House Panel Backs 'Internet Freedom' Legislation 87
GovTechGuy writes "The House Energy and Commerce Committee passed legislation on Wednesday once again affirming the current management structure of the Web. In doing so, the lawmakers made one thing clear: the only government that should have its hands on the underpinnings of the Internet is the U.S. ' It affirms the importance of an Internet free from censorship and government control and codifies the existing management structure of the Internet. ... Notably, however, lawmakers dropped from the legislation the phrase “free from government control,” which had threatened to derail the April 11 markup by the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology. ... [Democrats argued] it could undermine the U.S. government’s ability to enforce existing — or future — laws online.'"
And yet... (Score:1)
nothing about freedom from corporate control or censorship. Interesting.
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Eshoo told CQ Roll Call she had a “sneaking suspicion” the Republicans were using the Internet freedom legislation as a pretext to implement their anti-regulatory agenda.
In other words, they're talking about net neutrality.
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The terms get muddied. Net neutrality is regulation: Regulation to prevent service providers from doing things which are in their business interests, but would be detrimental to the internet as a whole. So an 'anti-regulatory agenda' is in opposition to net neutrality. Right now the internet is built in part on a set of very informal 'unwritten rules,' and it's dubious how well those will hold up as commercial pressures become ever greater.
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"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all packets are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Propagation, Transit and the pursuit of their Destination. --That to secure these rights, net neutrality is instituted among ISPs, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Regulation becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute n
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I think they that since they don't understand the internet they make break it and are afraid of doing so. I think they are actually wise to limit any changes until they are fully understood. The main drive to change things are the content creators who think that every pirated song or movie is a lost sale. They have a lot of influence but I think even they are somewhat unsure of just what to do, at least I think they lack a consensus on the matter. The internet just kind of happened for the most part wit
Re:And yet... (Score:4)
Basically it all boils down to net neutrality. To maintain net neutrality requires laws, these laws basically protect the individuals right of the nature of access and establishes hard limits upon controls being placed upon that access. Now the right is opposed to that because they want unfettered corporate controls upon individual access, including unlimited monitoring, censorship and alteration of communications, with a greed is God mentality.
Regardless no matter where in the world, the internet always crosses and is embedded in government territory ie where all the cable is laid and crossing state and national boundaries, hence the justification for government control and limits placed upon business that operate it or the preference for a government provided essential utility (as for any claims that the internet is not an essential utility, don't bother talking utter rot).
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Well what forms of corporate control or censorship are you referring to?
Only two forms of "corporate" censorship come to mind, one being acceptable and one being half-acceptable.
The first one that I would call acceptable is, for example, in a private forum (such as slashdot, a corporate owned entity) being allowed to remove content that most of us consider to be disruptive from its own forum. This really is no different than a barkeep throwing a catholic doomsayer out of a bar because he's annoying the payi
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Why? What makes "digital" so different from, oh, music, books, anything with copyright on it, that suddenly the first sale doctrine wouldn't apply?
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The reason that the Republicans rule the House is simple. When Pelosi and her cronies ruled they stunk it up so much anything at all seemed better. The way the Democrats ran amuck with control of both Houses of Congress and the Presidency ignored one simple political reality, that elections come every 2 years. For 2 years they acted like it was all about them ignoring and ridiculing an electorate that still leans slightly to the right overall. I can't believe the ignorant fuckers didn't see the backlash
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In the end, both Republicans and Democrats can't help being themselves - politicians. What we need are statesmen and they're always in short supply.
The definition of "statesman" is "a dead politician". While I don't think those are in short supply, I am rarely disappointed when their numbers increase.
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The way the Democrats ran amuck
The USA in your head must be very interesting. Unfortunately, it bears little resemblance to the one in the real world. Try to focus, okay?
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Re:The House? (Score:5, Insightful)
That sounds like the democrats too. They put on a big show together of fighting over things, but on most issues they are really very similar. Just find me any recent act passed by congress in which they gave up any significant amount of power.
Even when the parties aren't screwing the people over, there are lobbyists to make sure they do. Look at healthcare reform, for example: It started out as a well-intentioned plan to set up a minimal level of universal health care. By the time the lobbyists from the insurance industry were done, all it did was compel everyone to have an insurance policy and hand out mountains of money in subsidies. Not even subsidies to directly pay for medical care, but subsidies to private insurance companies.
I agree that the Republicans are, on balance, worse than the democrats... but that just means the democrats are less bad.
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That's what the "free from government control" bit was about. Republicans wanted to sneak that nice sounding line in there so that they could kill off net neutrality. Democrats saw through their scheme and stopped it.
Hey, the rest of the world (Score:2)
Such an effort is hindered by. .
