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FCC Suspends Net Neutrality Comments, As Chairman Pai Mocks 'Mean Tweets' (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader writes:Thursday the FCC stopped accepting comments as part of long-standing rules "to provide FCC decision-makers with a period of repose during which they can reflect on the upcoming items" before their May 18th meeting. Techdirt wondered if this time to reflect would mean less lobbying from FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, but on Friday Pai recorded a Jimmy Kimmel-style video mocking mean tweets, with responses Gizmodo called "appalling" and implying "that anyone who opposes his cash grab for corporations is a moron."
Meanwhile, Wednesday The Consumerist reported the FCC's sole Democrat "is deploying some scorched-earth Microsoft Word table-making to use FCC Chair Ajit Pai's own words against him." (In 2014 Pai wrote "A dispute this fundamental is not for us five, unelected individuals to decide... We should also engage computer scientists, technologists, and other technical experts to tell us how they see the Internet's infrastructure and consumers' online experience evolving.") But Pai seemed to be mostly sticking to friendlier audiences, appearing with conservative podcasters from the Taxpayer Protection Alliance, the AEI think tank and The Daily Beast.
The Verge reports the flood of fake comments opposing Net Neutrality may have used names and addresses from a breach of 1.4 billion personal information records from marketing company River City Media. Reached on Facebook Messenger, one woman whose named was used "said she hadn't submitted any comments, didn't live at that address anymore and didn't even know what net neutrality is, let alone oppose it."
Techdirt adds "If you do still feel the need to comment, the EFF is doing what the FCC itself should do and has set up its own page at DearFCC.org to hold any comments."
Meanwhile, Wednesday The Consumerist reported the FCC's sole Democrat "is deploying some scorched-earth Microsoft Word table-making to use FCC Chair Ajit Pai's own words against him." (In 2014 Pai wrote "A dispute this fundamental is not for us five, unelected individuals to decide... We should also engage computer scientists, technologists, and other technical experts to tell us how they see the Internet's infrastructure and consumers' online experience evolving.") But Pai seemed to be mostly sticking to friendlier audiences, appearing with conservative podcasters from the Taxpayer Protection Alliance, the AEI think tank and The Daily Beast.
The Verge reports the flood of fake comments opposing Net Neutrality may have used names and addresses from a breach of 1.4 billion personal information records from marketing company River City Media. Reached on Facebook Messenger, one woman whose named was used "said she hadn't submitted any comments, didn't live at that address anymore and didn't even know what net neutrality is, let alone oppose it."
Techdirt adds "If you do still feel the need to comment, the EFF is doing what the FCC itself should do and has set up its own page at DearFCC.org to hold any comments."
In the famous words of Mr. Harry S. Plinkett:
Shut your f**kin' face.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ9wY7CXXaQ
First read that as DeafFCC. I'll leave it that way, because the shoe fits.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Chairman Pai knows what's best and you people need to stop being so mean to the Trump regime. He was elected by the largest margin in modern history and he's the CEO of the country, so if he doesn't want Net Neutrality, you shouldn't complain because he's got the best people around him.
You should feel lucky that you're being allowed to comment at all.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Pai is nothing but a whore for those who will profit by eliminating net neutrality.
Don't like that I said that, Pai ?
Maybe you should get out of the kitchen if you can't take the heat, asshole.
can we at least _pretend_ we're still a democracy?
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First they ignore you: FCC shuts down comments
Then they ridicule you: FCC chair mocks commentators
Then they fight you.
They you win.
Stopped accepting comments or the server crashed again?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
He should have asked Slashdot. What a noob.
Can Americans start refreshing the tree of liberty yet?
Or is there still too much so-icky freedom left?
"The Verge reports the flood of fake comments opposing Net Neutrality may have used names and addresses from a breach of 1.4 billion personal information records from marketing company River City Media. Reached on Facebook Messenger, one woman whose named was used "said she hadn't submitted any comments, didn't live at that address anymore and didn't even know what net neutrality is, let alone oppose it." "
Isn't that identity theft?
Why are these criminals not having their doors battered down and firearms held to their families heads like every other dangerous criminal that's caught in their own home?
Chairman Pai knows what's best and you people need to stop being so mean to the Trump regime. He was elected by the largest margin in modern history and he's the CEO of the country, so if he doesn't want Net Neutrality, you shouldn't complain because he's got the best people around him.
You should feel lucky that you're being allowed to comment at all.
Why so serious?
Mean tweets are clearly hate speech, and Chairman Pai is clearly onboard with the movement to suppress it.
I mean - commenting on policy is one thing, but we can't let people make hate speech now, can we?
Where are your priorities?
Net neutrality boils down to a set of networking rules and principles that could be laid out in no more than about 8 pages.
While the rules themselves might only require 8 pages, what's missing is procedure, enforcement, oversight, penalties, etc. All of those things are necessary if the rules themselves are to have any meaning.
Consider this simple rule: "People aren't allowed to kill each other." By your logic, these 7 words are the extent to which the laws against murder should be defined. Any additions beyond that must be for nefarious purposes.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
So ATNT and Verizon, the two biggest bribers behind this, will start double billing, as they said they wanted to before the regulation. Bill the customers, and bill the sites wanting to send data to the customers. That in turn will have a negative consequence, which in turn will lead to a push back.
Nothing is forever, and that's certainly true of a President who does his press through Russian news agency TASS, meets a known spy Sergey Kislyak, lies about the names of people he's meeting in the WH meetings list. Double dare is the same as out-on-a-limb. Pai is completely associated with Trump at this point, Trump goes down, Pai is gone.
Here's Pai, out of a limb, making enemies he doesn't need to make, being unprofessional as a show of power, thinks he's untouchable?
what's missing is procedure, enforcement, oversight, penalties, etc. All of those things are necessary if the rules themselves are to have any meaning.
