Information control, or, How to get to Orwellian governance

georgeob1 wrote:

What could be more authoritarian than a government agency empowered to determine which media sources are "fair" and which are "unfair"? What could be more libertarian than free expression in the media?

A large multinational corporation that controls every aspect of the broadcast that the citizenry can not vote out of office is much more authoritarian. Just think of all the music that is never aired because of those corporations. And that's only the beginning.

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Let's not talk too much of freedom or we will conjure up OmSig and his giant type faces.

Funny, these conservatives yell about freedom and yet they want to quash almost everything.

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McGentrix wrote:

Everyone has the freedom to turn the dial. If you don't like what's on, don't listen to it or watch it. But to legislate what you think others should listen to or watch, then that is a boundary that shouldn't be crossed.

Imagine my disbelief to learn liberals are in favor of this.

Well, thanks to major corporations, there are lots of stations and nothing on. Like rap music, McG?

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Thomas wrote:

I would also observe that the rightwing-to-leftwing ratio of blogs is more similar to talk radio than to terrestrial TV stations. This suggests that George and other Republicans here are right: The relative conservativm of talk radio serves a genuine demand on the marketplace of ideas, while the fairness doctrine would boil down to censorship of conservatism.

You can not judge what the your imagined "marketplace" is because it does not exist. There are conservative tonguewaggers on the radio because the station owners will not allow liberals, which is why the liberals had to start their own broadcast service. Wanna but the Verrizano Narrows?

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plainoldme wrote:

You can not judge what the your imagined "marketplace" is because it does not exist.

Yet another broad statement of yours without any evidence to support it.

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Thomas wrote:

plainoldme wrote:
You can not judge what the your imagined "marketplace" is because it does not exist.

Yet another broad statement of yours without any evidence to support it.

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plainoldme wrote:

Well, at least we have this mutual sentiment in common. That's good. Good night, mylady.

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You want to encounter fascist authortarianism? visit your local Dept of Motor Vehicles or Zoning commision or try to get the city trash service to pick up nearly empty paint cans.

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dyslexia wrote:

You want to encounter fascist authortarianism? visit your local Dept of Motor Vehicles or Zoning commision or try to get the city trash service to pick up nearly empty paint cans.

OR VISIT GEORGE SOROS
George Soros and/or his subordinates claim the following:

Quote:

I do not accept the rules imposed by others. If I did, I would not be alive today. I am a law-abiding citizen, but I recognize that there are regimes that need to be opposed rather than accepted. And in periods of regime change, the normal rules don't apply. One needs to adjust one's behavior to the changing circumstances.

Usually it takes a crisis to prompt a meaningful change in direction.

Ousting Bush from the White House is the central focus of my life. It's a matter of life and death.

My greatest fear is that the Bush Doctrine will succeed--that Bush will crush the terrorists, tame the rogue states of the axis of evil, and usher in a golden age of American supremacy. American supremacy is flawed and bound to fail in the long run.

What I am afraid of is that the pursuit of American supremacy may be successful for a while because the United States in fact employs a dominant position in the world today.

These are not normal times.

The principles of the Declaration of Independence are not self-evident truths but arrangements necessitated by our inherently imperfect understanding.

Help Design the Constitution in 2020 to match a progressive vision of what the Constitution ought to be.

Now the Democratic Party is our party. We bought it, we own it.

Looks to me like Soros and his associates are working to transform America into an atheist collective.

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plainoldme wrote:

McGentrix wrote:
Everyone has the freedom to turn the dial. If you don't like what's on, don't listen to it or watch it. But to legislate what you think others should listen to or watch, then that is a boundary that shouldn't be crossed.

Imagine my disbelief to learn liberals are in favor of this.

Well, thanks to major corporations, there are lots of stations and nothing on. Like rap music, McG?

plainoldme wrote:

Thomas wrote:

I would also observe that the rightwing-to-leftwing ratio of blogs is more similar to talk radio than to terrestrial TV stations. This suggests that George and other Republicans here are right: The relative conservativm of talk radio serves a genuine demand on the marketplace of ideas, while the fairness doctrine would boil down to censorship of conservatism.

You can not judge what the your imagined "marketplace" is because it does not exist. There are conservative tonguewaggers on the radio because the station owners will not allow liberals, which is why the liberals had to start their own broadcast service. Wanna but the Verrizano Narrows?

Nothing, absolutely nothing gets plainoldme more riled up than "evil multi-national corporations" and her belief that she is suffering terribly because she apparently cannot buy every last little thing she wants.

pom, has it ever occurred to you that maybe not enough people want what you like, so they don't wish to go broke trying to sell what you want in your sacred little "marketplace?" After all, in the free market, there is a little thing called "Supply and Demand." It might be worth your while to study the principle for once, and you might finally get a clue about something.

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thomas

I haven't been to Italy, but there are few places I'd choose above it for a visit. Perhaps in a year or two we can meet there?

But as regards media and control of governance through media ownership, here's a fairly good piece... http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18998 And of course, America will, for the most part, remain a place much worth visiting or living in regardless of what set of authoritarian schmucks pull the strings. For the most part.

Actually, the NYRB has had extensive pieces on Berlusconi over the years (their archive search function works very well) but most are now behind the pay-for wall.

