On 11/02/2017 04:16 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
On Thu, Nov 2, 2017 at 2:21 PM, james woodyatt <jhw@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I’m not taking "that approach” at all. I’m trying to point out that a strong
majority our elected representatives, particularly most of the ones who are
powerful members of the ruling parties, view the fundamental concept of an
Internet Society as essentially unacceptable. In that light, I think that
revising the ISOC mission statement to align better with their view of the
world would be to neuter the ISOC completely. I’m not sure that’s an outcome
I would support, but I do think pretending that we aren’t doing that is a
road to failure.
That is nonsense.
If you begin by assuming absolute bad faith on the part of all elected
representatives
... you are not far from the truth. Though the reality is somewhat
closer to selfishness and desire for ego gratification rather than
absolute bad faith, and nearly all elected representatives rather than
absolutely all of them. People do sometimes run for public office for
unselfish reasons, but (a) the good ones tend to be weeded out by the
system, and (b) those who aren't weeded out tend to be corrupted.
The pathology of US regulation is that industry assumes that all
regulation will be utterly unacceptable, resists all attempts to come
to any form of common understanding and eventually ends up being hit
by a series of punitive regulations that are then taken as evidence
that the system is broken.
No, industry assumes that legislators can often be bought, and that the
purpose of legislation is to tilt the playing field in the favor of the
buyers. Any meaningful regulation is therefore likely to be seen as an
insult to people who paid good money to have things go their way.
Keith