More Net Neutrality Talk (sorta)

I am frequently dismayed by how easily economic conservatives get hoodwinked into adopting the positions of their ideological opposition. Case in point: "Big social media platforms should be public utilities to guarantee access to all".

No. They shouldn't. Why not? Because the answer to a threatened monopoly is not to make it a *guaranteed* monopoly under the partial or full control of the government.

How do we know this? Look at ISPs. The alarmists of yesteryear used the fact that broadband was nascent and far from ubiquitous to suggest that there might be a market failure of ISPs to service under-privileged neighborhoods. Thus, the government erected regional quasi-monopolies, and have since been protecting them from outside competition through licensing and quashing new technology (like Google Fiber).

What was the result? Just about every area in the U.S. has one or ISPs, with regular outages, poor service, and little (if any) choice.

So, now big tech monopolies are using their power to banish people from their platforms, and because these platforms are monopolistic and ubiquitous, we are facing another (somewhat more legitimate) fear of loss of access, and we seem to have a quandary: the libertarian resists government regulation, but the free speech absolutist acknowledges the massive human rights violation that occurs when someone is banished from what is effectively a public forum. So the libertarian in us is meant to swallow sadness and go along with the effective nationalization of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. turning them into a public utility "for the greater good".

Well, again no. My questions would be, "why have Facebook, Google and YouTube attained such dominance in the first place? Why have competing platforms failed so much? This is important, because if there were a plethora of Twitters, Facebooks and YouTubes, then there would be no 1A concerns if you were banned from one platform. You'd simply go to another platform, and the platforms that didn't exercise censorship would become more or less popular based on the tastes of their users. You might recognize this as precisely what the internet was 10-20 years ago, with chatrooms and message boards across all spectrums of use.

So what caused the change? One issue is misuse of patent law (as it always is). Some company comes up with a formula that works well online, catches fire, makes billions of dollars, then they are insulated from competition who want to utilize their invention for so many years that they are able to consolidate an effective monopoly. In short, current patent law is outdated. Twitter gained net dominance within a year. They didn't need years of patent protection to protect them.

Even worse, you have tech giants like Google who go around buying up patents, and turning them into proprietary software that they incorporate into their service so that no other platform can use them. Then, you have Google Maps, Google Docs, Google Drive etc, all making the Google search engine the natural choice, and protecting their market hegemony. In both of the cases, deregulation would help to solve problems.

The final, and in my opinion most easily dealt with, problem was Title II Net Neutrality. Now that the abomination has been mercifully released, hopefully we can see a small chipping away of market dominance, and the flourishing of alternate vendors such as Gab and BitChute.

The problem with Title II was that it guaranteed free and neutral access of broadband to all. This is a nice thought (as virtually are government regulation is) but it came with a host of unintended consequences (as *all* government regulation does).

Imagine the government decided that national freight shipping was necessary and extremely important, to the extent that it had to be protected for everyone. Thus, businesses should be allowed the use of transport for free. No taxes for the roads, not paying for cars, boats, trains or planes. Every business, regardless of scale or location, gets free and neutral access to transportation. Sounds lovely, right?

Now imagine that when this legislation was passed, I owned a business (let's call it Schlamazon) that held a near monopoly on products being shipped around the country. 98.8% of all goods shipped, were shipped by my company. Suddenly, this regulation frees up millions (if not billions) of dollars in my budget, which I can put towards improving services, and R&D. Still sounds kinda nice, except imagine my competitors trying to get started. They have literally no advantage over me for being small. Sure, they get free access to transportation, but so do I. And that access benefits me, the giant, more than them by many orders of magnitude.

Naturally I, the CEO of Schlamazon, would *love* this policy, and the freedom it's given me to crush my competition in other ways. You have just erased the single biggest problem of holding a monopoly (the high cost). So if someone threatens to take it away, I'll fight tooth and nail to keep it. "I don't want to pay the millions for access to transportation," I'll say. "I'll force you to pay."

"Every Schlamazon package you buy," I'll warn, "Will cost you, the customer $75, because that will cover my expenses."