You likely understand as well as anyone the forces working against net neutrality. I'm certain that you would have legislation in place to ensure the present system is retained. Likewise, I'm sure that you'd not object to maintenance of governmental controls on media ownership, to some extent at least. And you'd hold to these regulations for the same reasons as I.

As regards your comment on my Blair question...you do avoid the question. In the case of Iraq, Blair has clear motives to continue his deceits. But as regards comments to a knowledgeable friend on such a matter as they spoke of, that motive is missing.

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Another on our italian friend... http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16596

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dys

Kucinich is one of the voices presently pushing for re-introduction of something like the Fairness Doctrine.

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FAIRNESS!!!! Ye Gods!

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blatham wrote:

You likely understand as well as anyone the forces working against net neutrality. I'm certain that you would have legislation in place to ensure the present system is retained.

You would be wrong. Net neutrality involves many sub-issues that are interesting, but technical and unfit for the consumption of people who have a life. Ninety percent of the political discussion are hype on each side of the debate. It's easy to get wrong impressions of what this is about.

In the context of this thread, suffice it to make two points: (1) The "discrimination" that "net neutrality" is opposed to is by type of service, not by content. This is not some Orwellian attack. Rather, the idea is that if your permanent YouTube-watching slows down your neighbor's e-mail, your service provider should be able to charge you more than him. (2) The IP protocol, on which the internet is built, has always reserved some memory in IP packet headers for "type of service" information. The IETF put this field there in the early 1980s with the explicit purpose of letting IP providers discriminate between. Since then, IP providers ignored it. Providers could have discriminated between services long ago and never even bothered. This strongly suggests that "net discrimination" is an inferior policy for providers, and that failing to enforce net neutrality wouldn't make all that much of a difference.

Again, the full details of this are reserved for nerds whithout a life. But since this falls into my range of professional expertise, I did want to point out that there are reasonable arguments on both sides of the net neutrality debate. I'm sitting on the fence about it myself.

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Quote:

Rather, the idea is that if your permanent YouTube-watching slows down your neighbor's e-mail, your service provider should be able to charge you more than him.

Sure. But is the service provider allowed to make decisions about what gets the top access arbitrarily and without oversight?

For example, Time warner provides cable service to Joe Consumer; Joe Consumer writes regular blog posts about how slow and terrible their service is and how bad their customer support it, but he can't get out of his contract; Time Warner doesn't want people reading his post, so they make sure his page takes 30 seconds to load each and every time.

Chilling effect?

Much of this comes down to competing views of the internet, imo; different ideas completely about who owns and runs the thing, and what it is actually for.

Cycloptichorn

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Cycloptichorn wrote:

Quote:
Rather, the idea is that if your permanent YouTube-watching slows down your neighbor's e-mail, your service provider should be able to charge you more than him.

Sure. But is the service provider allowed to make decisions about what gets the top access arbitrarily and without oversight?

Yes it is -- based on type of service, not user ID. In the case of bloggers, the cheapest service would be hypertext transfer for text-only blogs. More expensive services might include video streaming for blogs with multimedia content. In the absence of net neutrality legislation, providers could charge text-only bloggers higher fees than blogs with video streams. But they couldn't charge liberal bloggers higher fees than conservative bloggers.

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Thomas wrote:

Cycloptichorn wrote:
Quote:
Rather, the idea is that if your permanent YouTube-watching slows down your neighbor's e-mail, your service provider should be able to charge you more than him.

Sure. But is the service provider allowed to make decisions about what gets the top access arbitrarily and without oversight?

Yes it is -- based on type of service, not user ID. In the case of bloggers, the cheapest service would be hypertext transfer for text-only blogs. More expensive services might include video streaming for blogs with multimedia content. In the absence of net neutrality legislation, providers could charge text-only bloggers higher fees than blogs with video streams. But they couldn't charge liberal bloggers higher fees than conservative bloggers.

Couldn't or Wouldn't? Would they be barred by law from doing so?

Cycloptichorn

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Quote:

This is not some Orwellian attack.

Nor did I say it was. I forwarded it as an instance (comparable to restrictions on monopoly or laws in general along with a court system to uphold such) where we tend to consider that a Hobbesian world isn't the preferred state for our children or us. To quote Colbert, "Don't patronize me."

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Cycloptichorn wrote:

Couldn't or Wouldn't? Would they be barred by law from doing so?

(1) No, they would not be barred by law from doing so. Then again, I don't think they're barred by law from doing it now. I'm not sure about that latter part though. (2) Couldn't, because the technical architecture of the internet makes it impractical. The same technical reasons make it hard for the governments of China and Iran to keep their part of the internet censored. Remember that those governments have orders of magnitude more power over the web than Verizon and AOL do. So what's hard but possible for tyrannic governments becomes prohibitively expensive for service providers in a free market democracy. Hence my "couldn't".

There are other reasons to support net neutrality, most of which have to do with anti-trust policy. If Verizon invents its own protocol for IP-TV or IP-telephony, the legislation it proposes would allow it to favor its offerings over, say, Comcast's. That's one good argument for regulating the market for IP services. There are other, related good arguments, and together they explain why I'm on the fence about net neutrality, not against it.

So, to repeat, I am not categorically against net neutrality legislation. I'm just protesting against the "certain" in Blatham's sentence: "I'm certain that you would have legislation in place to ensure the present system is retained." When I answered that "you would be wrong", I meant to say he was wrong to be certain.

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Information control, or, How to get to Orwellian governance

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