I suspect they'll go the Jason Fyk route and try to apply the 5th Amendment to their appeals next which I know sounds silly but that's the latest (not so greatest) bad legal takes going on with Section 230 lol
Seriously, they just don't like how they can't yell at random people online it seems. I just wish they get a clue and maybe actually update their message to make it acceptable to their target audience rather than shouting down and forcing themselves onto unwilling audiences.
Well it's more that capitalism always favors controlling markets by non-market means when possible. The idea that markets ought to be liberated enough to allow for profits to fall and competition to diversify the economy is antithetical to capitalism. It's liberated enough to make profits for big firms and not much else. laughs in Proudhon and Tucker
I think it's clear Nintendo would rather control their IP than profit from it. What I mean by that is there's a myriad of ROM sites and downloads you can go and get many old games, translated and native, which folks absolutely would pay to get access. Sure, they have their virtual console but IIRC their whole store presence is terrible and they really need to get with the times. Seriously, ROM sites exist because most of these games are effectively abandonware no different than the old Epic Games catalog and you don't see Epic or Id going out of their way to sue folks for their IPs. If anything they try to reuse, remaster, and republish their work so people who do want to buy that they can. Artificial scarcity and overlording doesn't get you more cash, it gets you less customers.
To me the fact that rural ND has fiber to the home in most cases is no surprise to me. In my home state of Kansas, I moved to the far northwest corner of the state into Norton county (and the city of the same name which was the county seat) they had the same kind of service but it wasn't a cooperative. Still, it was really good for the price. 25/25Mbps for just around 35 bucks when I was there in 2013. It's around 40 bucks now just from checking while skimming this article. It really shows that if you want something half decent then you have to build it yourself.
It's unfortunate that urban and suburban infrastructure is tied up with all kinds of nonsensical regulations that prevent new comers to the ISP scene to expand out. Like the case of Google Fiber fighting over the Kentucky regulations on touch-make-ready regs which essentially meant that Google Fiber installers would be able to move around other ISPs cables while installing theirs which obviously AT&T and company were furious about since they wanted to control the rate of Google Fiber's rollout. It obviously exhausted Google Fiber's shareholders patience which I think why they pivoted to wireless like they did. In theory fiber internet is the superior product but dominant ISPs will do everything in their power to prevent anyone else from furnishing the product to others even if they leave entire sections of the urban infrastructure to rot.
Not surprising to be quite honest. The best solution is often one that doesn't require you to shoot stuff into space. In this case, I'm wondering why Musk just doesn't promote the use of directed wireless relays with last mile hub/spoke wired internet? I mean the last mile wired part is expensive but you could make your wireless business the main part and have cooperatives sell the last mile to folks in rural communities. This all seems to be another grift to subsidize SpaceX.
If there's any monopoly on the Internet it's mostly around advertising to be quite honest. Hosting, search (even there), and social media seem to have a wide selection. Some are crap but some are oddly good in their niche. Like I wouldn't go to AWS to spin up a MUD server or a webpage as there's way cheaper hosts for such low resource use cases. Also, I think mobile is a whole different can of worms as you mention. I think there's definitely a duopoly there which I don't know if traditional antitrust can fix the problem. Fragmentation of the app stores don't seem to me a good idea or really a solution at all but that's just me.
Yandex is a terrible search index. DuckDuckGo is better since it's aggregates Bing and Google. You're not gonna find many other folks willing to fork over hundreds of millions to build a new search index whole cloth. And I'm not joking on the money required cause half of that is gonna have to go to brand marketing just to get traction.
I'm gonna say no to that assertion. Google puts quite a bit of effort into making a very low bias search algorithm. The worse part of the algorithm is that it's TOO open and you have to know all the search engine tricks like using minus on keywords to get exactly the results you want if your initial search terms or phrase happens to be too ambiguous for it. I remember when Google had to tackle click farms but now they have to tackle fake review or pay-for-positive-review sites. So the attacks against search rank has escalated over time. So I have serious doubts that Google devs and C-suite nerds are trying to actively bias the results. At worse, they put preference on their services that fit best the search terms used. And like Mike, I think that comes under antitrust not common carrier nonsense.
