Quote from: UnunoctiumTesticles on November 19, 2014, 05:31:52 PM

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Quote from: UnunoctiumTesticles on November 18, 2014, 05:52:25 AM

Eric S. Raymond's (the progenitor of the term "open source" in the infamous essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar") past writings about "net neutrality":

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Net neutrality: whats a libertarian to do?
Posted on 2008-11-13 by Eric Raymond

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Your typical network-neutrality activist is a good-government left-liberal who is instinctively hostile to market-based approaches. These people think, rather, that if they can somehow come up with the right regulatory formula, they can jawbone the government into making the telcos play nice. Theyre ideologically incapable of questioning the assumption that bandwidth is a scarce public good that has to be regulated. They dont get it that complicated regulations favor the incumbent who can afford to darken the sky with lawyers, and they really dont get it about outright regulatory capture, a game at which the telcos are past masters.

Ive spent endless hours trying to point out to these people that their assumptions are fundamentally wrong, and that the only way to break the telco monopoly is to break the scarcity assumptions its based on. That the telecoms regulatorium, far from being what holds the telcos in check, is actually their instrument of control. And that the only battle that actually matters is the one to carve out enough unlicensed spectrum so we can use technologies like ad-hoc networking with UWB to end-run the whole mess until it collapses under its own weight.

They dont get it. They refuse to get it. Ive been on a mailing list for something called the Open Infrastructure Alliance that consisted of three network engineers and a couple dozen organizers; the engineers (even the non-libertarian engineers) all patiently trying to explain why the political attack is a non-starter, and the organizers endlessly rehashing political strategies anyway. Because, well, thats all they know how to do.

In short, the network neutrality crowd is mainly composed of well-meaning fools blinded by their own statism, and consequently serving mainly as useful idiots for the telcos program of ever-more labyrinthine and manipulable regulation. If I were a telco executive, Id be on my knees every night thanking my god(s) for this opposition. Mistake #2 for any libertarian to avoid is backing these clowns.

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Why I wont be signing the Declaration of Internet Freedom as it is
Posted on 2012-07-03 by Eric Raymond

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because libertarians who understand why asymmetries of power and information are in general bad things have very particular reasons to know better than this.

In the long run, open systems and networks are always better for consumers. Because, whatever other flaws they may have, they have one overriding virtue they dont create an asymmetrical power relationship in which the consumer is ever more controlled by the network provider. Statists, who accept and even love asymmetrical power relationships as long as the right sort of people are doing the oppressing, have some excuse within their terms of reference for failing to grasp the nasty second, third, and nth-order consequences of closed-system lock-in. Libertarians have no such excuse.

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Quote from: username18333 on November 18, 2014, 11:43:08 PM

Quote from: Wilikon on November 18, 2014, 09:56:57 PM

Quote from: username18333 on November 18, 2014, 08:14:36 PM

Quote from: Merriam-Webster link=http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democracy

democracy
1 b : a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections

Quote from: Merriam-Webster link=http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/plutocracy

plutocracy
1 : government by the wealthy

You write as if plutocracy were republican democracy.

You write as if lobbyists paid very well for influencing politicians' votes do not exist...

Comcast loves 0bama's plan. Does that mean the people voted for Comcast?

More control from government will not make things easier for creatives minds now, especially the ones with ideas but no money. This has been proven over and over again.

Quote from: username18333 on November 18, 2014, 08:14:36 PM

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You write as if plutocracy were republican democracy.

As well,

Quote from: Dr. Richard Stallman, Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software link=https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html

When we call software free, we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of free speech, not free beer.

These freedoms are vitally important. They are essential, not just for the individual users' sake, but for society as a whole because they promote social solidaritythat is, sharing and cooperation. They become even more important as our culture and life activities are increasingly digitized. In a world of digital sounds, images, and words, free software becomes increasingly essential for freedom in general.

Tens of millions of people around the world now use free software; the public schools of some regions of India and Spain now teach all students to use the free GNU/Linux operating system. Most of these users, however, have never heard of the ethical reasons for which we developed this system and built the free software community, because nowadays this system and community are more often spoken of as open source, attributing them to a different philosophy in which these freedoms are hardly mentioned.

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