campaign promises. In other words: pure, distilled politics.

I flagged this and hope others do too.

> I flagged this and hope others do too.

Yeah, we shouldn't pay attention to politicians breaking their promises! It's not like what politicians do has any effect on our lives!

I disagree. This is about breaking a very particular kind of campaign promise, namely one that directly affects the interests of Hacker News readers as a group. In other words, we already are political, simply by existing. The article doesn't go beyond that kind of politicalness.

> This is about breaking a very particular kind of campaign promise

Except insofar as the promise can have been read to be an implicit promise to assume dictatorial powers and impose laws on net neutrality by fiat over the resistance of Congress, I'm not sure how its about breaking a promise. Obama did seek net neutrality laws in his first year in office, and his appointees to the FCC have repeatedly instituted net neutrality regulations, only to have them turned back by the courts. And are, by their own statements, preparing to do so again.

Yeah, there's anonymous-sourced rumors that the new draft would expressly allow something that most people would see as contrary to net neutrality -- rumors that the FCC Chair has expressly denied. The actual proposal will be up for public review in a short period, and we'll all be able to intelligently discuss its actual contents rather than reacting to rumor then.

My question to Americans is this: Can you trust elected officials to make due on their promises they make when they run?

Not to say politicians don't lie (Obama included), but they also change their minds.

now that's something a politician would say

Sounds like something Keynes would say too. And anyone else who is able to change their answers when the inputs change...

Most humans change their minds, and presidents are not an exception. But they also consitute an special case, they were voted based on their promises (ideally) and if you go back on your word (or make things worse as I think is the case) there should be consequences. Or at least people shouldn't sit idle while being lied at.

Mind-changing is great, as long as the person comes out and says, "I changed my mind because this and such, I previously thought X because of A, B, and C, but now because of D, E, and F I have come to see that Y is correct."

I can't recall ever seeing a politician saying it like this. They treat it more like a Ministry of Truth exercise wherein they pretend that they always believed Y.

My favorite example of a politician reversing a position on which they campaigned, and actually explaining why they changed their position, is this: http://youtu.be/2y05XmZlF44

I suppose the whole Center-Of-Attention-In-Washington-DC thingy might do a thing or two to your perception.

"Monarchy Where We Swap Out The King Every Couple Years" has a much less free ring to it than the almighty "Democracy", now doesn't it? Much more accurate though.

There are very few areas where a politician can single-handely make changes. So even if Obama did want to enact Net Neutrality law---and I don't know if he still does---then he'd have to convince congress to pass a bill. Obama has had limited pull over congress, even within his own party, and on an issue where so many congresspeolpe have been bought by industry, Obama's going to have even less pull.

Congresspeople get elected by campaign dollars, not by the laws they enact or fail to enact.

Nope. Politicians running for executive office frequently make promises to do things they don't actually have the constitutional authority to do, but are sometimes able to wield their influence to accomplish. Politicians running for legislative office can't promise anything but priorities because they can't do anything by themselves.

Each elected official has limited power. A President can expend all his/her political capital on just one piece of legislation and still fail to pass it--or pass it, but in a severely watered-down form. Even after a law is passed or an executive order given, the courts may eviscerate it (which is and should be within the judiciary's power).

Thus, it often happens that a candidate makes a promise, fully intending to fulfill it, but is unable to as a result of his/her limited power. Knowing as much, perhaps candidates should make much more modest promises. Except that would be campaign suicide in most cases. The rules of the game incentivize and reward over-promising. So even if a candidate is motivated purely by a desire to serve the public s/he must over-promise in order to be given the opportunity to serve.

But this doesn't even look like that. Not even a watered down bill or attempt at one seems to have been documented... or at least it wasn't newsworthy.

You don't necessarily see every policy initiative a President tries to undertake. Often, policy initiatives begin in private consultation between executive staff, legislators, lawyers, and lobbyists. Sometimes, it becomes clear from those private consultations that the policy initiative cannot succeed. When that happens, it typically doesn't serve the President to publicly proclaim that failure.

So it's quite possible (and I believe probable) that the Obama administration tried to do net neutrality, but ran into some kind of wall before the policy went very far.

If that's possible, it's equally possible that it's because they accepted campaign contributions from Comcast, one of the larger violators of net neutrality. Furthermore, is it not possible that they made it all up so that Comcast would give them a large contribution?

While I don't like to go for conspiracy theories, I would like to point out that these are about as likely as the Obama administration actually intending to improve network neutrality.

Why is that a "question to Americans"? I would assume that any "elected official" would be subject to this. The question, as worded, implies that American elected officials are less trusted than elected officials elsewhere.

I think it's worth keeping the question narrow in order to keep discussion focused on the topic at hand. Other countries have different sets of laws around elected officials, lobbying, campaign contributions and so on that probably give rise to somewhat different behavior for different reasons. I don't think that focus implies that the US has the least-trustworthy politicians.

Not when they depend utterly on campaign contributions. This "pivot" is unsurprising given that FCC commissioners are appointed by the President and Comcast is one of the President's largest campaign contributors*

*via its employees, PACs, and owners. See: http://www.opensecrets.org/pres12/contrib.php?id=N00009638

The non-partisan answer is: Of course not. It takes an astonishing degree of naiveté to believe any professional politician's campaign promises.

That said, I don't know if it's entirely fair to blame Obama for flip-flopping on Net neutrality: remember there was an appeals court decision slapping down the FCC's silly regs in between. That left the FCC with less room for regulatory adventurism. Also the FCC is nominally, at least, an independent FedGov agency and not part of the executive branch in the same way that DoD, DoE, DoT, etc. are.

It is fair to blame Obama for flip-flopping on other promises, such as retroactive immunity for companies that illegally opened their networks to NSA spying. He told me in December 2007 that he did not support it: http://news.cnet.com/Technology-Voters-Guide-Barack-Obama/21...

Then, after getting the Dem nomination wrapped up, Obama flip-flopped and embraced it: http://www.cnet.com/news/obama-flip-flops-on-telecom-immunit...

No, which makes the entire process rather dubious. If I can't trust the campaign platform, what exactly am I basing my vote on?

And, in fact, Obama did push Net neutrality laws in office, and the FCC under Obama has passed net neutrality regulations several times (only to be reversed by the courts) and is, per their Chair's statement, getting ready to do so again.

The only indication of any "reversal" is unsubstantiated reports by anonymous sources about the specific content of the draft that was to be circulated that have been denied emphatically by the FCC Chair.

It's probably easiest just to redefine "net neutrality" to mean "whatever the FCC comes up with" which seems to be their current strategy.

I really, really, really hope Net Neutrality is brought up in just a few weeks when Obama hosts a fund-raiser at Y Combinator.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/219461164/Obama-YC-invite

That said, I'm doubtful.

We ought to let that slide since he totally delivered in lots of other areas like closing Guantanamo, getting out of Afghanistan, and repealing the (Lock-up-a-)Patriot Act.

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