> keeping the government away from internet is a good thing
See, I would have agreed more with this if most of our internet infrastructures were not controlled by three megacorps with more power than many small to medium sized economies in the world. As it stands, the only valid option is to fight fire with fire.
If anti competitive corporations are the problem, why not pursue these monopolistic companies using the existing anti-trust laws? Why does there need to be a new law with the FCC involved?
No, likely in anticipation of the rules being changed back.
Better question for you. Why did ISPs attempt to fake support for repealing Net Neutrality [0][1], as well as spend money lobbying Congress? You'll note in that article that there were also fake comments in support of Net Neutrality, apparently mostly generated by one individual, but many, many fake comments against it from ISPs that even used real people's identities [2].
These aren't the actions a company takes if they don't have incentive.
No, because California and 12 other states, as well as quite a few local governments, passed their own net neutrality laws. The larger, national ISPs were pretty hamstrung: they couldn't really follow the NN laws in the places where they existed, but then impose non-neutral terms in the places where they didn't, without running into lots of trouble.
A federal rule is good, though, to harmonize things, even if the state/local laws were more or less already doing the job.
I think the point the person you're replying to was trying to make is that the line drawn between things the government should have a hand in vs. things they should leave alone is fairly arbitrary, and is a matter of opinion. So saying the government should be kept away from the internet is just one place to draw the line, and it's perhaps interesting to know of other places where someone might draw that line, in order to get a baseline, and determine if it's even worth trying to have a productive discussion with them about government regulation.
The way you positioned the argument is helpful and conducive to a conversation. Just throwing out scenarios and expecting me to derive meaning isn't productive.
The internet was explicitly privatized and deregulated in 1995 by the Clinton Administration.
It has flourished under private sector control without net neutrality. A 30 year track record of success, yet people are still clambering to have it back under government control.
The American libertarian dream confuses me because unlike libertarians abroad (where it's a synonym with "anarchist") they stop with political authority, and seem to have no issue with corporate authority. The ISP business in the USA is very clearly an oligopoly with the top players colluding. Not sure how a rugged individual is supposed to fight back against that.
Fighting back against powerful corporations does happen, though usually over long time scales.
Plenty of the most powerful corporations a few generations ago are weak or nonexistent today. Their abuses of power, though problematic, are typically less egregious than governmental abuses of power.
Even at an individual level, I can simply withdraw my support by not buying their products or services.
Whereas fighting the government - or even trying to withdraw support - typically leads to imprisonment or death.
The difference between political authorities and corporate authorities is that the former can conscript you, tax you, send you to jail, seize your assets, etc.
The latter can affect you insofar as you enter a contract.
There is no "opt-out" of a political authority. "No thanks, I'm better off without your services."
The usual claim in right libertarian circles is that monopolies only arise because they can bribe the government into passing laws that enable them to exist.
The usual claim in right-libertarian circles is that it is only possible for monopolies to arise through government action (bribery is sometimes a means to encourage that action, but its not always intentional or that kind of specific corruption, but it is, in most libertarian explanations, always government action.)
And for this purpose, “government action” excludes protection of what the libertarian in question thinks of as proper property rights, which almost dogmatically have no adverse consequences.
There exists already anti-trust laws to deal with monopolies.
Why does there need to be another new law that, instead of punishing the monopolistic companies, gives them the right to maintain their monopolies as long as they promise not to discriminate on filtering their traffic?
Why can't the government pursue these literal monopolies using the DOJ with existing laws?
Yep, the Peter Thiel school of thought. But people like that tend to not stay libertarian in any meaningful sense for long; to quote Thiel himself, "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible". That's how you get neo-reactionaries, basically.
You only get neo-reactionaries out of people that define their freedom as including their abilities to coerce others, and then get frustrated that said "freedom" is being impinged. They think they're morally right because they've defined away the coercion.
Personally, around the time the whole Unqualified Reservations / NRx thing was starting up, I considered myself a libertarian with more rightist sympathies. Reading UR and its classification of left versus right is actually what pushed me back into seeing that my philosophy is more aligned with the left. Axiomatic framing and fundamentalism simply doesn't work (cf Gödel). Systems need to be judged on their effective results regardless of their implementations' terminology.
The problem with right libertarianism, IMO, is that private property rights (as opposed to personal property / "right to that which you're using") broadly necessitate coercion. The notion of abstract ownership of, say, a piece of land that you have never even visited in your life and that you do not currently occupy - which is necessary to e.g. lease it to someone for actually to live on it or otherwise do something useful with it, and then collect rent from them for that use - requires coercive force to prevent people from just using it without paying said rent to you. This is also why any realistic model of a right libertarian society requires government large enough to provide this coercion as a service.
How exactly do you define a piece of land being occupied in your argument? Your example is obviously clear cut. But what about the 'extra' area of a residential lot not actually holding a house or otherwise used for much? Or unused rooms of a house, for that matter?
Doesn't that still require your definition of coercion to prevent my neighbor from using it for what he wants? Or to prevent a new party moving in and setting up their own shelter there?
To me, the right libertarian conception of property rights is not the problem per se. It's when that is taken as an axiomatic framework and claimed to justify all the emergent behavior that happens on top of it.
libertarians are a subgroup of classical liberalism; limited government and socially liberal, or at least the right to live as one wants within reason in a society. Anarchists, at least to Americans, have so many subgroups I don't even know where to start, it always seems completely watered down to me other than the "no central government" part.
> libertarians are a subgroup of classical liberalism
No, they aren’t. There is some overlap between “libertarians” and groups from left to right (in the modern sense) that are grounded primarily in classical liberalism, and those include the bulk of what tend to get labeled “libertarians” in America (which are mostly the center-to-right subset of the classical liberal subset of libertarians.)
But “libertarian” also encompasses anarchists, libertarian socialists, and a number of other left-libertarian ideologies that are not particularly grounded in what would usually be regarded as classical liberalism (most of them are grounded in newer philosophies which could reasonably be viewed as later developments from or reactions against – but not in a reverse direction – classical liberalism.)
It's just another system of control. Temporarily embarrassed millionaires and all that. And once the desire for freedom has been transmuted into support for corporate authoritarianism, the money flows and the political hacks get to work shoring up the platform for the sponsors.
I don't think 'libertarian' has to be synonymous with 'anarchist', but US libertarianism desperately needs an analog of anarchism-without-adjectives and to drop the axiomatic-fundamentalist approach that ends up fooling so many into supporting authoritarianism. Coercion is not some binary thing, but rather a matter of degree based on power differentials.
If you made a Venn diagram of self-proclaimed libertarian’s beliefs, the center would be empty. That is the practical definition of libertarian in today’s world.
Could you not lay this same criticism at the feet of the other political parties as well? Due to the way plurality voting works, the incentive of each party is to be as large as possible (at the expense of group consistency), and the incentive of each individual is to align themselves with only one party (at the expense of accurately expressing all of one's views).
