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Q&A: FCC Chairman Ajit Pai on Repealing Obama's Net Neutrality Rules

Posted by Bethesda-gal 6 years, 4 months ago to Technology
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This was a helpful article on understanding the whole net neutrality issue. Granted it is in a partisan outlet, but I was interested to read the FCC chairman’s rationale. I'd like to hear others' thoughts. This current stance seems to be in line with Objectivist principles, yes ?
SOURCE URL: http://dailysignal.com/2017/11/21/qa-fcc-chairman-explains-hes-ending-obamas-heavy-handed-internet-regulations/


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  • Posted by peterchunt 6 years, 4 months ago
    There may be many things Objectivists don't like about Trump, but there are a lot of things to like. This is one example of what to like.
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    • Posted by $ allosaur 6 years, 4 months ago
      Me dino feels moved to write this yet again~
      I knew Trump was a well-meaning flawed bull in a china shop when I voted for him against The Evil Hag.
      Now I'd like to add~Give 'em hell, O Imperfect One!
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  • Posted by $ jbrenner 6 years, 4 months ago
    Ajit Pai is one of the few people in the US government that actually understands us.
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    • Posted by 6 years, 4 months ago
      Interesting. Do you know anything about him, or you are surmising that from this position the FCC is advocating ? And so would Objectivists oppose the Sherman Act against monopolies ? And just let the free market decide 100% ?
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      • Posted by $ jbrenner 6 years, 4 months ago
        Without Ajit Pai, President Zero's administration would have successfully implemented net "neutrality". Think of the Internet this way. If I build a road (or set of roads) on which people (or their information) travel, should others be able to use them without me being able to charge them for it. Moreover, should others be able to use my roads enough easily enough that I am unable to charge a premium to my existing customers for preferential service? Imagine a toll road that you owned that had a special lane for your own customers, much like exists in some states for carpoolers (except they don't pay extra for it!).

        Objectivists should oppose the Sherman Act against monopolies. The antitrust case against Rockefeller was the real life version of the Hank Rearden "trial".

        Re-watch the Rearden trial in the AS movies, and then (re)watch The History Channel's portrayal of the Rockefeller trial during The Men Who Built America. They are so uncannily similar that John Aglialoro has an outstanding basis for a lawsuit.
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  • Posted by $ nickursis 6 years, 4 months ago
    It is refreshing to hear how the free market will be the driver of change rather than some corrupt herd of swamp dwellers.
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    • Posted by 6 years, 4 months ago
      A few posts below I included something that a friend who is of opposite mind sent me. Would you take a look at it and tell me what you think ??
      I hear jbrenner's explanation above, but I think this article raises some other points, such as that we, the taxpayers paid for the infrastructure through taxes that paid Verizon to build it, so we should be able to say that everyone has equal access to it and those who "built" it don't get a head start. As always, the devil is in the details and this one has a lot of details.
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      • Posted by $ nickursis 6 years, 4 months ago
        I would have to do some digging, as I am unsure of just who funded what as a lot of it was done with tax credits etc to many players as incentives, but I don't know for sure. Also remember art of the taxes you pay on you phone is specifically earmarked for rural delivery of both cell and phone.
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  • Posted by 6 years, 4 months ago
    So this doesn't convince anyone:

    “What’s most striking to me is that the taxpayers paid for the copper infrastructure, paid for it through regulated, expensive telephone service with taxpayers slated to own the resulting infrastructure,” said Benjamin Edelman, an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. “Now, that all got privatized in a particular way, [but] the short of it is, this is a public resource. It’s a public right of way; it was funded through public expenditures. It seems strange to declare this is actually one company’s asset to do with as they see fit.”

    https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...
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    • Posted by ewv 6 years, 4 months ago
      The left assumes that if a business did not pay more in taxes then it has been "subsidized", that if government already took control of anything used in the economy it should thereafter control everything that followed it making any use of it, and that therefore government should control the whole industry. It is a circular argument with a false collectivist premise.

      The Soviets used the same illogic when they refused to let people escape their collectivist utopia on the grounds that the victims had been "educated" at state expense. The moral premise is "once a slave always a slave, no escape is possible or justified" -- You are a "public resource" "funded through public expenditures".