"You, as the customer, will have no choice," I'll lie. "Because I'm currently your only option, and will always be your only option."

In reality, the moment Schlamazon starts charging $75 per package, consumers will go crazy trying to throw their money at my competitors. Since my competitors can stay small, and only use small amounts of local transportation, or build relationships and get special deals, they can deliver packages at a tiny fraction of the cost, or for free, to drum up business. Rapidly, my monopoly with dwindle under the sheer expense of itself, and soon you'll have a free marketplace of shipping, and the threatened monopoly will evaporate.

Obviously, things aren't always quite this simple in practice. However, I think it's important to take a harder look at these issues, and consider the obvious, well-documented and unintended consequences of government action. As Milton Friedman said, "When a market program fails, it is ended; when a government program fails, it is expanded." The answer to failed government regulations that put the internet into today's sorry state, is *not* MORE well-intentioned, nice-sounding regs that just make the problem worse. Maybe instead we should go back, and try to find where the internet first went wrong. And I can tell you, the internet used to be pretty dang great.

Free Speech Fragment

Here is the thing about "suffering consequences" for exercising your free speech. In our society, there are only two real "consequences" for free speech. One is online harassment, which is another issue. The second is the loss of your job.

As certain as death and taxes in the social media age, is the fact that you will lose your job if you make public an act of offensive expression. Whether it's saying something deemed microaggressive and transphobic, or it's flipping off a war memorial in a selfie, the normal and expected fallout is for the transgressor's company to fire them. This is, at best, met with cries of "the idiot deserved it for doing that on Facebook!" At the worst, it is met with enthusiastic approval.

Here's the thing, though: corporations could not care less about the content of their employee's speech, or the appearance of their actions. Corporations fire these people for good PR, plain and simple, end of story. The reason that they do this is because a growing number of people are expressing this enthusiastic approval, or outright demanding this action.

Decades ago, if a multi-billion dollar company fired a salaried employee for saying something offensive, the vast majority of Americans would have decried it as corporate censorship. Now, in a post-Michael Richards world, it's expected. Without this expectation and enthusiastic participation by the public, these things would not happen. Corporations could get no good PR out of firing an employee when censorship itself, regardless of the content of one's speech, was a bad thing.

In a world where losing your job when someone takes offense to what you've said is taken as read, the very real stakes attached to your every word constitutes a chilling and coercive effect on your freedom of speech, without the federal government having to lift a finger. Consider Justine Sacco, who made a tweet deemed offensive before boarding a plane to South Africa, and by the time she landed 11 hours later had become a reviled internet sensation and lost her job. In that case, even the corporation that fired her had nicer things to say about her than the mob demanding her head across Twitter.

Whether or not this is a bad thing to you depends on whether your desire to see someone pay for saying something you didn't like outweighs the danger of allowing and encouraging corporations to destroy lives for PR brownie points.

An incomplete discussion of Net Neutrality.

To be fair, Net Neutrality *has* been in policy for years, and was only recently struck down. The reason why it has come up so much in recent time is the advent of Netflix, Hulu, Steam, and other services which allow consumers to stream digital content online. 

In effect, with the entire population of the developed world carrying around powerful data streaming devices in their pockets, the data load on the ISPs has increased exponentially. A large amount of everyone's bandwidth in any one area is choked up with thousands of people streaming TV, movies, and videogames. 

The only answer is for ISPs to continually upgrade their bandwidth infrastructure, but this is an investment that ISPs are beginning to balk at. Their point is that Net Neutrality has forbidden them to monetize their bandwidth to content creators. Therefore, bandwidth-light sites, such as Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, and Reddit (largely text, or still-image based) pay as much to the ISPs as bandwidth hogs like YouTube, Netflix and Hulu (spoiler alert: zero dollars)

Another major change from the GeoCities era, is that there really aren't that many "indie" sites out there anymore. Few people have "personal" webpages outside of the deep net. The overwhelming number of users maintain profiles on Facebook. Virtually no one online hosts their own videos, but rather use services like YouTube or Vimeo.

