How to throttle the FCC to dial up modem speeds
gist.github.com
gist.github.com
How about instead, you set their pay to a percentile marker for the income of their constituents, entirely disregarding income received from any government, including those without wage or salary income. For households with spouses and dependants and such, each member has income equal to the total income of the household divided by the number of members.
So if 20% of households have no one working at all (as it is now), elected officials could significantly increase their own pay just by finding a job for just one person in each of those households. Increasing the income of the top 1% would not produce any additional pay.
If 51% of households are broke or on the dole, elected officials paid at 50th %ile would get $0. They get to rely on welfare too, just like everyone else. And really, if that's the case, they're lucky enough to not be paid with bullets to the head for their "service".
Also, build in a safeguard to the obfuscator/de-obfuscator program so that the engineer cannot fire himself.
http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-coo-henrique-de-castro-...
Those are other, unrelated problems that need to be addressed in their own right, but cannot be used as justification for high pay scale of politicians.
So basically no one expects to make money from their paycheck, but rather go into politics for the fame, connections, and other intangibles.
Position, connections, and influence go a long way before you even commit a crime.
Look at Harry Reid as an easy example.
They can trade stock knowing certain laws will be passed or bills introduced that will have an effect.
Sure why not, all they did is take money from willing people called customers. While we're at it let's add...
Basketball, baseball, football, hockey, and soccer players, golfers, Hollywood stars, and successful book authors like Steven King.
These people are so greedy because they make millions a year! All while their viewers/readers/hot dog venders/editors make so much less. It's not fair.
Seriously, I don't understand why people complain about executive pay when the folks I just listed make more for adding less value to the world.
But why are we talking about this when there are kids starving in Africa
/sarcasm
Not everyone has to list everything that annoys them when they are talking about one of those things.
a) Offer to do their job for less.
b) Start a competing company? With your lower costs you should have no trouble crushing them in the market.There's absolutely no empirically or rationally supportable argument that executives in general ought to earn even 50 times the lowest-paid employee's wage, much less the 100s of times they currently are. This isn't to say there are no arguments for such a condition, or that there are no specific cases where empirically or rationally supportable arguments exist.
Whether and how others might complain about sports or celebrity personalities is entirely irrelevant to that issue.
The market has decided what an executive is worth and that's good enough for me. There is no better system. Markets can act irrational because it is the result of human behavior, which is often irrational.
Take all the irrationality out of humans and nothing of great achievement happens. No Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, no Bugatti Veyron, no guys in squirrel suits flying down mountains....
Thanks, but I'll keep my free market with the penalty that some irrationality makes a few people here and there a little more wealthy than they deserve.
No, it means they'll care even less because they'll be relegated to satellite only rural bullshit internet that has insanity latency, etc.
They will not experience anything relating to Comcast/cable/DSL/telcos in any significant way because the truly out there rural places in the country have far worse connections than a comcast monopoly.
On the other hand, my brother in Wilmington has Time Warner, and I can't even SSH out, at least with whatever default setup they hooked him up with.
a) The most obvious villains, i.e. the decision makers at the top of the chain of command will be affected directly and indirectly.
b) Even those who aren't directly or indirectly responsible have much more power to influence things than your regular citizen and should be shown how bad this can get.
b) If the company I work for goes belly up I do feel partially responsible for it. If it gets involved in some corruption scheme, I feel ashamed. FCC's empoyees should feel responsible for the doings of the organization they work for and contribute to. They are partly their doing.
c) Immediate effects aside it is a nice form of protesting.
> Should a simple header/corner banner be injected also?
This would be good, particularly if it was served from a connection without this throttling.
http://www.fcc.gov/document/chairman-tom-wheeler-remarks-nct...
"Let me be clear. If someone acts to divide the Internet between “haves” and “have-nots,” we will use every power at our disposal to stop it."
"Prioritizing some traffic by forcing the rest of the traffic into a congested lane won’t be permitted under any proposed Open Internet rule. We will not allow some companies to force Internet users into a slow lane so that others with special privileges can have superior service."
The FCC could put the money where their mouth is by re-classifying ISPs as "Title II - Common Carriers."
