Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Licensing the content is already necessary
To be fair, it seems reasonable to argue that it's just as impossible for the rightsholders to police every upload (anywhere, across the entire Internet) for possible infringement, and that the result when they've tried to do that is the type of draconian over-enforcement we complain about.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Licensing the content is already necessary
I think his argument could be expressed in somewhat more rigorous form as something like:
For copyrighted content to be viewed legally by an end user, a license is required.
Until a license check has been performed, it is not only impossible to know whether or not a license has been granted, but even impossible to know whether or not any given content is copyrighted.
Therefore, before any given content is viewed by an end user, a license check must be performed.
If the platforms don't do that license checking, it must be the responsibility of the end user(s) who want to view the content.
As people in these discussions have repeatedly argued, doing that license checking at the scale of these platforms is impossible.
However, the end users who want to view the content are in an even worse position to do such a check than the platforms are.
And then he apparently tries to use that as a supporting element in a deeper argument, which is something like:
In order for the platforms' business to be legal, the license checking must be done.
In order for the platforms' business to be successful, it must operate at such a scale that the license checking cannot be done.
Therefore, the platforms' business cannot be both legal and successful.
Therefore, something has to change.
He seems to insist that the thing which must need to change is the platforms' business (model) - that since doing what they're trying to do is not possible without breaking the law, they are trying to do the impossible, and therefore they (and anyone else who tries the same thing) should and must either fail or be shut down.
Some people in this debate would probably argue that the thing which must need to change is the idea that the responsibility for performing a license check must lie on either the platform or the end user.
Other people in this debate - and this would probably include me - would probably argue that the thing which must need to change is the need for a license (to do what these platforms do) in the first place. (Whether by a change in licensor business practices, or a change in copyright law, or the abolition of copyright law, or something else.)
He didn't log in. Logged-in people don't get the colored-snowflake avatar images; a logged-in person with no designated image gets a silhouette, like the one I currently have.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Mansick evades again with irrelevant personal opinion.
Given that a debate involves honest discussion between reasonable individuals, a debate between you and *anyone* - never mind Mike - would be impossible, because all available evidence to date would seem to indicate that you are neither reasonable nor capable of being honest.
As mouseover of the link will reveal, it's a mailto: URL (instead of, e.g., a http: URL); it will open in the configured default mail client, to compose an E-mail to that E-mail address.
(Which does mean that, if that's a valid E-mail address, you just exposed it to the bots which crawl the Web looking for addresses to spam.)
Those lawsuits tend to get dismissed under "qualified immunity"; the rule is that if the officers were within the bounds of their training and department policy and so forth, you can sue the department (alleging that its policy and its training and so forth are deficient in some way), but not the officers.
Which does neatly result in avoiding any direct incentives for the officers to change their behavior; the best you can hope for is indirect incentive, by first applying enough pressure to convince the department to change, and having the department then put pressure on the individual officers.
My point is precisely that - going only by the wording and phrasing of what you quoted - "subsequent comments" may have meant "comments posted prior to the order which are subsequent to the ones attached as Exhibit A", not "comments posted subsequent to the order".
That would still have been overbroad, unless the Court had (and had properly considered) evidence to indicate that the thus-additionally-covered comments were also within the bounds of what would be appropriate to restrict in that context (which I know of no indication that it did).
But it would not have been as overbroad, or as obviously so, as a would have been a requirement to remove all comments posted by those users at any time in the future.
Because prior restraint of (any and all) speech is more clearly unconstitutional than any restraint on (particular) already-made speech, and "remove everything posted to date" is not prior restraint of speech.
I didn't and don't say that it wouldn't be unconstitutional, or even clearly so - just that it would be less so than what the interpretation you were working from would be.
Given that it would (theoretically) be possible for those users to post comments more than 7 days after the date of the order (at which point it would be impossible for Yelp to comply), I suspect that what the court meant by that may have been something closer to "remove any reviews posted by these reviewers which are attached here as Exhibit A, and also remove any other comments which those same reviewers have posted in the interim, and do it within 7 business days of the date of the order".
I.e., that this does not apply to any comments posted in the future, only to ones posted in between the ones given and the date of the order. (Presumably this would also be accompanied by an order which separately binds the commenter against later posting anything corresponding to what the order has called defamatory.)
That would be less clearly unconstitutional, and seems compatible with the given phrasing. Unfortunately, it's also not clearly the (only) correct interpretation of that phrasing; it could also be interpreted in the way you have done, with the addition of "block these reviewers from posting any further comments at any time in the future". That means that, even if that is what the court intended, the court failed to clearly express its intent in its order.
