Comments Elsewhere

Jason:

Peering agreements often do not, currently, require the various sorts of “neutrality” rules in how the packets are delivered once they are handed over at the peering point. get dropped for all kinds of reasons all the time, and nobody guarantees that every packet handed over to it will be delivered to its intended destination. Currently a lot of agreements offer a lot of leeway as to why packets might get dropped, or slowed down, or whatever. Craig is right that part of the reason for this is that FCC regulations controlled these agreements more tightly in the past. On the other hand, it has been years since those regulations were dropped and the companies have had plenty of time to renegotiate the arrangements if they didn’t like their network peers having that kind of leeway.

Personally, I would like it if non-slimy infrastructure providers would demand a fairly robust set of neutrality policies in their peering agreements. If such contracts were made, there would be no regulatory issue at all, since violating those neutrality policies would be a civilly actionable breach of contract. But until such a time as they do, I think there’s no justification for having the government force the kinds of peering agreements that I’d like to see on carriers that aren’t yet willing to make them. I wish I could change Comcast’s idiotic Acceptable Use Policy, too, but since I don’t own Comcast or their cable I’ve got no right to force them to provide better service.

Me:

[H]ow, exactly, does a content provider pay a carrier company for “access to the customers,” except by paying the carrier company for the use of its bandwidth? Isn’t the use of their bandwidth precisely how Internet providers provide “access to their customers”?

Craig:

The customers have already payed for the bandwidth.

Whom have they paid for whose bandwidth? We’re talking about interconnected networks here where not all of the infrastructure is owned by the same group of people.

In the scenario I sketched above, Craig is paying Nicenet for access to their bandwidth, but Craig has no agreement at all with Scumnet which would guarantee him the use of their bandwidth just by paying Nicenet what he pays them. Nicenet and Scumnet have an agreement, but the terms that they agreed to (like many actually existing peering agreements) makes no particular guarantee that Craig can expect any particular quality of service from Scumnet. There’s no apriori mandate that carriers must charge at only one point in transit; that’s often the wise thing to do, and the convenient thing for customers, but it’s not an injustice against drivers that you have to pay to drive on I-90 in Ohio, and then pay again to drive on it in New York.

What in the hell am I paying Verizon for if not access to content? Their service is useless without content.

You’re paying Verizon for access to their network. Paying them for access to their network does not entitle you to also access AT&T’s network unless AT&T has made an independent agreement (either with you or with Verizon) that would guarantee that. If there is such an independent agreement, then this is a civil matter rather than a regulatory one. If there is no such independent agreement, then you’ve done nothing which would entitle you to force one on AT&T.

Of course, it may be that part of the reason you find access to their network useful is that you also get access to AT&T’s network as part of the package, thanks to the current set of agreements between carriers. But so what? AT&T does not owe it to you not to renegotiate those agreements if they see fit. And if AT&T and Verizon agree to different terms, which makes it so that access to Verizon’s network is no longer useful to you, then the thing for you to do is to stop paying Verizon for a service that you no longer find useful.

The telecomms want to artificially degrade that already paid for service so they can charge content providers for restoring it.

You’ve paid your telecom for this month’s service, not next month’s, and if they decide to change their service or to scrap the whole damn thing at the end of your next billing cycle then you have no claim against them.

“Artificially degrading service” is, incidentally, a very nearly useless term in this discussion. Every ISP in the world has an Acceptable Use Policy that “artificially degrades service,” in the sense that it imposes restrictions on what you can and cannot do on their network, and to what degree, which have nothing to do with the technical capacity of their networks. Most broandband ISPs, for example, prohibit residential users from running servers on their network, even though the line is perfectly adequate for casual web hosting needs. They do so because they want to sell their business service, which allows for running servers. Is this “artificially degrading service”? In a sense, but so what? It’s their network and they have a right to set the rules — even if those rules turn out to be inconvenient, foolish, avaricious, etc.

Think the telecomms don’t like the FCC? You are dreaming.

Who made this claim? I’m well aware that the telecomm companies are government-backed oligopolists and that they are quite happy with restrictive regulation as long as it comes from an agency they’ve captured. But so what? That doesn’t change the fact that this:

And let me also say that while I am sympathetic to the general deregulation arguments, I am not sympathetic to those arguments when they come from industry players who are quite happy with regulation that creates artificial barriers to entry in their market — exactly like the telecomms.

