Man of Honour
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...which are emotionally engaging for an audience - thats basically the exact definition of appeal to ridicule.
Why doesn't Unlimited mean Unlimited anymore? :/
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...which are emotionally engaging for an audience - thats basically the exact definition of appeal to ridicule.
Do you believe it is morally right to monopolise a service so others can't use it? Ethics and morality in this context require support on both sides. If customers didn't try to monopolise the service, then companies wouldn't need to put provisions in place to prevent them from doing so...
I don't understand how people are accusing me of using a straw man argument when you agreed with what I said. This is hilarious.
If you agree with what I said about your position, how can it be a straw man argument?
We haven't accused you of a strawman, but an appeal to ridicule, which you have essentially admitted in your posts claiming that you haven't done it. Appeal to ridicule can involve creation of a strawman (and yours did, because your created example of his position was so far removed from the actual position as to be rendered irrelevant), but not always. You deliberately chose an emotive, off topic subject to create a comparison to in order to emotionally engage the audience and turn them against bigredshark's position.
That is, in a complete nutshell, an appeal to ridicule.
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First off, before Dolph accused me of dodging the arguments, as I said before you make a lot of sense in some practical areas. I agree that under the current law ISPs don't have much of a choice, which is why, in essence, I am arguing for a clarification of the law that would prevent misleading advertising. From what you've said I understand that you would support such a law/clarification.
I also agree that's it's very important for users to be notified regarding any sort of restrictions applied to them, and actually I would think a system where 2-3 warnings are sent before capping is applied would be even more effective at keeping "abuse" down without upsetting customers.
What I don't agree with, however, is your moral approach. I believe that it's up to the individual human being to make the distinction between right and wrong and legality can't always be "the end of". I do think it's wrong to cheat on your girlfriend and that's one of the reasons I never have/would.
Anyway, a discussion of "moral approaches" is way beyond the scope of this thread so I'll leave it at that
Fair enough, I would support a clarification of the law to prevent the usage of unlimited in it's current context. For historical reasons it's incredibly unlikely to happen of course but I would support it.
However, while it is legal I won't condemn ISPs for using it in adverts because they are compelled to use it to keep business to an extent. I love the idea of an ethical corporation (no sarcasm, I really do) but in a competitive market where consumers are drawn to the lowest price it's not feasible. You can see now, in a recession, how much the idea of buying organic, free range and whatever matter to the vast majority of people. That is, not as much as other things.
Morally, you can only guide your own actions, other people's actions are guided by the law and their own morals. Therefore the legality of something is the only constant. I wouldn't cheat on someone but I don't think it should be illegal to do so, I think it's really not cool and seriously despise people who do but I'm not ready to start locking up those who disagree with me.
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In a nutshell, the important points are your example was way out of the box, completely unrelated and it was emotionally engaging (paedophiles = bad).
I didn't agree as such, I was trying to make a parallel point in saying that while it might be wrong, if it was legal then what can you do.
Wait, I'm confused. First of all the collective "you" didn't accuse me of using a straw man (although someone above did) but then in the next sentence the collective "you" did accuse me of a straw man. So, I am still unclear whether you are accusing me of using a straw man argument or not.
Anyway, I can see why you would think I am trying to emotionally engage "the audience" but I was actually trying to engage BRS himself. I appreciate it may not have looked like that, but that was what I was trying to do. As I said, I think we can now be clear from his responses that I represented his position with a sufficient degree of accuracy, i.e. he agrees with applying the moral principle of "legal = acceptable" to most circumstances. I don't agree with this and that's where we differ.
In general, I don't think that comparison with examples from other areas is an unfair way to test moral theory. I think I mentioned that doing this gives you some perspective. A very simple example of this mechanism is what we call "put yourself in the other person's shoes".
It's perfectly clear, I didn't accuse you of a strawman argument. I accused you of an appeal to ridicule. One componant of an appeal to ridicule can be a strawman argument, but your position was bigger than that, hence strawman did not cover it, and appeal to ridicule did.
No, you're misrepresenting him. What he actually applies is that "legal = legal", there are plenty of legal activities that he does not consider acceptable. However, the key issue in his post is not that it's acceptable, but that it's legal. And when you have people on both sides who disagree what should be acceptable, the logical position is to look at legality. Your example was an emotionally charged misrepresentation of such a position taken to an extreme with an example that nearly everyone will find unacceptable, which is why it was not appropraite or equivilent.
The argument here is that ISP's and their users have conflicting beliefs of what is acceptable, but the high user doesn't just affect the ISP, they also affect all the other users, and that is why it's acceptable to police that.
It's not, provided that the example is vaguely equivilent and not emotionally charged. There are lots of valid alternative examples you could have used, but instead you went for an invalid, emotionally charged and very onesided one, with the purpose of making bigredshark's position look stupid. That is a classic appeal to ridicule.
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Broadly, I'm not quite comfortable with legal = acceptable, I'm basically just saying legal = legal, doesn't mean it's acceptable in society or that you should do it or that I would do it. Just that it's legal and there ends the ability to prevent it happening and there begins a persons personal responsibility for their decisions based on their morals.