(The need to avoid this sort of misinterpretability is part of why legalese exists, and in fact, is sometimes necessary.)
It's true that the only guarantee of free speech in US law (of which the Constitution is the foundation) is against government restriction of speech.
But that doesn't mean that government restrictions are the only thing that "free speech" is about.
Free speech is a principle; it can apply equally well in any context where restrictions on speech may be considered.
The idea behind enshrining protection of free speech against government interference in the Constitution, but not doing so with protection of free speech against any other kind of interference, seems likely to have been based on an assessment that attempting to restrict the ability of non-government entities to restrict speech would introduce more and/or problems than it solved - and that idea may very well be correct.
That doesn't mean that it's not legitimate to cite "free speech" in an argument about non-governmental restriction of speech, however - just that all such an argument can be about is convincing (non-governmental) people to change their minds about restricting speech, since there's no legitimate (governmental) authority to either require them to do so or prohibit them from doing so.
Re: Re: In this one piece are TWO zombie "accounts" with SIX YEAR GAPS!
What possible reason would there be for bringing back dead accounts? If you truly believe -- as you imply -- that we are somehow behind these accounts, why wouldn't we just create new ones?
Because a bunch of new accounts which happen to mirror the 'correct' views are more obviously identifiable as sock-puppets than are existing accounts with established posting histories.
Of course, if one assumes you're willing and able to go that far, it would seem just as reasonable to assume that you could and would also retroactively create a false posting history for a new account, by inserting appropriately-dated comments into the database that stores such things; it would be more work, but also much less detectable. And if you could do that, why would you bother either resurrecting old accounts or creating new sock-puppet accounts?
Basically, if one starts out by assuming bad faith, it's possible to find "evidence" to support a conclusion of bad faith everywhere one looks. It just requires accepting a premise, and then deciding that because the premise is correct, any evidence which would conflict with it must be invalid.
>the neighbor who's sharing with others would be part of the protest by definition.
Please explain this because the only way I can see them being considered part of the protest would be if they too ditched their internet access.
I think the structure of the protest (as outlined by the implications of things posted thus far, although not clearly expressed at any point) is supposed to be "instead of everyone buying Internet access, people cut back to where only a handful of people are doing that, and those few people share with those who have stopped doing it".
Under that model, someone who agrees to keep paying for the service but share the resulting service with those who don't pay, for the purpose of making the protest possible, would indeed by definition be part of the protest.
The suggestion in the original comment was much more absolute, of course, but I think the bit about "shareable" in the second comment was supposed to represent a refinement of the idea. (Without clearly acknowledging that there had been a problem with the original, of course.)
First: per the article, they were pre-teens - i.e., at most, 12 years old. (I'm far enough removed from such things to have forgotten which age the grades start counting at, so I can't pin it down based on "sixth grade".) Do you really expect kids of that age to have that sort of mindset?
Second: given that a police officer (the one assigned to work at that school as its resource officer) was the one to have suggested searching their underthings in the first place, why would even kids who did have the mindset of "call in the police" have expected it to do any good?
Third: maybe policies differ from one jurisdiction to another, but my strong impression is that in most schools - or at least most public school systems, although I don't see any confirmation offhand that this took place at a public school - the students aren't allowed to carry cell phones on school property during school hours. It's entirely possible that the kids wouldn't have had any way to call 911 while things were going on, even if the idea occurred to them and they didn't think it would be useless.
And of course those people don't lose their rights when they group together into a corporation.
But that (at least by itself) doesn't mean that the corporation has those rights - only that the people who make it up still retain them.
Also: which people are we talking about?
The people whose money (and, therefore, influence) is being used to express what the corporation says are the investors - which, in the modern publicly-traded markets, more or less means the shareholders. If their money weren't invested in the corporation, they could spend it on speaking directly, so it seems reasonable to argue that they should be allowed to have the corporation spend it on their behalf.
But for the most part, at least as I understand matters, the investors are not the ones making the decisions about what the corporation will say. For the most part, those decisions are being made by people who work for the corporation - from board members and C-suite officers on down - who, in many cases, may not actually control any stock. (Though, at least in theory, they probably serve at the pleasure of (some fraction of) those who do.)
The problem with corporate speech being protected is one of disproportionality. An entity with the combined resources of many individuals can make itself heard much better than can any of those individuals alone, and that's part of the reason why people might want to band together into a corporation - but if the people deciding what will be said by the corporation are not the ones whose resources are going to be used to say it, then it seems much harder to argue that the speech of the corporation is simply an extension of the speech of the individuals who form the corporation.
