US Senate votes to undo FCC internet privacy rules
So much of this conversation has turned political that I'm going to write this as a top-level comment instead of a response to any of the Republican/Democrat comments.We all want to perceive our political views as the result of deep, personal thought--reflection on our own moral guidance, our own observations about the world, our knowledge of the law. Or some combination of those things. We don't want to think that our political views are determined by something as arbitrary as where we grew up.But I think that we are, in fact, shaped more by our environments than we want to think we are. I grew up on a small farm in Texas. My parents happened to be university professors, so I had access to decent education and placed some value on the arts. In fact, I was a professional violinist for 20 years before I got into software engineering and data science.My working theory is based solely on my observations, and I haven't done a study to try to support this theory, but I am working on getting the funding to do such a study in a rigorous way.It's this: the primary driver of political philosophy is access to property. When you have access to cheap, functional property, you tend to lean Republican. When you don't, you tend to lean Democrat.The reasoning behind this is pretty simple. When you live in a place like Texas, you don't really need other people's rules. If you don't like the rules in your city, it's pretty cheap to go buy some land with little-to-no oversight from anyone and live your life as you please, so long as you aren't being really obnoxious.So you have to drive 2 hours to work instead of an hour? No big deal. Your freedom to live under your own rules is more important than that. Why would anyone compromise on their way of doing things when it's so easy to not compromise? It doesn't make any sense.Contrast that to NYC, where I've been living for almost 2 years. Everything is about compromise. Very few people can afford to just move to a place where no one cares--for a variety of reasons. You can't live in that kind of a dense population without accepting limitations to your freedoms. And you want those limitations in place because people are jackasses. So you agree to curtail what you are allowed to do so that you have some confidence that other people are similarly curtailed. There's a sort of minimum viable level of human decency that gets enforced.If you think of personal freedom in the sense that it ends when it starts to infringe on the personal freedom of another person, it makes sense that you are going to have more of it if there's no one near you for 10 miles vs. your next door neighbor living in what used to be the second toilet in your apartment.I don't see much of a conceptual problem with either attitude. I'm much happier in NYC than I ever was in Texas. Texas just doesn't have a whole lot to offer to a liberal, atheist, violinist, and software engineer.What I see as a problem is that people are incapable of understanding the different needs of different human situations and want to impose their own ideas on populations they do not understand at all.New Yorkers grow up riding the subway to school. They see all kinds of people from all walks of life and all different races from a very young age. I didn't even meet a black person until I was in college. New Yorkers don't understand how the south can be so racist. I can understand it. I don't condone it at all. But I can understand how it happens. We still have housing laws that allow what's basically racial segregation in Texas and all across the South.We have Senators and Supreme Court Justices from New York City who don't have a clue about how utterly different things are 2,000 miles away trying to enforce the compromises they absolutely need on the entire country. And conversely, we have idiots from Texas pretending that places like NYC, LA, SF, Chicago and other high-density populations just don't exist--pretending that anyone who doesn't want to compromise is completely free to just go someplace else.Both sides of the aisle are completely fucked in the head. They are wrong. There is no universal set of rules that make sense in both the context of sparse population/cheap land/driving culture and dense population/expensive land/walking or pub trans culture.To bring it back to something relevant to this particular conversation, I think you can apply this heuristic to the Senate, FCC, and FTC.As parties, yes. Both of the big ones are owned by corporate interests. That's clear. But they are owned by the ones they want to be owned by. The ones that they think are in alignment with their political philosophy.The Republican version of the story on privacy and net neutrality is that everyone has space to move to something else if they don't like it. Let the companies do what they want, and if users don't like it, they can go do something else. Which would be reasonable if Republicans weren't already in the pockets of all the major providers and have made it impossible for there to be another place to "move" to, in terms of internet providers.The Democrats did, unfortunately, almost nothing to protect users. The Democrats are too willing to compromise to get something done.In my opinion, it's the will/won't compromise that is fundamentally derived from the geography of where you live that is driving our politics now, including the politics of the internet. Republicans win because they don't compromise. It's not in their vocabulary. Democrats lose because they are, by nature, the compromise party.In a perfect world, both sides would get out of their shells and try to experience the places other people live. They would realize that one-size-fits-all compromise legislation does not, in fact, work for everyone all the time. And it can't really.But there are some cases that affect everyone equally: bottom 1%, top 1%, anything in between, the internet matters. This is one of the rare few instances where Republicans and Democrats should be holding hands and applying rules equally across the board.Those rules should be in favor of privacy and neutrality. No compromise, no matter where you are from or where your political philosophies came from. Net Privacy should be absolute by law as should Neutrality from the providers. That's all there is to it.In the absence of that, I see a good market opportunity for a social network like Facebook that is entirely encrypted and unscannable by the Intelligence Community. Totally private. No ads. You pay a dollar a month for this. Your data is yours, and you can leave at any time and take it with you in a reasonable format.I'm already working on that. Ping me if you are interested.