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by
Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday January 28, @01:38PM (#1455)
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Mr. Trope must make his money off of government work, because it's hard to imagine anyone else being so cavalier with their freedom.
Mr. Trope's main idea -- that anything that has been touched by government is now fair game for further regulation -- is, quite simply, a formula for eventual dictatorship.
Mr. Trope presents farm subsidies and NASA as positive examples of government subsidies. Oh, really???
Almost everyone agrees that the farm subsidy program has been a disaster, and is only carried on because of the strong political backing from those who make money off of it (both farmers and politicians).
Likewise, though I admire the scientists, engineers, and astronauts at NASA, and I get as excited as anyone over their accomplishments, NASA is still not a positive example of government spending. Consider the following...
In 1904, the Wright Brothers managed to achieve their first circular flight. By 1934, just thirty years later, the aviation industry was logging 1.9 _billion_ passenger miles per year.
Now consider the space industry. The first American to orbit the earth, John Glenn, did so in 1962. Now, after 40 years have passed, NASA is still putting people into space by using technology that is over 30 years old!!! And the commercial space industry, let alone passengers, is almost non-existant -- no one is willing to invest the money when it means competing with a government-subsidized program.
Look at any government-regulated industry, and you see stagnation. Television broadcasters wanted to introduce high-quality sound in the early sixties, but the regulators wouldn't allow it to happen until the ninties. Likewise, the telephone system had barely changed in half a century, before being de-regulated some years back. Small-cell radio broadcasting was starting to form in the early 1900s, until government regulators outlawed it (what the broadcasting industry needed to have established was property rights, not regulation).
The only people who like government regulation are the lawyers who get rich off of it.
And now Mr. Trope is proposing more regulation of the Internet. Big surprise. :-/
Mr. Trope points to the fact that much of the Internet's infrastructure was created by branches of the government. And I would point out that most of the Internet's problems stem from that fact.
The current Internet protocols have little provision for billing according to resources used. The large carriers have worked out deals for the main trunk lines, but the rest of us pay overhead-style, i.e. one payment per month, after which any resources we use represent a cost, rather than a source of profit, for someone else.
As a result, websites struggle to use advertising, or cumbersome membership sign-ups, to pay the bills; Spammers can flood the Internet at everyone else's expense; Users can use software that is known to be insecure, because they don't pay for the resulting DOS attacks and e-mail floods; And so on.
Imagine, instead, a Free-Market-based Internet, where carriers and websites charged your ISP, who in turn charged you, according to the actual resources you used. Websites would be encouraged to attract your business by improving their content, and the speed of their sites. There would be no sign-ups to annoy you, and no multiple accounts to manage. Since you wouldn't need to sign up for every service, you wouldn't need Draconian identification and tracking schemes like Palladium -- only your ISP would have to know who you are.
Once the current government-overhead style Internet is replaced with a proper Free Market Internet, with the payment-for-services problem resolved, then the Internet can really start to fulfill its promise. Instead of a few good websites struggling to get by on advertising revenue, we would see businesses attracted by profit, resulting in hundreds of quality sources for audio, video, reference information, and other services.
More government regulation of the Internet is not the solution. On the contrary, the existing regulations, and government involvement, are the major sources of the current problems.
Mike Cornall
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