I find it telling that in the end you admit that i’m right, and want us to hang our liberties on the hope that Obama will continue to be an incompetent buffoon.

If they feel they can discriminate against traffic flowing across their equipment than I feel I should be able to, as a citizen of my municipality, charge them for the use of our public land, every single square inch.

That is a sufficiently inane statement that it becomes difficult to take anything that follows seriously. Companies have lots of places where the money goes out, but there’s only one place where it comes in: from the customers. You propose to charge them higher taxes? OK, they’ll charge you higher rates. Where else could they get the money to pay your new taxes? Beam it down from the Enterprise? What you said there is really, really, stupid. Please do not do that again.

Ignoring the incendiaryness of your post

Actually, by saying it was, you did not ignore it.

I’d like to point out a few things. As far as ‘dictate to private individuals and firms how their private property must be run’, I’d like to point out that most major telecoms dictate how you use your private property via EULAs.

No, they dictate how you will use *their* property. You may do whatever you wish on your own equipment. It’s only when bits get transferred on the lines they own, through routers they own, that they have any say whatsoever.

It’s also definitely worth noting that while the telecoms own the lines and the equipment they do not pay property tax or any form of lease to run lines above or under ground.

They pay taxes aplenty. You are not taxed on the air you breathe (yet). Should the government therefore get to control how much of the free air they will let you breathe?

If they feel they can discriminate against traffic flowing across their equipment than I feel I should be able to, as a citizen of my municipality, charge them for the use of our public land, every single square inch.

Your authoritarian, government-ownership-of-the-Earth mentality is abhorrent. It reeks of servitude.

But you say “if they feel they can discriminate”. Let’s slow down and take that word by every ill-considered word.

IF. This is a hypothetical problem, since companies are not yet doing it, at least not on a wide scale. As I understand it, two times on the enitre Internet in the last 5 years, some company or another has tried to charge either more to move competitor’s bits than their own, or more to move some kind of traffic than another kind.

THEY. Who is this “they”? If the world were ordered as it should be, “they” would be you and I, each with our WiFi hub, cable Internet modem, 3G wireless phone, and Ethernet cable run between our houses, and that of our other neighbors, in a dense mesh. Then you and I agree to carry traffic bound for elsewhere. It’s called “peering”, and is why the Internet works.

As long as we each pay our upstream provider(s), neither of us worries too much that sometimes we have to carry the other’s traffic. But if you drop your upstream connection to save money, I’m going to block your traffic. Similarly, if you choose a cut-rate ISP, I’m not going to give you the same priority I give the rest of the neighborhood.

For ISPs, that’s the boat they’re in. In a peering environment, the only way they can signal their unhappiness with one another is to throttle bandwidth.

FEEL. I want to puke. Companies don’t feel, unless they want to get eaten alive.

FEEL THEY CAN. Translation: WANT TO RISK.

DISCRIMINATE (ING). What a loaded word. But I’ll let it stand, because it’s important to you to frame this in a civil rights context, and I’m all about charity in debate.

What happens if a company fails to discriminate among the various types of traffic it is asked to carry? They only have a certain amoun of bandwidth, after all. Even you must recognize that there is a limit to the amount of bandwidth they can allocate. But consider their preparation for Denial of Service attacks and other bandwidth spikes. They have to be able to throttle things down under normal circumstances, so that there is bandwidth left for peak times.

So the customers who run P2P mirrors of every music download, YouTube video, and Linux distribution have the same priority as the people reading their blog. Guess who is happy? Hint: it’s not the blogger.

As for the rest of your twaddle, I’m not wasting any more time on it.

Are you really that misinformed? I’m surprised that nobody here has called you on this obvious untruth.

Lets see, here’s an article on franchise fees and right-of-way fees:
http://www.heartland.org/publications/infotech%20telecom/article/18347/Abolish_Franchise_Fees.html

Here’s one on property taxes paid by cable companies on their physical assets: http://www.maao.org/content/Policy%20Statement.pdf

And here’s a little study I participated in on taxes paid specifically on telecom services (I did the comparisons to other goods and services, finding that in some jurisdictions telecom services are taxed more heavily than alcohol or tobacco): http://www.heartland.org/publications/policy%20studies/article/21104/No_113_Taxes_and_Fees_on_Communication_Services.html

In my job don’t have a position one way or another on “net neutrality,” although I’m somewhat wary of the censorship opportunities it presents. But come on, man - you don’t have to so blatantly misrepresent the truth to make your point.

