Kagan and Sunstein Aim to Censor Free Speech: Web, Books, Radio

Sunstein, Kagan, Rush ^ | May 18th | Rush

[bamahead]

I’ll tell you what’s seductive about it - They like their BitTorrent downloads (for whatever reasons) and don’t want to see ISP have the right to throttle these back simply because they’re literally killing their networks.

THAT is the core concern of 98% of Net ‘Neutrality’ proponents. I know, because I work with about two dozen ‘advocates’, and this is their sole reason.

Quite a small price they’re willing to trade for your liberty, isn’t it?

[bamahead]

Well, DUH. If I pay for a 5MB connection, of course the guy who sold it to me doesn't have any right to throttle it back, any more than a butcher has a right to put his thumb on the scale when he sells me a pound of meat.

That guy has the right to do whatever it says in the contract that you agreed to when you established service with him. He may have sold you a 5MB capable circuit, but that doesn't mean he can't throttle what comes across it, if that's specified in your service terms that he can.

Step back for a second and ask yourself - considering that there are dozens of national ISP's, and several completely Wi-Fi based ISP's (like Clear Networks) which are picking up market share rapidly. If the big dogs really start heavy throttling of their traffic at the consumer level, do you actually think a competitor is not going to compete with that by offering 100% unfettered service? Even if the big dogs throttle specific traffic at the backbone level, there will even be a backbone provider who will not choose that business model, and who will see not going that route as a competitive advantage.

You seem very apt to bring the government in to solve a problem which is practically a case study waiting to happen in how the free market works. Why do you really feel that Government will serve the interests of the people if given this enormous regulation power?

[opentalk]

btt

[Halfmanhalfamazing]

(from the link, before it disappears)

=========Cass Sunstein was hired by Elena Kagan for the Harvard Law faculty, and in 2008 she said of Cass Sunstein, “Cass Sunstein is the preeminent legal scholar of your time,” and you just heard the Cass Sunstein audio sound bite about net neutrality and he’s a big pusher of this negative versus positive rights version of the Constitution.==========

========”While it isn’t always fair to ascribe personally to solicitors general the positions they argue in court on the government’s behalf, it is fair if the arguments they use in court echo ones they made in private practice. Ms. Kagan’s record suggests her personal views match her solicitor arguments. In a 1996 University of Chicago Law Review article, she argued that speech restrictions are allowable if the government’s ‘motive’ is acceptably nonideological. In dense academic prose, Ms. Kagan openly mused about the merits of ‘redistribution of expression.’==========