Most information and activity now transitions through the auspices of sites with business aspects. Forums, are generally owned by businesses (and if not, they are hosted on services like Yuku which ARE businesses). 

Therefore, one key argument of the Net Neutrality debate, (that of maintaining an "open" internet) is losing its teeth. After all, who cares about an open internet when virtually everyone only interacts with the internet through corporate portals? Generally speaking, the only truly independent sites left are on the deep web, and arguing in defense of the deep web is difficult to do in front of congress, seeing as how many illegal activities take place there.

So ultimately, why should we care if Comcast wants to start charging Netflix to stream to users? Well, as many have pointed out, this can lead to slower internet speeds. After Net Neutrality was struck down a year ago, Comcast told Netflix that they would have to fork over a king's ransom to maintain their bandwidth streaming. They just happened to do this over the holidays. Netflix balked at the multi-million dollar price tag, and so Comcast delivered on its threat and throttled Netflix's bandwidth to a crawl.

The practical upshot was that millions of users who were sitting around Netflix with their family for the holidays suddenly could no longer reliably stream their copies of It's a Wonderful Life, because the bandwidth simply was not there. Netflix began receiving angry complaints and threats of discontinued services from their subscriber base. They caved to Comcast's demands pretty quickly after that.

However, as has been pointed out numerous times, what's to stop Netflix from passing their increased cost of business onto the customer? Many will argue that Netflix exists in a different world now, with actual competition. Amazon prime, HBO Go, Hulu Plus, etc. are just a few examples of streaming services users can visit instead of Netflix. The entire purpose of competition being to keep prices low for the consumer.

And yet, even when Netflix was virtually the sole provider of streaming media, subscription cost hikes sent their user base into protest, and were quickly rescinded. This has caused many people to proclaim the "increased costs of basic services" problem to be a myth.

Personally, I think it's telling that Comcast chose to go after a media giant like Netflix rather than a non-profit group like Wikipedia. First off, the sites that really gobble up our bandwidth are anything but non-profit. But also, even cable companies know they will get a bad rap by visibly attacking non-profits.

And, when Comcast can post profits of millions extorted from Netflix, their complaints that they cannot monetize their bandwidth are gone. So why wouldn't they begin upgrading their bandwidth infrastructures again?

Well this is where you get into whether the internet should serve as a common utility, and whether ISPs function in a fair competitor market, or whether they operate like mini-monopolies. Because, of course, the answer to "the loss of Net Neutrality means that ISPs will start to gouge their customers", is to "go pick another ISP."

However, the reason why things like power and water are considered public utilities is because many economists believe that the investment in infrastructure (i.e. power lines, and water pipes) would be too high to allow free competition. In effect, new companies could not afford the investment, and so the old guard could prevent them from competing and thus maintain local monopolies.

Whether or not this is true is a century-old argument that I won't get into, but the fact remains that Comcast in particular has proven that it has the bargaining power to force competitors out of the market. For instance, Google Fiber has been kept out of several cities by Comcast lobbyists on grounds of unfair competition. (http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/06/06/hundreds_of_cities_have_laid_fiber_for_faster_internet_but_big_telecom_companies.html)

Personally, I see this as a sign more of a problem with government corruption than with greedy corporations, but then I personally believe that capitalism best thrives when corporations are greedy, and its only when the government has the power to play favorites among the greedy corporations that capitalism breaks down (but I'm a major proponent of the free market, and not everyone is).

At any rate, the FCC is not a local legislator. It has something of a better track record with regulation, and so placing the internet under its auspices is less frightening than, say, the government trying to create a *new* regulatory board.

Ultimately, I feel that Net Neutrality is a much more complex issue than most people give it credit for being. Personally, I am very much on the fence about it. But then, the only sites that I frequently use which would be affected allow me to stream TV shows for free, and I happen to know that those have an expiration date no matter what. Hopefully I have given some of you more information to chew on before you make a decision for yourselves.