… is a particularly crass example of argumentum ad hominem. The fact that big telcos, cable companies, etc. are hypocritical in putting forward an anti-regulation line does not make that line false, or the arguments for it any less capable of being assessed on their merits.

Craig:

I’m just a caveman. I fell on some ice and later got thawed out by some of your scientists. Your technology frightens and confuses me! So help out my primitive mind here: how, exactly, does a content provider pay a carrier company for “access to the customers,” except by paying the carrier company for the use of its bandwidth? Isn’t the use of their bandwidth precisely how Internet providers provide “access to their customers”?

Also, suppose you have the following network path:

Craig pays Nicenet for Internet access. Rad pays Scumnet for Internet access. Nicenet and Scumnet have a contractual agreement to exchange data with each other, but the agreement doesn’t specify any particular “neutrality” requirement on what each does with the packets from the other.

Now, suppose Craig wants to send data to Rad. The data goes onto Nicenet’s lines, and thence to the exchange with Scumnet. Nicenet is providing the use of its pipes to Craig, which is what Craig’s paid them to do. Craig, however, has not paid anything to Scumnet for the use of their pipes. So, Scumnet, for whatever reason, says that they won’t deliver the packets to Rad unless Craig pays them for the use of their pipes.

Now, this may very well be a foolish demand by Scumnet. But since Craig never paid them for the use of their pipes, and since Nicenet and Scumnet never made an agreement about Craig’s packets in particular, I can’t see where the “double-dipping” occurs. Where was the first “dip”? Help me out here.

Incidentally, just to be clear, I think that nearly every proposed application of non-neutrality, with the possible exception of simple tiered service, is a foolish and destructive way to run a network, and I agree with you that “Dropping neutrality also adds technical complexity to the network while lowering the value of the network to the consumer.” What I disagree with is the suggestion that it’s the government’s job to make sure that computer networks are run well. They have neither the knowledge, the virtue, nor — most importantly — the right to make those decisions.

Finally, nothing in my remarks is intended to defend the telcos, cable companies, and other government-backed oligopolists in the Internet business. They can all go hang for all I care. All that I’m suggesting is that the right way to deal with this problem is to lobby against government-imposed barriers to entry in telecommunications infrastructure, not to add yet one more government regulation in the attempt to calculate the “right” way to run an Internet service.

White Wolf press flack: “Pimp is a fictional game about the humorous stereotypes created by television and film …”

The question for the day is: what sort of person do you have to be to find these stereotypes really “humorous” in the first place?

Lopez,

Right. Also once you’ve convinced yourself that what justice demands is not that you, personally, not violate anybody’s rights, but rather that you somehow or another try to minimize the total number of rights violations going around in society. After all, that frees you up for all kinds of policy wonkery and social engineering that a personal obligation to do no injustice would rule out, on principle.

Jason,

The short answer on “What’s all the fuss about?” is that two corporate coalitions are crashing into each other in the regulatory arena. Big Internet providers — the telcos and the cable companies mainly — want the ability to ration or charge extra for access to their bandwidth. Big Internet content companies, especially those such as Google, Yahoo, and Vonage, who are rolling out bandwidth-intensive products — want to be able to force the bandwidth providers to carry their services. Since they’re both pouring a lot of money into their P.R. fronts, and the “Net Neutrality” types can enlist the aid of a lot of the trade press, it’s resulted in a lot of noise over what’s really a pretty sordid tussle over just who gets to hold the captured agency.

Stephen,

Carriers could in theory cut all kinds of crazy deals with providers. What if Comcast cut a deal to replace half the normal channels with Animal Planet for a week? What if the USPS had Netflix and WalMart offer bids and did faster deliveries for all the DVDs from the higher bidder? What if UPS cut a deal with Amazon to deliver all their packages twice as fast as their competitors’? I don’t know, but there are pretty strong incentives not to engage in this kind of dickery. Of course, most carrier services that are able to, do have tiered cost structures for different levels of service (first-class/coach; Express/Priority/first-class/media/bulk, etc.). But the tiers are generally based on how much you’re willing to pay for the premium carriage, not who you are or where you’re coming from.

