Sunday, January 30, 2011

Our US national phone companies didn't feel the need to track and log the phone calls of their customers for over one hundred and twenty-five years, and civilization and phone company infrastructure survived unscathed.

As for the need to track for purposes of managing bandwidth; expand the bandwidth so that it is not necessary. The present situation, managed artificial scarcity, exists to maximize profits and provide an excuse for governments to enforce surveillance on a scale never imagined by Orwell in his darkest nightmares or Stalin's maddest dreams. There is enormous profit in the current system being used to buy up content providers and competitors, instead of expanding the current capacity so that everyone can eat all they wish. You don't become a billionaire by providing vital communications bandwidth; you become a billionaire by throttling bandwidth to maximize profits. Regulate the profits and force them to expand their bandwidth to necessary levels.

If we allow this nonsensical excuse, bandwidth will never expand to the level we need, prices will go up, providers will "manage" us to an inch of our lives, and government/corporate power will monitor our every move until the day we die, and they will never, ever go away.