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."

Comments

STOP BEING MEAN

[PopeRatzo]

As Chairman Pai Mocks 'Mean Tweets'

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.

Re:STOP BEING MEAN

[Cyberax]

Because he had to. Literally, he had to appoint at least one Republican into this commission by law.

Re: STOP BEING MEAN

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure about the OP but I'm long past attempting to converse and reason with conservatives. It shouldn't be my responsibility to always argue from their stance back to a middle ground, so I'll take the modern conservative approach and simply discard their perspectives entirely and push my own.

Unfortunately, as liberals continue to lose battles, they'll increasingly employ the "winning" tactics of conservatives to promote their own agendas. We'll have an ugly America either way, but it may snap conservatives back into sanity and real discussions. I gave up after 2016 when this disgrace was elected.

Re:STOP BEING MEAN

[PopeRatzo]

Has it ever occurred to you that Trump is attempting to negotiate with the plutocracy corruption that's been allowed to fester for the past 30 years? You can't really just stand up to them (U.S. Chamber of Commerce et al) and say "hey, we're taking all the things you've enjoyed since the 70's away and you're going to like it." These are very powerful and influential people in this country and it's hard to tell what they would do in the face of a populist president that did just that without throwing them any kind of bone.

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?

I'm not saying Trump is a model president but he's not pro-corporation.

OK, it's now 10:17am and you've already surpassed yourself.

This country is a plutocratic mess.

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.

First Comey now this

[rsilvergun]

can we at least _pretend_ we're still a democracy?

Re:First Comey now this

[acrimonious howard]

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.

Re:First Comey now this

[h33t l4x0r]

We are still a democracy, the problem is that half of us are idiots.

Re:First Comey now this

[Plus1Entropy]

We still are, believe it or not. There have been many checks against Trump's power in the short time he's been President, mostly from the judiciary, but also some from Congress as well. The new FBI director will require Congressional approval, and there are at least a few Republican Senators who are wary enough not to put some toady in... I hope.

The areas where Trump has far more latitude are things like the Department of Justice, immigration enforcement, regulatory agencies, etc. So it's not surprising to see him have the most effect there.

Of course the final check on him is impeachment, potentially. But (I didn't know this because I didn't live through it) apparently Watergate took 2 years to unfold before Nixon resigned... So no matter what, even if the Russia thing turns out to be the worst it could be, we're in for the long haul.

Re:First Comey now this

[monkease]

Right? Who'da thunk it?

Regulation actually preserving freedom??

I guess there are some situations that the universal application of severe quasi-intellectual philosophies like Objectivism don't really work for. Go figure.

Re:First Comey now this

[TheRaven64]

Two Winston Churchill quotes are probably more relevant:

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time

and

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

Re:First Comey now this

[silentcoder]

Well since the law requires the president to appoint at least 2 commissioners from the party he does not belong to - Obama didn't have much choice in the matter. Pai was a requirement under the law that created the FCC. Unfortunately when the republicans gave him the list of possible candidates for their seats it was pretty much Pai or "Our dark lord, Lucifer". Obama tried to choose the lesser of two evils (so instead of Lucifer we got the antichrist).
Then Lucifer became president and Pai went "annoying commissioner who keeps saying stupid shit" to "idiot in charge of the agency". Something that makes about as much sense as creating a "Privacy Protection Agency" with the mandate of monitoring inteligence agencies and ensuring they do not exceed their 4th amendment authority in surveillance - and then putting the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover in charge of it.

Re:First Comey now this

[silentcoder]

There are more than a few problems with the benevolent dictators:

1) People do, actually, have a right to govern themselves or at the very least choose who they allow to govern them - a dictator no matter how benevolent - can never be a legitimate government.
2) The succession problem. Plato suggested the philosopher-king (another form of 'benevolent dictator') was a better choice than democracy because of democracy's vulnerability to demagogues, but the problem with both is - what happens when he or she kicks the bucket. There is no good way to ensure the next person in line will not be an evil and authoritarian dictator. In fact the lesson of history is that this seems inevitable, you go from 'one of the great kings who led his people from strengths to strength and raised standards of living for all" to "bastard king who ultimately deserved the beheading he got" in a generation, in fact you then tend to get between 5 and 10 more of the bastards before you get another smart one (usually one who had no expectation of being in the succession at all).
3) Corrupting influence of power - the longer somebody is in charge, the less honest they tend to be come and the more likely to commit gross abuses of power. FDR is about the closest thing to a real exception there is - and even he ended up doing those Japanese Internment Camps near the end. Democracy lets you institute term limits, so the good guys who get in charge can be kicked out before they BECOME bad guys. Failure to have term limits tend to be a grave mistake. In the 1980s a people's leader led his oppressed countrymen to freedom and independence. He became president - praised and cheered the world over as a true bastion of human rights, liberties and justice - and ultimately as a peacemaker and under his rule the country became the largest food exporter on the continent. Today that EXACT SAME PERSON is known as one of the most brutal dictators on the continent, the country is constantly starving and they've been through numerous waves of hyperinflation. Robert Mugabe is the evidence of the problem: good guys become evil if you they stay in power for too long - and what's worse the dirtier their hands get the more desperate they become to cling to power, after all, losing power will likely mean spending the rest of his life in jail.

