Jack Shafer
moncler mens jackets If the latest installment in the long running net neutrality debate has rendered you mentally exhausted, allow me to approach the future of the Internet argument from a less draining direction. You needn worry about mastering such tech and regulatory topics as Title II regulations, peering, and fast lanes.
The net neutrality crowd fundamental worries can be boiled down to this: They believe that if the Federal Communications Commission leaves the Internet largely unregulated, the leading Internet service providers like Comcast https://www.moncleroutletmall.com and Verizon will take advantage of their growing powers to 1) fleece customers and websites (and services) with new charges and fees; 2) reduce commercial innovation and competition by ghettoizing new sites and services that won pay their new tolls; and 3) censor content cheap moncler coats for women that doesn serve their corporate masters. The wild, wonderful Web that we roamed for the past two decades will be subdivided by the cruel, corporate gatekeepers into millions and millions of tiny veal stalls. And the great Internet dream will die.
Few who have held an account with Comcast, Time Warner, or other major Internet service providers would be surprised if these companies behaved in dictatorial and choice limiting ways. They entered the Internet business to make money, not build a techno utopia for you. They as ruthless as you when you buy a house.
Although the Internet cheap moncler service providers have yet to string the Web pasture with barbed wire veal stalls or price competing Web sites moncler coats for men and services off the Internet, the worry remains that they might if unimpeded. The worry is not irrational: Big Internet service providers have potential leverage over their customers, other Web womens moncler jackets economy businesses, and the market for ideas simply because there is little competition. If you don like Comcast terms, you usually can turn to another broadband provider in your market, because there isn one.
And whose fault moncler jackets is that? Well, that would be the government fault. It regulated the cable moncler jackets outlet online TV business moncler outlet uk with a heavy hand since discount moncler outlet its infancy, giving monopoly rights to operators Official Moncler Outlet to string cities with coaxial cable. Those policies have been relaxed, so now it easier for a new provider?like telephone companies or fiber upstarts moncler outlet like Google?to create broadband competition. But the market power of entrenched cable operators and the remaining regulatory hurdles still deter new entrants, suppressing the sort buy moncler jackets toronto of competition that would make broadband companies more mindful of the needs of customers.
moncler outlet sale The most ardent net neutrality advocates (President Barack Obama is in the process of becoming one), believe that broadband moncler jackets canada is so vital to moncler jackets for women life, politics, and commerce that it must be regulated as vigorously as public utilities like water, electric power, and natural gas, with regulators determining price and terms of service. But as Berin Szoka writes, regulation is a self fulfilling prophecy: It assumes competition is impossiblend keeps it that way. that the technology behind moncler outlet usa broadband service is nowhere near as static as that for water and electric power, Szoka suggests that policies that encourage competition between Internet service providers instead of carving out monopoly rules will produce the best results. I lucky enough to live in one such market, where Verizon pits its Fios service against Comcast, giving me both price and service leverage.
cheap moncler coats An unspoken premise behind so much of the net neutrality debate is instead of allowing the market to distribute bandwidth?an unusually scarce resource the government must intervene to make sure that it is allocated The fallacy here is that available bandwidth is moncler coats for cheap a function of technological progress and built out infrastructure, and we haven even begun to approach moncler outlet mall the technological limits of how much bandwidth we can produce and distribute. To pinch a phrase from an old column of mine, more capitalismot lessharts the path to abundance. Bandwidth abundance will help reduce the chances of Comcast censoring the Web or blocking the next Facebook from happening.
The fact that Comcast is currently shaking down big customers like Netflix to prioritize the transmission of terabyte after terabyte of movies to viewers is a good sign. It signals to the market that bandwidth is a valuable commodity, and that money is to be made in producing more of it. Postal Service charge a premium for expedited delivery, so why should it be evil for Comcast to charge the same to move Netflix goods? If the FCC insists moncler jackets mens on butting in to allocate bandwidth more the market will logically read this intervention as a signal that politics and not cash determine how bandwidth is distributed, and the growth of broadband will stall. In fact, it already has. Obama saber rattling this week caused AT to
cheap moncler sale Instead of erecting new barriers to investment and competition, policymakers would be wiser to moncler coats cheap eliminate them by encouraging new Internet service providers to string cable on utility poles. And don forget the over the air Internet. My friend Thomas W. Hazlett, former chief economist for the FCC, proposes that we use auctions to reallocate underused frequencies, now controlled by TV stations, to mobile operators and thereby increase phone and Internet competition.
moncler sale outlet Because my crystal ball has gone missing, I don know with any certainty what the Internet will look like in 10 years if we encourage new Internet entrants and more moncleroutletmall competition instead of giving the FCC the powers that President Obama desires. But I would guess that with proper economic incentives and the continued application of a light regulatory touch, engineers will devise new technologies that will make our current Internet bandwidth look as pathetic as our old dial up services.
