Why isn't Internet free for everyone yet?

[publiusr]

On the subject of politics and finance--I thought the story Ayn Rand's Lord of the rings amusing.

You may not agree with the political bent of this blurb--but you may find it amusing none the less:

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

— John Rogers

[Crazy Eddie]

Alidar Jarok wrote:

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I'm not quibbling with your overall post, but I am going to take issue with this. There are people in the inner city, small towns, and rural areas who consume goods without producing anything of value to anyone. By saying inner city you make it a racial thing when it sure as hell is not.

I kinda WAS making it a racial thing, insofar as it's a self-diagnosed problem of deep concern to the black community in particular. When you're part of a demographic that historians have occasionally described as "The labor reserve" this sort of thing becomes a hell of a lot more important.

Overall point taken, though.

[Mr. Laser Beam]

publiusr wrote:

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On the subject of politics and finance--I thought the story Ayn Rand's Lord of the rings amusing.

You may not agree with the political bent of this blurb--but you may find it amusing none the less:

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

— John Rogers

Oh, I agree with that blurb all right!!

[RB_Kandy]

Alidar Jarok wrote:

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No they are not. It actually was a Supreme Court case, though. Nat'l Cable & Telecomm. Ass'n v. Brand X Internet Servs., 545 U.S. 967 (2005).

You are 100% right. It appears I was mistaken. I do know for a fact that DSL was considered telecommunications, but it appears that changed in 2005 with that ruling as well.

Alidar Jarok wrote:

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No. I said the law currently exists to prevent obscenity on the internet (at least for sale) and that the official Republican Party Platform says that these laws should be enforced. In fact, obscenity prosecutions took place in 2005 with the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force. You claimed that the government could only prevent obscenity if they own the internet services but can't do it now, which is wrong.

From http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/53314.html

Former obscenity prosecutor Patrick Trueman, who now heads the group Morality in Media, said the claim of 150 recent obscenity prosecutions is misleading and that, in fact, no adult obscenity prosecutions have been initiated under Obama.

“In various administrations — not just this one — DOJ has tried to sell the notion that it has a vigorous enforcement of obscenity laws underway,” Trueman said. “A look at the cases, however, reveals that what are counted as ‘obscenity cases’ are in fact child pornography cases where the defendant is allowed to plead down to an obscenity charge. … To suggest that such cases are adult porn cases is just wrong.”

From that wiki article it says

Notable cases were brought against Joseph R. Francis' Mantra Films, Inc. (Girls Gone Wild), as well as producers Ira Isaacs and Max Hardcore

The citation on Wiki leads here http://www.pcworld.com/article/13505...n_charges.html

and says (the first part is the distribution charge, the second part is)

and two counts of failing to label sexually explicit DVDs with the name and location of the custodian of records containing age and identification information for performers in sexually explicit films.

Which translates to "that woman on Girls Gone Wild who exposed her breasts in public in front of hundreds, can we see her ID to verify she wasn't under 18?"

I do remember that case, and how the entire issue was "failure to prove all girls were over 18"

After searching online about this task force, I am unable to find even one example of them winning a case for adult obscenity; all of it is attacking child porn, or more accurately, attempting to tackle adult porn using "child exploitation" as the flimsy pretense.

Furthermore, the line here between obscenity law and distribution law is blurred. It seems to me, just by reading articles about the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force such as this http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/53314.html

That all charges, that were anything other than blatant child porn, were for the sales/distribution of materials (attacking the method of records keeping and ID verification).

And as you've admitted, this is not an internet (communication/speech) specific law. Actually, let me rephrase that, Obscenity Prosecution Task Force is a group, not an actual law. Because it is next to impossible to nail a citizen in the US for crimes of speech, they resort to using other laws that are not specifically speech, such as sales and distribution, child exploitation, etc.

The 18 U.S.C. § 1465 law, to the best of my knowledge, after a couple of hours of reading it and googling it, is an archaic distribution law who's only purpose today is to assist in child porn cases. "we'll drop the child porn wrap if you plead guilty to this"

Which would seem to go right along with what I quoted earlier, that all persons charged under this law, are charges as a result of plea bargaining in a child porn case.