      Under that mentality any claim of private property rights, let alone the right to your own life, "seems strange", as Edelman put it. Of course it does: they start and end with the same collectivism. No one can leave the Borg, only new victims assimilated and existing victims further absorbed. Edelman was educated in economics and law at Harvard with four degrees and became one its "stars". What do you expect?

      It is the same mentality as Obama's and Mass. Senator Big Squaw Running Mouth's "you didn't built that" because you made use of "the roads" and took part in society. They leave out who paid the taxes for "the roads" and everything else, how anyone (like Soviet students) could have done anything else under state monopolies, and why all those others who used "the roads" and everything else did not accomplish what the producers did. What they ignore fundamentally is what it does take to succeed.

      We all live in society; that is not collectivism. Ayn Rand observed that the main values of civilization are voluntary trade of value for value, and the accumulation of human knowledge, which can only be understood and used by the individual mind. None of that is collectivism or an excuse for collectivism; it is the opposite. What matters is what you do with the circumstances in which you are born, following and acting on your own reasoning mind as an individual for your own life. Individualism means thinking and acting for yourself for your own values, and dealing with others through honesty, voluntary cooperation, and rational persuasion, not living by yourself on a desert island.

      Being born into society of any kind does not make you a permanent indentured servant serving the collective. Civilization was made possible by freedom from submission to the tribe. According to the collectivist premises of the left, no one was ever justified in leaving the earliest primitive tribes. If they had gotten their way we would still have nothing but primitive tribes.

      Edelman objects that "that all got privatized in a particular way". If the products of the mind had not "got privatized" they would not have been created. Every company that develops something new, with any kind or degree of government involvement (which can no longer be avoided), even if in rare cases it is partially subsidized, does so only if it knows it knows it is retaining the rights to what it creates and cares about. Otherwise it does not proceed. The right to the results of your own mind and effort is private to start with; it doesn't "get privatized" by a fluke of government giving away the "public's resources".

      The illogic of the left's "you didn't built that" fallacies tries to relegate individualism to existing in solitude with no relations with anyone else, while claiming the source of all benefits of and in society is inherently collectivist -- as it tries to take over the source of human value in the individual mind and destroy the freedom to rationally cooperate with other individuals for mutual benefit. No wonder they hate Alas Shrugged.
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    • Posted by freedomforall 6 years, 4 months ago
      I think that Verizon's free speech argument has more validity against Verizon's attempt to censor or bias the content via their pricing than for Verizon's free speech. They want to have their cake and eat it, too, imo. On one hand Verizon will use its lobbyists to increase regulations to gain a competitive advantage against competitors, and then want to have regulation reduced to control content.
      OTOH, if Verizon maintains the network (regardless of who originally built it) they must be able to profit or the network will not serve customers adequately, and that will affect all customers, large and small.
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  • Posted by LibertyBelle 6 years, 4 months ago
    I remember Ayn Rand's article "The Property Status of Airwaves". She did not advocate anarchy; she said that it was legitimate that one broadcaster not be allowed to bust in onto another's frequency (at least, so far as I understood it). Still, and on that basis, I do not see why the FCC should exist, and why someone should have to beg the government's permission before being allowed to broadcast.

    As to the Internet being a "public utility", I do not believe in "public utilities" whether water, gas, etc.
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    • Posted by ewv 6 years, 4 months ago
      Ayn Rand explained why the "air waves" should be recognized as private property, i.e., segments of the frequency spectrum within geographical regions, just like land originally claimed and used, or like anything that is developed for a human value. The FCC should not exist as it is. The only role of government would be to legally define and protect the "air wave" property rights, which preclude interference. There is no legitimate role for the FCC granting "permission" to broadcast on a "public resource", which is a thoroughly collectivist premise. The attempt at government control of the internet in recent years is nothing but a power grab for the sake of a collectivist mentality.
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      • Posted by CircuitGuy 6 years, 4 months ago
        I am amazed how packed the ISM bands are. They're bands that the FCC granted unlicensed access to if you meet certain requirements. WIFI is on the 2.4GHz and 5-6GHz ISM bands. The 5.5GHz requires unlicensed users cease transmission if radar is detected. Despite this, the bands are packed in a typical office or light-industrial environment. People use them to control municipal pumps over links running several miles. Yes, they use WiFi and sometimes hoppers (frequency hopping radios) running proprietary schemes complaint with the ISM rules for links running miles controlling important equipment.