Now, when the spam comment gets deleted later on, yours will almost certainly still be left behind - and it'll look like you're addressing the main article, which (since that article isn't spammy) just makes you look like a random trolling asshole.
Re: Re: Re: Re: EFF wasted much court time, yet got worse than status quo ante.
I think the argument basically boils down to "they make it hard to avoid using them" - not in search services et cetera, but in their ad business, and the tracking which underlies it, and in the free services they offer which many Websites choose to embed or otherwise rely on.
I'd certainly prefer to avoid Google's tracking across the Web, and I probably succeed at it to a larger extent than many people probably do, via use of NoScript and so forth - but there are so many otherwise-unrelated Websites out there which rely on running scripts loaded from under a Google domain, and won't function properly without those scripts, that blocking Google via NoScript as a means to avoid being tracked is not really a practical option.
(I can't be entirely sure that this isn't a holdover from having allowed it from some other site, but looking at NoScript's domains-with-scripts-on-this-page list for the page I'm currently on, I notice that one of the only three domains I've marked as "allowed" is ajax.googleapis.com - so Techdirt itself may be one of those Websites.)
Thus, even if you choose not to use any of the services Google provides, you can't really escape them if you're going to meaningfully participate in large swaths of the modern WWW-centric society.
That may well indeed not qualify as a monopoly, but if not, we need a separate term for it - because it seems problematic enough to be worth discussing, and possibly trying to address, in its own right. (Possibly in something analogous to the way we also have the term "monopsony" for a single-buyer situation, vs. monopoly's single-seller.)
(Google may not be the only company doing this, but they're certainly the most prominent, to the point where the only other possible candidates I can think of for companies that might be sufficiently ubiquitous in script-origin lists to be doing it are cloud and/or CDN providers.)
Your point about "what are they doing that's abusing this market position?" is a good one, however; I can't actually think of any specific things to point to off the top of my head, except to the extent that some people may think of the tracking behavior itself as an abuse.
The FCC was formed in 1934 and is officially on record as stating that they will regulate the telcos as "natural monopolies".
This does not mean what you seem to keep insisting it means.
Saying "We will regulate this industry as a natural monopoly" does not mean "We are going to grant a monopoly to the companies in this industry".
It means "We recognize that trying to force this industry to not be a monopoly would not only be futile, but cause bigger problems than it solved; therefore, we will instead place restrictions on the companies in this industry, so that they cannot abuse the monopoly".
Some of the things you have suggested doing to the ISPs (et cetera) are, in fact, within the bounds of the type of restrictions that might reasonably be placed on companies as part of regulating a natural monopoly. They are more extreme than what the government has historically chosen to do in regulating this particular industry, but they are not outside the limits of how the government has handled other types of natural monopoly.
If the government did those things, it would be doing exactly what that quote you keep referencing says the FCC was established to do: regulating this industry as a natural monopoly.
If you want to argue that the FCC, and the government in general, has failed in the goal of preventing the ISPs from abusing the natural monopoly - I'm pretty sure most of us agree!
But that failure is not in any way due to the goal of "regulat[ing] [them] as a natural monopoly" which you keep citing; it is due to failure to go far enough in reaching for that goal.
It's more an intellectual exercise than anything; I always like to try to see if there's some way, no matter how much of a stretch, the other party's position could make sense from some perspective.
I even manage that with Trump, often enough.
That doesn't mean the perspective from which that position makes sense is right, or even sane, of course.
Looking for a way for those two statements to be compatible (in hopes of maybe finding a way to avoid the fall-back conclusion that he wasn't thinking it through at all), maybe he wants a wall honeycombed with small holes, too small to crawl (or, presumably, pass small items - like packaged drugs) through but big enough to let people see what's on the other side?
I'm not sure that would be particularly practical, but at least it's not as obviously nonsensical as transparent concrete.
On the post: Copyright Industries Reveal Their Ultimate Goal: An Internet Where Everything Online Requires A License From Them
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Licensing the content is already necessary
To be fair, it seems reasonable to argue that it's just as impossible for the rightsholders to police every upload (anywhere, across the entire Internet) for possible infringement, and that the result when they've tried to do that is the type of draconian over-enforcement we complain about.