The Friendzone Fracas

So there's about a million people sounding off these days about the term "friendzone". I figured that if there's anywhere to add my voice to the throng it's here, tucked safely away in the anonymity of a never-visited blog. I've had what many might consider a contrary opinion to the majority voice (depending on which set screams the loudest according to you) for a long time, but what drags me out of this well-advised silence is the following comic strip that a friend of mine shared on Facebook. Got a moment? Check it out:

http://imgur.com/a/RmAjE

Ok so we start off with two persons at an outdoor cafe, a boy and a girl. The boy asks the girl out, and she responds (either being snarky or unbelievably thick) that they already out, to which he responds, no OUT out. In response she calls him a friend, and he utters that most controversial term.

Ok first off, they don't seem to have any food or drinks in front of them, so there's no evidence whether they have or intend to consume anything at this cafe. And if they have or will, there's no indication of whether the boy is paying. However, I would just like to point this out first: None of us were raised on an alien planet. With very few exceptions, every single terrestrial culture (and none of those that could potentially be represented by two whitebread kids at an outdoor cafe) has a courtship tradition centuries old. So except in the very rarest of cases, everyone you meet in the English speaking world understands that when a boy likes a girl he will try to go out on dates with her. Since there are very few people (though they do exist) who do not believe that a man should pay on a date, it is in good taste to assume that if a fellow offers to buy your dinner, or movie ticket, he either thinks, or wants it to be a date. On the flipside, if you are a female, and you accept this offer, be aware that you are ALSO indicating that this encounter is a date.

You can argue all you want that all of your platonic friends are just so kind and generous that they wish to buy all of your meals out of friendship and never expect anything in return, but doing so is not convincing. You know better. So, if a fellow consistently pays for everything when you go "friend hang" with him, then he thinks you're dating. Now, there are two remedies to this, one that is respectful and kind, and one that is woefully inadequate and not a little manipulative. The latter is to add as a caveat every fourth date or so, "Sure I'll go to dinner/that concert/a movie with you, but only as friends, right?" while still happily accepting as many free meals and tickets as you can wring out of your "friend". This is atrociously self-serving. The entire tradition of courtship is based upon changing a potential love interest's mind. The roots of a man paying for a date is founded in the idea that a man must be the breadwinner and support his female partner. You may think to yourself "He's only my friend and will only ever be my friend." Your actions are saying "We're friends now, but every time I let you pay for me, I'm giving you a chance to change my mind.

This is patently misleading, manipulative and greedy. If you know for a fact that you will never be interested in a fellow who is broadcasting his feelings by engaging in centuries-old courtship ceremonies with you, then put a stop to the freebies. Again, in our comic here there is no indication of this sort of past relationship, so we will not indict her behavior here, except to say that if she has, by any chance, been bleeding this fellow dry of "friend" dates, then she is a mooch, not a friend.

Moving on, after the transformation into a superhero (who apparently beats up exclusively on straw men) we reach the point where the villainous, erstwhile "friend" begins to list, in his gormless, disgusting way, the things that he has done for her. The author of the strip seems to take the tack that this behavior is epitome of grotesque sexual overtures, but once again I would point to the all-encompassing courtship model that has yet to be replaced by any meaningful modern tradition. While obviously not a good way to tug on a girl's heartstrings, the fellow listing the ways that he feels he has shown his devotion is hardly the sort of thing that say, a famous poet might balk at. Let us not forget the timeless sonnets of Bill the Bard, or, hell, any sonnet at all. Sonnets are usually about wasting away in unrequited love. It's kind of a theme. But oh no, this behavior must NOT be tolerated!

Right about now is when the violence starts, but I'd like to take a brief second to highlight one of the first (but definitely not last) really ghastly examples of a straw man argument here. The spurned beau reminds the Defender of the Friendzone that one time she got drunk and vulnerable at a party, and he drove her home to help her keep safe. The girl then responds, "You don't get ****ing brownie for not raping me."

