They are still liable. They unleashed it upon the world.
Can't wait till they are sued out of their bubble.
239 karma · joined July 7, 2016
Can't wait till they are sued out of their bubble.
And, I have a hunch that three letter acronym gov organizations dealing with keeping us safe would rather know who is interested in terrorist induction videos, and track them, than just remove the videos and let opinions fester at an isolated individual level (lone wolf).
Allow people to chose content level just like they choose security level in browser settings.
1. Legal content. May include content that violates YouTube content policy, but is legal in USA, or the country of the viewer. Maximum freedom of speech and maximum ability to see content that you may find offending.
2. YouTube content policy met. Content that is legal and meets YouTube Content Policy.
3. Legal, Meets YouTube content policy, Meets a certain org's taste. Like when you can pick a charity that you can donate to when you shop on smile.amazon.com. You can select the org whose bubble you want to live in. ADL, Focus on Family, Skeptics etc. The org bans content and it only is banned for people who opt into that blacklist on youtube.
4. When user is not logged in they get AI filtered list but can select "all legal" or "all that meets content policy" filters, even when logged out. All others bubbles available to logged in users only.
Advertisers can opt into certain bubble if they want, or opt out of certain content e.g. content deemed inappropriate by the AI?
How does that sound YouTube?
Doesn't the government security agencies want to know who is watching extremist content and who is not interested in it? How would we know who the extremist are if they fall back to person to person, in person, communication?
Now content that does not violate any terms of conditions if also getting removed/demonetized, again following political ideology.
You are focused on Google being able to do what they are doing, I agree, they are quite within their rights to do so.
But, I see this situation same as a Github project uses Apache license to begin, to get adopters, to get eyes that find and resolve bugs, eyes that ask for much wanted features, after being successful the project changes to AGPL or Propitiatory closed-source license selling Enterprise Edition. This is slap in the face of people who gave time to the project.
Anyone who spends time in modern software industry, like an user on hacker news, would clearly see the similarities between the YouTube situation and bait-and-switch on license for successful open source software.
The fiefdoms of AFGAM are there for pretty much life.
Should we get to see the training data used and labels?
Or is this the modern day equivalent of credit score algo, something that can have huge impact on lives, but you are not allowed to know what it is.
This is bad.
The people who bought into YouTube as a platform, the content creators and their followers, paid for by their time and watching ads into the platform. Remember, when you are not paying for the service, you are the product. The people who adopted into YouTube platform paid for it's success. YouTube was sanctuary when Facebook and Twitter were cracking down on Free Speech. Now, YouTube changing their position is clear bait and switch. You allowed people to use the platform till you are successful, taking their time and energy to drive your ad revenue, now you are cracking down on content you don't like. It is true that it will be relatively easy in this day and age, to secure funding outside of YouTube Ad revenue and host content yourself. Startups will start doing just that. YouTube will look at this moment in time where the executive's individual political preferences were turned into company policy, destroying shareholder value.
>Monopolies have a specific lock on their customers or their supply of a limited resource.
YouTube changes are bait and switch on content creators and consumers who made the platform successful. DeMonetizing someone overnight after years of efforts into the platform and acquiring followers is extreme power held by a corporation.
>If a delivery entity opened your packages to evaluate content, that would present an entirely different sent of problems for them and their customers - because the content is private.
My argument precisely for Net Neutrality. :-) Don't look at content, I bought data transfer, ISP should just forward it on using internet routing rules, just like Post Office does.
I now fully support breaking up Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft; may be Apple.
Executives at publicly traded companies have no right to enforce their individual political views as company policies. They are not privately held companies, they are public companies who are held at higher standards of equal treatment to all.
What if Bic and Mead said you can't write a opinion that we don't like using our pen and notebooks?
What if US Postal Service said you can't send a snail mail if it contains references to UPS or FedEx?