Re:Hey, the rest of the world (Score:4, Informative)
They've already built up their own networks, and the protocols are open source and free for all.
This isn't about infrastructure, its about regulation.
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Oh, really? One should like to position you there, or Egypt, for a while, to see if your spew holds true.
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By the network effect, entrenchment, that sort of thing.
The practical fix? Make the internet be its own country, and put all infrastructure (especially the DNS) and international servers in it for legal purposes. Then every country needs only make "internet extradition" treaties with "the internet", not with every other country possible. That is also the only way to ensure cencorship as well as warrantless wiretapping stays within bounds.
You can't prevent all damage, but you can contain it, and route around
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If you want to complain about a U.S. institution, start with the Federal Reserve.
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And they say Americans dont get irony.
Boy you got that right....
From the story
the only government that should have its hands on the underpinnings of the Internet is the U.S.
I could name a dozen countries I would trust to manage the web more than the U.S.
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Re:Internet freedom legislation (Score:5, Funny)
And they say Americans dont get irony.
Boy you got that right....
From the story
the only government that should have its hands on the underpinnings of the Internet is the U.S.
I could name a dozen countries I would trust to manage the web more than the U.S.
The U.N.?
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Oh man. No mod points but you deserve +5 Funny if anyone ever did. I laughed so hard I almost ruptured something.
Re:Internet freedom legislation (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually the UN would be perfect. When was the last time they actually accomplished anything? Pretty much every motion they ever make is vetoed. It's perfect, put the Internet under the control of an entity so dysfunctional that they simply can't get their act together to mess it up.
I would trust the UN over the USA to run the internet any day.
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They couldn't agree on a global form of censorship, but if you count all the countries who'd like some form of censorship I don't think there'd be any problem to find a majority to open the door. Then you start building international treaties like the Berne convention saying we'll help you with your censorship if you'll help us with ours. Cue the obvious poster children that nobody* can object to in order to get the ball running then start poisoning the well. Or to put it another way, no matter what other c
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Considering how horribly the US has been running it so far, It wouldn't likely be worse. At least at the UN the USA isn't the only country with a veto, Right now the USA can screw it up without any oversight (and have on many occasions). At the UN the USA would still need to want to screw it up, but they could no longer do it on their own, they'd ALSO need to convince the other veto power nations.
There's really zero downside to this compared to the current situation.
Of course a better solution would be a ne
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I could name a dozen countries I would trust to manage the web more than the U.S.
Please name some.
Other countries to run the Internet? (Score:2)
Trying to regulate any major international infrastructure with a single country in charge of almost everything is always going to be troublesome, but if I had to pick an alternative to the US, I can think of a few credible choices.
Switzerland, maybe? Their position on neutrality in international matters is promising.
Germany? They are successful economically, but also for obvious reasons very conscious of individual freedom and the dangers of centralising too much power.
The trouble I have with the US is that
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The US doesn't have a high enough standard for privacy and data protection laws for me to feel comfortable with them running the Internet either. But the freedom of speech issue can be fixed using a widely used "common carrier" principle that might well be acceptable in Switzerland or Germany and someone could easily detect whether this was being honoured. Unfortunately, the privacy issue cannot be so easily fixed, and I find it implausible that the US government would voluntarily surrender a chance to spy
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How many of them invented the internet?
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And they say Americans dont get irony.
Indeed, in this case they don't... they get coppery (as in: the cop of the Internet; nobody else has the right to police it)
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Kind of like the term "People's Republic" isn't it.
Somewhat academic, really. (Score:2)
The power to control the internet rests with whomever has either control over the hardware, or control over those who have control over the hardware. They can blow all the hot air they want about an internet 'free from censorship and government control' - but in the end, a lot of that internet runs on hardware that isn't located in the US. If China, or Iran, or Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan, or Turkey, or any other country with a government that decides the internet needs to be censored of 'harmful' political o
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It's not the job of the US government to worry about censorship practices in other countries. If you live in a country that censors the internet you can take it up with your government. It is the US governments responsiblity to ensure that countries that do practice state censorship never have a mechanism to inflict their censorship across the entire internet. If anyone has a problem with that they are certainly free to build their own.
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Are we so diseased we assume "control by government" is the natural and proper base from which to start thinking about topics? It's a truism that government, AKA people in power who want to maintain it -- including those in the US -- will automatically assume so.
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Someone has to control it, and it is an unavoidable fact that that control will ultimately rest with either those who control the hardware or those who are able to coerce them. Building large-scale network infrastructure is beyond the budget of volunteer groups, so there are only two options: Either the government controls the internet, or private corporations control the internet. Pick your poison.
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Man, I have no idea what you just said. Do you?
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free from control by anyone with an IQ less than 140 and that hasn't had a minimum of 20 years of computer / networking related experience
This is why we need more H1B's!