Seriously, my subject line says it all. They're not about their principles or their ideology, it's all about control. If they can't "trust the market" to protect their peculiar set of values then they'll burn the whole thing down out of spite. It borders on abusive behavior that you see in some dysfunctional relationships (particularly from the abuser in the relationship). I don't think legal analyses will help here, I think these folks need a shrink to work over their neuroses.
For some conservatives, I think the goal is to make the Internet so toxic that everyone cries for draconian laws to squash any dissent and variation on the Internet. Essentially, they want to turn it into cable TV minus the bundling. It works for them, in their minds, because they really think they can "teach us a lesson" or whatever nonsense rationale some of them have cooked up. It's like dealing with the racist uncle that keeps insisting on being at a nephew's cookout after he called his biracial children mongrels (or worse), just so he can keep saying such racist things to him and his family without consequence.
Koby, he's not inventing a whole new Internet. He's literally just opening a website on the actual existing one. Sweet Christmas, you really are stretching definitions here. It's like saying Burger King or McDonald's are the only fast food joint when there's dozens of old and new franchises/companies doing the same thing or something like it. This is the kind of desperation to control a private company's website when the push should be to actually develop federated/self-hosting social platforms is the better option. Because at least with self-hosted and federated social platforms you can opt-in and no need to let the camel into the tent (the govt) as to defining what's lawful or unlawful moderation which will just poisoning ALL OF THE INTERNET. Especially when presidential administrations will swap (Imagine some GOP administration wanting to force Grindr or some LGBT focused social media platform to only service straight Christian people because of such nonsense moderation regulations? that's gonna be weird).
Twitter or Facebook smacking you with the ban hammer isn't equivalent to John Deere locking you out of your own tractor. You actually own the tractor, you don't own access to Twitter or Facebook. Also, the right to communicate is still intact as you can literally hop on just about any VPS or other hosting provider and roll yourself a blog. Just go to wordpress' commercial site (the dot com one) and setup on for free and pay for the fancy features if you're so inclined.
As I've tagged my comment's subject line, to me the right to repair is also part of property rights. And my reasoning on this is that if you wholly own a thing then repairing, modifying, disposing, etc are all part of the package deal. The idea that you don't own your car, tractor, or phone is nonsensical to me and I think to most folks who are lawyers will probably agree inasmuch as how ownership both in the common meaning and the legal meaning isn't too different. To not extend these rights to things which people in the common meaning of property ownership buy is basically another kind of theft but through technicalities. True, you don't own the software on your smart phone but the software is essential to make it function. And it's equally true that I don't own the firmware on my car's ignition system but again it's necessary for its function. So this is why right to repair laws to me seem absolutely necessary to avoid these silly technicalities or gotchas by greedy slothful firms who demand a reliable return on investment where none legally is guaranteed by any law in the US or really under any government in the world.
Seriously, these moves smack of turning the Internet more into Cable TV where only a few players can afford the process of even defending themselves from errant lawsuits. In this case, section 230 is great for small blogs or web forums where it's just someone's hobby interest to maintain. I can't imagine web forums and blogs with comment sections staying up long without some kind of shrink wrap legal agreement or even some kind of for-pay membership to decrease the chances of being sued or harassed.
Poland's own government just came up with a doozy of law where somehow it's a-okay to sue anyone that basically bans or removes a third party's content FROM THEIR OWN WEBSITE. Seriously, this is getting out of hand. People keep insisting some random website whether it's a big one like Twitter or Facebook or your grandma's knitting Livejournal (insert boomer meme here) has to let any comer post anything even if it's pure spam or just vile crap. At this rate, I'll have to just turn off my rarely used blog just because these clowns in government keep insisting there's something wrong with people moderating content on their own property. This isn't like blackballing or any other kind of private censorship which society already has some legal recourse to tackle. And it certainly won't end anyone's life if they can't post their content on someone else's website. But they'll keep it up and I expect the Internet will become more passive/consumer driven as a result.