Hey! Thanks for that!
-blackwater skyops
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Eric Idle said it best...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If you can't handle the heat, stay out of the kitchen.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In hindsight, he was excellent at his job, and deserves a lot of credit for his tenure. Pai is a mouthpiece for big corporations.
No, Net Neutrality doesn't and shouldn't be a list of technical specs any more than the second amendment should have listed how to form a millitia.
And no, yu're lying your pasty white ass off when you claim that the NN laws are not like what we techs discuss when NN happens. Your fakery is not real.
Aah yes, the republican's favorite argument (they made it about their healthcare bill too) "If it's smaller it must be better".
I can only assume they spend a great deal of time practicing this argument while their wives and mistresses try not to laugh.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I support keeping telcoms regulated as common carriers under Title II.
A lot of people confuse Network Neutrality with legislation or regulation enforcing Network Neutrality. The Internet has always been, or at least strived to be, neutral. Everyone passing along everyone else's packets without regard of content, destination, owner, religion, nation, or creed. It was more or less neutral, as anyone who wasn't would be laughed out of the industry as customers chose to buy the whole Internet rather than some censored, stumpy, Internet.
And competition assured that. When there were dozens of ISPs in cities and they were all hungry for customers, the thought of breaking the fundamental underpinning of the Internet was unthinkable.
But times have changed. The wild-west frontier markets have consolidated into a handful of companies that have drawn maps dividing up the nation into non-competing territories. Mostly. Google tried competing with them. And wherever Google fiber showed up, the telcoms competed and prices dropped. Yay! But it means Google isn't making money at it and they've stopped expanding. Telcoms have even legally fought municipal wifi multiple times. You know a situation is bad when people think government could do a better job selling a service than a company.
Without competition, there is no free market. Without some alternative choice of which ISP to go to, the company has no incentive to provide good service. And so they can get away with tearing down network neutrality just to squeeze another buck out of the system. And they've been caught doing it before. I'm still royally pissed at being forced to buy access to EPSN360.com against my wishes. This bundling of internet channels is vile. An example of how they want the Internet to be structured like cable TV with the good old Internet being renamed to exclusive platinum access Internet at 500% the cost.
Without the common carrier regulation, the only think keeping them from tearing down a fundamental principle of how the Internet functions is bad PR and political backlash. If the FCC sanctions the death of Network Neutrality, that will disappear.
There are a bunch of ways to screw up regulation. Especially with something like the Internet which a lot of people don't understand. I was hesitant of trusting such a task to the FCC, and really didn't trust a telcom lobbyist like Tom Wheeler, but he did a surprisingly good job. Classifying the Telcoms as common carriers, with the nuance and details of what that means being left to the FCC with the intent of protecting consumers and encouraging innovation and a level playing field for business, seems like the best way forward.
At least that's what I wanted to say. I didn't have any time until the weekend and thought I could push it off till then. Lesson kiddos, strike while the iron is hot. Leonard Nimoy said that. Don't forget it.
When this government wants your opinion they will beat it out of you.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Any country (or for historical reasons, church) before going to war, claims killing X people doesn't count.
Modern law has a few exceptions too: Self-defense allows killing, although many countries don't allow purpose-built weapons (eg. guns and swords). That becomes a general rule of: Committing a small crime excuses committing, or allowing, a big crime.
If you actually meant what you said, and weren't just trying to troll, you would have stood behind your comment instead of posting AC.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
When it comes to information exchange, establishing rulesets, etc., I can't think of a case where terseness trumps explicitness. Sets of short explanations may help convey the underlying theme but such writing is far easier to abuse in court.
While I'm not a fan of terse definitions, I'm also not a fan of verbose definitions. Being concise is different than being terse. There is something to be said about framing a level of ambiguity and interpretation into law (it worked fairly well for an evolving document like the US constitution), but that approach doesn't work well when a time sensitive issue has been pinned down and rules need to be eatablished to prevent exploitation of the issue. Also, such ambiguity built in at the level of the constitution has many eyes watching. Ambiguity on some FCC actions has a far smaller set of eyes observing.
Title II was accepted byt the telecos because it didn't actually interfere with anything malicious that they were doing. They just had to change a few names to throttle all competing video instead of just youtube. You got duped by the press.
Are regulations smaller in Republican Texas?
If it's smaller it must be better
Unless it's the military. Because they're making a policy of pissing off as many countries and peoples as possible in their apparent quest for populism and nationalism, and they'll need a huge military, otherwise there won't be a United States much longer, everyone they've pissed off will bomb us back to the stone age.
The joke was about the President's hands. You filled in the rest. We all did too, but where you took that comment is on you so quit pretending otherwise.
'Lacking personal accountability while still requiring it of other people.'
Sorry your dick is tiny
The military doesn't write policy, politicians do.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
RE: Killing to save lives is justifiable homocide. Always has been.
First of all supporting homocide is hate speech. Why are you homophobic? Please turn in your progressive card.
Secondly, "justifiable homicide to save lives" is how abortion clinic bombers are motivated and justified. So perhaps you wish to rethink your simplistic assertion.
Non-sequitor. Try again.
it was created by wealthy land owners to prevent the working class from electing a popularist who would redistribute land. Whoever's been feeding that line about the EC being a part of checks and balances is full of it. Well, it's a check alright, a check on democracy...
The correct solution is a representative parliament. Like the UK but without the house of Lords. Anyone who can get a reasonable percentage of votes gets in.
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and the ability to comprehend it. Put another way, Libertarianism doesn't work with Health Care because unless you're a heart surgeon you can't judge the quality of your next bit of Open Heart Surgery until after it's done and you're dead or not dead.
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