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Net Neutrality Comments Surge Past 1.7M, an All-Time Record For the FCC
An anonymous reader writes Following Wednesday's Internet Slowdown campaign, the Federal Communications Commission says it has now received a total of 1,750,435 comments on net neutrality, surpassing the approximately 1.4 million complaints it saw after the exposure of Janet Jackson's breast during Super Bowl XXXVIII in 2004. Wednesday saw citizens submit more than 700,000 new comments to the FCC, and place more than 300,000 calls to the agency.
Maybe the FCC can finally do their job.
News to me.
Which is a novelty for this site.
Man, when personal citizens' rights and powerful corporate interests align, amazing things can happen.
Now if we could only get powerful corporations to do the same thing on NSA overreach, CIA overreach, money in politiics, ...
I'm a little more concerned that the fact that Janet Jackson's led to over a million complains. Why are American's afraid of tits?! There wasn't even a nipple. I don't get it!
It was recently found that when the FCC (or some other US federal govt. agency) has a request for comments, they're only compelled to seriously consider the in-depth, intelligent comments. In practice, this means that form-letters done via the EFF website etc. are tossed out, while lawyer-produced walls of text that read like Congressional legal pronouncements get serious consideration. Almost always, the latter are produced by big businesses with lots of money to spend on lawyers to ensure the decision goes in the direction of greater profits for themselves.
The only way to undermine this is for organizations like the EFF, and individuals, to gather and present as much easily-digestible data as possible and edit and refine their message until it's intelligible and palatable to a politician. Mindless ranting is immediately dismissed as uninformed. Probably only a dozen or so of these 1.7 million messages will actually be read by a decision-maker.
Fax is the best medium to contact your agencies with, as it tends to be printed and read by a human, rather than a keyword-search-delete-all like can be done for email ("delete all emails containing superlatives"). Also, 1.7 million sounds alot bigger when pushcarts full of paper can be wheeled into their office, rather than the messages easily fitting on a disc or flash drive. I presume they don't tend to auto-OCR faxes.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
1,750,435 names were added to the No-Fly List today.
All under the suspicion of plotting to vote incorrectly.
It was recently found that when the FCC (or some other US federal govt. agency) has a request for comments, they're only compelled to seriously consider the in-depth, intelligent comments.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Your comments give me such a thrill,
But your comments don't pay my bills!
...that the only thing that stirs more outrage than a nipple on TV is the chance that one will have to deal with a slow connection when downloading a picture of it.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Net neutrality provides justification for massive policing of the internet, because it calls for equal treatment of *lawful* content. By definition that means filtering for unlawful content. Wait until we find out what becomes designated as unlawful. The copyright crowd and authoritarians are gonna love it. Then we all get to apply for internet licenses... whee!
Anybody want a peanut?
It's lack of competition in the US markets.
In deregulated markets when you have competition, if your Netflix doesn't work, you shout at your ISP who either loses you as a customer, or sorts their peering out.
Problem in the states would seem to be that if your Netflix doesn't work, you don't appear to usually have an alternate/comparable ISP you can switch to that will give you working Netflix.They've got you over a barrel, and see an opportunity to make money. Asking you for extra cash to make your netflix work is what they'd really love to do, but as they can't, they'll ask Netflix for it (who'll then ultimately have to pass this onto you).
Looking at it another way - if you had a 'net neutral' google connection available to you, you wouldn't care what other ISPs you didn't use were doing.
US ISPs are currently trying to have their cake and eating it - they want the regulation that prevents the competition, but don't want regulation that makes the connection 'neutral' (whatever exactly you think that means).