Sean Parnell
President
Center for Competitive Politics
http://www.campaignfreedom.org

“I’d like to point out that most major telecoms dictate how you use your private property via EULAs.”

Do you realize just how nonsensical that statement is? You do realize that we all have the choice of whether or not to contract with this or that company, right? And that very much includes telecom companies.

Because we have that choice, no company — telecom or otherwise — can truly “dictate” anything to any of us. All we merely need to do is say “No, thanks” and take our business elsewhere.

Neil’s blog hit the nail on the head: “Net Neutrality” is a really bad, albeit seductive, idea. It’s inviting the government into a room they’ve thus far been unable to penetrate. And I’m relatively certain that most people who favor the idea will end up regretting it.

They’re making the mistake of thinking that regulators will always stand up for their interests (better, anyway, than the companies they’d regulate would) — when history would suggest that nothing could be farther from the truth.

regulate internet porn is because they “won’t” do it. It would abrogate their longstanding (and erroneous) claim that pornography is covered by the First Amendment, which it most assuredly is not.

The Founding Fathers did not pledge their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor because they weren’t getting enough porn in the Old Country.

They risked everything to, among other things, protect the people’s right to engage in freewheeling political discussion such as is found on the internet everyday.

The left is using the Net Neutrality banner as the crisis with which to push through sweeping socialist action.

It’s a scam.

http://americansforprosperity.org/102009-phil-kerpen-and-glenn-beck-discuss-net-neutrality

The Big 0 and his minion czars are working a complex interaction scheme so you can’t see what’s happening. Think of it as a three part liquid explosive; none of the components alone is dangerous, but when you put all three of them together, kaboom.

Looking at the people behind this, even if I agreed with the end point of what they wanted to do, I’d opt against doing until they were WELL out of the picture.

Oh, and when I did the Google search for the Beck segments, the only things that appeared on my first search were “debunking” pieces from outfits like Think Progress. You want to see corporate censorship in action, that’s a good example.

Under net neutrality an ISP would be constrained from charging higher rates for those who use the system the most. They also cannot change the rate of transmission.Therefore if an ISP thought that one of its users was taking up 40% of their bandwidth they could not place a surcharge, nor put the client on slower servers.

The result of this meddling is that hackers, down-loaders, spam blogs and other nuisances would get to use up most of the band width and continue to slow down service for everyone.

Read the links from my links.

You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him think.

Billf,

Bill Moyers did an excellent piece on this a few years ago. Look it up and you can watch a video of the show that investigated. He also did one on media consolidation that’s vitally connected to this issue in this way: If a media conglomerate can gain control over the newspapers and tv and radio stations in a given market, the consumer may be unknowingly getting all his information from one corporate source. There used to be rules against this, but they were removed by the FCC under the Bush Adminstration. The internet remains the one source of information that still has the potential to be independent in this scenario. If Net Neutrality is not reinstated (it was struck down after being in place since the days of the early railroads and telecoms when it was called Common Carrier), then wealthy corporate content providers who also own the newspapers etc can pay an ISP for faster delivery than independent content providers. We all know that users prefer web sites that load more quickly, so smaller startups and those without huge financial resources can’t compete. Small independent voices can’t compete.

It’s yet another step in dismantling your ability to gain information from multiple independent sources. Do you really want your ISP determining which sites you can and can’t access, or which ones load more quickly or slowly? Those who are trying to prevent this are being painted as communists (naturally) by whom? Large media outlets who know they can rely on readers of blogs like this to rabidly repeat their talking points. In reality, democracy only works when EVERYONE has equal access to information, not just those with money.

Do yourself a favor and look up and watch the Bill Moyers show, even if it’s just a starting point. Find and evaluate the (rational) arguments on both sides and decide for yourself. Even Wikipedia has a pretty informative and balanced bit of information. This is an incredibly important issue and everyone should be as informed as possible.

If you have big corporations on both sides of a dispute, don’t side with the ones calling for bigger government.