I think YouTube went down pretty fast and without fight. The ideological takeover of Facebook and Twitter raged on for few years. I think YouTube was taken over literally overnight. I remember being appreciative of YouTube just a few days back.
Guess, time to cancel my $15 Youtube Red Family membership. Ugh, I really hate ads on YouTube. And I was happy to give my $15 month over month. But, I can't fund Youtube anymore given what they are doing. $15 to Youtube, $10 to NetFlix, $10 to Amazon, with $35 a month, I can sponsor ton of content on Patreon that I like. My subscription list on YouTube is not 35 people long, I think it would work out.
Never ever I thought I would type these words... break up Google and Facebook and Amazon.
Youtube is big media? It's only in recent history that Youtube is exercising power to decide what stays and what doesn't, even if it meets the youtube content policy. This is political opinion enforced by youtube.
Given Google is a public company, taking one side or another in a political discussion may not be in their interest, it would be their right of first amendment to change the sites they own as they wish, but it dilutes the usefulness and trustworthiness of their product in the eyes of the customers, and the stock holders may not like it that way. The employees have fiduciary duty to not impose their political views on their product.
I am asking these companies as a fan of their platform that they keep it neutral.
I am not selling any dogfood. I am asking dogfood companies to sell it to all dog owners, don't discriminate if they have a poodle or a pit bull.
I found that article physically repulsive.
Patreon, if you are listening, don't buy into all the power that the article wants to shower upon you. They want you to influence your exercise of that power, and they want you to use that power to do their bidding in limiting free debate of ideas.
Patrons and the person that they support, that's it, that's all there is to it. The silver coin is being given by hands of patrons and taken by hands of one that is being supported, that silver coin shouldn't have opinions, emotions and desires. Stay neutral, that is the greatest challenge of our time, stay neutral. If a crime is being committed then co-operate fully with law enforcement, but don't give in to the pressures from lobbying groups with their own agenda.
Don't get carried away into the corrupting power the platforms like youtube, facebook, twitter exercise on the discussion carried out on these platforms. They have absolute power, and you can see that once you use it, it's addictively corrupting. Stay neutral, it is going to be hard to do, I hope you find the power within you to do so.
Good luck.
Who gets to decide what commons we all should share?
Record labels and publishers?
Youtube, facebook and twitter are already exercising undue influence in terms of algo changes to suggested videos or auto-play videos.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/1/16072840/youtube-placing-l...
It's a marketplace of ideas. Let them compete. Google deciding what's good and what's not is not fair to the people who want to decide for themselves.
Thanks. :)
If you can't build/run a better AWS replacement then it's a mute point, isn't it?
Then the question turns into if you can't build better AWS, can you architect your application to handle AWS failures? AWS itself lets you handle many kind of failures at AZ/DC level. Are you using that? For global AWS outages, can you have skeleton, survival critical system running on GCP or Azure?
Have you thought about outages that would be out of your control and out of AWS's control e.g. malware, DDoS, DNS, ISP, Windows/Android/iOS/Chrome/Edge zero day? How are you going to handle outages due to those issues?
If you are prepared to handle outages (communication, self-preservation, degraded mode, offline mode) then can a serious AWS outage be managed just like those outages?
What do you think is going on while, as you suggest, entire population of the country updates its capability to deal with information presented? Are we not being influenced?
Is that an achievable goal? Why in a highly educated, highly liberal, highly resourceful society like USA we still lack this capability? Is it because at the end of the day we are emotional beings, not rational?
>What I'm suggesting is that if big business and mass media can can effectively control the population, it doesn't matter if they have to control 500 or 500,000,000.
They would try to control as many as they could for their benefit. Do you think we should make it easy for them by asking them to influence 500 or should we band together and use our numbers as a deterrent to mass influence?
"If they can effectively control...", but you are assuming it to be foregone conclusion. I think the battle is still raging on and more people we have on our side that they must influence the better, instead of just 500.
>In other words, the priority should be sorting out the news media first.
