immerc

Coal can be clean if the emissions are sequestered underground.

That's like cleaning your room by tossing everything in the closet and cramming the door closed. You're just setting up a time bomb for future-you.

Worse yet, the whole "cram everything in the closet" technique has been tried and the flaws are well known. There hasn't been any successful CO2 sequestration at any scale.

To claim that coal can be clean, based on an untested procedure that simply tries to hide the CO2 underground, is laughable.

A radio station 100km off shore is fine. You use a generator to power the transmitter, and you play records. You don't need to receive anything, and you transmit one signal to everyone.

An internet service would need to both transmit and receive data. How are you going to do that? Run a bunch of fiber to the ship? How well would that work? Where are you going to connect that fiber? If it's inside a country, you haven't solved any problems really. Satellite would be too slow and probably too expensive. Wireless wouldn't work from 100km away because of the earth's curvature.

Also, once you're out in international waters, who's going to protect you? If someone is hosting an anti-china site out in the middle of the ocean, what's to stop China from sending it's navy out there to "discourage" that?

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Secrecy would be fine if everyone were being represented fairly and equally.

Instead, "Industry Trade Advisory Committees" get to see the text of the treaty and provide "advice" to negotiators. Who's in these committees? GE, Google, Apple, Wal*Mart... Technically there are ways that groups representing normal people can get to serve on these committees, but the limitations mean that very few groups representing normal people actually serve.

It's easy for a corporation to write off the salary of lobbyists who serve on these committees to ensure their voice gets heard loud and clear. It's actually a really great investment for those companies.

Say you, and everyone you know, really thinks US copyright terms are far too long, and that the DMCA needs to be fixed so it isn't used to silence criticism. How is your voice going to be heard in these secret negotiations? Can you afford to send someone to monitor them? Who's going to pay that person's salary?

You can bet Disney's voice is going to be heard, and they're going to do everything they can to not only keep the DMCA, but expand it word-for-word into other countries.

There would always be a chance to reverse it, but once the rules are in place it will be much harder.

Comcast, etc. aren't going to immediately block access to sites like Reddit because they know that would have people up in arms. Instead what they'll do is the equivalent of the boiling frog. They'll slowly make changes over time that are in their business interests and mildly inconvenience users, making it worse over time.

With nothing to fuel people's anger, it will be very hard to put enough pressure on politicians to reverse the change. Meanwhile, by slowly preferring their own services, vertical monopolies like Comcast NBC Universal will increase their own revenues. Those revenues will be used to fund lobbyists and lawyers who will ensure that the rules are kept in place.