After all, if this were an active and effective law, doctors couldn't send you a prescription for birth control pills by mail, you could not receive pornography by mail, condoms, or pamphlets about getting an abortion. Again, I say it's an archaic law who's only purpose was in 1977, when child porn first became illegal, existed as a plea bargain when the prosecution didn't feel confident they could nail you with child porn.

When it comes to obscenity, I think it is interesting that as an American man, I am not allowed to walk down the street naked, but I can walk around my house naked and broadcast it over the internet. Hmm, I got more freedom on the web than in real life?

I'd like to now respond to this part of your statement. "You claimed that the government could only prevent obscenity if they own the internet services but can't do it now, which is wrong. "

I don't recall saying that. I recall saying that if government owned the internet (or more accurately owned America's internet access) it would be "easier" for them to control "speech" too and from their own citizens.

Let me explain, with a bit of melodrama and exaggeration, how things in America work. You have "the people" which are dived into two groups: the politically correct Left, and the bible thumping Right. They form noisy protest groups that politicians suck up to for votes. Both groups want the same thing; to limit the freedom of citizens so that everyone acts and thinks like they do.

Politicians, who only care about money and power, are more than happy to take away every last drop of freedom America has. A left wing group may say pornography should be illegal because it objectifies women. And then a right wing group says "pornography should be illegal, because sex is the devil's work" and each use a "think of the children" speech. But then there are rich greedy corporations who says things like "I got a million dollars worth of campaign funds that says pornography is a first amendment right. If you don't agree, I'm sure your opponent will."

And sometimes a politician walks up to a company and says "My administration feels that only companies that fit our family friendly image, should receive a 50 million dollar tax break in the form of our new family values insentive. You guys aren't doing or supporting anything that would conflict with our family values, are you?"

And far to complicated to explain is the roll advertisers have on the media, and the effect the media has on politicians. Put it all together and fanatic civil rights groups, bible thumpers, politicians, corporations, advertisers, and media, all exchange words and cash, to make any and every law that governs us. And citizens who are "easily offended" tend to have the loudest voices. Freedom seldom makes a profit, but safety often does.

Point being If corporations control ISP's we the average user have at least a fighting chance of retaining freedom (for a while at least).

If the US government controls it, we can kiss our internet rights good bye the moment someone stands up and shouts "won't someone think of the children".

And this is why I am glad I pay $55 a month for unlimited internet access.

And also, of all the things working class tax payers should have to pay for via taxes, for non working people to get for free, I think "free porn on the interwebz" ought to rank pretty low.

In regards to my earlier claim of net neutrality, it appears you are right and I am mistaken. There is no law to enforce net neutrality. However, for all intents and purposes, we do have net neutrality, just not one big powerful law enforcing it.

Here is something really interesting. On the wikipedia article about net neutrality

On February 25, 2008, Kevin Martin, the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said that he is "ready, willing and able," to prevent broadband Internet service providers from irrationally interfering with their subscribers' Internet access.[21]

In August 2008, the FCC ruled that Comcast broke the law when it throttled the bandwidth available to certain customers for video files in order to make sure that other customers had adequate bandwidth.[22][23] The FCC ordered Comcast to disclose the details of its network management practices within 30 days, submit a compliance plan for ending the offending practices by the end of the year, and disclose to the public the details of intended future practices. The FCC’s order was the first Internet network management decision of its kind.[24]

Which law did they violate? This one: From the FCC website: http://www.fcc.gov/topic/open-internet

Transparency. Broadband providers must disclose information regarding their network management practices, performance, and the commercial terms of their broadband services.

No blocking. Fixed broadband providers (such as DSL, cable modem, or fixed wireless providers) may not block lawful content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices. Mobile broadband providers may not block lawful websites, or applications that compete with their voice or video telephony services.