I think the forgetting aspect is something private companies shouldn't be afraid to employ if it's dealing with victims of crimes, children, and the like who are most vulnerable to harassment and exploitation. I'm not a fan of the "right to be forgotten" laws since it's hard to discern what's a matter of public record and what's a matter that's not relevant to said record. For example, knowing the name of a victim of a crime isn't the same as knowing the demographics of the victim and the crime itself. The name isn't all that relevant but other facts might be. Aside from that, I think the idea of privacy is going to have to adjust here as long as demand an ever growing system of indexes that are suppose to be accurate for personal and commercial use.
Seriously, I'm no Elon stan here but the principle of the satellite network he's proposing isn't novel it's just hasn't been cheap enough until now. You have to remember many satellites were and are one of a kind construction. What's he's doing is taking the academic cubesat stuff and making it into commercial products to carry point-to-point communications which isn't hard at all. You can make a 'wifi gun' here on old Earth with some copper sheeting and steel rods for around twenty bucks give or take another forty for the tools (assuming you don't have them). It's the same idea, launch sats with directional antennas in LEO relatively evenly spaced so they can relay data between themselves and down to their uplink/downlink stations or just broadcast most generally (assuming their onboard routers are up to such an aggressive regimen).
Seriously, there's lots of things to go after Elon Musk for (pedo guy defamation, overstating the reliability and safety of self-driving cars, being anti-union) but this one ain't it.
It's capitalism in a nutshell at least historically. What's mine is not yours even if it's not really mine anymore. That book you bought? Mine. That burger you just ate even though you paid me handsomely for it? MINE!
Like I'm willing to be lenient with evangelicals as not all of them are Family Research Council dirtbags, but anyone who's a race realist or bigot of another stripe I'm just not gonna invite them to the cookout, sorry. And note, that I don't talk party affiliation because it's not a straight line. There's plenty of center right Democrats as there are (even if some are afraid in this time of resurgent fascism) center right Republicans. It's just gonna take time until this all settles out and we'll see what happens from there. But I do feel for conservatives even though I'm a leftist. There's a similar problem on the left with the "red-brown alliance" of Nazbols (national bolsheviks), so this isn't just a right or left problem but a universal one.
On the post: Florida
ManGovernor Wastes More Florida Taxpayer Money Appealing Ruling About His Unconstitutional Social Media LawI suspect they'll go the Jason Fyk route and try to apply the 5th Amendment to their appeals next which I know sounds silly but that's the latest (not so greatest) bad legal takes going on with Section 230 lol
On the post: Texas Legislature Sees Florida's Social Media Bill Go Down In Unconstitutional Flames; Decides 'We Can Do That Too!'
Oh not this again...
Seriously, they just don't like how they can't yell at random people online it seems. I just wish they get a clue and maybe actually update their message to make it acceptable to their target audience rather than shouting down and forcing themselves onto unwilling audiences.
On the post: Community Broadband Dominates List Of Fastest US ISPs
Re:
Well it's more that capitalism always favors controlling markets by non-market means when possible. The idea that markets ought to be liberated enough to allow for profits to fall and competition to diversify the economy is antithetical to capitalism. It's liberated enough to make profits for big firms and not much else. laughs in Proudhon and Tucker
On the post: After All That, Nintendo Can't Even Get $50 A Month Out Of RomUniverse
A missed opportunity
I think it's clear Nintendo would rather control their IP than profit from it. What I mean by that is there's a myriad of ROM sites and downloads you can go and get many old games, translated and native, which folks absolutely would pay to get access. Sure, they have their virtual console but IIRC their whole store presence is terrible and they really need to get with the times. Seriously, ROM sites exist because most of these games are effectively abandonware no different than the old Epic Games catalog and you don't see Epic or Id going out of their way to sue folks for their IPs. If anything they try to reuse, remaster, and republish their work so people who do want to buy that they can. Artificial scarcity and overlording doesn't get you more cash, it gets you less customers.
