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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."
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.
can we at least _pretend_ we're still a democracy?
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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.
Then you're dead.
Well, it's really more of a moral victory.
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.
"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?
I see you're not familiar with how this works. This is what happens when some political actor, either group or powerful individual wishes to launch such an attack they:
1. Arrange with a politically-friendly data-aggregator business to "discover a data breach". Maybe even leak some legit data to criminals so it appears the work of cyber-criminals.
2. Allow some time to pass. Not necessary if there is already/still 'fresh' data from past 'breaches' available to use while the 'heat' cools on the latest data 'acquisition',
3. The data is now ready to be politically-weaponized to create fake online identities, post comments on proposed rules and regulations, post comments to legislators concerning proposed laws and acts, post disinformation on forums, etc etc.
4. Profit!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
And if you can't handle the heatsink, stay out of the computer.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
USA elected Trump. USA wants this to happen. All the other shit Trump does - voted for. Enjoy the next 3.7 years or so. (Or is it 7.7? lol).
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
USA voted hillary. USA wanted this not to happen. All the shit trumpalina does = not voted for by the USA.
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 would suggest unmixing your metaphors, replace the second one with one more inline with the first one.
"Get out of the cheap hotel room if you can't take the carpet burns, asshole".
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
This progression is always quoted as a certainty. It is not. The vast majority of the time they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they kick the shit out of you.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
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.
Noone's saying Trump wasn't elected. Just that the majority USA voters don't want his bullshit. After all, that's what was being implied by "USA want's this to happen". Sure, Trump is in a position to make this happen - thanks to the Electoral College and any number of other factors. That does not mean USA (i.e. the majority of American citizens) want him to.
And what the hell does 'Running up the score in California' mean. You could just as easily say "Running up the score in a bunch of over-represented low population states". But again, we're talking about what the people want - not what the screwy Electoral system produced.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
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.
if you look at the select tweets he's mocking, they deserve to be mocked. None of them were of any substance, or had any content beyond threats of violence or ad hominem attack.
This man is an asshole, but let's not pretend that these "commentators" are more than what they actually are.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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.
Well apparently the DNC wanted it, because they caused it, by every conceivable metric.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
What you are saying is this:
If we change the rules by which a candidate wins, but don't ever tell anyone, Hillary wins.
Since this is true given the results, but completely divorced from reality or even possible reality, I would say that whatever you wrote after this assertion is complete bunk. You cannot apply a different set of rules post hoc and then use that juxtaposition of rules and results to determine what was meant by the voting public under the original set of rules. At that point it becomes clear that this is just an attempt to eek out some satisfaction from a situation that you were obviously emotionally connected to that didn't work out the way you wanted.
Look, it didn't work out the way I wanted either. Shitty campaign finance laws, beholden superdelegates, and sexist dumbfucks screwed me out of a walk-in-the-park Sanders landslide and a brand new era in American politics certain to forever transform the electorate and catapult the US into the 21st century. We all got problems man, but being illogical and irrational isn't helping.
Your attempts to use illogical and outright wrongheaded thought to support your point signal to rational people that you are willing to disregard not only what really happened, but also logic in general, as you attempt to assuage some emotional deficit you feel in regards to the last election.
Another way to think of this, properly, is this:
If you change the rules of the election process, expect a change in the way the electorate votes.
You cannot conclude from the available information what the majority of the US wanted, as not even a majority of eligible US voters voted. Nor can you determine what the vote would have been if we were using a direct democracy system to elect the president. With different rules candidates would have campaigned differently and the voters would have voted differently. I am sure that some that stayed home would have come out, and some that came out would have stayed home. Regardless, due to the electoral college's influence, you cannot use the vote in the last election to determine anything other than who got the most electoral votes. Attempting to piece together some kind of democratic mandate or squeeze out some kind of justification for candidate A over candidate B, other than the electoral college results, is rife with inaccuracy and unfounded conjecture.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Non-sequitor. Try again.
No. What I'm saying is that you can't just say because Trump won, that the majority of people want what he's doing. The popular vote surely reflects the desires of the majority better than the Electoral College result does in cases where the results differ.
In any case, I'm not trying to manufacture a mandate. The election was close enough that neither party has a mandate. So my complaint is with folks like the original poster equating a squeak it out win as a mandate. After all, the original post I was responding to said "USA elected Trump. USA wants this to happen". USA doesn't even know what Net Neutrality is - let alone wants it killed. In fact, if you asked them "Do you want Netflix to cost more so your ISP can make more money?", I think an overwhelming majority, based on common sense alone, would say no.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
That 30% figure is actually from the primaries... it was 28%ish or so iirc. Turnout for the actual election was about double that. Still, I think your points are valid and having 40% of your eligible voters refrain from doing so says a lot.
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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