It's legal for a 40 year old man to chat up a 16 year old girl, it's not right, it's not something I'd do, it's not acceptable in society in general but it is legal and therefore it can't be prevented.
Maybe we just differ on this but all I've been trying to point out is that the law is the only real constant, and if something isn't banned then, distasteful or immoral as we might find it, we just have to live with it. Same thing with advertising, if it's legal to advertise it that way, then while we might not like it we may just have to deal with it.
It's hardly as straight forward as that.
I appreciate what you're saying about being sold a contended service but the point is, you're also sold a service that says "24MB OMG FASTEST EVER CONNECTION, DOWNLOAD TILL YOUR RIGHT HAND FALLS OFF" etc.
Another aspect of this is that the definition of "monopolising" varies with average use. If the ISP doesn't invest in expanding its capacity in line with growth in demand for traffic consumption, as a user of its services you are in fact being penalised for this. That means that instead of working to provide a better service all an ISP has to do is penalise the heavy users to the level of the average user to keep its costs down.
As I said earlier in the thread, I don't personally have any problem with my current download limits (whatever they are) but as Be expands I might suddenly fall into the "monopolising *******" bracket, just because other consumers are catching up to the many ways the internet can be used. I don't consider my current traffic use to be "unethical" therefore why should it be "unethical" when other people start using more?
Man of Honour
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Err, change the law?
We'll assume that isn't going to happen. Because of how internet access was historically (dial up), the ASA is unlikely to reinterpret the law to find unlimited to be misleading. That's just facts.
So to change the law, you need an act of parliament. What exactly does that look like? How does that law read and is it a good use of parliaments time legislating on such a narrow issue?
That's the consequence of a contended service, but the fact the service is contended is why it's so cheap. A good ISP keeps expanding it's infrastructure, but that still doesn't mean it's possible for everyone to keep downloading everything indefinitely.
Then hope that O2 keep funding Be's expansion. I agree with you about much of this, but I can see it from both sides. It's a complicated area, and that's where the problems come, especially as most consumers have the simple mindset of "I should be able to do as much as I want for as little as possible".
Tiered packages with priority systems might be a way forward, but that's probably going to lead to an increase in cost for the high end users that they don't like...
OK, I think I'm going to have to accept that I used the wrong example. I wish I had used a service that he is a consumer of
That said, I assure you that my purpose wasn't to make his position look stupid, but to point out that he is arguing in favour of something a) because he in an industry that benefits from the status quo and b) because it's legal, while agreeing that it's wrong. I don't consider the law to be constant, so that's not an approach I can agree with, but I also don't feel the need to ram my attitude down his throat either.
I doubt very much that I'm a "high end" user any more, but I'd gladly pay more per month to avoid being traffic shaped at any time of the day.
Well, actually I'd do whatever I can to avoid having to get Virgin, maybe even go the drastic route of having a phone line installed in the next place I live in so I can get ADSL (Cambridge is mostly Cable).
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Well thank god we're back on topic at least.
There are a couple of points.
Average use varies, there are times of exceptional demand which really do need traffic shaping. Maintaining the infrastructure to handle these peaks the rest of the time would be uneconomical, you'd be back to the £100 a month broadband problem.
Same with uncontended services. £100 a month broadband.
Consumer broadband is a low margin product and backbone infrastructure is exceptionally expensive, it takes the entire profit from 10,000 users for 6 months usage to buy a new peering router.
It's not in an ISPs commercial interest to work to provide a good service for 100% of users, it's in their interest to provide an excellent service to those 92% who download less than 50GB a month of average. They're subsidizing the remaining 8% for their connections quite heavily.
While I appreciate thats not very nice and isn't appreciated by the 8% (who're over represented here), it's economics and they're in this to make profits.
In answer to your last question, because it begins to affect other people, your ISP is pretty nice to ignore you while you cause no problems (in spite of the subsidy you receive from other users they could be pocketing as profit), but when you affect the service other people receive it's in their interests to take action. Sure it doesn't seem too nice for you, you download the same as you have every other month and suddenly they have a problem with it, but they have an interest in protecting the experience of the majority.
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But how much is the question. Seriously, how much would you pay for 8Mbit, no traffic shaping?
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OK, I think I'm going to have to accept that I used the wrong example. I wish I had used a service that he is a consumer of
That said, I assure you that my purpose wasn't to make his position look stupid, but to point out that he is arguing in favour of something a) because he in an industry that benefits from the status quo and b) because it's legal, while agreeing that it's wrong. I don't consider the law to be constant, so that's not an approach I can agree with, but I also don't feel the need to ram my attitude down his throat either.
One last point, I agreed that I *thought* it was wrong. However that's opinion, the only universal black and white is the law, which say it's legal, that can be the only constant here. Anything else is what somebody thinks.
For you maybe. The majority of the population see the law as grey. The law professionals themselves see it as very grey indeed...
Otherwise there would be no court cases, decisions would be made by a computer.
You can go some way towards this by going with an ISP that uses a capped service. Generally no traffic shaping and if you go over your cap, you pay for it. Can work out expensive if you download a lot.