[GRLUG] new Comcast mail blocking?

[John-Thomas Richards]

On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 02:17:16PM -0500, Tim Schmidt wrote:
> > I agree it's stupid, but it's not the same thing as draconian new laws.
> > Censorship is what *governments* do, not businesses.  If I own a radio
> > station and I don't want to play any songs about drunken brawls in bars,
> > that ain't censorship.  It's my business and I choose which products to
> > offer and in what manner to offer them.  If the government tells me I
> > cannot play songs about drunken brawls in bars, that is censorship and
> > completely unacceptable.  As much as I dislike what Comcast is doing,
> > it's their business.  I could always get DSL or U-Verse.
> 
> This logic fails when the business you are talking about is a
> government-sanctioned monopoly / duopoly.

I love competition in business.  I hate the notion of nationalizing
businesses (especially the Big 3 auto companies).  I dislike the idea of
the government bailing out any business.  I strongly support free market
economics.  The government should not have given massive tax
breaks/incentives to companies for the laying of coax or fiber or copper
or good ol' interweb tubes.  But the fact is Comcast is free (and should
remain so) to offer whatever services they want to offer, in the manner
they want to offer them.  I think blocking any ports and preventing me
from hosting a server with the bandwidth for which I pay is a really,
really dumb idea.  I recognize that the alternatives are limited for
most people (though I would argue that we're really just talking about
discrepancies in bandwidth, to wit, DSL speeds vs. cable speeds vs.
dial-up speeds and not in actual choice).  If I had the only radio
station on this side of the state, the government should have no right
to tell me what music to play.  Even if Comcast was the only ISP
available, the government should not be able to tell it how to run its
business.

The actual point I was trying to make, however, is that businesses
making business decisions (the merit of those decisions notwithstanding)
is not in the same category as government censorship or government civil
rights abuses.  I was not trying to argue whether Comcast is or should
or shouldn't be a government-sponsored monopoly.  Because it is a
privately-held (even if publically-traded) business, it can make
whatever decisions it wants to make.  That's not draconian.
-- 
john-thomas
------
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the
argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
William Pitt, British prime-minister (1759-1806)