The Supreme Court hasn't said any such thing. All the Supreme Court has said is that they have to enforce what the law says, and not just make things up on their own if the law doesn't say what they want. The problem is that in reality, that's pretty much what the FCC has been doing with ISPs for years.

The law tries to make a clean delineation:

• A "common carrier" just provides communication. If (for example) I use a phone to commit a crime, it's not the phone company's fault (because they're just a common carrier). In return for that, the phone company is not allowed to control my communication. They can cut me off because I fail to pay my bill, but not because the dislike what I say. A common carrier also has to stay out of the business of providing most content--they're limited to providing "neutral" communication. So in the days of Ma Bell, they could provide a few purely informational kinds of things (directory assistance, and a number for the date and time), but that's about it. And even those were sometimes at least mildly controversial.
• An "information service" doesn't just provide communication--it may provide or exercise control over content (e.g., locking accounts for posting content that doesn't fit terms of service, even if the content is actually legal). Since they're allowed control over content, they can be held responsible (to at least some degree) for that content.

The FCC has basically tried to create a combination of the two, where ISPs aren't really either of those. They want to continue to hold ISPs responsible for user's content, but also prohibit (at least some kinds of) decisions about the content they carry.

Classifying an ISP as a common carrier would be particularly problematic for ISPs like Google that not only provide communication services, but also provide content (search, YouTube, office tools, etc.) It would only take some fairly minor policy changes for some ISPs to fit the definition of a common carrier--but for others like Google, it doesn't even come close to fitting at all.

And the FCC shouldn't be in the business of telling ISPs (or whomever) which classification they should fall into. It should be up to the company to decide which fits their business. Once they've made their choice, the FCC makes sure the abide by the consequences of that decision (e.g., if they decide to be a common carrier, they can't be held responsible for users' content, but they also can't provide or control content).

to excite! for $5 million, and excite! turned them down?

this will be nothing at all like that

it's the most realistic one.

Thanks to two things: 1: that there is no use case story for bitcoin except "moon," and 2: that it has been from the very start highly centralized in the only way that matters - distribution - Bitcoin will likely reach an exchange-manipulated $100,000 at some point close to it's final retreat into permanent status as a lesson in bad economics.

Despite the messaging that certain types of crypto advocates have been trying to use for years to confuse the public, cryptocurrency is not synonymous with digital currency. Central bank-issued digital currency is just regular currency minus the printed paper.

It is explicitly centralized and traceable and its advocates do not pretend otherwise, unlike cryptocurrency which is propped up on a lot of decentralization hype that is wishful at best and deceitful at worst, and specifically in the case of Bitcoin - a veneer of pretend anonymity.

There are already several companies who do this commercially, using hundreds of ordinary-looking nodes scattered throughout the network to figure out where transactions are initially broadcast from using statistical analysis and timing attacks. Also, a lot of insiders know each other and aren't always careful who they brag/complain to or sleep with.

> it's all make-believe anyway

Even if you have a system to determine it, it is still entirely make-believe.

A "system" serves solely to increase and sustain the total energetic commitment to that belief, rendering its signal correspondingly more expensive to revert to noise.

A massive stone pyramid is much more of a commitment to a set of social values represented by that monument, than is a speech given about those values.

But the speech, being infinitely lighter, can be carried everywhere, by anyone, and thus grows in strength with greater distance traveled, while even the largest monuments soon sink below the horizon.

All forms of money strike a tradeoff somewhere between these two semiotic extremes.

Money is just one domain specific form of it.

Bitcoin folklorists have identified Adam Back with the Nakamoto character for at least 7 or 8 years, but he's only one of several people connected to it through similarly circumstantial associations.

If Nakamoto is still around, Bitcoin is in serious danger of being unambiguously exposed as a de facto centralized currency, due to his disproportionate degree of influence over future design decisions and his enormous personal holdings of coin, which are generally assumed "frozen" and thus a constraint on all users' exposure to liquidity. If that fig leaf were to fall Bitcoin's carefully curated illusion of decentralization would be seriously, if not fatally compromised.

a message of domination is the actual rationale motivating support for this. the rallying cry of authoritarians is merely to appeal to superior force, no matter how this appeal is disguised. the appeal to existing force is a quintessentially small-c conservative posture. it's a heuristic that simplifies so much expensive and frustrating contemplation.

...a demonstrably fatal, contagious and frequently asymptomatic airborne virus with little hard data available to assess its total threat potential would be it.

This lockdown amounts to a long overdue pandemic fire drill for the planet, and the amortized costs will be well spent when the next one comes along.

I think you're on to something here - someone should inform these world class neurological experts about operant conditioning, confounding effects and negative reinforcement, topics they surely overlooked despite being covered in every intro to psychology textbook on the planet.

I actually think it's taken too long to get this message out, and the professional rage wranglers have been given far too much of a head start in corralling the emerging currents of frustration and uncertainty into a cohesive repression narrative.

It's already reached the point that wearing masks = admission of fear and weakness, rather than a temporary bandaid to throttle back the spread to manageable levels. There's no going back from here, the ambiguous cover of preparedness will collapse into a clean line between masked oppresson vs muh freedom face. The messaging will then be forced to abandon public mask and PPE guidelines as hopelessly unenforcable, very prematurely, It's unfortunate.

> the real reason they don't want to use them is because they have to pay to get scores and they figure it'll be cheaper to just develop their own test.

This is exactly what it is. Optics presently discourage attacking the he College Board testing monopoly head on, unlike the way UC has cut off Elsevier to force a change to the journal racket. So UC has the resources to replace these tests with their own and cut off the CB from a huge revenue source. Now if they'd only do this with the GRE as well...