        Despite the bands being jam packed, you can still get plenty of data across. Many of the schemes use clear channel assessment, sometimes with CTS/RTS to check if there's a hidden node the transmitting node can't hear on the receiver's end. Other schemes spread the spectrum or use very narrow-band signaling for very brief periods. They share the spectrum pretty well--- all with no central planning.

        If central planning worked, you'd reliable connections would be licensed. Instead we see the ISM band packed. We see hundreds of people go in to a building, all carrying WiFi transcivers on the ISM bands. Sometimes in the same building there's an IT network and a wireless machine network with lots of small packets. And usually it works. On a sniffer you see packets flying everywhere with a good deal of retries, but from users' perspective latency and throughput are good.

        I absolutely would have thought the airwaves need central planning. I still see the need to treat segments of spectrum as private property, as you say. I'm just amazed at how the wild-west of the ISM band is so orderly and works so well.
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        • Posted by ewv 6 years, 4 months ago
          If you're listening to a radio or TV uninterrupted over distance it has to be reliable without all the retries and exceptions. For applications where sharing with rules works, the rules for priorities can still be recognized and implemented as property rights even though that may only means things like "stay within your own building or part of a building at low enough power" and "must pull over when radar comes by" -- the right to use a particular frequency band does not have to specify a particular frequency within it. That is for all practical purposes what we have now, but the FCC would not admit to property rights. At some point everything is limited and even frequency hopping can no longer work in an overused band. The limits of any resource leads to the necessity of resolving conflicts with well-defined property rights.
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          • Posted by CircuitGuy 6 years, 4 months ago
            "If you're listening to a radio or TV uninterrupted over distance it has to be reliable without all the retries and exceptions. "
            I am amazed, though, how many things like controlling sewer pumps and or displaying video cameras is done on the ISM band over long links that intersect with many small Wi-Fi networks. If you sniff it there are loads of retries. The higher levels of the protocol have to accept interruptions, but I'm amazed how people send video across major cities for years with lots of layer-two retries but very few lost packets.

            "At some point everything is limited and even frequency hopping can no longer work in an overused band. "
            There's a lot more you can do besides hopping, e.g. MIMO and direct sequence, but you can't break Shannon's Law.

            MIMO is the coolest technology I know of. You intentionally transmit separate streams of data on different antennas, and the receiver has multiple antennas all receiving a cacophony of interference from the multiple transmitters talking over one another. If the receiver knows the channel function between each TX ant and each RX ant, it can reconstruction all the streams. I remember thinking it's fun in MATLAB but could never be practical. Now there are $40 radio cards that implement MIMO in firmware!

            Direct sequence is when you spread the signal across a large spectrum such that it appears to be part of the noise floor. I have heard it works outside of MATLAB, but I've never been involved in it. I don't know how it works, how they keep narrow-band signals from saturating the receiver.

            I do not know how to handle the property rights issues you talk about. I strongly see the need, though, because you have to do these fun tricks in an urban area, and then you get to a rural area and the spectrum is nearly dead. The supply is the same, but there's much more demand where the people are.
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  • Posted by $ Thoritsu 6 years, 4 months ago
    Yet another small tap into the swamp. Betsy DeVros is another one. 30% reduction in regulations in another.
    Now if he could stop the narcissistic nonsense.
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    • Posted by 6 years, 4 months ago
      Yes, my theory from the outset, as to why they went so nutso over DeVoss's nomination and subsequent confirmation, is that they know that K-12 indoctrination is where it all begins; the guilt for having the urge to be original and the urge to create and to be competitive, and that is where they try to stomp all that out, in favor of "the good of the collective". And by "they" I mean ALL of the SWAMP, the Left AND the Establishment Right.
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      • Posted by ewv 6 years, 4 months ago
        Freedom of choice in education is absolutely essential, just as it is essential for the left that it be destroyed in order to control thought.
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