One of the more congenial things about FaceBook is that while flaming (and trolling and all such related hate-baiting tactics) still happens, users aren't locked into the thread where it occurs. With multiple conversations going on all the time among many different arrangements of "friends" it is not a problem requiring something like a nuclear option to deal with.
This is yet another blatant broken promise by Obama. He promised that he would be a champion of net neutrality, yet picked a Commissioner who sold out consumers and innovators in order to enrich telecoms. Tim Wu explains at the New Yorker:
The new rule gives broadband providers what they’ve wanted for about a decade now: the right to speed up some traffic and degrade others. (With broadband, there is no such thing as accelerating some traffic without degrading other traffic.) We take it for granted that bloggers, start-ups, or nonprofits on an open Internet reach their audiences roughly the same way as everyone else. Now they won’t. They’ll be behind in the queue, watching as companies that can pay tolls to the cable companies speed ahead. The motivation is not complicated. The broadband carriers want to make more money for doing what they already do. Never mind that American carriers already charge some of the world’s highest prices, around sixty dollars or more per month for broadband, a service that costs less than five dollars to provide. To put it mildly, the cable and telephone companies don’t need more money.
Five minutes ago, I received a phone call from a man who claims to be "David Johnson" who said he's working from Microsoft. He had an accent that I was unable to identify, but I assumed he was from India. His phone number showed up on my cell phone as "212-414-155" (that's right - -- it's missing a digit). He told me that MY computer has been throwing out error messages that are being received by the Microsoft Server, and that we need to fix the problem. I led him on a bit. He said to hit the control key plus r, and that this is the beginning of the fix. I asked for his phone number. He wouldn't give it. He repeatedly said that he's working with Microsoft, not FOR Microsoft. He wouldn't give me his supervisor's name. I repeatedly asked for his PHONE NUMBER so I could call him back (I wanted it to report him to Microsoft). He wouldn't give it. I offered to add Microsoft to the call, and he got evasive. My assumption is that he was trying to have me give him access to my computer by installing monitoring software. I eventually called him a "criminal," and told him he was despicable, then ended the call. I recorded most of the conversation. Beware . . . . I'm including a link from Microsoft regarding phone scams.
At Public Citizen, Andrew D. Selbst explains the importance of Net Neutrality:
Common carrier regulations are a century-old concept that has been applied to telecom services from its early days. The concept originates from travel: If you are a bus operator, you must allow anyone with a ticket to board and ride. Applied to telephones, common carrier obligations are the reason that your phone company cannot first listen to your conversations, and then when you discuss switching carriers or call a competitor to sign up, kill your connection or make it so full of static that you cannot hear. If the idea of a telephone company doing that seem preposterous, it is only because common carrier obligations on telephones are so ingrained into our expectations. In terms of the internet, net neutrality simply requires that the ISPs treat each bit of data identically, and send it where it needs to go at the same rate of speed, regardless of its source (subject to legitimate network management concerns). Net neutrality merely regulates the “paved road,” and not the “cars,” in the old metaphor of the “information superhighway.” We would not expect the operators of the road to choose speeds that a car can travel, depending on where it comes from or who is in it. Without net neutrality rules there is nothing stopping ISPs from simply blocking websites and media they don’t like because the websites and media compete with their offerings or haven’t specifically paid them off. This is not just a scary hypothetical. AT&T recently released a plan called “Sponsored Data” that works as follows: AT&T has already set an artificial data cap on its consumers (itself a policy design solely to extract the most profit out of them). Now, AT&T will allow a provider, like Netflix, pay them for the privilege to reach the user without affecting the user’s cap. Thus, other competing sites become comparatively more expensive since they will run through the user’s data limit. To take another example, Comcast and Time Warner both have online TV services, which allow customers to watch cable programming on their computers or mobile devices. The cable companies’ online TV services don’t count as data under their artificial caps either, so that the home-grown online TV service is preferable to Netflix, a competitor. Then as cable prices get ever higher, the ISPs can point to all the “free” new online TV services they’re offering as justification for higher prices.
This is an in-depth profile of Aaron Swartz by The New Republic. I'm not sure I would agree with the conclusion of the article, but it's a sympathetic review of many of Aaron's accomplishments.