On the post: New NTIA Broadband Map Exposes Expensive, Patchy US Broadband
Rural North Dakota is no surprise
To me the fact that rural ND has fiber to the home in most cases is no surprise to me. In my home state of Kansas, I moved to the far northwest corner of the state into Norton county (and the city of the same name which was the county seat) they had the same kind of service but it wasn't a cooperative. Still, it was really good for the price. 25/25Mbps for just around 35 bucks when I was there in 2013. It's around 40 bucks now just from checking while skimming this article. It really shows that if you want something half decent then you have to build it yourself.
It's unfortunate that urban and suburban infrastructure is tied up with all kinds of nonsensical regulations that prevent new comers to the ISP scene to expand out. Like the case of Google Fiber fighting over the Kentucky regulations on touch-make-ready regs which essentially meant that Google Fiber installers would be able to move around other ISPs cables while installing theirs which obviously AT&T and company were furious about since they wanted to control the rate of Google Fiber's rollout. It obviously exhausted Google Fiber's shareholders patience which I think why they pivoted to wireless like they did. In theory fiber internet is the superior product but dominant ISPs will do everything in their power to prevent anyone else from furnishing the product to others even if they leave entire sections of the urban infrastructure to rot.
On the post: Elon Musk's 'Next-Gen' Broadband Service Is Overheating In The Arizona Desert
Not surprising to be quite honest. The best solution is often one that doesn't require you to shoot stuff into space. In this case, I'm wondering why Musk just doesn't promote the use of directed wireless relays with last mile hub/spoke wired internet? I mean the last mile wired part is expensive but you could make your wireless business the main part and have cooperatives sell the last mile to folks in rural communities. This all seems to be another grift to subsidize SpaceX.
On the post: Map Of The Internet Exposes The Lie That 'Big Tech' Controls The Internet
If there's any monopoly on the Internet it's mostly around advertising to be quite honest. Hosting, search (even there), and social media seem to have a wide selection. Some are crap but some are oddly good in their niche. Like I wouldn't go to AWS to spin up a MUD server or a webpage as there's way cheaper hosts for such low resource use cases. Also, I think mobile is a whole different can of worms as you mention. I think there's definitely a duopoly there which I don't know if traditional antitrust can fix the problem. Fragmentation of the app stores don't seem to me a good idea or really a solution at all but that's just me.
On the post: Ohio Files Bizarre And Nonsensical Lawsuit Against Google, Claiming It's A Common Carrier; But What Does That Even Mean?
Re: Re:
Yandex is a terrible search index. DuckDuckGo is better since it's aggregates Bing and Google. You're not gonna find many other folks willing to fork over hundreds of millions to build a new search index whole cloth. And I'm not joking on the money required cause half of that is gonna have to go to brand marketing just to get traction.
On the post: Ohio Files Bizarre And Nonsensical Lawsuit Against Google, Claiming It's A Common Carrier; But What Does That Even Mean?
Re:
I'm gonna say no to that assertion. Google puts quite a bit of effort into making a very low bias search algorithm. The worse part of the algorithm is that it's TOO open and you have to know all the search engine tricks like using minus on keywords to get exactly the results you want if your initial search terms or phrase happens to be too ambiguous for it. I remember when Google had to tackle click farms but now they have to tackle fake review or pay-for-positive-review sites. So the attacks against search rank has escalated over time. So I have serious doubts that Google devs and C-suite nerds are trying to actively bias the results. At worse, they put preference on their services that fit best the search terms used. And like Mike, I think that comes under antitrust not common carrier nonsense.
