McCain on Net Neutrality, Copyright, Iraq

An anonymous reader writes "Sen. John McCain kicked off the All Things Digital conference Tuesday night with some interesting comments about net neutrality among other things. His take: there should be as little government regulation of broadband as possible. The market should be allowed to solve the Net-neutrality issue: 'When you control the pipe you should be able to get profit from your investment.'"

Follow the money

[Scrameustache]

JOHN MCCAIN (R-AZ)
Top Contributors [opensecrets.org]

1 AT&T Inc $39,500

Re:Vehemently Anti french

[azav]

And if it weren't for the French, there would be no USA as they bailed us out when we were seeking independence from British rule during our Revolutionary War in the late 1700's. Or maybe you forgot that part of history?

Cheers.

Re:Follow the money

[Anonymous Coward]

also:
8 Verizon Communications $17,200
16 Viacom Inc $12,100
17 Time Warner $12,000

Re:Let The Market decide!

[dgatwood]

Satellite broadband, assuming a geostationary orbit, has, by definition, high latency (more than a half second round trip even if both you and your ISP were directly under the satellite at the equator and if there were zero additional delay from routers, etc.). For web browsing, you might not notice this too much if you have a good local caching DNS server in the satellite router. For most other uses, though, it will seem very, very slow, and VoIP is right out.

With that in mind, you don't have to be in the middle of nowhere to have only one choice. Just outside Santa Cruz, CA, I've been looking at land. Nearly every piece of property that does not have a structure on it is outside the range of DSL from the CO, which means that unless you can convince the local telco to put in a remote terminal, your only option is cable. In fact, there are places in the heart of the Silicon Valley where DSL is not available due to distance limitations. Granted, I've seen one wireless ISP that serves some of those areas, but at their prices, it is no wonder that people don't see it as a viable option.

By most estimates, only 60-70% of the U.S. population lives within range of DSL. That means that 30-40% of the population has at most one real choice for broadband (and that's assuming that their cable provider offers broadband). It is not at all uncommon to have only a single choice in broadband providers.

I won't mind his stances if the market was open...

[Fallen Kell]

The problem we face is that the market is actually closed. There is no free market in the telecom or cable industries. Almost all towns, counties, and even states have laws in place restricting the number of cable providers and forcing a monopoly in the state, county, etc., etc.

In an open market, things would work out for the consumer, as they would have the choice to go to a different company if they were not getting the service they want or even expect from their current providers. Yet, where I live, I can not even start a rival cable company if I wanted let alone have a choice between different ones because the law forbids me from being able to use anything other then Comcast, as they have an exclusive deal with the county to be the only licensed cable tv provider, and the county will not license any other competition. So, since I have a choice of them or nothing, it isn't like I can do a whole lot when I am upset about a change in service or experience poor service, etc., etc. In a free and open market, I would go to someone else who didn't do X or Y to me, and isn't speed throttling different network connections, etc., etc., and that is the idea of the free market, and in that case, the free market would make sure that the consumer got what he or she wants, not what is forced on them.

Office of Management and Budget - fy2006

[CrazedWalrus]

Since the taxpayers of this country have been saddled with tens of millions (billions?) of subsidies to those who we have to go through for our net connection,

I've seen this claim before, but where is the proof? Can anyone actually quantify the amount of money and how big a percentage of the whole it represents?

I'm sure there's more, but here's one I found in 30 seconds on TheGoogle:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2006/agricu lture.html [whitehouse.gov]

Rural America is home to one-fifth of the Nation's population. The needs of this population are as diverse as those of the populations in large towns and cities. Communities in rural America rely upon many of the same things as urban areas, including good paying jobs, access to critical services like education, healthcare, and technology, and strong and safe communities. One specific utility that many growing businesses are relying on for further growth is broadband, which allows high-speed data transmission.

[...]

In 2004, President Bush announced an initiative to make access to broadband technology available to every American by 2007. While broadband has begun to penetrate rural America, rural areas still lag behind urban centers. The Rural Utilities Service delivers one of the Department's programs designed to increase access to broadband for rural residents and businesses. This program provides loans to companies that are willing to provide broadband in rural communities. Since the beginning of this program in February 2003, USDA has approved over $658 million in loans. The 2006 President's Budget provides funding that will support an additional $359 million in loans.

I don't know what sort of percentage this represents, but I'm sure you'd agree that it's a significant amount of taxpayer money involved, regardless.

Re:Vehemently Anti french

[Anspen]

1) They didn't know that. As far as they knew surrender might result in the kind of thing that happened to Germany 22 years earlier: decommissioning of the armed forces, very heavy war payments, maybe some loss of territory. Remember the final solution didn't really gather steam until years later.

2) They didn't exactly surrender at the first sign of fighting. Some villages changed hands dozens of times, large parts of the French military where destroyed or captured before the surrender came and it's only ally, the UK, had already given up the fight on the continent (wisely probably, but still devastating for morale. Also by then a significant part of France industry and Farmland had already been conquered.

3) As others have noted you can't understand the situation in 1940 unless you look at what happened between 1914 and 1918. They lost literally millions of people. And not as casualties (e.g. death and wounded) but in deaths. For four years hundreds of thousands of men died without much effect on the opponent.

In 1940 the French simply lost to a better trained opponent. If there had been a land bridge at Calais I doubt the UK would have lasted much longer. The only thing you can accuse the French government of the time of is that they didn't flee and continue the fight. To call them cowardly or weak ignores the reality of the time.

As French as the smurfs

[GuerreroDelInterfaz]

> It wasn't WWII that broke the French, it was World War I. Their casualties were literally in
> the millions; they fielded the majority of the allied land forces, and most of the war took
> place on their territory. They held back, literally, the best army in the world. Fought them to
> a standstill for years in the face of obscene casualties.

      With a little BIG help from their little Belgian friends... It was the Belgian king Albert I who, by not allowing his relative the Kaiser to enter Belgium to take the French by surprise, put his country as a buffer against the powerful german army. Then it was the decision to flood Belgium and the courage of its little army that stopped and held the ruthless Prussians (in Visé, Dinant and many more places they simply executed all Walloon civilians and destroyed their houses). And this involvment of Belgium in this war was crucial for that war to become the first "World War" and not yet another french-german war.

      I guess it is yet another case of famous "french" stuff like the "frites" ("french" fries), the Smurfs, Lucky Luke, Tintin, Hercules Poirot, etc.

--
El Guerrero del Interfaz