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zanny

I just want to mention the opening quip:

"For the past two decades, the Internet has operated as an unregulated, competitive free market."

Is just hilarious. Hilariously wrong.

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It only seems wrong from the perspective of a residential buyer.

Anyone buying transit did indeed experience a very competitive market. Why else has the cost of backbone bandwidth been steadily falling for a almost 20 years? Not out of the goodness of a monopolists heart.

The hilarious part to me was that it will continue to be, comcast are a US provider. So whatever garbage the US ends up calling "the internet" the rest of the world will still have the internet.

Except that we won't either, as the media companies (funnily enough, many of which are tightly tied to US ISPs) and Governments impose filter upon filter on us.

Tor, i2p, and GNUnet, will be the only places free from censorship, and even they will be labelled as being for criminals only; why would we want to bypass the filters, we must be either pirates or paedophiles. We're witnessing the swift end of the very short-lived era of free information for all over the next five years.

Poignant and well phrased.

No we aren't, this is just melodrama...

https all the filters stop working.

VPN all the filters stop working.

Use Tor all the filters stop working.

So we aren't allowed to put big billboards up in public with hardcore porn on them... that is not the end of free speech though, that's just the end of billboards with hardcore porn on them.

Even if you put all that aside:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship#Around_the_...

There is a heap of green on that map.

In the next 5 years, I'll still be able to send you whatever information I like, and I'll still be able to ensure you are the only person who can receive it, and that no body else will be able to receive it for ~100 or so years (depending on how encryption develops)...

https sends the certificate in clear text. you most certainly can filter on the subject. and obviously you can filter by ip. parent post is correct.

Okay, you had a weak response to 2 out 4 of my points...

I was mostly thinking about the Internet backbone here, and I think this statement is correct. Until recently, there have been many backbone providers that compete with one another with minimal regulation.

Who's regulating the internet in the US?

The US government?

In what way? The US government has done nothing to restrict the growth of the Internet compared to other nations that force national firewalls and web-filtering proxies on their citizens.

Sure they haven't...

You're confusing regulation with censorship. I hope to hell that congress doesn't do the same.

You mean apart from domain seizures?

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/feds-seize-foreign-...

I'm not so much striking down the "regulated" part, as I'm striking down the competitive one. In most places around the US coax and twisted pair lines (that were funded by the public purse in the first place) were sold to private companies at hilariously low rates to then milk the market in perpetuity while you are required to get permits to tear up roads and run your own network cable. And of course in most places that could happen, the cable company lobbies to prevent it.

So it isn't competitive at all. Though it is honestly hard to be competitive with infrastructure - how would you go about having multiple redundant private highways going to the same place just to maintain competition so that one road doesn't milk toll rates and let the quality degrade because they have a monopoly? Honestly, the latter is happening even now with public roads because without any competition or monetary motivation states just let their infrastructure crumble.

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