Will it ever be completed sorted out to be fair all the time, to all the parties?
I believe we have created this current phenomenal prosperity, not by assuming people doing right thing all the time, but despite there being bad elements. Hence, I appreciate what we have much more.
Anytime I hear, "and, over here all of us do the right thing.", I bet against that solution being successful.
If there is one thing that I agree with bible is that humanity is fallen. We must work with that assumption as we design or evaluate solutions.
Are you willing to say that you support the President, because he is result of representative democracy?
>It takes a certain amount of curiosity to want to do that, and that's something that has to come from within, you can't bring it about directly.
Is that "something within" a requirement for our elected representatives? If not, aren't they just as equally susceptible to the same bubble think?
Arguing for 500 congressman with all the power is arguing for all the "Research Institutes" which write the laws for them.
How many years would it have taken if we had forced those 500 to write just 2300 page ACA/Obamacare?
> why direct democracy is not a always a good idea
Always? When did I say always? I specifically said it had least things working against it compared to other methods. You could have second coming of Christ and these lands will be blessed again in his kingdom, but we are discussing state of affairs till that happens, aren't we?
Both parties are spending to please base as much as they want.
Put it to people if they want military or healthcare.
You could have direct democracy on issues (Brexit e.g.) within representative democracy.
Majority agrees with this form of government including Supreme Court and Constitutional Rights. If 99% of USA agreed to not follow constitution, would Supreme Courts be able to enforce their opinions? Majority agrees to give that power to Supreme Court and is upholding it everyday.
If you think we gave our constitution to ISIS today, they would function the same way, without buying into it?
>It's easy to influence all Joes on the social media platforms virtually all of them use.
And that is a good thing. If they can be influenced in a bad way quickly, then they can be influenced in a good way, or away from bad way, quickly as well.
Representative democracy was a compromise of the days where direct democracy was not possible due to limits of communication. Not so in this day and age, you can have answer from people over the internet in few hours. Thought leaders would still continue to exist and influence people. But, representatives with limited attention span, limited brain power, limited time of the day, demands from multiple concerns, personal influences of experience and needs, won't wield so much power.
>I completely agree with you here, but like others you only talk about the big issues. Not the small day-to-day operation that must also be handled as well as all the small "boring" issues that face any real government.
Bureaucracy exists in representatives democracy as well. It will continue to exist in direct democracy. Hire the best that people want, not political appointments.
>Representatives are not rulers.
I don't know. We, in USA, has developed a class of people, who "represent" people for ages and generations. They do polling of people to find issues that would result into they winning the race to be representative and then do what they want to do once they win. Electing a representative has a huge disconnect with what people want done.
>I guarantee that if direct democracy was implemented you would have charismatic personalities telling people how to vote on day one. And they would be much better than influencers trying to use reason too.
Absolutely. No different than a representative trying to secure vote. But, with representative democracy people cede control for two years, four years, six years at a time. With direct democracy you get a chance every day to influence decision making.
>More information overload. More false information supporting your preexisting views.
really? Who is this external arbitrator of what is false and what is true? Can that arbitrator make mistakes? I believe there are more good people than bad, and many eyes examining what is true vs few arbitrators of truth, is better.
>At least their aides and bureaucrats can be ugly and socially inept as long as they are good at what they do.
A case for entertaining plumber or soldier, ha? I wouldn't mind knowing if the plumber can sing. lol. People would vote on a policy, a plan and a cost and an executive (Roman Consul) to carry it out. Hiring decisions would be left to the Consul. There would be a sense of Civic Duty and people would pay more attention, in a generation or two, education in schools would emphasize Civic Duties. Representative democracy, almost half the people don't even vote, knowing it doesn't matter much what the representative claimed in the election and what transpired.
Supreme Court can still function to validate laws against founding constitutional rights.
But, I do agree, majority will have its way most of the time. If minority has a grievance, it has to address the same way people holding any other minority of opinion would deal with it... make majority see things your way.
