Tim Berners Lee is wrong. “We” don’t need a Net Magna Carta

Someone that we follow on twitter is a classic violent socialist, that also believes in depopulation, and all of the other fear based politics out there that the needy live to cling to.

Recently, this person tweeted that:

UK regulator Ofcom lobbies Brussels against net neutrality — http://bit.ly/bRdVwJ #Ofcom betrays the British public #netneutrality

Knowing that this person tweets a mix of violent socialism and important tech news related to copyright, it spurred me to finally take a close look at ‘Net Neutrality’, and lo and behold, it is Orwellian doublespeak and violent socialism.

Throwing “Net Neutrality Socialism” into the googles, we get this:

James G. Lakely: ‘Net Neutrality’ Is Socialism, Not Freedom

There you have it.

Advocates of imposing “network neutrality” say it’s necessary to ensure a “free” and “open” Internet and rescue the public from nefarious corporations that “control” technology.

Few proposals in Washington have been sold employing such deceptive language — and that’s saying something. But few public policy ideas can boast the unashamedly socialist pedigree of net neutrality.

True.

‘Net Neutrality’ is a name that is highly deceptive and a form of subtle emotional and intellectual blackmail.

When you are asked whether or not you are for or against ‘Net Neutrality’ the conjunction of these two words, both of which are beneficial in meaning separately, immediately pressure you to believe that you are for it, since everyone wants to be (and appear to be) a reasonable person.

The word ‘Net’ is short for the greatest invention since the Gutenberg press. What reasonable person could be against that?

‘Neutrality’, the opposite of being biased, is a word that conveys goodness in almost every sense; a state which journalists strive for, closely related to that new brainwashing word ‘fair’.

What they do not tell you is that ‘Net Neutrality’ is actually a sinister code word for violent socialism.

The modern Internet is a creation of the free market, which has brought about a revolution in communication, free speech, education, and commerce. New Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski apparently doesn’t like that. He stated last month the way Internet service providers manage their networks — in response to millions of individual consumer choices — is not sufficiently “fair,” “open” or “free.”

And there you have it again. The unconstitutional FCC, openly uses the new socialist programming word ‘fair’ in its push to wreck the internet, which has grown perfectly well without the help of the State, despite its origins in DARPA.

The chairman’s remedy is to claim for the FCC the power to decide how every bit of data is transferred from the Web to every personal computer and handheld device in the nation. This is exactly what the radical founders of the net neutrality movement had in mind.

This is of course, complete madness. Whatever the State touches, it ruins. The internet works by private people agreeing to route traffic through each other’s private networks. None of this has anything to do with the State.

If some large providers want to shape traffic, that is entirely their business. Its their bandwidth, their hardware and the contracts they have with their customers are private. If traffic shaping ruins the experience of the users of these knobbled internet access points, then the customers will leave in droves, to find un-shaped access points.

The free market in internet access will determine which companies survive and which do not, which style of ISP is best and which should fail.

Once again, none of this is the business of government.

“Join us now, and share the software”

The concept can be traced to an iconoclastic figure, Richard Stallman, a self-described software freedom activist who introduced the term “copyleft” in the mid-1980s. In his 2002 essay “Free Software, Free Society,” Stallman fiercely attacks the idea that intellectual property rights are one of the keystones of individual liberty, so important that patents and copyrights are affirmatively protected in the body of the Constitution.

Copyrights and Patents are in fact evil. They are not founded upon any rational basis, are a legacy idea from the age of absolute monarchy, and are a disaster for humanity on every level. This is not a matter of ideology or belief, but is a truth grounded in provable evidence based fact.

According to Stallman, “we are not required to agree with the Constitution or the Supreme Court. [At one time, they both condoned slavery.]” Like slavery, he says, copyright law is “a radical right-wing assumption rather than a traditionally recognized one.” Rebuking those who might find a Marxist flavor in his call for a “digital commons,” Stallman turns the tables, writing: “If we are to judge views by their resemblance to Russian Communism, it is the software owners who are the Communists.” […]http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/OpEd-Contributor/_Net-Neutrality_-Is-Socialism_-Not-Freedom-8410175.html

What Richard Stallman and the Free Software movement people are actually advocating are property rights in software, which all Libertarians and correctly thinking people would agree with on careful examination.

When you buy a copy of a proprietary piece of software, you do not actually own it; you own a limited license to use that software, that restricts your ability (if you are law abiding) to decompile it, share it by copying it, modify it, re sell it, or use it in a context and on hardware other than what the writer and owner of the software allows you to. On top of all that, the manufacturer disclaims any liability of any kind for anything that happens to you or your hardware as a result of you using their software.