No unreasonable discrimination. Fixed broadband providers may not unreasonably discriminate in transmitting lawful network traffic over a consumer’s broadband Internet access service. Unreasonable discrimination of network traffic could take the form of particular services or websites appearing slower or degraded in quality.

The above also disproves something you said in your first post to me, that ISP's are free to block competitors.

As you can see, the FCC states they are not free to do so.

The level of authority the FCC and FTC have over the internet is an extremely complicated one to figure out. The FCC does not regulate ISP's http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/faqs-internet

Yet as with the above quote, they are forcing some level of net neutrality, in spite of there being no official net neutrality bill passed by congress.

But here is something interesting I just realized from reading through all that stuff, if corporations, namely ISP's had unchallenged control over the internet, there would be no net neutrality at all. And I believe that without the level of neutrality that we have now, the internet would be a very expensive place to do business, because not only would consumers pay to get on the web, big corporations would have to pay extra cash for data transfer speeds. So assuring consumers could view their product, means they'd have to pay even more cash to compete with their competitors. This would hurt both free speech and especially newly developing mediums such as Yutube, Blip.tv, and Netflix. These corporations could never have developed from the ground up, because of unfair competition practices. Only corporations with the billions behind them could start up a new service and compete. The ISP's greed would strangle the free web market.

So in away, the best system for the internet would be corporate controlled, with fair business practices being enforced by the FCC and FTC.

I personally think a government controlled internet would be good for businesses, but bad for free speech. But corporate controlled and unregulated would be bad for business and good for free speech.

So again, I am happy to pay $55 a month for unlimited broadband access.

I enjoy the fact I can come to a forum like this and use the "F" word, and that is my legal right. I realize on some other forums I may not. And I realize that on some forums I can be banned by a mod/admin for profanity, or having a politically incorrect point of view. I can deal with that for one simple reason, your forum, your rules. It's different than the FCC hammering someone with a fine.

And I know that some websites don't allow profanity because their host has a no profanity rule. This too is acceptable to me, because I can always go with another host. When building my own website, one of the things I did was examine the Terms Of Service and User Agreement, I made sure there would be no rule against political incorrectness, or profanity, because when I review an episode of Voyager, you know I am going to have to use some profanity to express my feelings on some of their bad episodes

[Alidar Jarok]

RB_Kandy wrote:

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If the US government controls it, we can kiss our internet rights good bye the moment someone stands up and shouts "won't someone think of the children".

The problem here is that the government has the legal authority now. All that has to happen is someone says "won't someone think of the children." All your research has shown that they haven't used it to target adult pornography, not that they can't. If the government subsidized it, it would be the same (they still can, not that they would).

[RB_Kandy]

Alidar Jarok wrote:

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The problem here is that the government has the legal authority now. All that has to happen is someone says "won't someone think of the children." All your research has shown that they haven't used it to target adult pornography, not that they can't. If the government subsidized it, it would be the same (they still can, not that they would).

I understand this. What I am saying is, ISP's being corporate makes it harder for such a bill to pass. Not impossible, just more difficult.

I also warn everyone to appreciate the internet as it is now, this is the golden age my friends. When our children are our age, there won't be this kind of freedom on the web.

[Maurice]

gturner wrote:

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Very interesting. I guess that exception sort of "proves the rule" because they have to make videos to explain it.

Just because someone makes a video about it to explain it is a silly, specious argument. The population of the Indian subcontinent is 16% of the world total, so even assuming not everyone there does it, we're still talking maybe 1 in 10 humans who don't do exactly the same head gestures you consider universal.

[Alidar Jarok]

RB_Kandy wrote:

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I understand this. What I am saying is, ISP's being corporate makes it harder for such a bill to pass. Not impossible, just more difficult.

I also warn everyone to appreciate the internet as it is now, this is the golden age my friends. When our children are our age, there won't be this kind of freedom on the web.

It's hard to say. I tend to agree with you because censorship will get easier (as proven by Iran during the Green Revolution). On the other hand, at least in the United States, the first amendment law is getting more favorable to free speech. I suspect that cases regarding indecency will eventually be overturned and it'll become even harder to enforce obscenity laws.