Gay partners should be able to adopt. Make majority see it your way. We should have not criminalize marijuana use. Make majority see it your way.
In fact Civil rights have more advantages than people with majority race, ethnicity, religion but holding a minority opinion e.g. euthanasia. At least for Civil Rights there are courts to go to, majority has agreed to have that as a recourse just for Civil Rights opinions.
I honestly think minority Civil Rights are only possible when majority is doing good, economically and emotionally. Because, Civil Rights need to be enforced through education, and might of the state, which is the majority at the end of the day.
Sure, Gay rights and no slavery exists in USA, mostly because majority sees it that way. In Saudi Arabia or in ISIS territories those rights don't exist.
Civil Rights only exists where majority agrees that Civil Rights deserve to be honored. If they didn't, it wouldn't. We can feel as uncomfortable as we want about it, but that's just how the world operates. Unless there are technological advantages where one assumes god position enforcing Civil Rights of each individual without any external dependency, I don't see if that way of how the world operates could ever be changed.
Much easier to bribe 500 people in a 300 million people. Actually, you may just have to bribe 100 or so, enough to tilt partisan things in your favor.
2. Direct democracy would not follow party lines, there is no need to.
You can have gun rights and abortion rights. You can have social safety net programs and curb illegal immigration. You can be tough on crimes and treat drug addiction as mental issue. You can have higher taxes but lower regulations. You can have higher military spending but no wasteful spending. You can have higher marginal tax rate while having simple tax code.
3. Because any other forms of rulers get disconnected form people as soon as they start ruling
4. No "too-big-to-fail" ruler (dictator, king, plutocrat, oligarch, meritocratic, strongman). Entire country doesn't depend on single charismatic person.
5. It might have been difficult in the past, but in the internet age in USA, direct democracy has less things that would work against it. More information available, more means to communicate available, decent education available.
6. Find best people for the job. Ideas can come from anywhere. Implementer can come from anywhere. You won't get "I implement my idea, not you". "You stole my idea". etc.
When did I say I am asking for dedicated circuit?
I actually granted that congestion could and would happen. I pointed out what happens if someone decides to saturate the line... would last only few hours each month before quota being hit.
What you are granting Comcast doesn't make sense technically, financially, legally or ethically. Don't open my packets other than headers for destination. Don't look inside the data of my packets. Don't offer intermediate certificates posing as proxy for end site. All those things are fine within a corporation's privately owned network. Comcast is similar to post office, they are not allowed to see inside my mail to see if it goes to bank or to insurance company, just the address on the envelope can be used. It is none of Comcast's business whom I talk to and what I talk about and how much I talk. As long as I am under quota and under bandwidth limit, they must carry the traffic.
In the catastrophic event they can stop traffic to certain IP address segments to keep voice lines and emergency sites accessible. They can work that out with regulators like for 911 service. But they can't use that as a way to extract payments from content providers. Complete stopping is preferred over degraded service. Comcast would have to come up with justification why they stopped the traffic, degraded is just a play to get ransom payment.
Or buy internet from phone company instead of cable company.
They allow or disallow it? The question itself doesn't make sense. If the users want to use capacity they bought and Comcast sold, is the user's right. Comcast didn't foresee the demand is error of their actuaries. A insurance company pays up even if their actuaries make an error. Comcast doesn't get to externalize their costs, they could try, but we as customers have no obligation to honor it. I would claim that video demand has actually made the equation very simple for them with higher build out but lower risk of it not being utilized. The demand is very predictable and not "unexpected". And, monthly quotas (1TB per month) on top of bandwidth limits (150 Mbps) the risk is quite reduced. If someone with 250 Mbps ran at 99% capacity, 1TB quota would be over in less than 11 hours.
It's not as if Comcast sends you a check every time there is a network congestion and you don't get top speed that you are paying for. There is no consequence of congestion for Comcast but they are using it as a reason to get ransom from content owners. They are setting up the conversation such that they have less and less reason to remove congestion, more the congestion, more the end user suffer, more the case for google and netflix to open up their wallet.
