btw, most Greenwald haters here will be happy to see that his latest column is bringing fire at the GOP for passing this bill.

Its pretty obvious why some leaders have a hard on for Putin and want to emulate his political system.

Yes because the national telecom giants have translated their roaring profits over the past 20 years into excellent value/cost and service/cost ratios.

Clearly Comcast keeps increasing prices, throttling internet speeds, and charging for unordered products because they're just not making enough!

Sorry, do you want to claim the value of the internet doesn't vastly exceed the $50 a month it costs, by like millions of multiples?

Cool.

Google gave me free internet access. I can testify that the internet at zero dollars a month is a better value than at $50 a month.

I'm going to go on the record saying that Internet access is not worth $50 million a month.

You realize prices have relative value? Have you ever been outside of the USA? Just like with healthcare, America ranks terribly compared to most developed countries.

Putin made him do it to throw libs off the scent imo.

Of course it's very likely that Comcast has actually studied and incorporated the highest amount their customers as a whole are willing to value their internet at.

The weird thing is that even a lot of the 4chan/reddit nihilist Trump people are flipping out over this bill being bad, but Tsao is so invested in contradicting 2p2 liberals he inexplicably landed on defending the bill.

To follow up, I liked the part about the Breitbart comments. They're calling for Trump to veto this bill. LOL. Maybe one day they'll figure out that the man who lives in a literal golden tower (and enjoys figurative golden showers) doesn't have Joe Sixpack's interests in mind. But nah.

A pretty good article on AI showing both the alarmist side and the utopian side though the article definitely leans more to the alarmist side, of which i am in agreement.

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/...top-ai-space-x

Oh yeah, you know you're on the right side of an argument when the Trump supporters are with you. Good point Fly, as always!

Anyways, I'm not really sure where I stand on this (not that any of you actually care about that), was mostly trying to get viewpoints. The fact that Wookie pointed out, that these internet companies really do have a lot of regional control definitely gives me pause.

Someone else asked the question of whether this would let the government collect users information without a warrant, which I think is an interesting question, too.

The US lags behind most of the developed world in broadband access and speed. Which is insane.

Vetoing this bill would be an enormous popularity win for Trump I think. Not expecting it to happen of course.

I wish when politicians bring up infrastructure, they would bring up broadband.

To be fair though, very little of the developed world has the same geographical challenges of the US.

You mean ****loads of people in rural areas?

I too am tired of subsidizing these people making bad choices in life and then expecting free handouts.

Keep eating from your backyard garden son.

Actually i mean the exact opposite. The sheer sprawl of the US make it difficult to have fast cheap broadband across the country. Its the same reason that public transportation is not very successful aside from a few select densely populated cities.

For people who legitimately believe corporations should have full control, a.k.a. "libertarians" in the U.S., it's totally consistent.

They don't. Russians been protesting all over the country against Putin.

Maddow saying a dude running a CalExit group is based in Moscow and getting help from mysterious Russians.

Yeah, I saw part of that. Somebody based in Siberia too I think. What a ****ed up world.

I'm going to start working on a disaster-end-of-the-world screenplay based on trolling.

Late reply but another thing I found interesting about the article is that the trends not only look like they won't be slowing down but rather speeding up.

Just something like robo-cars would kill tons of small businesses and concentrate more $ in big NY/SF firms.

Something like gas stations or restaurants is another area where private equity and chains reign supreme. The economies of scale is just way too easy for big companies to take it over.

The type of historically protectionist/anti-trust policies prevalent in that article aren't even on the radar. And most of these trends you probably couldn't reverse if you tried.

Also, I'm not really sure what the big deal is on this data sharing thing. So they can do what FB and Google do just on a larger scale?

It isn't like they're going to say Dave C in Sacramento likes domantrix porn, market that towards him.

I saw on twitter the Cards Against Humanity guy said he is gonna buy every congressman's personal history, lol don't think so bro.