On the post: Ohio Files Bizarre And Nonsensical Lawsuit Against Google, Claiming It's A Common Carrier; But What Does That Even Mean?
It's all about control
Seriously, my subject line says it all. They're not about their principles or their ideology, it's all about control. If they can't "trust the market" to protect their peculiar set of values then they'll burn the whole thing down out of spite. It borders on abusive behavior that you see in some dysfunctional relationships (particularly from the abuser in the relationship). I don't think legal analyses will help here, I think these folks need a shrink to work over their neuroses.
On the post: Conservatives Want Common Carriage. They're Not Going to Like It.
Re:
For some conservatives, I think the goal is to make the Internet so toxic that everyone cries for draconian laws to squash any dissent and variation on the Internet. Essentially, they want to turn it into cable TV minus the bundling. It works for them, in their minds, because they really think they can "teach us a lesson" or whatever nonsense rationale some of them have cooked up. It's like dealing with the racist uncle that keeps insisting on being at a nephew's cookout after he called his biracial children mongrels (or worse), just so he can keep saying such racist things to him and his family without consequence.
On the post: Trump Shows Why He Doesn't Need Twitter Or Facebook, As He Launches His Own Twitter-Like Microblog
Re: Re: Koby? Koby? Koby?
Koby, he's not inventing a whole new Internet. He's literally just opening a website on the actual existing one. Sweet Christmas, you really are stretching definitions here. It's like saying Burger King or McDonald's are the only fast food joint when there's dozens of old and new franchises/companies doing the same thing or something like it. This is the kind of desperation to control a private company's website when the push should be to actually develop federated/self-hosting social platforms is the better option. Because at least with self-hosted and federated social platforms you can opt-in and no need to let the camel into the tent (the govt) as to defining what's lawful or unlawful moderation which will just poisoning ALL OF THE INTERNET. Especially when presidential administrations will swap (Imagine some GOP administration wanting to force Grindr or some LGBT focused social media platform to only service straight Christian people because of such nonsense moderation regulations? that's gonna be weird).
On the post: Wall Street Journal Editorial Tries To Pretend That Fixing Repair Monopolies Is Bad For Your Health
Re: Re: Re: Company has rights?
Twitter or Facebook smacking you with the ban hammer isn't equivalent to John Deere locking you out of your own tractor. You actually own the tractor, you don't own access to Twitter or Facebook. Also, the right to communicate is still intact as you can literally hop on just about any VPS or other hosting provider and roll yourself a blog. Just go to wordpress' commercial site (the dot com one) and setup on for free and pay for the fancy features if you're so inclined.
On the post: Wall Street Journal Editorial Tries To Pretend That Fixing Repair Monopolies Is Bad For Your Health
Right to Repair is part of property rights
As I've tagged my comment's subject line, to me the right to repair is also part of property rights. And my reasoning on this is that if you wholly own a thing then repairing, modifying, disposing, etc are all part of the package deal. The idea that you don't own your car, tractor, or phone is nonsensical to me and I think to most folks who are lawyers will probably agree inasmuch as how ownership both in the common meaning and the legal meaning isn't too different. To not extend these rights to things which people in the common meaning of property ownership buy is basically another kind of theft but through technicalities. True, you don't own the software on your smart phone but the software is essential to make it function. And it's equally true that I don't own the firmware on my car's ignition system but again it's necessary for its function. So this is why right to repair laws to me seem absolutely necessary to avoid these silly technicalities or gotchas by greedy slothful firms who demand a reliable return on investment where none legally is guaranteed by any law in the US or really under any government in the world.
On the post: Section 230 Isn't A Subsidy; It's A Rule Of Civil Procedure
The turning of the Internet into Cable TV
Seriously, these moves smack of turning the Internet more into Cable TV where only a few players can afford the process of even defending themselves from errant lawsuits. In this case, section 230 is great for small blogs or web forums where it's just someone's hobby interest to maintain. I can't imagine web forums and blogs with comment sections staying up long without some kind of shrink wrap legal agreement or even some kind of for-pay membership to decrease the chances of being sued or harassed.
