MINE IS

He almost makes believe in a functional government of the people...almost.

Yaweh bless this man.

Yes.

I love Franken, but he's wrong to think that his crusade against right-wing radio somehow applies here. The tiered-by-domain internet is an old bogeyman that isn't even feasible (were it not for draconian copyright laws) but is going to lead to shitty legislation just the same.

What we need: guarantees that packets will not get dropped or deprioritized because of location or content. Like common carriage, but with certain kinds of innocent traffic shaping allowed. Like, you can slow down bittorrent, but not when the network is way under capacity, not because the file is named "Twilight," and definitely not by forging packets.

We we need: abolition of present and future three-strikes copyright infringement laws. If internet communication counts as free speech, then how could someone lose that "right"? There are good law-enforcement reasons for cutting off someone's internet access, pirating episodes of Lost is not one of them. (By the way, I am not ok with filesharing from a moral standpoint, it is still shitty.)

What we don't need: internet version of the fairness doctrine.

This is about the rights of amateur content producers vs the rights of aggregators and professional producers, not the d/l speed of NBC shows and Fox articles. Those are particular consumer products and really, who gives a shit. It is about the hurdles that I have to jump through to write my own articles and make my own shows. Schools now make students submit papers to software that judges the likelihood of plagiarism. What if blogs had to do that?* What if Turner-or Murdoch-owned blogs got to skip that, because they lobbied for a law that grandfathered them in?

*Yeah, sounds silly right? Except it's what happens to YouTube videos. I myself am fond of saying "it's their servers, so their rules" but when they're the only game in town we are going to need some higher standards in place.

I work with a guy who still lives with his dad. His dad is a auto mechanic. Said guy goes on and on about how he is a republican, and hates Franken (we live in MN). When asked why, his only repeat answers are "he supports health care" , "he cost us money prolonging a race he lost".

I show him stuff like this, and you can see him tune out 10 seconds in then just talk about how he hates Franken.