Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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 i...

Old joke. A traveller who is a huge fan of seafood arrives in Boston for the first time.  He leaves the airport and hails a cab.  After he gets in, he excitedly says to the cabbie, "Hey, I'm new in town.  Can you tell me a good place to go to get scrod?"  The cabbie replies [in a thick Boston accent], "Pal, I've got to congratulate you.  I've heard that question a lot over the years, but that's the first time I've ever heard it in the pluperfect subjunctive." That joke is so old that it was first told in an era when large numbers of people could explain what the pluperfect subjunctive is. [You can google it if you like, but of course it won't help. You either find the joke funny or not regardless.] Anyway, I can't help but wonder how badly T-Mobile and Sprint are finding themselves scrod by the recent FCC ruling on an airwaves auction. So far as I understand it -- The FCC has set the rules so that most of the available bits of ...