On the post: Copyright Industries Reveal Their Ultimate Goal: An Internet Where Everything Online Requires A License From Them
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Licensing the content is already necessary
I think his argument could be expressed in somewhat more rigorous form as something like:
For copyrighted content to be viewed legally by an end user, a license is required.
Until a license check has been performed, it is not only impossible to know whether or not a license has been granted, but even impossible to know whether or not any given content is copyrighted.
Therefore, before any given content is viewed by an end user, a license check must be performed.
If the platforms don't do that license checking, it must be the responsibility of the end user(s) who want to view the content.
As people in these discussions have repeatedly argued, doing that license checking at the scale of these platforms is impossible.
And then he apparently tries to use that as a supporting element in a deeper argument, which is something like:
In order for the platforms' business to be legal, the license checking must be done.
In order for the platforms' business to be successful, it must operate at such a scale that the license checking cannot be done.
Therefore, the platforms' business cannot be both legal and successful.
He seems to insist that the thing which must need to change is the platforms' business (model) - that since doing what they're trying to do is not possible without breaking the law, they are trying to do the impossible, and therefore they (and anyone else who tries the same thing) should and must either fail or be shut down.
Some people in this debate would probably argue that the thing which must need to change is the idea that the responsibility for performing a license check must lie on either the platform or the end user.
Other people in this debate - and this would probably include me - would probably argue that the thing which must need to change is the need for a license (to do what these platforms do) in the first place. (Whether by a change in licensor business practices, or a change in copyright law, or the abolition of copyright law, or something else.)
On the post: Uganda Bans VPNs To Prevent Users From Dodging Its Absurd New Social Media Tax
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Kim Dotcom Loses Latest Round In Extradition Fight, Will Try To Appeal Again
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Mansick evades again with irrelevant personal opinion.
On the post: Researchers Reveal Details Of Printer Tracking Dots, Develop Free Software To Defeat It
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Or
(Which does mean that, if that's a valid E-mail address, you just exposed it to the bots which crawl the Web looking for addresses to spam.)
On the post: Judge Says Parents Can Continue With Lawsuit Against Police Officer Who Helped Kill Their Son
Re: How to stop police brutality
Which does neatly result in avoiding any direct incentives for the officers to change their behavior; the best you can hope for is indirect incentive, by first applying enough pressure to convince the department to change, and having the department then put pressure on the individual officers.
On the post: California Court Not Yet Ready To Undermine The Entire Internet; Rules Yelp Can't Be Forced To Delete A Review
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I'm... not sure I understand your point?
My point is precisely that - going only by the wording and phrasing of what you quoted - "subsequent comments" may have meant "comments posted prior to the order which are subsequent to the ones attached as Exhibit A", not "comments posted subsequent to the order".
That would still have been overbroad, unless the Court had (and had properly considered) evidence to indicate that the thus-additionally-covered comments were also within the bounds of what would be appropriate to restrict in that context (which I know of no indication that it did).
But it would not have been as overbroad, or as obviously so, as a would have been a requirement to remove all comments posted by those users at any time in the future.
On the post: California Court Not Yet Ready To Undermine The Entire Internet; Rules Yelp Can't Be Forced To Delete A Review
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Because prior restraint of (any and all) speech is more clearly unconstitutional than any restraint on (particular) already-made speech, and "remove everything posted to date" is not prior restraint of speech.
I didn't and don't say that it wouldn't be unconstitutional, or even clearly so - just that it would be less so than what the interpretation you were working from would be.
On the post: California Court Not Yet Ready To Undermine The Entire Internet; Rules Yelp Can't Be Forced To Delete A Review
Re: Re: Re:
Given that it would (theoretically) be possible for those users to post comments more than 7 days after the date of the order (at which point it would be impossible for Yelp to comply), I suspect that what the court meant by that may have been something closer to "remove any reviews posted by these reviewers which are attached here as Exhibit A, and also remove any other comments which those same reviewers have posted in the interim, and do it within 7 business days of the date of the order".
I.e., that this does not apply to any comments posted in the future, only to ones posted in between the ones given and the date of the order. (Presumably this would also be accompanied by an order which separately binds the commenter against later posting anything corresponding to what the order has called defamatory.)
That would be less clearly unconstitutional, and seems compatible with the given phrasing. Unfortunately, it's also not clearly the (only) correct interpretation of that phrasing; it could also be interpreted in the way you have done, with the addition of "block these reviewers from posting any further comments at any time in the future". That means that, even if that is what the court intended, the court failed to clearly express its intent in its order.
(The need to avoid this sort of misinterpretability is part of why legalese exists, and in fact, is sometimes necessary.)