$70 a month is same as cable bill and for cable Comcast has to pay channel operators. On internet, Comcast doesn't even have to pay to youtube or netflix. I mean internet service is pure profit compared to cable which runs on same infrastructure. They charge to take traffic at exchanges, one 100 byte URL in browser results in 2GB of data transferred from Netflix. It is a request that Comcast customer is making, trying to use the bandwidth and quota that the customer purchased, but Comcast makes money at exchange because they take on that 2GB of traffic. So they are already compensated for taking this traffic on both ends, by customer and at the exchange. Now on top of that they want to pry open the communication channels and charge more to the two parties talking. That's triple Comcast tax.
Comcast runs their cable programming on their tcp/ip network as well, so they are provisioned enough for now. If net neutrality goes away what promises youtube/netflix has that Comcast won't prioritize their xfinity platform over netflix?
The customers are using the capacity that they wanted and bought, Comcast sold that capacity, they must deliver. They are having no problem delivering so far. Networking gear (merchant silicone switches and OpenCompute switches) are dirt cheap, gone are the days of buying expensive gear from Cisco and BigIP. Cheaper networking hardware is making it easy to operate and upgrade for Comcast. Same goes for cable boxes, DVRs. Seen the disk prices lately? A raspberry pi can be effective cable box. Their unit costs have gone down significantly. They are benefiting from Cloud platforms like everyone else. Netflix uses AWS, Amazon uses AWS, Comcast uses AWS.
Look at hosting bandwidth costs, look at CDN bandwidth costs, content providers are paying for their side of it fairly. Comcast has a large share of CDN and can get even bigger there.
I think content providers should pick a month and ban entire Comcast network for a month together. Users will switch to shitty stuff that phone companies are selling but at least Comcast will learn a lesson. What do you think would people chose to watch xfinity or would they switch to telco ISP?
I did not say that. My point was that Comcast kept pace with innovations in silicon and networking. Like AWS and GCP or Azure keep upgrading servers from Pentium to i7. They had to keep pace with technology advances and demands. Sometimes their investments were to lower costs, more customers supported by same dollar investment at upgrade time.
Comcast can try to increase profits as much as they like, the regulators and people are not interested in making google and facebook pay because they have more money.
Berkshire Hethaway doesn't own NASDAQ money because they are making a killing. There are plenty of startups that fail, Comcast is not subsidizing those startups. Plenty of startups that make it big, Comcast doesn't get to add their tax on that success.
Customers demanded better internet and paid more for it, to access youtube, pandora, facetime, facebook, twitter, flicker, netflix and MMOGs.
Comcast invested in faster CO side equipment because there was customer demand for faster internet. The coaxial cable was still the same, customer still paid for modem in the house and paid for upgrade to DOCSIS 3.0 modems. Investments here by Comcast are same as any internet giant invests in a data center equipment, there was no new digging of last mile by Comcast, it was same as what it had been for last 25 years, laying coaxial cable when homes get built. And Comcast did charge more for faster speeds. Customers paid for faster access to the web. Just like content providers upgrade from Pentium to i7 on servers, Comcast upgrades were cost of doing business and it did pass that cost to customers in terms of more money charged for higher speeds.
>All content providers are in the business of creating bits which must be carried across space, and there are some kinds of content where local offers a big advantage. Many of these are yet to be discovered, as local circuit quality has been fairly poor since the origin of the internet. Net neutrality makes it far less likely that any of these will be explored.
CDNs are working just fine on existing internet. Google or Netflix or Amazon moving content closer is not prohibited by concept of Net Neutrality. The request to the local/geo-graphically server originates from the site/app html-js-DNS/code based on geo-location of the end user. This is only limited by Comcast CDN build out and offering made available for sale. Comcast doesn't want to do that, they want to peek inside packets and be arbitrator of what happens based on contents of the packet, regardless of what the browser or server wanted the packet to do.