[Gary7]

Radio is free. At least, at the moment... Many years from now, we may find ourselves at a point where most quality radio stations have shut down their radio transmitters in favor of Internet streaming. You'll still be able to pick up AM/FM broadcasts, but they'll be tiny grassroots operations with comparatively short range.

So, why wouldn't the Internet be free? Well, it is facilitated through an infrastructure that is owned in various segments, some by large telecommunications companies and some by the government. Eventually there will be plenty of broadcast towers located throughout the country whereby Internet access through wires will be unnecessary. Will Wi-Fi become free? Well, it's already "free" in some locations, but that's because it's sponsored by local agencies. Who knows... down the road, maybe it'll all be consolidated and we'll be paying an Internet access tax to the government, a flat rate for unlimited access.

The scary thing is that privacy will be practically eliminated. When you're on the Internet, your access will be resolved to a specific identifier that points directly to YOU... not a household, public computer, or generic access point. The government will know exactly when you're on the Internet, at any time, as well as keeping a record of that throughout your lifetime. You can still bypass it to a degree (you don't have to be logged onto sites like Google or YouTube to use them), but eventually when you check e-mail or log onto Facebook, the record is there. Brave new world...

[Alidar Jarok]

Radio is free to the listener, but it isn't costless either. It's not free to the broadcaster (both because of the limited range of frequencies requires renting a frequency and because the infrastructure needed to broadcast costs money). I suppose the future you imagine is close to free, although it will still cost the price of the equipment to broadcast (and the electricity to power it).

If the question is about making the internet costless to the consumer, there needs to be a viable mass-use revenue source for people like commercials are for radio. This would have to be on top of the revenue sources for individual websites. Things in the past like pay per impression ads generally have not been the solution.

[RB_Kandy]

Gary7 wrote:

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Radio is free. At least, at the moment... Many years from now, we may find ourselves at a point where most quality radio stations have shut down their radio transmitters in favor of Internet streaming. You'll still be able to pick up AM/FM broadcasts, but they'll be tiny grassroots operations with comparatively short range.

So, why wouldn't the Internet be free? Well, it is facilitated through an infrastructure that is owned in various segments, some by large telecommunications companies and some by the government. Eventually there will be plenty of broadcast towers located throughout the country whereby Internet access through wires will be unnecessary. Will Wi-Fi become free? Well, it's already "free" in some locations, but that's because it's sponsored by local agencies. Who knows... down the road, maybe it'll all be consolidated and we'll be paying an Internet access tax to the government, a flat rate for unlimited access.

The scary thing is that privacy will be practically eliminated. When you're on the Internet, your access will be resolved to a specific identifier that points directly to YOU... not a household, public computer, or generic access point. The government will know exactly when you're on the Internet, at any time, as well as keeping a record of that throughout your lifetime. You can still bypass it to a degree (you don't have to be logged onto sites like Google or YouTube to use them), but eventually when you check e-mail or log onto Facebook, the record is there. Brave new world...

In addition to what Alidar Jarok said.
Radio is a one way system, unlike internet and telephone.
AM (Amplitude modulation) and FM (frequency modulation) are waves that are intercepted by an antena. Those waves are then electrically amplified to kick a speaker. The speaker kicks, you hear sound.
Carrying digital data is far more complicated, requiring a much higher magnitude of wave, and requiring frequency bandwidth.
As it is now, we are running low on wifi bandwidth and will hit our limit in 2 to 5 years. Though building a system upgrade is still possible.

Keep in mind that wifi has got to be carried by transmitters to towers, that send signals to satellites, in order to reach the end user (since no FFC approved device for the general public allows sufficient amplitude to deliver a signal to a satellite). This network of relays is big money, unlike a short wave radio.
Commercial radio is expensive, and paid for by advertisements.

I'd really hate for ISP's to start bombarding us with advertizements. Imagine going to a website, closing the pop up, waiting for the flash object commercials to load up, looking past all the embedded commercial text, and then from your ISP comes 5 minutes of commercials blocking your screen as if your monitor were a television.

