Skip to main content

Internet neutrality 2.0

Image result for ajit pai

Current debates about twitter, Alex Jones, etc. help put in perspective a quite recent debate over "net neutrality." We are now facing "net neutrality 2.0" and we can achieve some clarity over what it does and what it doesn't mean. 

 Last year the Federal Communications Commission, at the insistence of the man that President Trump has made its chair, Ajit Pai, repeals an Obama-era rule that prohibited Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from charging websites or apps for the ability to load ahead of potential competitors.

 Advocates of the rule said that it wasn't an Obama invention, but simply the codification of an older tradition and understanding, and that Pai -- and the huge  ISPs including AT&T and Verizon, were breaking not only with the one but with the other, to the detriment of the public interest. 

 Pai, on the other hand, portrayed the rule itself as fixing something that wasn't broken, and said the ISPs should be allowed to innovate in ways the rule would constrain -- that their room for innovation IS in the public interest. 

 Now we face another, apparently unrelated, argument about social networks -- Facebook, twitter, Instagram, etc. Conservatives say that these networks have become dangerous (left leaning) censors, as illustrated for example by twitter's recent action against conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.  The government has to step in to stop them. Of course the conservatives aren't proposing that the government step in to enforce conservatism. But they do seem to be proposing that government enforce some notion of fair play, or neutrality. 

 So what we are hearing is a demand for Net Neutrality 2.0.  The battle has nothing really to do with the public interest. It is part of a fight between two contending sets of government cronies, two media giants, the maintainers of the pipes on the one hand and the Kings of Content (K of C) on the other. The corporations involved on both sides are huuuge. 

 The Trump administration is simply all in for the guys who own the pipes, and intent on weakening the K of C precisely because it offers countervailing power to the ISPs. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti
7 comments
Read more

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers
Post a Comment
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak
13 comments
Read more