Tel Jiberish

Net Neutrality is a deceptive term designed to convince non-technical people that the government is on their side,…for a change.

Net Neutrality is a form of fascism.  Fascism differs from Communism in one relevant particular:  Communism stresses government ownership of all means of production, Fascism leaves production in private hands, but attempts to control it in every way as though they owned it.

The argument goes that cable and phone companies should not be permitted to decide what you can see and what you can’t.  And if that was the truth of the issue, then I’d be all for Net Neutrality.  But the truth is more subtle than that.

When we say “what you can see”, we aren’t talking about news sites, blogs, conservative/liberal, religious/secular content.  Net Neutrality has no bearing at all on the OPINION of any content.  What it attempts to regulate is the SOURCE and SPEED of that content.  I don’t mean the SOURCE “or” SPEED, but the SOURCE AND SPEED.

If Comcast or Bellsouth (cable internet companies) offers a subscription movie service that competes with Amazon Prime, Hulu, VidAngel or some other service, then Comcast wants to give priority to those customers watching movies/shows on the Comcast movie service over the Hulu or Amazon service.  This is done through a technology called QoS or Quality of Service.  If you have a fancy home router, you probably have the same ability as Comcast, just with coarser-grained controls.  Gamers typically up the priority of the UDP protocol or Gaming protocols to have less choppy gaming experiences.  Users that stream audio/video often could prioritize that traffic over, say, incremental, cloud-based backups that are less time sensitive.  Who wants a choppy viewing experience, right?

And virtually all content in question is Video.  No one cares about web pages loaded over the HTTP or HTTPS protocols.  No web pages are affected by Net Neutrality.  Web pages are so small compared to video content that no one would ever notice if their Quality of Service settings were one way versus another.  If Comcast set browsing traffic to top priority or to dead last, it just wouldn’t affect anyone’s browsing experience.  Why?  Because web pages are just too small to matter.  A couple tenths of a second loading the 45 resources that your web page references isn’t going to be noticeable.

But Net Neutrality advocates also gloss over the difference between CABLE and PHONE companies.  Why?  Because knowing the difference is going to cause conservative minds to object to the generalization.  Conservatives tend to be sticklers for “the principle of the thing”; and there is a principle in question.

If you have DSL internet, your data is being downloaded over a copper wire that was installed by your phone company, probably when the original builders built the house.  It was first installed as a phone line.  DSL is a technology that uses the phone line to transmit a second frequency on the same line that your phones use.  The two signals don’t interfere with each other, but you still have to add a line-filter on each of your phones to avoid line-static coming from your always-on internet service.

Here is an important point:  Someone living in a dusty cowboy town in rural Montana didn’t pay more for their phone line than the guy across the street from the Bell Labs headquarters in Cincinnati.  Why?  Because the laying down of copper wire by the phone company was heavily subsidized by the government.  Still today, everyone’s phone bill includes a line-item to subsidize some rural person’s phone line.  If Ma Bell laid down 45 miles of copper to service 3 houses out in the woods, it will take 100 years to recover the costs of that line installation.  If market forces alone were to dictate line-install priorities, people in rural communities would have had no land-line phone service for the past 70 years!

Today’s cell-phone tower installation is a much more market-driven process, with the first and fastest towers and switching equipment serving the largest markets by population density.  You may not like that, but it’s the only way Verizon and AT&T can afford to roll out that service to more rural communities.  And by the time it makes it there, it tends to be much cheaper than its initial debut in New York, Chicago and LA.

Why did the government assert itself in the rollout of access to land-line phones but not cell phone towers?  Because the government’s only interest was in assuring access to government services, such as police, ambulance and fire.  Since those services are maintained through taxation, it was not constitutional to charge people for services they could not access.  Phone lines made that possible.

Cable companies are much different.  Whereas DSL internet comes over the phone lines, subsidized by tax payers; the coaxial cable that serves cable internet users was paid for exclusively by your cable company (Comcast in my case).  They had to fork over the cash ahead of time to run coaxial cable, and install signal boosters and other equipment in your neighborhood with the hopes that they could lure enough customers away from their older, slower internet, at a higher price, to adopt cable internet service.  Still today, cable internet is as solid and high-performing internet as you can find.

Now, someone with fiber-channel just choked.  In Utah, where I live, several cities bought into the government/private cooperative called Utopia.  I opposed it before rollout, and I oppose it today on the grounds that it would stifle technology development and the government ought not to be in competition with private business (picking winners and losers).  Many Internet Service Providers were wiped out by cities adopting Utopia at the municipal level.  The hopes of super-high-speed internet was tantalizing…but the price, unbelievable!  Utopia was advertised to be just $8 per month.  Today, about 8 years later, users are paying between $35 and $55.  And their speeds can reach 250mbit/sec and 1000mbit/sec respectively.  Comcast connections in my neighborhood have been clocked at 276mbit/sec.  Faster than the slowest fiber, but slower than the 1000mbit/sec.