When you download Free software on the other hand, it belongs to you. You have the right to modify it, to share it, to run it anywhere and to make money off of doing all those things.

The authors and licenses that cover Free Software respect your property rights in ways that the makers of proprietary, ‘closed’ softwares under restrictive licenses do not. You cannot be for property rights of ISPs and simultaneoously against Free Software and its advocates, and be logical at the same time.

Richard Stallman is actually for property rights, not against them in the matter of computer software. He is doing something about it, not by advocating violence against the makers of proprietary software, but by creating his own software and releasing it for free, under a license that respects your rights. This is a pure free market response to a problem, that uses voluntarism and liberty as its tools, and it has worked so spectacularly, and to such an extent, that it has become a commercial threat to the makers of closed proprietary software, causing them to lie, bribe, steal and use the violent State (much in the same way that the Net Neutrality advocates are trying to do) to destroy Free Software.

Net Neutrality is about state control of ISP’s hardware and the expense of bandwidth (physical property and cost). Intellectual Property is a separate matter.

Intellectual Property is a State granted limited monopoly on ideas, and who can profit from them. People who are against collectivism and the State must concede that Intellectual Property is a bad thing if they are to remain honest; especially after having read ‘Against Intellectual Monopoly’, which proves that Intellectual Property is damaging to the very thing that they claim it produces and protects; prosperity and the promotion of the creation of new ideas.

Now, lets take a look at what Net Neutrality actually means in practice.

You run an ISP, and have entered into private contracts with one million people. The State, at the behest of violent and ignorant socialists, passes a law saying that you may not shape your traffic on your own machines that deliver bandwidth to your customers.

Should you refuse to do what they say, a representative of the violent socialists will launch a ‘Class Action Suit‘ against you and you will be fined. If you refuse to pay the fine, you will have violent thugs arriving at your office to arrest you and haul you off to gaol.

This is the reality of what the Net Neutrality advocates are asking for; they want people who do not believe what they believe and who will not work for them to be put into gaol and to have their property confiscated by the State.

This is a despicable, evil and dastardly personal philosophy.

We tweeted to the person what we follow that if he wants ISPs not to shape traffic, he should set up a brand and standard that ISPs can conform to, ask them to join it and let people voluntarily work together for an internet where all traffic is treated the same, pointing out that Net Neutrality is government violence… Yes, all of that was compressed into 140 characters.

The response?

I’m advocating intelligent government, not violence…

Ostrich Posturing

It all sounds nice and cozy doesn’t it? “I’m a nice guy, I’m not violent, I want ‘Intelligent Government’ and ‘Net Neutrality’”… its all lies, designed to cover the inherent violence of the State and its clients.

These people are disgusting, not because they want a better world, indeed, their motivations are pure, and in person, they are nice people — they are disgusting because they are violent, and point blank refuse to face the facts and consequences of what it is they are advocating, and in the case of ‘Net Neutrality’ they are advocating theft, coercion and violence.

We know for sure that we do not need the State to keep us safe or to make the net ‘fair’ Underwriters Laboratories is a perfect example of how voluntary cooperation works better than the state. Indeed, the internet itself is proof of that.

We do not need the State to mandate more efficient light bulbs; private industry is more than capable of doing that in ways that environmentalists and politicians are not capable of imagining.

Think about it; Bitorrent is responsible for one third of all internet traffic. If ISPs start to shape traffic, there will be a mass exodus to ISPs who do not, causing one of three things to happen:

1/ the ISPs that shape traffic relenting to stem the loss of customers

They are only interested in making money. If they lose customers, they die. Its as simple as that.

2/ the ISPs that shape traffic entering into contracts with content providers, replacing lost customer revenue with fees from the media giants

This means that everyone who wants Bittorrent and unrestricted access to any service on the net will leave those ISPs that shape traffic, leaving those who want to watch corporate content.The people who want full access will get what they want, the ISPs will get what they want, new business models will emerge, new ISPs — everything will work perfectly.

3/ something unexpected

The violent Net Neutrality advocates say that new services will not be able to become successful if ISPs shape traffic; this is simply not the case. No service starts at a size that requires mass bandwidth; all startups begin by using a trickle of bandwidth, they grow slowly and organically and only when they are hugely popular begin to hit a wall bandwidth wise. In other words, as these businesses grow they have a chance to find their place in the market under the constraints of it.

