Judiciary Committee Approves Internet Censorship Bill

[R. Shackleferd]

Slyck News - Judiciary Committee Approves Internet Censorship Bill

There wasn't even any opposition, it just passed with flying colors

So they all supported it eh.. Who is in the Judiciary Committee?
Committee Members

Ron Wyden is using whatever power he has to stop the bill (after reading around I still dont know how senators can block bills)
Internet Censorship Bill | Ron Wyden | Geekosystem
Now I've seen everyone getting excited over this but really, I'm not at all impressed with Ron Wydens stance.

"It seems to me that online copyright infringement is a legitimate problem, but it seems to me that COICA as written is the wrong medicine. Deploying this statute to combat online copyright infringement seems almost like using a bunker-busting cluster bomb when what you really need is a precision-guided missile. The collateral damage of this statute could be American innovation, American jobs, and a secure Internet."

As we see with the judiciary committee and with a democrat introducing the bill and a democrat blocking(?) it, this issue is non-partisan and seems to have most of the support from everyone in Washington. Even the idea of combating copyright infringement in general is supported by the one person who is blocking(?) this bill. I can only guess that a "precision guided missile" is a copyright patriot act and nationalization schemes like "net neutrality" that will be fraudulently marketed as a way to fund/create innovation, jobs, security and all of that other BS government cannot and will not provide without lost liberty, deficit spending, hyper extortion and big media run amok.

 

[TacticalEvilDan]

Ron Wyden is using whatever power he has to stop the bill (after reading around I still dont know how senators can block bills)

Before reading the rest of your post, I just figured I'd throw out there that any Senator may initiate a filibuster, after which no fewer than 60 votes is required to end "discussion" and call for a vote.

 

[danarhea]

Here is what they eventually want to happen:

meanwhile, "controversial" websites that the government doesn't think we need to be reading will all but disappear, unless you want to pay for them, and they might not even be available then. Without internet neutrality in place, the internet is going to be dumbed down in a huge way. This particular bill is just the first step in the process.

 

[R. Shackleferd]

They? Who they? Here are some major problems with your premise.

"They" havent implemented this in all the time we've had the internet and relic internet services like AOL 2.0 that required a special browser and a special method of doing things online was rejected by the market and AOL's competitors ended up taking a lot of the market from AOL by providing the consumer with full access.

It's not hard for ISPs to do all of the things that net neutrality proponents claim ISPs will do without net neutrality. We don't have net neutrality. Why isn't the internet a distopian restricted hell today? Even if there were reasons to support net neutrality, it's still unethical for governments to dictate what telecom companies do with their servers.

Also, if things like myspace and youtube and such were worth ISP premiums,.. ISPs wouldn't be the ones charging you for access to it, the individual websites would. Proof? Netflix on-demand, iTunes, World of Warcraft servers, somethingawful forums.. even facebook considered becoming a paysite. There is a reason why these websites don't go premium and it's the same reason why ISPs don't do this today or in the future; people won't buy it enough to the point where these pay services can sustain the same profits from free content provided by advertisers.

We don't need net neutrality, we need government neutrality(which would include no longer giving telecomm and big media anymore subsidies), which is something we cannot expect the government to do. Anyone who is concerned about government censorship should not be endorsing the progressive wealth-redistribution statist wet dream that is net neutrality.

 

[TacticalEvilDan]

It's not hard for ISPs to do all of the things that net neutrality proponents claim ISPs will do without net neutrality. We don't have net neutrality. Why isn't the internet a distopian restricted hell today?

The big media companies have actually made plays at getting better control of the Internet on a number of different occasions, with efforts ranging from heavy lobbying of Congress to discussions regarding packet prioritization -- ISPs giving preferential treatment to data transmitted for their own services, so that a VoIP conversation over Skype gets poor service while Time Warner's digital phone service gets good service on Time Warner's network. Time Warner even briefly dabbled with the idea of bandwidth caps (they even started beta testing the idea in my area), but that got shouted down by the customer base.

Ultimately, the reason why we have a reasonably neutral Internet is because there isn't a government-sanctioned path to any other model at present, and the various media companies don't want to risk the anti-trust allegations that would almost certainly follow without one.