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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."
If '#thanksobama' was a thing, can we start saying #thanksrepublicans? 99% of this entire net neutrality issue debacle has been brought to you by republicans, so this isn't even really tongue-in-cheek.
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.
And this is why we can never have a viable third party.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
There is no clause in the law that says he has to appoint anyone suggested by anyone. He could have done his own candidate search and found a Republican that isn't a fucking shill for the telcos.
"It's always been done that way" is poor justification for putting the wrong guy in a position of this kind of power.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I think the flaw in your thinking is a case of false equivalency - while Clinton was a very flawed candidate ( and a terrible campaigner) she did not represent the threat of a demagogue, she did not spend her time on the campaign trail promising to frankly abolish constitutional rights for huge swaths of Americans (though she was accused of that in one instance "taking your guns" it wasn't true and there has never been any truth to that accusation - personally I wish there was but there wasn't).
The Muslim registry idea on the other hand - that was straight out of the Nuremberg laws (as was a half dozen other things Trump said). He was practically quoting Mein Kampf on the podium over and over.
Now it's also true that Trump has not ceased absolute power - at this stage, I am more inclined to put that down to having his authoritarianism tempered by his own incompetence than to any lack of trying. The only American institution that still seems to be somewhat functional in it's checks-and-ballances duties is the court system.
But even within a fully functional America a bad president can cause incredible harm. It's not a surprise that Trump's professed role-model for the presidency is Andrew "Trail of Tears" Jackson. When enough people are convinced that some people are subhuman that you can get the people who think that into powerful parts of the governing apparatus - then the checks and balances fail because the people doing the checking don't want to restrain the abuses.
You are half right in one instance - the E.C, has become very democratic - but that's the problem. The check on democracy was never meant to be democratic. Now if it had been FULLY democratic - and the winner of the vote simply won the white house, then perhaps it would be okay (Trump certainly could not muster enough Americans to vote for him to win the popular vote and probably never could - almost certainly every able bodied American who would ever WANT to vote for him DID - while a lot of presumptive Clinton voters stayed home).
So I would be in favour of Larry Lessig's proposal for an E.C. reform - forcing the E.C. electors to follow the popular vote in their STATES - rather than on a county/by-county system as it stands now. Such a system would be far more robust against gerrymandering, would be more democratic than the way it works now - and retain much of the supposed benefits of the current system in keeping low-population rural areas from being overlooked by washington.
I am not much of a fan of the latter, the low-pop areas complain they "shouldn't be told how to live by a bunch of liberals in San Francisco" but fail to see that, that is a two-edged sword -since they now get to tell those San Franciscans how to live, in fact about a third of America's population gets to tell the other two thirds who live in the liberal, coastal cities how to live. This isn't democracy fine but it's not a republic either, it's just a broken system at this point.
The answer to failures of democracy though, is not to do away with democracy - it's to strengthen it, there are better systems than the American one. Every system has it's pros and cons and in many occasions your best outcome is actually a a mix-and-match. Pure party-list representation has the problem that your governing politicians don't feel accountable to the voters. Pure by-region systems like America has the problem that they ONLY care about the place that elected them - and tend to screw up things for everybody else. I think one should mix it - with about half the representatives elected by the local population and the other half appointed by the parties in accordance with their share of the national vote (in the US perhaps one could divide it up so the house is regionally elected like today but the Senate becomes a proportional representation). That would prevent the current situation where one party controls both the entire executive and the entire legislative branches from happening so easily - that's not a good thing. A lot of democrats will scowl at
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I'm trying to figure out a way to say this without being offensive, but that is the stupidest fucking thing I've heard so far this morning. To be fair, it's only 10:15am, so there's still plenty of time.
If Trump was "attempting to negotiate with the plutocracy", do you think a good first step is to appoint an Exxon CEO to be secretary of state and Wall Street bankers to be all over his cabinet? Is that how a negotiation works - by immediately giving away the store?
OK, it's now 10:17am and you've already surpassed yourself.
And you believe a corrupt billionaire is just the person to fix that plutocracy. Maybe you should look up "plutocracy".
Say, I play poker with some friends every Thursday night. Would you like to join us? We'll provide the snacks.
You are welcome on my lawn.