Comcast being allowed to do deep packet inspection is like opening up letters going to bank to see if it is for car payments and then delaying the envelop if bank doesn't pay the postal services extra fees. It doesn't matter if the customer selected overnight delivery, as long as bank doesn't pay postal service, checks don't arrive on time.
I firmly believe that people think of their ISP bill as something they pay for youtube, gmail, maps, photos, amazon, pandora, school/college/work websites. It is ISPs who should be thankful to content owners for making their product offering something that customers want. The canvas company wants to be able to charge more if a successful painting gets painted on it, after it has already sold the canvas, would that be OK?
The individual user at home bought certain amount of data transfer per second, and may be agreed to upper limit on total data transferred per month, the content provider paid their ISP bill to do the same e.g. Amazon AWS data transfer rates. Now, the individual's ISP like Comcast wants to hold their users hostage and seek additional payout from content providers for doing the things that they already took payments from their customers.
CDNs are different and fair. CDNs are micro sized data centers spread across the land that content owners can lease space/power/cooling/compute/storage/network from. Net neutrality opponents want people to get confused about CDNs and deep packet inspection. CDN does not require deep packet inspection. Comcast wants you to think that this is unsolved problem that they can solve if only people allow them to look inside their mail and read contents. No, thank you.
Can you imagine if gasoline companies asked for paybacks from car companies? Why can you imagine if tcp/ip companies ask for payback from online video companies?
You buy gasoline and you can use it as you wish, in a Ford, Toyota or a Craftsman lawn mower. You buy tcp/ip and UDP capacity and you use it as you wish on youtube, netflix or yahoo mail.
Can you imagine if same gasoline slowed itself down if it figured out that it was being used in a Hyundai and offered 91 octane if found to be used in a BMW? Costing you the same at the pump, but works differently by figuring out where it is being used, a Hyundai vs a BMW? Does the gas company has right to know which car I will be using the gas into? Can it reduce the value its product has to the purchaser, the person pumping gas, unless the car manufacturer pays it to unlock the full potential of the gas?
One can't do it with gasoline but can do few things with tcp/ip packets. Just because it is possible to open up an envelope mailed to the bank and hold bank hostage for additional postage, doesn't mean postal service should open up the mail. Just because it is possible to open up tcp/ip packet and see if it is headed for youtube vs vimeo, doesn't mean ISP should do it. It is not ethical, it is not legal. Find the shortest path to the destination and forward it on, post or packet.
Youtube Red is available for $9. Ad-supported Youtube itself is free. Comcast charges $70 for 100 Mbps connection. $40 for VOIP phone.
Average Comcast bill is $120 a month. Comcast has a goose that lays a golden egg every day, they are out to slice it open for reasons beyond me. Comcast share holders should take company executives at task for risking their investment over opposition to net neutrality. Ask Comcast to cut costs. They are throwing dirt in your eyes over "boogeyman of Net Neutrality keeping the stock from soaring" while throwing money to the wind. Comcast should reduce costs and make itself more profitable. Comcast should introduce innovative products that customers want and will pay for like its VOIP and home security product line. A more fine grained CDN deployment would be great product idea. Comcast engaging in political debate bating against its own customers wishes will only empower activism against the company. The Comcast executives are burning the brand value in a bonfire right in front of the share holders, such destruction of share holder value shouldn't be tolerated.
If Television sets manufacturers created "Information Service" that plays short funny video clips instead of ads by deep inspection of HDMI signal, or a centralize service tracking ad start-stop times publishing it over internet, would that be OK Comcast? You are jealous of google and facebook's ad revenue. What if Samsung decides to cut in on your ad revenue on MSNBC? Samsung TVs won't show ads on MSNBC because they don't pay Samsung, it plays CNN ads just fine because Time Warner paid the ransom to Samsung.