[GRLUG] new Comcast mail blocking?

[Tim Schmidt]

On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 3:01 PM, John-Thomas Richards <jtr at jrichards.org> wrote:
> 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).

I suspected this card would get played, and I respectfully submit that
since the speed of a given connection effectively determines _what_
that connection can be used for - not just how long you sit waiting
for an ISO to download - a fast connection capable of video
conferencing, VoIP, etc is inherently a _different_ thing from a slow
connection which is not so capable.  i.e. TV is different from radio.
You're arguing that we shouldn't complain about the monopolization of
the TV frequencies because we can always just read a newspaper.
Sorry...  significant classes of data _just_don't_fit_ in a newspaper.
 Ditto dialup.

> 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.

It _is_ when the government doesn't allow competition.  A private
business can be every bit as much an arm of the government as a local
/ state / federal agency.

--tim