Re:Sad aint it... (Score:4, Informative)
The US goverment is the least corrupt...
Citation please! [transparency.org]
Spoiler: 13 other governments are less corrupt than the US
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Yeah - I saw [thomsonreuters.com] that too. There is something fishy about this list. As if there is data missing.
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Nothing there ...
I am using Firefox w/ NoScript. The so called "full table" is one big white space.
Stupid web developers. They can't even publish a simple list of countries without using Javascript.
Reminds me of this [slashdot.org].
This [thomsonreuters.com] is how it can be done. A simple image [thomsonreuters.com].
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Hmmm, lets see...
Based on that into, you have New Zealand, Finland and Denmark tied for equal first. Seeing as NZ jumped into the US pockets with the whole megaupload/kim dotcom thing a while back, you can rule out all three. I mean, clearly you can't trust the folks at the top. Next up, Sweden in 4th place. You can't trust those crazy folks, I mean...they are like Swedish. Enough said. I can't even find who they are tied with, so that rules them out as well. Switzerland is next up. You simply must rule the
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k... well I guess I should not have expected anyone to actually read the page on how the index was created. But I thought at least the title might have been a clue. Let's take it one word at a time, shall we?
Time to cut us off I think (Score:2)
I'm waiting for the rest of the world to wise up and cut off the US from the Internet. Our "we control da wurld" attitude needs a serious slap down.
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Who else? Who else would you have do it? China? Iran? Mexico? Germany?
Bitch all you want, but right now the US is the fairest playing field.
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Who else? Who else would you have do it? China? Iran? Mexico? Germany?
How about all of the above, in some sort of collective organization that isn't controlled by any one government.
United Nations
WTO
OECD
Probably in that order.
As dysfunctional and impotent as the UN is, it is -precisely- the sort of organization for this. And the dysfunction and impotence is -precisely- the desired operational mode; you don't want an efficient dictator. you want the near deadlock that ensures little gets done that isn't acce
Absolutely NOT. (Score:1)
I'm a big fan of the U.N., but something like this absolutely is not a good idea.
Take a look at the recent ITU meetings/conferences and how they are run. Yeah, that's exactly what a U.N. controlled Internet would look like. Not a pretty sight.
For now, the U.S. is the best combination of large-enough-to-matter, and free-enough-to-be-mostly-nonevil there is. There's certainly no other country with the combination of economic/technical power that also has quite as much of a open society mindset. I'd love it
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Technically, anyone can create DNS servers (Score:2)
Which means if China decides it wants to create it's own Internet, there's nothing we can do about it.
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no, the protocol only respects the 13 logical root servers, and ultimate control of that root zone is by the United States Department of Commerce. so good luck with your private Chinese internet
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However, local files determine where it finds those. Simple matter to rewrite the local tables and use those.
Who do you think manufactures most of our devices?
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nonsense, not a simple matter to subvert operating system of a machine (by some imagined manufacturing trick) and find and overwrite whatever dns system is in use. such a thing would be quickly noticed, and would only work in the two-way and more-way transactions of the internet if all machines were subverted. in other words, it wouldn't work. you can make a private internet, but the real internet won't work with it.
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But if said private Internet is all of China and they control all the routers and gateways, how could you stop it? They could then filter out all outbound traffic so that we could only block outbound packets, which would leave them up and running.
China has more devices on the Internet than existing in North America in the last century. That's pretty darned big.
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you are the one who understands nothing, we're not talking about private DNS in an internet attached network.
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Megaupload was shut down around a year ago... (Score:2)
Sometimes I do wonder if the US having all the control is such a good idea - Megaupload was shut down last January, without judicial due process. However I am pretty damn sure that I don't want countries like China to control my Internet...
What about monopolies? (Score:1)
I'm still stuck with AT&T DSL at 1.5mbit because South Carolina passed a law giving them a legal monopoly on fiber services in the State.
Fuck AT&T. Fuck the US Government. Anyone who thinks the government does anything with the best interest of "we the people" in mind is a fucking blithering idiot.
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South Carolina passed a law ... Fuck the US Government.
So, planning on heading down to Ft. Sumter soon, are we?
They have opened the door. (Score:2)
They have opened the door. From TFA: Notably, however, lawmakers dropped from the legislation the phrase “free from government control”
Which is to say: They have deliberately opened the door for further regulation by the FCC and whatever other federal agencies care to stick their noses in.
Obligatory pedant rant (Score:2)
hmmmm (Score:1)
'Freedom' and 'Legislation' are two mutually exclusive terms as far as I am concerned. It seems to me that if the US govt were really concerned with internet freedom they would NOT be passing laws, as the nature of a law is to forcibly limit freedoms that would otherwise exist naturally.