I'll stick with paying $55 a month, and occasionally clicking an advertisement and giving it a look, just so the web master of a site can collect a penny for me clicking an ad. I can handle this, I rather like web 2.0 and my corporate government hybrid ISP.

Oh, and by the way, it is nice to click on an advertisement now and then, and give it a look. If you see an add that looks even remotely interesting, just give it a click if you want to help support your favorite websites.
I recently clicked an ad for Amanda Palmer's new CD, that I found on this website, because I like Amanda Palmer. I am seriously considering buying her new CD.

[gturner]

In the long term, the way we'll probably get around the RF bandwidth limits (which are physical) will come along some years after we've switched almost entirely to LED lighting. LED lighting systems can carry a piggybacked Internet signal that can be branched building by building, room by room, even more precisely than current WiFi signals, and carrying almost as much data as a fiber. That would clear the spectrum of the download bandwidth of people who are indoors, while user's uploads could remain non-directional RF to the receivers in the lighting system.

LED's are already competittive with street lights (even at current prices and performance, their lower maintenance saves cities money), so the system could be extended to cover the outdoor areas of most cities. Since the streetlights would already be wired up to carry signals, the signals could carry WiFi/cell repeater during the day or to users who aren't picking up the lighting signals, making the current antenna grid vastly denser.

Instead of using WiFi as the model (where you have to connect to a particular wireless network), the system would be a dense, miniturized version of a cell network, where the antennas track users and hand them off to other antennas. In this application, an antenna would try pinging the user optically (via the LED) and if that doesn't work it would try very short-range RF. That would clear almost everyone in cities from the current networks, leaving the existing system for rural areas and highways.

Getting to that level is going to take a lot of time and investment. The communications industry (ISP's, etc) would have to coordinate with LED lighting manufacturers (the signal switching speeds probably requires RGB leds instead of white from blue/phosphor), and the LED controllers would have to include modems and other very sophisticated electronics. Then they'd have to coordinate with municipalities and business to run the signals all through the streelight system, and the entire industry would have to come together on standards and spectrum allocations.

ETA: Oh, and there's also the issue that LED transmitters and receivers aren't able to use frequency selectivity like an RF signal (with LED's, only a few colors are available, so you can't frequency hop up and down the "blue" spectrum). So if you have two rooms where the lighting overlaps, the rooms have to either use different colors (red, green, or blue) to avoid having an area where the signals walk over each other, or time-division multiplexing where "blue" isn't used at exactly the same time by both rooms.

That means the equipment has to figure out how to detect and correct overlaps via switching colors or multiplexing, otherwise the electricians installing the system have to constantly solve the three-color map problem on the fly, which isn't going to work very well.

[Gary7]

I was using radio as an example of an existing service being free to the consumer/listener, not comparing the technologies employed. That wouldn't make any sense, as they're entirely different (as pointed out, one is one way and the other interactive).

True, radio is not free for the broadcaster. And revenue is made via commercials as well as sponsorship. With "free" Wi-Fi, I could see a mandatory app required to be run in the browser that will layer over your viewed content which you'll have to watch periodically, and anything that blocks them would suspend the Internet connection. That could probably work. But ultimately as the infrastructure becomes more optimized, the overhead costs will shrink quite a bit.

[Crazy Eddie]

^ Besides which, that would be a highly invasive way of generating revenue and would turn a lot of people off from that service. Add to that the fact that advertising don't have any common fucking sense and will inevitably push that advantage WAY too far, producing mandatory ads that either hang your entire device for fifteen minutes or take nearly as long to finish loading just so you can skip them and access the internet.

In the end, though, I think rising prices and increasingly bottlenecked accessibility will keep on creating cheaper alternatives which the larger ISPs will have to compete with eventually. Deriving revenues from controlling ACCESS is ultimately untenable, which is why alot of the larger companies are doing increasingly sneaky and back-stabby things to stake claims to popular content (witness the licensing war between Hulu, Netflix and Xfinity right now).