Next year, however, Comcast is rolling out DOCSIS 3.1 that will enable speeds as high as 10,000mbit/sec or 10Gbps! That’s 10x what the Utopia folks are getting today!  We had to wait a little longer for it, but the market solved the problem without government interference or blanket municipal adoption wiping out competition!  That’s what free markets do.  Meanwhile, some cities are having huge financial issues with Utopia because operational costs are so much higher than bureaucrats and politicians had speculated.

At this point, the difference between 100 Mbit and 1000 Mbit is irrelevant in most cases.  This is because many switches, laptops, smart televisions, desktop computers, smart phones, etc.,  still only support 100 Mbit communication.  If 5000 Mbit were rolled out today, less than .1% of devices could make use of it.  Thus, the cable companies are still ahead of the curve.

In 2005, I became a Comcast subscriber paying $55 for 2 Megabit internet.  Today, I pay $65 and get 267 Megabit internet most of the time.  Comcast has consistently upped my speed without notice, and only once has upped my bill by $5.  The other cost increase was a house-move and service upgrade.

But I digress.  Back to Net Neutrality.

If you’re watching a Comcast-purchased movie over your Comcast internet on your smart TV, and suddenly you lose connectivity, who do you call?  Comcast of course.  If you are watching a VidAngel movie on your Comcast internet and it goes down, who do you call?  Hmmm..  Not sure.  Both I suppose.  But VidAngel, Hulu, YouTube, Amazon, Netflix or Apple TV will probably blame a connectivity issue on Comcast.  Comcast will be burdened with tracking down why the VidAngel movie service isn’t performing well over their network.  The situation will never be reversed!  VidAngel will never be burdened with tracking down performance issues for a Comcast movie.  Is this fair?  Both offer a video service, but just one owns and operates the coaxial cable network that is Comcast.  An extra degree of support is placed on Comcast that is not placed on VidAngel.

In my opinion, Comcast should be permitted to give priority to their own movie service because they own the network over which they are broadcasting.  To force Comcast to de-prioritize their own traffic in order to make room for their competitors, when their competitors paid nothing for the network, and pay nothing to maintain it is not freedom.  It is fascism.  Wealth redistribution from Comcast stock owners (401k, Roth IRA holders), to tech startups is not a government function.

Imagine the government required that you open your fancy new riding lawn mower to all your neighbors, and you have no higher priority in using it than they do.  You wouldn’t stand for it.  You paid for it, you maintain it.  To let anyone at all use it is an act of charity.  But to revoke priority from the one who paid for it and maintains it is just wrong.  If you’d known ahead of time what the government would rule, you wouldn’t have bought the lawnmower at all!

Comcast sold internet service, which implies the carrying of all content that goes over the internet.  Since that time, speeds and technology have made it possible to stream movies over internet connections.  This is a new market that Comcast foresaw.  Now that it’s here, the Government is pushing to control the internet in new ways, not just at Comcast’s expense, but at ours!  Do you really believe Government bureaucrats care if you occasionally get a “buffering…” pause in your movie?  Do you trust the government to act in good faith, or do you, like me, suspect that the leftist and crony-capitalists that are pushing for “Net Neutrality”, really want more control over the one venue that has disrupted their control of information over the last 20 years:  the Internet?  Their regulatory powers will only grow.  Net Neutrality will, in my opinion, lead to real censorship in the future.  It was never about freedom or “neutrality”.

Net Neutrality advocates have a narrow window of time in which to press their case.  Just as broadband speeds have hugely outgrown the demands of users surfing web pages, so it will shortly outpace the demands of streaming movies.  Even multiple 4K displays will not be able to eat all the bandwidth being supplied by internet providers.  Each 4K stream only consumes about 25Mbit/sec of bandwidth.  In the next few years, internet customers will have 1000-5000Mbit/sec internet and the argument behind Net Neutrality will fall apart.  Don’t give in to permanent government regulation over the internet for a temporary problem the market is already in the process of solving.

Ignorance is an excuse.  The idea that ignorance is no excuse has its roots in ignorance, …which is excusable, I suppose.

Romans 1 and 2 describes how the nations fell away from God, and that it’s not God’s fault they did.  Paul argues in these two chapters that by various signs that are common to all, mankind cannot claim complete ignorance, and thus they cannot claim innocence either.  For this reason they will be found to be “without excuse” in the final judgment.

Romans 1:20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:

The evidence of the created universe, their own moral compass, their constant efforts to justify themselves and their constant judging and condemning of others using the universal standard written on their hearts, and by their own hypocritical standard by which they themselves are guilty, make it entirely impossible to claim complete ignorance of God’s existence and of His authority and supremacy over all things.  Simply put, no one is completely innocent because no one is completely ignorant.

That said, most nations, even in Paul’s day, had completely forgotten the name of the one God, or even that there was just one God.  Yet, since the current generation was ignorant of God, it called for some patience on Paul’s part, which reflected the longsuffering of Paul’s God, who acknowledged mankind’s ignorance and reacted to it with patience and firmness:

Act 17:30 And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent:

Now, ignorance can still get you killed.  No less spiritually than physically.  But it’s certainly an excuse.  Thrice the Father’s response to the crucifixion of His Son Jesus Christ is tempered by the truth that they acted out of ignorance.  They meant to do what they did, and did it with malice, but they didn’t understand that they were crucifying God’s Son.