Here is an example of how it would work in real life. A new service starts to become popular. This service requires bandwidth (like Soundcloud). People want to use this service, but find that their ISP is shaping traffic to and from it. The ISP has two choices; un shape traffic to the new service, or risk losing their customers.

The new service, as it grows, will suddenly find that it could have millions of voices all rooting for it with their ISPs. This kind of commercial pressure is enough to ensure that any new service that starts to become popular will have enough bandwidth to grow and potentially dominate.

Think about this also; if many smaller services get together to put pressure on ISPs, their voices could be bigger than any single growing startup.

You can sit around and come up with an infinite number of scenarios that will solve the shaping problem; the point is that_interference from the State is the worst possible solution of all solutions._

Not only is state interference not the best solution, it is also inherently immoral and violent.

If people insist on pushing for Net Neutrality, they need to acknowledge that they are indeed violent socialists.

That sort of plain speaking honesty is very important when framing any discussion about this subject. From the looks of it however, it seems that honesty about their violent tendencies is not going to be forthcoming.

And now on to Tim Berners Lee.

Tim Berners Lee has an article at Scientific American, where he says:

The world wide web went live, on my physical desktop in Geneva, Switzerland, in December 1990. It consisted of one Web site and one browser, which happened to be on the same computer. The simple setup demonstrated a profound concept: that any person could share information with anyone else, anywhere.

So, the first instance of the WWW went live on a private desktop in Geneva.

Then we get this:

In this spirit, the Web spread quickly from the grassroots up. Today, at its 20th anniversary, the Web is thoroughly integrated into our daily lives. We take it for granted, expecting it to “be there” at any instant, like electricity.

The Web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles and because thousands of individuals, universities and companies have worked, both independently and together as part of the World Wide Web Consortium, to expand its capabilities based on those principles.

[…]

The Web as we know it, however, is being threatened in different ways. Some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles. Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web. Wireless Internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. Governments—totalitarian and democratic alike—are monitoring people’s online habits, endangering important human rights.

Why should you care? Because the Web is yours. It is a public resource on which you, your business, your community and your government depend.

This leaves out some very important detail, and makes a statement that is factually incorrect.

The web evolved into what it is today because people decided to freely and voluntarily cooperate with each other, for their own ends as well as the common good that served those ends.

The web as we know it is NOT being threatened by Facebook and the other huge social-networking sites, or by traffic shaping; it is being threatened by violent socialists who think that it is ethical to steal property and capital from others so that their idea of what the web should be can be maintained.

Before I cary on, I agree that Governments — totalitarian and democratic alike, are a threat to people’s rights. Where we differ is in the understanding of what rights are, and where they come from. Rights do not come from the government, and no one has the right to steal, wether they are Tim Berners Lee or the State.

The net is not ‘yours’. The nicest way that I can put it is to say that this is a completely wrong construction. The part of the internet that belongs to you is your machine, bandwidth and your storage wherever it is. Your ability to contribute to it depends on the size of your bandwidth, storage and the processing power of your machine, all of which are your property, that no one has the right to steal from you.

The content you produce and upload to a third party site is subject to private contracts you enter into with the owners of sites you use. For example, Flickr has a contract that you have to agree with when you sign up with it. If you do not like it, you can decline their generous offer and go somewhere else or start up your own photo sharing site.

What Tim Berners Lee and the Net Neutrality people are advocating, is that your bandwidth and your computer, by virtue of being connected to the internet, somehow cease to be your property, and instantly become a part of some communist collective where you do not have any property rights, and where other people have rights to your property.

Luddites Smashing the Internets

Think about it; under Net Neutrality, you will be compelled to keep your computer on and never to turn it off, unless the government gives you permission to.

There is no difference between that, and being told that you cannot shape traffic that your clients get from you as an ISP, except in scale.

As a Skype user, you agree to route traffic through your computer as part of the Skype TOS. This voluntary sharing of your machine and bandwidth helps other Skype users make calls. What Net Neutrality is demanding, is that you may not shut down Skype, because the telephone network is a ‘public utility’ of which your computer becomes a part as soon as you download and run Skype.

Its completely absurd.

Clearly the question remains; do ISPs and individuals have property rights, or do they not? If they do, how and by what right can Tim Berners Lee and the Net Neutrality advocates call for those property rights to be suspended by the State?

Just who do these people think they are?