You’re right that we’re very far from a free market in the telecom industry, and that as a result broadband Internet is clutched in the fists of a corporate oligopoly. But since government-granted monopolies and FCC regulation are what created the oligopoly in the first place, it seems like the obvious solution is to stop protecting the monopolies and roll back the regulation, not to add more regulation in the attempt to calculate the “right” level of Internet service. If providers are damaging the network, the thing to do is to let entrepreneurs get in there and route around the damage.

As far as transparency goes, it’s pretty easy, actually, to find out where the problem is: just give a ring to a buddy of yours who doesn’t use the same ISP and see if she is having the same problem. If behind-the-scenes dickery becomes a common practice from ISPs, it would not be hard to create services that automate this process and aggregate the results, so that people can find out which providers are being dicks and which aren’t. If a noisy enough minority of customers make it clear that this kind of behavior is unacceptable then companies will, by and large, not do it, or will provide ways around it. If customers don’t care enough about it to do anything about it, well, it’s probably not much of a problem to begin with.

Jim,

I’m one of the people who’s doled out such critiques. But I don’t think that Kos has anything like the same thing in mind. Thus:

Libertarian Dems are not hostile to government like traditional libertarians. But unlike the liberal Democrats of old times (now all but extinct), the Libertarian Dem doesn’t believe government is the solution for everything. But it sure as heck is effective in checking the power of corporations.

In other words, government can protect our liberties from those who would infringe upon them — corporations and other individuals.

He then goes on to explain how the New Deal State (minus gun control, I guess) “maximizes individual freedom,” as he sees it.

As I’m sure you know, anti-corporatist left-libertarians consistently stress that government power is the chief enabler and weapon of the robber barons, and they advocate the abolition of all forms of State economic intervention as the only proper response. The idea that Leviathan does or should or even could serve as a “check” on Behemoth is, from this standpoint, sheer statist fantasy.

Basically, as far as I can tell, “Libertarian Dem” is Kos’s new phrase for just another damn corporate liberal who likes to use Rooseveltian “Four Freedoms” talk. The contrast point is, apparently, an imaginary form of corporate liberalism which loves Big Government for its own sake and envisions no independent role for corporations or individual initiative. There is no actually existing corporate liberal who believes this (FDR, JFK, LBJ, Galbraith, Hubert Humphrey, Mario Cuomo, Ted Kennedy, and the rest of the crew certainly did not or do not; they all loved the idea of a properly “checked” or “coordinated” market), but it does make a useful rhetorical foil for passing yourself off as something new in intra-party power struggles.

Clayton,

Careful with the modalities there. “Custer died at Little Big Horn but he might not have” is actually a sentence of a sort that we often say. For example, he might not have if he’d been a better tactician, or less of an asshole. It’s just that here “might not have” raises a counterfactual possibility for Custer, rather than a salient error-possibility for the belief about what actually happened, which is the sort of possibility that Duck’s point was about.

That quibble aside, I’m a bit confused by your reply. Are you siding with the view that you can’t raise the possibility that a belief of yours might be false, without thereby treating it as something other than a belief? Or with the view that you can? Because Duck’s view is apparently the former, but what you say about “I believe that Custer died at Little Big Horn” as vs. “Custer died at Little Big Horn” would seem to count in favor of the latter view, not the former.

It’s true that asserting that Custer died at Little Big Horn expresses a belief to the effect that Custer died at Little Big Horn. And it’s true that directly asserting that rules out raising an error-possibility for that belief. But it’s precisely when you not only express a belief but also say that you believe so-and-so that you can raise error-possibilities for the belief in question. And I certainly find it hard to believe that you treat P less as one of your beliefs when you say “I believe that P” than when you say simply “P.” You’re treating the belief as something you’re more ready to give up or revise; and you’re treating its truth as less than certain; but you’re not thereby actually giving it up, in whole or in part, or treating it as something other than a belief of yours.

B/L:

O.K. I misunderstood you, then. I wasn’t trying to argue that some particular argument of yours in particular was in fact a “cheap shot;” I was asking about your intentions and the standards to which you’re holding yourself, given your own description of what you were doing. People often make cheap shot arguments knowing that they are cheap shots, or not caring whether the arguments are cheap shots or not, if they’ve decided that the situation doesn’t demand being “fair” or “reasonable.” (If you asked Robin Morgan, for example, whether she meant to give a serious presentation of cultural feminist thought in her one-paragraph mockery of it in “Radishes…,” I’d bet dollars to donuts that she’d say that she didn’t.) But since you didn’t intend by that description of yourself what I thought you might have intended by it, my bad.