Luk 23:34 Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.

Act 3:14-17 But ye denied the Holy One and the Just, and desired a murderer to be granted unto you; And killed the Prince of life, whom God hath raised from the dead; whereof we are witnesses. … And now, brethren, I wot that through ignorance ye did it, as did also your rulers.

1Co 2:8 Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

Paul himself, acting zealously on “God’s behalf”, and in ignorance persecuted the church, and fought against the very God he professed to serve.  His ignorance is exemplified in his response to God, “who are thou, Lord?”.  His prior ignorance led Paul to persecute the church he would later lead and bless:

Galatians 1:3 …beyond measure I persecuted the church of God, and wasted it:

Yet, God acknowledged his zeal for God, which Paul, in turn, recognized in his fellow Jews:

Rom 10:2 For I bear them record that they have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge.

Academia never ceases to decry ignorance as the source of human suffering.  And much suffering must be to ignorance ascribed.  Christ repeatedly condemned the Priests’ and Pharisees’ ignorance of the Law and the Prophets.  Yet, man’s ignorance was also of primary interest in securing the Father’s pity and patience, and as such, cannot be completely maligned.  Academia aims to inject education as a substitute savior to eliminate suffering.  That their powers are limited, and for this world alone remains a subscript.

Two key differences between the angels and mankind are:

1. The angels were created in the presence of God, whereas God is invisible to mankind.
2. The angels who fell received no second chance, whereas mankind received grace through faith in Jesus.

Jud 1:6 And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day.

Ignorance is never commendable, and the simple ought to seek through God to be wise.  But man’s born ignorance and innocence, limited knowledge and loss of innocence, and eventual wisdom or blindness, are not accidents over which the Lord exercises no control.  God made no mistake when He created man with limited knowledge and a simple command to obey.  It was a designed feature that would later work in harmony with the redemptive work of Christ.  It made it possible for God to extend salvation to man by faith in Christ Jesus.

The Angels, which are great in power and might, who have looked upon God in Heaven, for whom faith is impossible due to the possession of sight, were never given the option of forgiveness, once fallen; and this is in accordance with God’s will.  The God who desired to save men hid Himself from men, revealed Himself only in word and Word, and created men in ignorance, each born knowing only appetite.

The Law of Moses echoes the view of God that sins of ignorance are not to be treated as sins of deliberation.  The category of sins known as trespasses are those committed in ignorance or with innocent motive.  Leviticus 4 and 5 assign the price of ignorance and the path to forgiveness for the individual and the congregation, should they sin by ignorance.

Mankind was created by God the way God saw fit.  God, who foresaw the pitiful state of mankind through sin, also saw the solution to man’s sin in Jesus Christ.  The holiness and love of God, working in perfect harmony, yet often opposites in execution, were bridged by God through faith in Christ; a door left open by man’s lack of sight, and subsequently his potential for faith.

Ignorance left a power vacuum that faith filled in those that believe.

Heb 11:1-2 Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. For by it the elders obtained a good report.

 

 

Young people must be taught, in their formative years, to not take themselves too seriously.  This is not a novel observation with myself or even my generation.  But they must be taught to take some things seriously.  Honesty, respect for elders, love of flag and country, the honor of one’s mother, the elderly, the family name.  As Christians, we must add the name of God, the body of Christ, the Word and words of God, our own testimony, etc.

Should a young person take himself too seriously, their malevolent peers and enemies will soon find ridicule and insult sufficient to offend, alienate and banish them, disenfranchised and stewing in self-pity, away from the cruelty of company and into a hermit’s life.  One’s own shortcomings of strength, wit or words will do him in when outnumbered or outmatched by an opponent, or when routinely maligned for failures, real or perceived.

A young person should be conditioned to take seriously only worthy things external to himself.  If a knight rode around defending his ability to look knightly atop his handsome steed, clad both in mail, draped in velvet from shoulders to floor, then knighthood loses its value, its virtue.

Young people are often contentious.  Our natural inclination is to criminalize this offense/defense instinct as troublesome, to train or discipline it out of them.  Yet, Jude instructed us to earnestly contend for the faith.  Our defense should not be of our own vanity and pride, but things more noble; our energies spent on profitable things.  We can’t let chivalry give way to pomposity.

In order to avoid injury to one’s pride, it is often necessary to sidestep injurious insult, and take issue with only the external and moral components of an attack.

Years ago, a young lady from our church was attacked by a large dog while out canvassing for the church.  It latched onto her leg, but suppressing her natural instinct, she recalled what her father had taught her about the nature of dogs.  They don’t like to bite things that don’t react.  She instead clamped up and stood statue-still until the dog lost interest.  In doing so, she escaped with far lesser wounds than had she obeyed her fears.

Increasingly, the world is full of dogs.  To help our children cope with broadening hostility, and to ensure they are useful, not just active, in the moral battle, we must teach them to take themselves less seriously than principles, to sidestep insult to their person and pride, to reserve their indignation for noble causes external to themselves and to earnestly contend for things sharing an elevated plateau with faith.