I think the FCC's repeated adoption of pro-neutrality regulations are very clear actions. The people who keep knocking them down are the federal courts, and then the FCC keeps setting up new ones framed slightly differently but aimed at achieving the same ends. So, yeah, actions speak louder than words -- and the FCC's actions on net neutrality are pretty consistently in favor of it (just as the words of the majority of commissioners, including the current chair, are.)
The whole "fast lane" idea is based on a couple news outlets reporting of claims of anonymous sources with unspecified qualifications about their interpretation of the content of an unreleased proposal (note also that the original articles weren't actually consistent on their claims, either, as one claimed that the proposal would include a provision allowing for "fast lanes", and one suggesting that the proposal would allow it implicitly because it didn't address the practice at all), claims which have been emphatically denied on the record by Wheeler, whose proposal it is.
Once they've actually published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for public comment, there will be a chance for informed discussion.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/chapter-5/subchapt...
How about we collectively buy them faster lines?
How do we get from "the kind of deal Netflix struck with Comcast will continue to be legal in the future" to "Comcast will start serving web sites to customers paying $50/month at dial-up speeds"?
It's nonsense. Why have so many ostensibly smart people bought into it?
So, given that these kinds of deals only happen when service is slow: What's the best way for Comcast to continue to be able to pull these fees in from large services? You're a smart person; I'm sure you can figure it out. Hint: Comcast has not exactly shown reluctance to participate in "traffic shaping" in the past.
The only references to Comcast traffic shaping I can find are related to BitTorrent. Did you have something else in mind? And again, what does that have to do with a supposed future of browsing websites at dialup speeds?
Isn't that enough?
1 - The site, i.e. "Yahoo must be getting a lot of traffic today."
2 - Your ISP. ie. "Comcast must be overloaded in my area right now."
3 - Your equipment. i.e. "Maybe I need to restart my wifi / PC"
And then, somewhere way down that list you maybe, just maybe think - "I wonder if there is an organized effort by a small group of developers to set up their sites in such a way that my particular IP here at the FCC is having its speed throttled."
I agree that we need to spread the word about what is at stake with Net Neutrality but I'm not sure if this is the best way.
Shouldn't be that difficult I get the same thing with cookies because i have a UK ip. Well not the throttling part but the banner part.
When news outlets say the "FCC's plan for net neutrality", what they really mean is the plan that Tom Wheeler and his office put together. You're going to hurt the wrong people if you do this and it succeeds. Why not write to your Congressperson instead or think of something that doesn't adversely affect a ton of people who don't have anything to do with the net neutrality debate?
The other way is that we treat the FCC as an entity. We make it tough for that entity to do everything in order to put pressure on the top. It's not like the employees have zero power there. And while it may indeed be near-zero power, I still feel that they have more power as an employee of the FCC than I do as a member of the faceless public. Maybe this will empower a scared employee to come forward and speak out. Or maybe you're right and they do have zero power there, but maybe they'll understand what's at stake and call their representative.
Also, it's not like we're throttling these employee's home connections. We're not slowing down their daughter's access to Wikipedia at home, we're slowing down their connection to Facebook while at work.
If this type of bandwidth throttling limit is to work it would have to target a much larger group than the FCC. The entire federal government might be a start. But management might like that as it would likely lead to increased productivity. One would have to focus on that list of people outside of work somehow.
Maybe a day of slow loading YouTube videos for all the customers of certain ISPs with a banner explaining what's going on.
All in all, I don't think anything like this could work unless you're willing to accidentally suck in a lot of people that are not involved.
Its not a protest of the FCC's stance on net neutrality, its a protest of a media rumor of the stance of the FCC chair in a proposal under discussion at the FCC that has been denied by the FCC chair. Literally no one at the FCC (well, except maybe the minority on the commission that were overtly opposed to net neutrality before the recent Open Internet Order was struck down) has publicly endorsed anything like the rumored position.
> When news outlets say the "FCC's plan for net neutrality", what they really mean is the plan that Tom Wheeler and his office put together.
But when they say it would "allow a fast lane", they mean that a couple of news outlets had anonymous sources that claimed something like that (which other outlets have grabbed and reported the fact that other outlets have reported it), and Wheeler himself has rather forcefully denied it.
