DISQUS

Hey Steve,

You should probably specify that this is Warner Music that did the takedown, not Warner Bros. Warner Bros is the movie studio, which no longer has any connection to Warner Music...

Mark,

I respectfully disagree. These rules that Culberson and you are complaining about are ALREADY in existence. It forbids Congressmen from using ANY commercial website to send out a message. The letter here is an attempt to loosen those rules. It doesn't go far enough, but it is not, as you claim, an attempt to make the restrictions worse.

Culberson is already breaking the rules by posting on Twitter.

The problem is the existing rules, which this is an attempt to loosen -- not these new rules.

The letter DOES NOT as you say, increase enforcement.

Mike

Mark,

I respect you and your reporting, but I'm afraid on this one you're just wrong. First off, I'm not being blinded by my bias. I am not a Democrat nor a liberal, so I don't see what makes you assume that my politics has any impact here.

The letter in question was clearly designed to loosen EXISTING rules. In other words, it's to make the situation better, not worse. It has nothing to do with Culberson's use of Twitter, but was supposed to FIX the issue with Congressional Reps not being allowed to use YouTube.

You have badly misread the letter, and bought into Culberson's false interpretation of it.

Mike

Hi there,

While it's always great to see Techdirt mentioned somewhere, I'm at a loss as to how Brijit is like Techdirt in any way.

Brijit looks cool, but it looks completely different to what we're doing with Techdirt. We don't pay people to write abstracts for public consumption -- we pay experts to provide detailed and in-depth analysis for private consumption by companies.

Am I missing something?

Mike

Well, lucky for you, part of the value of the Insight Community will be the *community* aspect of it... so the more the merrier. Maybe we'll even let each of you play opposing characters in future imaginary dialogs. Who knows, maybe version 2.0 will let you guys do ajax-based puppet shows as well... ;)

Hey Whit,

While we cringe a bit at being included or compared in any way to something like PayPerPost, glad to see you like what we're working on, and can't wait to see you sign up as the community's official asspatent expert...

Mike

Funny that you say that in response to a post on Techdirt that totally rips apart the telcos arguments as being totally bogus. It's pointing out all the lies and dishonest statements in the Chicago Tribune editorial I see you wrote about elsewhere as if it was a *good* argument.

I'm against net neutrality legislation, as you are, but I actually find the telcos are being a LOT more dishonest in this debate.

You keep saying the internet is under stress but there's little evidence that is true. As George points out, VoIP is a very low bandwidth intensive app. There are questions as to whether it could use some QoS, but to say that it's a problem is silly. As far as I can tell, your argument is that BitTorrent is a problem. BitTorrent is only a problem if the telcos artficially limit bandwidth capacity. It's a problem they're creating on their own.

Meanwhile your claims that Google et al want "free reign" are so laughable I wonder why it's even worth responding. Would you like to pay Google's bandwidth bill? You think Google would be buying up so much dark fiber when they get such a "free ride" from the telcos?

Finally, while I agree that the idea that telcos would censor a website are silly, it's not quite as easy to dismiss as you've stated. The CEOs of AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth have all very publicly stated that they would consider blocking certain websites if they aren't willing to pay extra. So, you say it's far from reality, but the telcos have all suggested it's in their plans.

I agree that it's not likely to happen, mainly because the backlash would be extreme, but it's not quite as ridiculous as you state. The bigger concern is degrading or blocking other services, such as VoIP or video in favor of their own. *That* seems very likely.