On the post: NY Times, Winner Of A Key 1st Amendment Case, Suddenly Seems Upset That 1st Amendment Protects Conservatives Too
Re: Re:
But that doesn't mean that government restrictions are the only thing that "free speech" is about.
Free speech is a principle; it can apply equally well in any context where restrictions on speech may be considered.
The idea behind enshrining protection of free speech against government interference in the Constitution, but not doing so with protection of free speech against any other kind of interference, seems likely to have been based on an assessment that attempting to restrict the ability of non-government entities to restrict speech would introduce more and/or problems than it solved - and that idea may very well be correct.
That doesn't mean that it's not legitimate to cite "free speech" in an argument about non-governmental restriction of speech, however - just that all such an argument can be about is convincing (non-governmental) people to change their minds about restricting speech, since there's no legitimate (governmental) authority to either require them to do so or prohibit them from doing so.
On the post: Latest Text Of EU Copyright Directive Shows It's Even Worse Than Expected: Must Be Stopped
Re: Re: In this one piece are TWO zombie "accounts" with SIX YEAR GAPS!
Because a bunch of new accounts which happen to mirror the 'correct' views are more obviously identifiable as sock-puppets than are existing accounts with established posting histories.
Of course, if one assumes you're willing and able to go that far, it would seem just as reasonable to assume that you could and would also retroactively create a false posting history for a new account, by inserting appropriately-dated comments into the database that stores such things; it would be more work, but also much less detectable. And if you could do that, why would you bother either resurrecting old accounts or creating new sock-puppet accounts?
Basically, if one starts out by assuming bad faith, it's possible to find "evidence" to support a conclusion of bad faith everywhere one looks. It just requires accepting a premise, and then deciding that because the premise is correct, any evidence which would conflict with it must be invalid.
On the post: AT&T Begins Testing Its Power In The Wake Of Merger Mania & The Death Of Net Neutrality
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: AT&T monopoly origin
I think the structure of the protest (as outlined by the implications of things posted thus far, although not clearly expressed at any point) is supposed to be "instead of everyone buying Internet access, people cut back to where only a handful of people are doing that, and those few people share with those who have stopped doing it".
Under that model, someone who agrees to keep paying for the service but share the resulting service with those who don't pay, for the purpose of making the protest possible, would indeed by definition be part of the protest.
The suggestion in the original comment was much more absolute, of course, but I think the bit about "shareable" in the second comment was supposed to represent a refinement of the idea. (Without clearly acknowledging that there had been a problem with the original, of course.)
On the post: Fifth Circuit Says No, You Fucking May Not Strip Search A Classful Of Female Students To Find $50
Re:
First: per the article, they were pre-teens - i.e., at most, 12 years old. (I'm far enough removed from such things to have forgotten which age the grades start counting at, so I can't pin it down based on "sixth grade".) Do you really expect kids of that age to have that sort of mindset?
Second: given that a police officer (the one assigned to work at that school as its resource officer) was the one to have suggested searching their underthings in the first place, why would even kids who did have the mindset of "call in the police" have expected it to do any good?
Third: maybe policies differ from one jurisdiction to another, but my strong impression is that in most schools - or at least most public school systems, although I don't see any confirmation offhand that this took place at a public school - the students aren't allowed to carry cell phones on school property during school hours. It's entirely possible that the kids wouldn't have had any way to call 911 while things were going on, even if the idea occurred to them and they didn't think it would be useless.
On the post: NY Times, Winner Of A Key 1st Amendment Case, Suddenly Seems Upset That 1st Amendment Protects Conservatives Too
Re: Re: Re: Re: Corporate Rights...
Of course corporations are filled with people.
And of course those people don't lose their rights when they group together into a corporation.
But that (at least by itself) doesn't mean that the corporation has those rights - only that the people who make it up still retain them.
Also: which people are we talking about?
The people whose money (and, therefore, influence) is being used to express what the corporation says are the investors - which, in the modern publicly-traded markets, more or less means the shareholders. If their money weren't invested in the corporation, they could spend it on speaking directly, so it seems reasonable to argue that they should be allowed to have the corporation spend it on their behalf.
But for the most part, at least as I understand matters, the investors are not the ones making the decisions about what the corporation will say. For the most part, those decisions are being made by people who work for the corporation - from board members and C-suite officers on down - who, in many cases, may not actually control any stock. (Though, at least in theory, they probably serve at the pleasure of (some fraction of) those who do.)
