Using Government to Stop Competition

Think government is good? Think laws protect you? Better think again. Government today does more harm than good; government isn't out to protect you. Government protects those with money and power to lobby and influence the passage of laws that stop fair play, competition, and consumer choice --

Slow cable Internet service providers lobby to kill local broadband | BGR: " . . . Ars Technica’s Jon Brodkin writes that that ISPs have successfully lobbied legislatures in 20 different states to pass laws that make it more difficult or even impossible for individual municipalities to build their own broadband networks. What’s more, ISPs apparently aren’t satisfied with their current winnings and are pushing for fresh restrictions in two of the three states where Google has just happened to launch its Google Fiber services...."

Throw the bums out!

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FTC and FCC asleep at the switch: ISPs injecting ads onto websites

In this era of privacy rights, copyright, and other regulations--how can the FTC and FCC allow this infringement of both users' and web publishers' rights? Based on the following story, and known abuses of video streams by Time Warner and other ISPs, we need stringent, effective regulation of all ISPs by the FTC and FCC to guarantee a free flow of internet data, without interruption or intervention or other manipulation by any ISP. ISPs are just carriers and should now be subject to harsh regulation by Washington after these antics.

How a banner ad for H&R Block appeared on apple.com—without Apple’s OK | Ars Technica: Update: CMA Communications' Terms of Service now contains a section on "Internet Advertising" that is "effective as of April 4, 2013"—a day after Henkel's reddit thread and the same day that I asked them questions about the practice. The section says, in part, that R66T will use a "digital layer which enables aggregated, curated, and created multimedia content and digital information presented in many digital formats" for "the purpose of inserting Information that is informational, promotional, entertaining, location-based, and generates advertising and sponsorship revenue for R66T and CMA." R66T's system is called BlueSky, and CMA has "entered into a contract with R66T to provide the services." (read more at link above)

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