Poland's own government just came up with a doozy of law where somehow it's a-okay to sue anyone that basically bans or removes a third party's content FROM THEIR OWN WEBSITE. Seriously, this is getting out of hand. People keep insisting some random website whether it's a big one like Twitter or Facebook or your grandma's knitting Livejournal (insert boomer meme here) has to let any comer post anything even if it's pure spam or just vile crap. At this rate, I'll have to just turn off my rarely used blog just because these clowns in government keep insisting there's something wrong with people moderating content on their own property. This isn't like blackballing or any other kind of private censorship which society already has some legal recourse to tackle. And it certainly won't end anyone's life if they can't post their content on someone else's website. But they'll keep it up and I expect the Internet will become more passive/consumer driven as a result.
On the post: Should The Media Voluntarily Embrace A 'Right To Be Forgotten'?
I think the forgetting aspect is something private companies shouldn't be afraid to employ if it's dealing with victims of crimes, children, and the like who are most vulnerable to harassment and exploitation. I'm not a fan of the "right to be forgotten" laws since it's hard to discern what's a matter of public record and what's a matter that's not relevant to said record. For example, knowing the name of a victim of a crime isn't the same as knowing the demographics of the victim and the crime itself. The name isn't all that relevant but other facts might be. Aside from that, I think the idea of privacy is going to have to adjust here as long as demand an ever growing system of indexes that are suppose to be accurate for personal and commercial use.
On the post: Space X May Soon Give The US Broadband Sector A Much Needed Kick In The Ass
Wow naysayers...
Seriously, I'm no Elon stan here but the principle of the satellite network he's proposing isn't novel it's just hasn't been cheap enough until now. You have to remember many satellites were and are one of a kind construction. What's he's doing is taking the academic cubesat stuff and making it into commercial products to carry point-to-point communications which isn't hard at all. You can make a 'wifi gun' here on old Earth with some copper sheeting and steel rods for around twenty bucks give or take another forty for the tools (assuming you don't have them). It's the same idea, launch sats with directional antennas in LEO relatively evenly spaced so they can relay data between themselves and down to their uplink/downlink stations or just broadcast most generally (assuming their onboard routers are up to such an aggressive regimen).
Seriously, there's lots of things to go after Elon Musk for (pedo guy defamation, overstating the reliability and safety of self-driving cars, being anti-union) but this one ain't it.
On the post: Sony Is Feverishly Battling Vita Tinkerers Despite Vita Being Discontinued
Re: MINE, MINE, MINE...
It's capitalism in a nutshell at least historically. What's mine is not yours even if it's not really mine anymore. That book you bought? Mine. That burger you just ate even though you paid me handsomely for it? MINE!
On the post: Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech
Re: Re:
What's your take on Matrix.org? I think it's got good bones but it needs more work (obviously, since it's still in development).
On the post: Ex-Googler Recently Held Up As A 'Whistleblower' And 'Proof' Of Anti-Conservative Bias At Google, Actually Supported Richard Spencer, Racist Skinheads
Re: Re: Re: Re: False Argument
Like I'm willing to be lenient with evangelicals as not all of them are Family Research Council dirtbags, but anyone who's a race realist or bigot of another stripe I'm just not gonna invite them to the cookout, sorry. And note, that I don't talk party affiliation because it's not a straight line. There's plenty of center right Democrats as there are (even if some are afraid in this time of resurgent fascism) center right Republicans. It's just gonna take time until this all settles out and we'll see what happens from there. But I do feel for conservatives even though I'm a leftist. There's a similar problem on the left with the "red-brown alliance" of Nazbols (national bolsheviks), so this isn't just a right or left problem but a universal one.
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