Now we've got some news outlets claiming, based on the original leaks, and not paying attention to later information, that the "fast lane" is part of the FCC proposal, and others, based on assuming the original leaks were completely accurate, but trying to reconcile the later denial into a coherent narrative, that the FCC "reversed course" on the "fast lane" proposal.
The specific regulations, of course, have not been drafted, but if these are the only three policies the FCC has in mind, it seems reasonable to infer that the ban on "commercially unreasonable" discrimination, implies that "commercially reasonable" discrimination is permissible. The devil, of course, is in the definition of ""commercially unreasonable." But it seems like there is good reason to worry that this would permit something like a fast lane and, thus, it seems like a good idea for those of us who think this is a bad idea to begin mobilizing.
That all said, I do think that throttling the entire FCC to dialup speeds is a stupid idea. As others have pointed out, this will harm many more people than are actually involved in the regulatory decision in any way, and is unlikely to make a difference in the thinking of the actual regulators in the face of the reams of actually well-thought-out comments they will be receiving from lawyers and internet policy experts.
It also ignores the fact that the "slow-lane," if it does come to exist, is very unlikely to be at anything like dialup speeds. Given the FCC's overall commitment to increased broadband penetration (which has been amply demonstrated, I think) I doubt that anyone at the FCC would be inclined to find such discrimination "commercially reasonable."
If you really want to have an impact, maybe you should band together and write a comment letter.
There might be reason to worry that it could, but to assume that it will and react as if that were an established fact rather than a possibility of concern is not reasonable. Before there is a rule in effect there will be a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking which will say exactly what the rules would be and how the FCC intends to apply them, just as there was with the old Open Internet Order.
Lobbying in Washington does not begin after an NPR has been issued. Why should we behave differently? The NPR is an important regulatory document because it typically indicates the Commission's favored outcome and plays an important role in framing the debate.
I agree with that -- I just think that the action should be focussed on what regulation should or should not contain, not on treating the regulatory agency involved as an enemy.
> Why should we behave differently?
Attacking people who are decision-makers that have historically been (and overtly still are) supportive of the position you espouse based on media rumors of provisions that might be in a plan that they are preparing is behaving differently than the firms that lobby before a concrete proposal in the form of an NPRM is released. Compare that attacks on Wheeler and the FCC to the Google/Amazon/Facebook/etc. letter.
You aren't even sure that will target the right people and not some kind of public worker who just doing some job!
Indeed. The FCC tried to promulgate a rule requiring net neutrality, but a Federal Court of Appeals ruled that the FCC lacked statutory authority to do so [1]. So the FCC is powerless unless and until Congress revises the Telecommunications Act of 1996 or otherwise grants the necessary legal authority to the FCC.
[1] http://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/3AF8B4D93...
Government branches likely have a block of IPs while lobbyists I doubt are registered like that :)
Content providers that depend on the US may want to synchronize on specific day of the week to limit each ISP, for example Comcast Thursday, while foreign providers can conservatively cut off all of the US so they don't have to worry about missing any future pay networks..
+1
Including .edu addresses would affect a population with plenty of time on their hands and who aren't afraid to let everyone know about their problems.
Now again, why would FCC or anyone in govt. visit Google or FB? I'll let you answer that!
[1]http://www.seeyounexttuesday.com/study-federal-employees-spe...
TFA cites a few isolated cases and sensationalizes it. The government is the biggest employer in the United States; a few dozen does not an epidemic make.
It would be sweet if businesses in the service industry (like lets say Manny's) had pics of the top X guys at the FCC in their kitchen. See one of them walk in - just delay their service ;)
Here is Tom Wheeler http://tinyurl.com/mlwnlgr
A friend of mine who interned at the FCC says the commissioners are almost always around in their offices.
It's not like the FCC pays amazingly well and these guys are sitting on beaches. The commissioners each earn $155,500 a year (they are level IV on the executive schedule).
What you really want is to identify the browsers of actual users in decision making capability, and target them. Surely, with the level of user tracking going on these days, this is a feasible concept.
Their IT staff probably doesn't deserve this either.
pure net neutrality could make it illegal to have software which treats any ip addresses differently.
there are some real issues to think through, but most of what's happening right now is emotionally driven banality.