[ale] [OT] Net Monopolies (was AT&T DSL vs RoadRunner cable broadband)

[Sean C. McCord]

On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 01:30:19PM -0500, Jim Popovitch wrote:
> And all this rant has what to do with ALE?  I have no issues with
> folks furthering their political/social/sexual/religious asperations,
> as long as they do it in the appropriate venue.

To be fair, this thread is labeled with a nice, big OT.

Also, though, such things do bear greatly on the Linux
community.  I don't really think discussions about the problems of
regulation, protectionism, corruption and collusion involving technical
companies and government policies, and, of all things, monopolies, are
inappropriate discussions for Linux-related mailing lists.

No, they are not directly related to ALE, but they are on the periphery,
which is why this thread is marked OT.

That said, this line could easily develop into a flame war, 
particularly with such emotion-loaded terms as "dubya" and
"Awful Telephone & Telegraph") in use.

> On 2009-02-10, aaron <aaron at pd.org> wrote:
> > On 2009, Feb, 09, , at 11:49 AM, Jim Popovitch wrote:
> >
> >> On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 11:19, Jeff Lightner <jlightner at water.com>
> >> wrote:
> >>> It doesn't matter what the rules are.   Awful Telephone &
> >>> Telegraph (as
> >>> well as most other ILECs) ignored them and the FCC under Dubya let
> >>> them
> >>> get away with it.  As an apparent quid pro quo they went ahead and
> >>> did
> >>> illegal call data gathering for the NSA.  A spineless Democratic
> >>> congress later passed a law preventing prosecution.
> >>
> >> Oh geeze.   Can't you keep this crap on just digg and slashdot?
> >
> > Corruption of governmental oversight and destruction of our commonwealth
> > through corporate influence peddling and monopoly political graft is as
> > much a part of the failures of internet distribution and technology
> > access in this country as anything in the purely technical domain, so
> > commentary on the corporatist controlled political systems has merit,
> > especially in light of the manufactured global economic crisis.
> > The comments being criticized above may be overly generalized, but they
> > have some truth at their core and some remote bearing on the thread.
> > (At the least, they are a lot less of crap and a lot more on topic than
> > discussions of radiator fluids).
> >
> > In any case, we certainly don't need any censorship to sustain
> > desperate,
> > knee jerk defenses for the death throes of the disastrous and globally
> > failed mythology of "free market", "invisible hand" political
> > economics or
> > the totalitarian, elitist, crisis driven, war machine, police state
> > torture
> > regimes these economic policies have invariably fostered and
> > entrenched for
> > decades. The only invisible hand in the radical right wing Friedman
> > fascism
> > experiment is the one that's been choking democracy and human rights to
> > death in every single nation that it has infected in the past 60 years.

--
Sean C. McCord
scmlist at cycoresys.com