That said, do you realize that criticizing the conduct or views of a vaguely-specified, undifferentiated mass of opponents — e.g. “rad fems” at large or “rad fem representatives in the blogosphere,” etc. — without making clear who and what you’re referring to, is exactly what you criticized Catharine MacKinnon for doing in your own post? I think I have some idea of who and what you have in mind, but I hope you realize that you are on much stronger ground when you’re referring to specific arguments that (say) Robin Morgan or Renate Klein or Heart or ginmar or whoever made than when you make these kind of statements.

gayle,

I agree about the smear on “rad fems,” etc. in the comments above. But it is unfair to compare the sort of intra-feminist criticism that B/L is doing, even when it’s mean and even if it’s unfair, to the hack anti-feminist polemics that are pumped out by Katie Roiphie, Warren Farrell, and the rest of the professional blowhard brigade.

In some sense it’s true that any criticism between feminists involves “attacking feminists,” but then, that includes plenty of radical feminist books and articles that criticize other feminists, or other radical feminists. Some of those criticisms are well-founded, and worth making, others much less so. (The Redstockings’ Feminist Revolution, to take one example, has plenty of both kinds, and at times gets a lot nastier than anything B/L has done so far.) The criticism can and should be assessed on its own merits, not on who the targets are.

piny:

I agree that there’s a difference. My concern is over just what “engaging with the text” is supposed to mean in this context.

B/L:

I’m not concerned with whether you’re “nice” or “rude” towards MacKinnon, Morgan, et al. What I’m wondering is whether or not you are trying to represent their work fairly and accurately in the course of criticizing it, given that you apparently deny this in the comment above. Maybe you meant something else by it, in which case my worries are misplaced.

So, just to be clear, in this series of posts (I know that in other posts you’ve taken a very different argumentative stance), are you just saying that you intend to return rudeness because you think you’re getting rudeness from the contributors? Or are you also saying that you intend to return uncharitable reading, cheap-shot argument, etc., because you think you’re getting uncharitable reading, cheap-shot argument, etc. from the contributors? If it’s the former, then that’s my bad for reading too much into your statement. But if it’s the latter, then why would this kind of “you-too” argument excuse perpetrating more of the same stuff that you’re condemning?

But what about private efforts? Many of the illegals cross onto private land. Right now, the Federal Government forbids these private landowners from doing much of anything to restrict access to their property.

1. Could you give an example of how the Feds are doing this?

2. If immigrants are crossing onto private land with the permission of the owner, would you then recognize their right to be left alone by La Migra? Or does your concern about private property rights only extend to those who are trying to keep the mojados off their property?

As for public property, do the people who paid (against their will) for this public property have no say in the matter?

You do realize, don’t you, that this argument could be used to make “libertarian” excuses for absolutely any form of tyranny whatsoever that enjoyed majority support, don’t you? Since drug traffickers, women in prostitution, gamblers, “assault weapon” dealers, corporate managers, and anyone else doing business uses government roads and other “public property” on a daily basis, you could use this just as easily to support the War on Drugs, the War on Vice, gun control, the whole federal regulatory apparatus, etc. Thank goodness The People will have their say; I was afraid that being a libertarian might actually require me to hold out for freedom.

(From the standpoint of justice, the answer is that not everyone has an equal claim to rightful ownership of all the government property within the continental U.S. I have some claim to a share of rightful ownership of the road in front of my house, and maybe the major thoroughfare I take to work every day. I have much less of a claim to a share of rightful ownership of I-94. I have absolutely no just claim to any control over how roads by the border in El Paso or San Diego are disposed of. Those who not only fund them but also habitually use them have a claim. So rightful use can’t be determined by taking national polls: insofar as it can be determined at all — which is not very far, socialist calculation being impossible, but let’s set that aside — it will depend on the varying attitudes amongst road-users in each actual border town. And, not to put too fine a point on it, but since unscreened immigrants pay the same gasoline taxes that everyone else pays, and habitually use those roads, they have as good of a claim to a share in them as the native-born Americans.)