Ok, hold up. The story being told here is not "hey you were drunk, and I didn't rape you." The story here was "we were both at a party, and you were in danger, so I stopped enjoying myself to take your drunk ass home so no one could possibly hurt you while you weren't capable of protecting yourself." Funny he doesn't point this out himself. Oh that's right. Uppercut. Well clearly she's capable of defending herself now, so she obviously must do so on the fellow that has demonstrated his intentions and willingness to help keep her safe whenever it might be needed.

This of course leads into the next tuft of straw in this one-sided argument. And one that I think is even more telling. The very next righteous verbal smackdown laid upon our laid out male is the oft-repeated bit that "what assholes like you mean when you say you've been friendzoned is 'this bitch won't let me put my **** in her, even though I treated her like a human being." Once again our brutalized male character offers no meaningful or rational response, so we are forced to provide our own. But which germane argument should proffer first?

Perhaps we could point out that keeping an eye out for your female friend who might suddenly find herself in a dangerous situation, and remaining sober enough to quit partying drive her home if and when she needs it is not how you treat someone "like a human being". Perhaps that is how you treat someone whom the entire Universe revolves around, or someone you are romantically interested in. But assuming that anyone with any shred of decency is just always going to be there, keeping an eye out for you so you can cut lose and go crazy while they play the responsible protector is, again, either insanely self-obsessed or unbelievably thick. But, whatever, maybe he was the designated driver for that particular outing, so let's consider the flipside. Who has brought up anything about sex between the two of the main characters? Only the super"heroine" the Friendzoner. A brief search of the preceding panels reveals no explicit or implicit request for sexual activity of any sort. What the boy specifically requests is a "date", not as friends.

This is one of those facets of the "friendzone" controversy that continually mystifies me. This rarely questioned assumption that anyone who EVER mentions the "friendzone" in a serious manner is just angry that they didn't get sex. Never mind the fact that they never have gotten sex and they're still around you, the mere fact of getting irritated that their obvious courtship is being ignored automatically insists base, lewd intentions upon them all along. Where this thought comes from I have no clear idea. Assuredly, many guys really so just want sex from their crushes. But how on earth this idea that every single guy friend who wants to be more is just in it for the sex became so widespread and undisputed is a true mystery. I know that I have personally felt severely disrespected by girls who told me that they only considered me a friend after allowing me to take them on date after date, and I respected each of them too much to just want to jump into bed with them. The very idea that someone who you've built up enough of a relationship with to even be considered a "friend" to be put in the friendzone, and all the time only be interested in sex seems actively illogical.

If the fellow was only interested in sex, then what has been keeping him around for so long? I think a valuable exercise would be to break down what is and is not a "nice guy". From my experience, the common traits of a nice guy are listening to a girl/being a shoulder for her to cry on, helping her when you can, and offering to provide for her. Whereas the "women date jerks" stereotype seems to posit that the jerk archetype is one who does not engage in this behavior. From this rather simple guideline, we might state that those labelled "nice guys" under these terms are those who engage in courtship behavior. Those who are "jerks" do not. It seems reasonable to assume that when a person says the girl he likes is dating a jerk that it MIGHT be because he feels that he has exhibited more courtship attitudes that his opponent.

Here is where I think the break down of the courtship tradition comes in. As I stated before, there is no real tradition that has sprung up in place of the courtship model. While nobody is particularly uproarious about retiring the "men provide" aspect, there seem to be few other guidelines beyond mutual attraction. While no one is beholden to any model when it comes to selecting a mate for themselves, in this day and age (particularly in the English speaking world) it is willfully ignorant to ignore the courtship model when it is at work. Namely, if you don't want to be with a guy who wants to court you, don't accept his courtship.

But then the question still arises, why does the author of this strip (and many others besides) assume that all "nice guys" who complain about the friendzone just want to get in a girl's pants? Is it because "friendship" isn't enough for them? Firstly, as I've already stated, if someone is courting you, and you accept their courtship with no intention of letting it sway you, then you're being a terrible friend anyway, but secondly why should "more than friends" only mean the one thing? My experience has been that if a guy is willing to court a gal for any length of time in a modern society where casual sex and one night stands are normal then he seems to have already demonstrated an interest beyond a quick lay. The hurt feelings seem to come in when a fellow feels that his courtship has been accepted but disrespected, and a lady feels that her friendship is being treated as worthless. Obviously every situation is different. For instance, we have no evidence that this particular boy (in the strip) has been courting her for very long, and it's not as though we should expect her to refuse his offer of a ride when she was incapacitated. However it must also be patently obvious that a blanket accusation that all men like him are only interested in one thing is specious.

