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Open letter to the FCC 5 regarding net neutrality
I’m in favor of net neutrality for a lot of reasons; a personal reason is that I rely on fair and open transport of my bits to work overseas. If you happen to find this little screed, you can also thank net neutrality for doing so as any argument for neutrality will likely be made unavailable by the ISPs that should charge exorbitant rents for their natural monopolies and would be remiss in their fiduciary responsibility should they fail to take every possible step to maximize shareholder value, for example by permitting their customers access to arguments contrary to their financial or political interests.
I sent the following to the FCC 5. I am not, I’m sorry to say, optimistic.
Please protect Net Neutrality. It is essential to my ability to operate in Iraq, where I run a technical security business that relies on access to servers and services in the United States. If access to those services becomes subject to a maze of tiered access limitations and tariffs, rather than being treated universally as flat rate data, my business may become untenable unless I move my base of operations to a net neutrality-respecting jurisdiction. The FCC is, at the moment, the only bulwark against a balkanization of data and the collapse of the value premise of the Internet.
While I understand and am sympathetic to both a premise that less government regulation is better in principal and that less regulated markets can be more efficient; this “invisible hand” only works to the benefit in a “well regulated market.” There are significant cases where market forces cannot be beneficial, for example, where the fiduciary responsibility of a company to maximize share-holder value compels exploitation of monopoly rents to the fullest extent permitted by law and, where natural monopolies exist, only regulation prevents those rents from becoming abusive. Delivery of data services is a clear example of one such case, both due to the intrinsic monopoly of physical deployment of services through public resources and due to inherent opportunities to exert market distorting biases into those services to promote self-beneficial products and inhibit competition. That this might happen is not idle speculation: network services companies have routinely attempted to unfairly exploit their positions to their benefit and to the harm of fair and open competition and in many cases were restrained only by existing net neutrality laws that the FCC is currently considering rescinding. The consequences of rescinding net neutrality will be anti-competitive, anti-productive, and will stifle innovation and economic growth.
While it is obvious and inevitable that network companies will abuse their natural monopolies to stifle competition, as they have attempted many times restrained only by previous FCC enforcement of the principal of net neutrality, rescinding net neutrality also poses a direct risk to the validity of democracy. While one can argue that Facebook has already compromised democracy by becoming the world’s largest provider of news through an extraordinarily easily manipulated content delivery mechanism, there’s no evidence that they have yet exploited this to achieve any particular political end nor actively censored criticism of their practices. However, without net neutrality there is no legal protection to inhibit carriers from exploiting their control over content delivery to promote their corporate or political interests while censoring embarrassing or opposing information. As the vast majority of Americans now get their news from on-line resources, control over the delivery of those resources becomes an extraordinarily powerful political weapon; without net neutrality it is perfectly legal for corporations to get “their hands on those weapons” and deploy them against their economic and political adversaries.
Under an implicit doctrine of net neutrality from a naive, but then technically accurate, concept of the internet as a packet network that would survive a nuclear war and that would treat censorship as “damage” and “route around it automatically,” to 2005’s Madison River ruling, to the 2008 Comcast ruling, to 2010’s Open Internet Order the internet has flourished as an open network delivering innovative services and resources that all businesses have come to rely on fairly and equally. Overturning that historical doctrine will result in a digital communications landscape in the US that resembles AT&Ts pre-breakup telephone service: you will be permitted to buy only the services that your ISP deems most profitable to themselves. In the long run, if net neutrality is not protected, one can expect the innovation that has centered in the US since the birth of the internet, which some of us remember as the government sponsored innovation ARPAnet, to migrate to less corporatist climates, such as Europe, where net neutrality is enshrined in law.
The American people are counting on you to protect us from such a catastrophic outcome.
Do not reverse the 2015 Open Internet Order.
Sincerely,
David Gessel
cc:
Mignon.Clyburn@fcc.gov
Brendan.Carr@fcc.gov
Mike.O’Reilly@fcc.gov
Ajit.Pai@fcc.gov
Jessica.Rosenworcel@fcc.gov
Kitty Poop (1995)
Many years ago (21 years, 9 months as of this post), I used some as-of-then only slightly out of date equipment to record a one week time lapse of the cats’ litter box.
I found the video on a CD-ROM (remember those?) and thought I’d see if it was still usable. It wasn’t – Quicktime had abandoned support for most of the 1990’s era codecs, and as it was pre-internet, there just wasn’t any support any more. I had to fire up my old Mac 9500, which booted just fine after years of sitting, even if most of the rubber feet on the peripherals had long since turned to goo. The OS9 version of QT let me resave as uncompressed, which of course was way too big for the massive dual 9GB drives in that machine. Youtube would eat the uncompressed format and this critical archival record is preserved for a little longer.
Time lapse of the litter box. Shot in Sept, 1995 in San Francisco, CA. Captured with a RasterOps ColorBoard 364 Nubus card from a Sony XC-999 on a Mac IIfx.
WordPress Twitter Integration
I discovered TwitterFeed and I was happy. It does a nice job of formatting blog entries to tweets. I set it up then went back to it later after I changed my login for twitter and whoops. You can only log in with OpenID.
Uh oh. OpenID. Why? Why do this? It is a solution in search of a problem. It is very clever and worse than useless. It must be a support nightmare. So instead of having my browser automagically insert my passwords (and instead of having my browser’s convenient password store “show passwords” option to help me figure out what they are all in one convenient place) I have to remember some random URL from a totally random company I’ve never heard of, do not have any reason to trust, and would never use for anything else.
Great.
Security! Plus they use some idiotic picture picker thing instead of a password. Why? Why?
These things are great in theory, but worse than useless in practice.
Time to find another blog->twitter tool. Hello hellotxt.com
Simple username/password login. Browser remembers it for me. Sign up once, done.
Of course this makes me enter my username and password for my twitter account, but I’m signing up with hellotxt so I’m already trusting them with a user/pass combination and at least I know something about them and I’m trading some security for some function, unlike the OpenID provider that’s just creepily asking to be my Big Id Brother to vouch for me when I go to the bar (and what happens when vidoop’s lights get turned out or the servers fail? No more logins?)
Anyway, hellotxt has a service called hellotxtfeed which uses a feed as input and then ping.fm like syndicates it out to all your hungry fans on every service who are just waiting with baited breath to hear how your most recent poop came out.
In the end though, I prefer having things run on my own servers because even if hellotxt isn’t a single point of failure like vidoop yearns to be, most “pre-revenue” companies don’t make it. So I use a nice clean open source solution: Alex King’s excellent TwitterTools plug in. It has a lot of great features for bidirection integration between blogs and twitter including the digest posts it is creating on this site. The only bug I’ve found is that sometimes twitter.com seems to reject login. For me it has just cleared up randomly, so I’m happy enough to assume it is twitter.com, at least as long as it continues working.