Net Neutrality

[Vagrant0]

The concern from the right seems to be that the government will use this to start censoring the internet.

China has tried, and failed for the most part.

Some EU countries have tried censoring things or just restricting piracy, they failed.

Australia is trying, and will probably also fail.

 

America won't fare any better. Put simply, that ship has long since sailed away. While there might be some things that this will let them do to combat piracy and other illegal activities, censoring the web as it exists would be mostly impossible. Even something as simple as scrubbing the internet of very specific information, such as personal details, is very difficult. Trying to do the same thing with pornographic, violent, hateful, or offensive content becomes infinitely more difficult based on how fine of a filter you use. Frankly, the only chance they would have at doing anything like this would be to make the internet as we know it obsolete, establish a new network from the ground up which is isolated and filtered at every entry point, and hope that people can't find ways to go around those filters, or just continue using the old internet. Even smaller, private networks have had little to no luck censoring content since all it takes is one person bored enough to find a way.

 

We need only look at America Online back in the 90's, before the Internet was really a thing. It was a small, mostly isolated network, being used by a fairly small portion of people. But, it still had circles for pornography, file sharing, hacking, and similar if you knew where to look, or managed to annoy the wrong script kiddie. And it continued despite the fact that everything was located on their servers, passed through their networks, and had to run in their client. AOL was one of the main reasons why anti-virus software started being pushed as something everyone should have. Similar services in the early days of the internet weren't much different. All this was before you had a computer in almost every home and pocket, a generation addicted to the social web, and established ways to get around most blocks, bans, and restrictions that get between them and content they want.

 

The only thing that people should be concerned about is the amount of money that might get thrown down into that hole in trying to censor the web.

 

The ultimate problem is that humanity really hasn't changed much since the days when we were raping, murdering, and pillaging whenever we could get away with it. We can try and dress up the monkey, bathe and shave it, teach it languages, but at the end of the day it will still throw warm, steaming feces when and where it wants to. And that won't change until we stop blaming things for our vices and instead focus on cultural and philosophical development to mitigate the underlying needs for those vices.

[kvnchrist]

Has anybody realized that the commission is set up to protect us from the companies whose donations go to the very politicians who give the fcc authorization to do what they do. Something to think about when you place your trust in something ran by the government.

[JimboUK]

 

The concern from the right seems to be that the government will use this to start censoring the internet.

China has tried, and failed for the most part.

Some EU countries have tried censoring things or just restricting piracy, they failed.

Australia is trying, and will probably also fail.

 

 

 

 

The UKs censorship efforts have been nothing short of comical, the optional porn filter that parents can enable is easily bypassed by kids with a simple Chrome extension and the ISP level blocks on pirate sites were bypassed within minutes of them going up. There was already a thing in place called "Cleanfeed" and it basically blocked sites that were found to peddle child porn, it worked as few people had any reason to want to bypass it, as soon as pirate sites were added people were given a reason and it's rendered the thing useless.

[Beriallord]

 

The concern from the right seems to be that the government will use this to start censoring the internet.

China has tried, and failed for the most part.

Some EU countries have tried censoring things or just restricting piracy, they failed.

Australia is trying, and will probably also fail.

 

Selective censoring is what they could do. Just like they can't pull over every speeder, write a ticket to every J walker, or be on top of every person who goes 1+ minute over on their parking meter, they won't be able to censor everybody. Certainly the worst offenders who attract the most attention would be targeted for censorship. For example, they took down the biggest pirate website on the internet. Within days, mirror sites went up, and/or people went to the next biggest ones. Nothing really changed. They did cause a minor inconvenience to many pirates, but that's about it. It would be the same thing with anything else they'd try to censor.

Edited March 11, 2015 by Beriallord

[Vagrant0]

 

 

The concern from the right seems to be that the government will use this to start censoring the internet.

China has tried, and failed for the most part.

Some EU countries have tried censoring things or just restricting piracy, they failed.

Australia is trying, and will probably also fail.

 

Selective censoring is what they could do... ...It would be the same thing with anything else they'd try to censor.

 

 

Even if what you're talking about isn't illegal or shady in nature, censoring it becomes much more difficult on the whole than the effort it takes to go around that censor. Even if you were trying to censor political ideals, the process would have to play out in some ridiculous way since even the notion is impossible to enforce. Trying to take down a blogsite would require pressing a claim against the site hosts, those hosts acknowledging the claim, and the blogger being complacent enough to just accept it despite the fact that it goes against their rights. Even if you point out that the right to free speech isn't really present any more really, it still exists strongly in the notions of average people; meaning that that person almost certainly won't just give up what they were saying, and instead will just say it other places, even condemning their webhost for allowing it. Short of knocking on this person's door and physically silencing them, it won't happen.

 

About the only censoring you could do on that end would be passive censoring via intentionally affecting everyone's search bubble away from certain news stories and the like. Not only is this something that already happens naturally via google (and many similar services) giving priority in search criteria based on previous searches, but could be used proactively to help certain events slip through the cracks of public consciousness by just preventing the various web bots from recording those kinds of sites.

[Harbringe]

I'm hearing people go on about how our ability to disseminate things over the web is impossible to stop and your using as examples things like porn , music , pirated (whatever) , but your context is wrong . Thats all happening in an enviroment that makes those kind of things possible . What if that context doesn't exist , thats what net neutrality is about. Think of it this way . Net neutrality is to the web what the alphabet is to language . Without it what we have today becomes entirely a different thing and the arguments your making likely will not even apply.

[Vagrant0]

I'm hearing people go on about how our ability to disseminate things over the web is impossible to stop and your using as examples things like porn , music , pirated (whatever) , but your context is wrong . Thats all happening in an enviroment that makes those kind of things possible . What if that context doesn't exist , thats what net neutrality is about. Think of it this way . Net neutrality is to the web what the alphabet is to language . Without it what we have today becomes entirely a different thing and the arguments your making likely will not even apply.

It's been framed in that context mostly because those sorts of things are what lobbyists, and therefore politicians, care about. They are things tied to moral or financial beliefs, so are much more likely to be restricted than basic things like sharing of knowledge.

 

Even without net neutrality, there wouldn't be much interest in restricting bandwidth to informational sites purely because these sites usually don't use that much bandwidth and aren't front and center in the minds of most people when they look at the internet. For example, without net neutrality companies would be more likely to put something like Youtube, Hulu or Netflix, behind a pay-wall because these sites not only draw a large amount of bandwith demand, but also marginalize their own cable tv packages. For the most part, those kinds of sites are why the idea of limiting speed to add a premium service even came about. That's not to say that an ISP won't decide to expand coverage to limit access to other kinds of sites once they know they can get money from it, it would just probably be an afterthought in the pursuit of more extreme greed.