These issues must be taken on their own individual merits. A woman who wants to stay friends with a man is not always being a bitch, and a man who is upset that a woman doesn't return his affections is not always a creep out for quick sex. The levels of courtship offered versus advantage taken must be considered. The easiest choice: Be a grown up (man or woman) never let anyone who you aren't interested court you. Don't pretend that you don't know when it is happening, virtually all of the television, literature and film n the English language explores this concept in some way. You have everything you need to recognize it. If you take advantage of someone's feelings, they aren't the selfish prick. You are.

Same-Sex Marriage and Civil Unions: The Culture War

I believe that the core of the issue with same-sex marriage is that marriage as a concept is fundamentally a religious one. While there are those who believe that a government has the right and the responsibility to appropriate the property of some for the benefit of the whole, I feel that this is unconstitutional. Ultimately, I am just as strongly opposed to a government ban on same-sex marriage as I am to a government provision allowing it. As a religious rite, it is none of the government's damned business who engages in it.

Unfortunately this puts the government in a double bind. If the government passes any law, either positive or negative, defining the marriage rights of Americans (including the laws that already exist) then they are appropriating a religious concept for themselves, and infringing upon the rights of Americans to engage freely in religious expression. If they do not, then they are denying equality to a subset of Americans, and infringing upon their civil rights. While there are those who would argue that civil rights supersede religious freedoms, I feel that it is a fundamental function of democracy to prevent one person from dictating to another what is or is not important. An irreligious person may not tell a religious one that her beliefs and values are worthless and expect the government to back him up and vice versa.

Unfortunately, the best option to my mind--to eliminate all references to 'marriage' in federal law, and replace them with 'civil union', to proclaim all current legal marriages 'civil unions', and to freely allow any two persons of any gender to enter into a legally binding civil union--requires a restructuring so radical it would be a virtually impossible undertaking.

C. S. Lewis said, “Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer.
If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road."

Despite the difficulty, I think that this is the only way out of the pickle the government finds itself in. The term "culture war" has been bandied about a good deal, but I earnestly believe that if the government can find a way to provide equal civil liberties for all, while protecting the freedom of religion, then much of the "culture war" hoopla will end. Of course, there will be plenty of religious people who insist that same-sex couples never be allowed to engage in civil unions on principle, just like there will be plenty of people who insist that the government should appropriate this rite wholesale from the religions that respect and observe it, and define it for their own purposes. But on a grander scale, I think many of the warriors on both sides of the "culture war" will stand down when their freedoms and equality are no longer being threatened. At least that's what I'd like to think.

There are many Christians who I know that have said that the object of a Christian's life should be to demonstrate the compassion and love of Jesus, and not to worry about what someone else does in their own life. I agree. But I also believe that the object of every American's life is to do what they can to ensure that their nation remains a place of freedom for everyone, even those who have views and beliefs they do not share.

There are plenty of people who point to divorce rates and celebrity gimmick weddings to demonstrate their belief that the institution of marriage has no meaning, and thereby justify the federal government's appropriation of it. I would counter that there are millions of people worldwide for whom marriage is an integral and vital component of their religious expression. While these people do not have the right to dictate what others can legally do based on their own beliefs, neither can others dictate the definition and identity of their engagement in religious expression. This is why the government surrendering the concept of marriage back to the religious institutions that invented it is so important. The government must recognize any and all 'civil unions' that the populace deems by majority to be acceptable, and religions must only acknowledge the marriages that adhere to their beliefs. The two should never have become intertwined in the first place, and the first nation to go back and fix this problem, to my mind, will be the most progressive.