The problem with corporate speech being protected is one of disproportionality. An entity with the combined resources of many individuals can make itself heard much better than can any of those individuals alone, and that's part of the reason why people might want to band together into a corporation - but if the people deciding what will be said by the corporation are not the ones whose resources are going to be used to say it, then it seems much harder to argue that the speech of the corporation is simply an extension of the speech of the individuals who form the corporation.
On the post: Stupid Patent of the Month: Alleged Cult Leader Wants to 'Improve Performance'
Re: fuck off, spammer
Now, when the spam comment gets deleted later on, yours will almost certainly still be left behind - and it'll look like you're addressing the main article, which (since that article isn't spammy) just makes you look like a random trolling asshole.
Just flag and move on, please.
On the post: The Monkey Selfie Case Continues, But The Dancing Baby One Does Not
Re: Re: Re: Re: EFF wasted much court time, yet got worse than status quo ante.
I'd certainly prefer to avoid Google's tracking across the Web, and I probably succeed at it to a larger extent than many people probably do, via use of NoScript and so forth - but there are so many otherwise-unrelated Websites out there which rely on running scripts loaded from under a Google domain, and won't function properly without those scripts, that blocking Google via NoScript as a means to avoid being tracked is not really a practical option.
(I can't be entirely sure that this isn't a holdover from having allowed it from some other site, but looking at NoScript's domains-with-scripts-on-this-page list for the page I'm currently on, I notice that one of the only three domains I've marked as "allowed" is ajax.googleapis.com - so Techdirt itself may be one of those Websites.)
Thus, even if you choose not to use any of the services Google provides, you can't really escape them if you're going to meaningfully participate in large swaths of the modern WWW-centric society.
That may well indeed not qualify as a monopoly, but if not, we need a separate term for it - because it seems problematic enough to be worth discussing, and possibly trying to address, in its own right. (Possibly in something analogous to the way we also have the term "monopsony" for a single-buyer situation, vs. monopoly's single-seller.)
(Google may not be the only company doing this, but they're certainly the most prominent, to the point where the only other possible candidates I can think of for companies that might be sufficiently ubiquitous in script-origin lists to be doing it are cloud and/or CDN providers.)
Your point about "what are they doing that's abusing this market position?" is a good one, however; I can't actually think of any specific things to point to off the top of my head, except to the extent that some people may think of the tracking behavior itself as an abuse.
On the post: AT&T Begins Testing Its Power In The Wake Of Merger Mania & The Death Of Net Neutrality
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: AT&T monopoly origin
This does not mean what you seem to keep insisting it means.
Saying "We will regulate this industry as a natural monopoly" does not mean "We are going to grant a monopoly to the companies in this industry".
It means "We recognize that trying to force this industry to not be a monopoly would not only be futile, but cause bigger problems than it solved; therefore, we will instead place restrictions on the companies in this industry, so that they cannot abuse the monopoly".
Some of the things you have suggested doing to the ISPs (et cetera) are, in fact, within the bounds of the type of restrictions that might reasonably be placed on companies as part of regulating a natural monopoly. They are more extreme than what the government has historically chosen to do in regulating this particular industry, but they are not outside the limits of how the government has handled other types of natural monopoly.
If the government did those things, it would be doing exactly what that quote you keep referencing says the FCC was established to do: regulating this industry as a natural monopoly.
If you want to argue that the FCC, and the government in general, has failed in the goal of preventing the ISPs from abusing the natural monopoly - I'm pretty sure most of us agree!
But that failure is not in any way due to the goal of "regulat[ing] [them] as a natural monopoly" which you keep citing; it is due to failure to go far enough in reaching for that goal.
On the post: ICE Rigged Its Vetting Tool To Make Sure It Can Always Keep Immigrants Locked Up
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
It's more an intellectual exercise than anything; I always like to try to see if there's some way, no matter how much of a stretch, the other party's position could make sense from some perspective.
I even manage that with Trump, often enough.
That doesn't mean the perspective from which that position makes sense is right, or even sane, of course.
On the post: ICE Rigged Its Vetting Tool To Make Sure It Can Always Keep Immigrants Locked Up
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I refer you to a comment from a previous discussion on this subject:
I consider it appropriate that Mexico should pay for a wall along its border, Canada should do likewise, and then maybe the world community will agree to spring for a lid.
On the post: ICE Rigged Its Vetting Tool To Make Sure It Can Always Keep Immigrants Locked Up
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I'm not sure that would be particularly practical, but at least it's not as obviously nonsensical as transparent concrete.
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