Moving along, does anyone remember AOL? It was a hideous walled garden pseudo internet garbage filled CDROM spewing lamer-fest. Where is AOL now? Its decline has been spectacular, because as people woke up to what AOL really was, dumbed down filtered junk, they abandoned it for the real internet of an ISP, a browser and the real internet.

This happened because the real internet grew exponentially, making AOL look like what it really was; a gaol. Word of mouse spread, and balance was restored to the force. AOL is dead and dying, their business model utterly destroyed.

The same thing is going to happen to Facebook; everyone thinks that its great now but once _social networking becomes a protocol_Facebook will die.

Rather than complaining about Facebook, software developers and standards people like Tim Berners Lee should be working on_‘protocolizing’_ social networking to make the viability of ‘the cancer that is Facebook’ a losing proposition in the long run.

All of these large companies can be superseded by other companies in an open, unregulated web; MySpace is dying as I type this, not because some socialists have determined that MySpace is too big for its boots and must be forced to ‘play nice’ but because it has been superseded by something superior. The free market is killing MySpace.

The free market in ideas and services will always improve the web; the last thing we need is socialists with their ultimate weapon, the State, raining down theft and destruction.

Its obvious to everyone that cooperating voluntarily makes the web work brilliantly; why should this be abandoned now? Why, all of a sudden, is it now necessary to get the State involved in forcing private companies and people to do what it is not in their interest to do?

We create the Web, by designing computer protocols and software; this process is completely under our control.

That is true, but Net Neutrality is not about voluntarily agreed upon protocols; its about controlling what other people do on the web by force and violence.

Openness also means you can build your own Web site or company without anyone’s approval. When the Web began, I did not have to obtain permission or pay royalties to use the Internet’s own open standards, such as the well-known transmission control protocol (TCP) and Internet protocol (IP).

This is a good thing. Once again, why now should companies have to get permission from the State to design their ISP policy? Why didn’t you run to the State when you ran the first web server and demand that government legislation control your new invention? No one would have listened to you then, but now that you have the ear of politicians because you are the man that invented the web, you are eager to abuse that position to hurt ‘our’ internets. SHAME.

In contrast, not using open standards creates closed worlds. Apple’s iTunes system, for example, identifies songs and videos using URIs that are open. But instead of “http:” the addresses begin with “itunes:,” which is proprietary. You can access an “itunes:” link only using Apple’s proprietary iTunes program. You can’t make a link to any information in the iTunes world—a song or information about a band.

And that is why people create services that are open, like Rate Your Music LastFM and all the other services out there that play nice. We do not need the State to make iTunes use “http:” instead of “itunes:”. There will come a point where iTunes dies because someone somewhere, another Bram Cohen, comes up with a protocol that shatters the way things get done now, and all of a sudden, everything changes. This WILL HAPPEN, even in a shaped internet, as I describe above. The market is a force so powerful that it can make what seems like magic happen. It can kill giants and turn midgets into giants.

And lets not forget; no one forces people to use Apple software. Apple makes very good products and software, and they offer them to you for money. In the case of iTunes, you can get it for free. If you want to destroy the walled garden created by Apple, you do not need government intervention and the violence that comes with it; you simply need to protocolize music files on the internet, or make your own iTunes alternative that is not a walled garden. People are doing this and eventually, they will be triumphant, because they are not proprietary in the protocols they use. Once again, we do not need socialism or the State to make this magic happen; people are writing the software without being told they need to do it, just like you did to create the web, without being told what to do, or asking permission from anyone.

An analogy is that the Web is like a household appliance that runs on the electricity network. A refrigerator or printer can function as long as it uses a few standard protocols—in the U.S., things like operating at 120 volts and 60 hertz. Similarly, any application—among them the Web, e-mail or instant messaging—can run on the Internet as long as it uses a few standard Internet protocols, such as TCP and IP.

Manufacturers can improve refrigerators and printers without altering how electricity functions, and utility companies can improve the electrical network without altering how appliances function. The two layers of technology work together but can advance independently. The same is true for the Web and the Internet. The separation of layers is crucial for innovation.

This isn’t a good analogy at all, but it serves to prove that governments should not be involved in selecting one technology over another.