cheap moncler Let not fight over the pieces of pie. Let moncler outlets uk make the pie bigger.
moncler outlet The pie is on me. BYO coffee. I would love to charge a fee to readers of my Twitter feed, but who would pay? Sign up for email notifications of new cheap moncler jackets outlet Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns.
buy moncler jackets PHOTO:A NBN Co worker arranges fibre optic cables used in the National Broadband Network moncler outlet kids in west Sydney July 11, 2013. REUTERS/Daniel MunozStop or I write! Why cops shouldn fake being reporters.comments
moncler outlet store Tue, 11 Nov 2014 00:06:07 +0000Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Moncler Factory Outlet James B. Comey waved his truncheon at the New York Times last week in a concise letter of protest addressed to the moncler chicago paper editor. The FBI, denounced in a Nov. 1 Times editorial for impersonating an Associated Press reporter in a 2007 Seattle area case, had nothing to apologize for, insisted Comey. While the impersonation was he wrote, it was still proper, appropriate, and lawful.
cheap moncler jackets In the case, a high school had been the target of a series of anonymous bomb threats. As was recently revealed, police enlisted the FBI, and an moncler jackets on sale FBI agent pretending to be an AP reporter began communicating over the Internet with a 15 year old who was suspected of sending the threats. The deception did not end there, however. The FBI composed a fake AP story savvy student holds Timberline High School hostage, which the FBI fake AP reporter moncler outlet location sent to the suspect and asked him to review for fairness. The kid moncler outlet woodbury clicked on a link in the story, the link surreptitiously loaded software onto his computer, the software telegraphed the computer location back to the FBI, and he was arrested.
cheap moncler outlet Comey allowed himself some wiggle room in his letter to the Times. The journalistic impostor ruse would require higher approval if proposed today, he wrote. But Comey didn vow to ban the practice completely, which means there a really long shot that the last reporter who phoned or emailed you wasn a reporter, he was an FBI agent. Every other big city chief of police and podunk sheriff who read Comey letter probably banged his desk in approval and started to think of hard to solve crimes they could crack if only their detectives could go undercover as moncler jackets cheap journalists. Whenever police officers masquerade as moncler coats for women journalists, they introduce doubt into the public mind moncler jackets kids about whether the next person purporting to be a journalist is moncler jacket online actually a police officer or the stories in the news are really bait set by police. It won take too many acts of imposture like the FBI in Seattle before the credibility of the press and the willingness of news sources to speak to reporters begins to fall, plugging the flow of information that nourishes a free society. Impersonators also expose genuine journalists to unnecessary physical dangers when violent sources have reason to think the nosy parkers asking them questions aren reporters, but cops. Impersonation can also boomerang moncler outlet ny on police: If a violent source unmasks a fake reporter as a cop, he might retaliate in his fury.
monlcer down jackets As best we know, police impersonation of journalists has become rare in the United States in recent years. Newark police seized a news crew video camera in 2000 when an alleged hostage taker demanded to talk to a TV audience. In a 2001 police moncler coats for kids standoff in Texas, a detective borrowed a press photographer camera and notepad to talk to a murder suspect who requested a conversation with a reporter. The practice was much more common in the 1960s and early 1970s, when police sought to spy on political activists. A 1971 study found Army intelligence agents to be the grossest offenders. They posed as cameramen at the 1969 presidential inauguration, obtained press credentials to monitor H. Rap Brown moncler jacket outlet and Stokely Carmichael during the 1967 riots, and investigated the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Across the country, police monitored civil rights and anti war demonstrations while posing as journalists, sometimes even carrying press credentials issued by the police. The FBI and other agencies also paid unscrupulous journalists to work as part time informants, the study adds, contaminating journalism by turning reporters into agents of the state.
moncler outlet online The American press is probably a more delicate institution than we like to admit. It survives as a credible outpost only as long as people regard it as independent of government power and influence, which is one of the reasons reporters seem so often to be picking fights with office holders and government agencies. Any blurring discount moncler jackets of the line between government and press can only benefit the government at the expense of the press and the dilution of the best law moncler jackets outlet the country has, the First moncler coats sale Amendment. If a law Discount Moncler Coats officer tells you that his force has exhausted every means of solving a terribly important, life threatening case and he must dress a moncler coats outlet few cops in journalist garb to crack it, quote him the famous line from Orson Welles A Touch of Evil: policeman job is only easy in a police state. My Twitter feed does moncler outlet store a good cop impersonation. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns.
moncler sale PHOTO:FBI Director James Comey testifies before the Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on to the Homeland, on Capitol Hill moncler outlet canada in Washington Nov. 14, 2013. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas.