Tesla and Edison were both vying for the State license to supply electricity to homes in the USA. Edison won the blessing of the State and Tesla lost. I do not know which was the better pick, but what is sure is that the people who gave Edison the nod didn’t know anything about how electricity generation and distribution works or would change america.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=tesla+vs+edison

The situation now is that AC electricity is a near ubiquitous utility that is licensed by the State. You cannot generate it and distribute it to millions of people because there is a well entrenched, state monopoly on generation. This has caused terrible and wasteful stagnation in the evolution of transmission technology. Electricity is very expensive and becoming more expensive, the fuels used to generate it limited in type. All of this is a result of the State interfering in energy distribution through the ‘Department of Energy’ and similar bureaucratic bodies world-wide.

Imagine if electricity generation and distribution were left entirely to the free market. Electricity would now be as cheap as tap water. Imagine what mobile phones would be like if the government was in charge of delivering the ‘right to a mobile phone’ to every citizen. We would still be using huge briefcase style phones; like the Lada of the old USSR.

This is exactly what will happen to the internet if Net Neutrality is made law. There will be a massive consolidation of ISPs until there are maybe twelve for the entire world. Under these twelve ISPs all content will be served, and to which all people and devices will be connected.

This will bring about the nighmare totalitarian web that Tim Berners Lee fears so much. The State will have its tentacles in every ISP, by law, and there will be nothing anyone can do to stop it, and no alternative or choice. There will be massive barriers to entry if you want to become an ISP, which will involve traffic monitoring equipment (that you will have to pay for) and heaven knows what, keeping out the renegades and the innovative.

All of this is the complete opposite of people freely choosing one ISP over another, and people freely volunteering to provide services and software to each other.

Which world is it that these Net Neutrality people want to create? The totalitarian one, or the free one?

Net neutrality maintains that if I have paid for an Internet connection at a certain quality, say, 300 Mbps, and you have paid for that quality, then our communications should take place at that quality. Protecting this concept would prevent a big ISP from sending you video from a media company it may own at 300 Mbps but sending video from a competing media company at a slower rate. That amounts to commercial discrimination.

No, there is no such thing as ‘commercial discrimination’.

If that were all Net Neutrality was about, then there would be no problem and no need for new legislation; what Tim Berners Lee just described is not ‘commercial discrimination’ but failure to fulfil a contract.

If I contract for bandwidth of a certain quality, and do not get it because my ISP is slyly traffic shaping, that is plain fraud. There are more than enough laws covering fraud on the statute books, and in fact, people who hold that there should be a small state accept that prosecuting fraud it is one of the few legitimate functions of a state.

Once again, the market can solve this problem, as I describe above. You do not like the policy your ISP is offering to you?Change ISPs. Your ISP is defrauding you? Change ISPs or sue them. No new legislation is needed for any of this.

A neutral communications medium is the basis of a fair, competitive market economy, of democracy, and of science.

Heavens above NO.

The internet is not ‘fair‘ and that socialist programming word makes me and every decent person SICK TO THEIR STOMACHS.

And don’t even start me on ‘democracy‘. No one has the right to vote to steal other people’s property.

As for science, science is a way of making sense of the world through the Scientific Method; it is not a religion, a political philosophy, a consensus driven methodology, majority rule group think or fair.

Debate has risen again in the past year about whether government legislation is needed to protect net neutrality. It is. Although the Internet and Web generally thrive on lack of regulation, some basic values have to be legally preserved.

What’s wrong with these people?

And this is the greatest fail, perhaps of all time.

The inventor of the most important technology the world has ever seen, a destroyer of tyranny, a literal liberator of man in every sense, breaking down barriers between people, facilitating cooperation, communication, commerce, copulation and greatly magnifying all the things that man does and thinks…. wants his invention to be crippled.

Government legislation is NOT needed to make people behave like good human beings. The basic values of the internet; sharing, openness, cooperation, cannot be legislated; you cannot force people to be good, and certainly threatening them with violence and state invasion is not a way to make people work together for the common good.

The growth and importance of the web is more proof that people can build great things together without the government being involved in any way, in case more proof was needed, and it seems that it is, even for the man who created the web.

Berners Lee goes on in the article to complain about ‘snooping’. Like I say above, the State having its nose in every ISPs business will facilitate surveillance, on the pretext that they are ensuring ‘fairness’ (Violently enforced theft of property aka Net Neutrality).

Pity the poor old ISPs.

On the one hand, they have the totalitarian Police State forcing them to pay for the infrastructure collect and store the private communications of their users, violating them, ‘for the common good’, and on the other hand, they have the violent Net Neutrality socialists pushing them to deliver bandwidth to their standards ‘for the common good’.

They are caught between a rock and a hard place, and both have the same thing in common.

A $10 lunch in China Town, Cantonese duck, rice and other nice things…. ↴