So no, the benevolent dictator is a bad idea. That said, democracy is not perfect either. Plato was correct in identifying the real risk that a demagogue could replace democracy with tyranny, the US founding fathers knew their Plato and greatly feared that - as they abandoned the monarchism Plato had inspired throughout Europe - they would risk the same in the new country they were founding. Their answer was numerous checks and balances - including one on the electoral process itself. This 'electoral college' served one key purpose: to ensure that, even if a demagogue wins the vote, he would not get to be president.
Unfortunately the E.C. ultimately became so watered down that - when an actual demagogue ran - not only did it fail to prevent him from becoming president, it actually ENABLED him in an election he had absolutely lost. That was the exact opposite of what the founding fathers had in mind. And the ultimate argument for undoing the E.C. is that it didn't do the job it was created for (and in fact didn't just fail but actually ACHIEVED the very thing it exists to prevent). Perhaps reforming it would be better than scrapping it, I am not sold either way - but the key point stands. Checks and balances, a leader subservient to a constitution with numerous institutions empowered to prevent him doing things he isn't empowered to do - those are the things that make democracy viable.

Re:First Comey now this

[silentcoder]

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

Re:First Comey now this

[silentcoder]

> As it is now, what you and Lessig describe is exactly what we have right now
No. What Lessig is proposing is making the Maine and Nebraska systems applicable in all states.

>"or corruption"
Yet the winner now was far more corrupt than she could ever hope to be. She was accused, and no evidence was ever presented, of a pay-for-play scandal in her foundation. Trump used HIS foundation - and we have actual PROOF - to bribe not one but TWO state attorney generals not to prosecute him for fraud ! Lots of whispers do not a case make.
Now I personally don't think Clinton's hands were really clean -few career politicians are, but compared to Trump they are sparkling bloody diamonds of righteousness ! It's really quite amazing just how much grime Trump managed to get on such tiny little hands.

> She demonized half the electorate
No - she didn't. She really didn't. The "basket of deplorables" statement was idiotic- but it was also quoted completely out of context to pretend it meant something entirely different to what she actually said. She NEVER accused Trump voters of being that basket - she said SOME OF THEM were. If anything she grossly underestimated how many.

>She chastised the Bernie supporters
Mostly, actualy, that was one small subset of her supporters, she didn't do that. And frankly a small subset of Bernie's supporters DESERVED that -as evidenced by the fact that Bernie ALSO chastised them. His exact words were: "I neither need nor want your votes".

>She played into peoples fears and prejudices to get them to support her.
No - that would be Trump. Unless you count their fear of an autoritarian demagogue who sucked up to racists - in which case those are actually LEGITIMATE fears which it was the duty of EVERY politicians to warn and guard against. Still is actually.

> She made it clear that she would reward corruption on her behalf
Example please ? You do KNOW that pizzagate never happened right ?

>She played into the desire the same way Sanders did by promising everything they wanted
That's a bullshit misrepresentation of what either of them said, AND she only adopted those liberal policies because HIS success proved that a huge swath of the democrat voters WANT those policies. If anything her fault was NOT really believing in them. And the greatest misrepresentation of those positions is the claim that they would cost too much - which is a flagrant lie based on hoping you don't know how 'cost' is calculated. The cost of something is NOT equal to the price you pay for it. It's equal to the price - value. Costs come in free varieties:
If price = value: then the item costs nothing, and the only loss is the opportunity cost (you lose the opportunity to buy something else instead) - and it's an individual calculation if it's worth it everytime and NO answer is always right.
If price > value: then it's a dumbfuckish purchase and only an idiot would make it. Spending more money on what is already the most overspent military in the world would be a great example of that - Trump and the republicans love that though.
If price Trump did not campaign on the abolishment of constitutional rights for any American citizen
The proposed Muslim registry DEFINITELY would abolish a constitutional right (the 4th amendment) for American citizens based on their religion (so it ALSO violates the 1st). His current immigration proposals ALSO violate the fourth (like the idea that you can use somebody's skintone or language as probable cause to ask for proof of citizenship). That was just one of many proposals of his that did EXACTLY what you just said he didn't do.

>Clinton was very anti-gun, did you not see the primaries?
Nobody said otherwise, I said she was never coming to 'take your guns' - just like Obama didn't in 8 years of republicans promising he would do it next week. In fact, Obama's ONLY gun actions actually REDUCED gun control in the USA. What Clinton DID say she stood for was common sense, intelligent gun regulatio

Re:Net Neutrality is a pile of crap... and it stin

[Plus1Entropy]

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.

Re:Net Neutrality is a pile of crap... and it stin

[silentcoder]

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.

What I wanted to say

[HeckRuler]

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.

Re:Fuck Agit Pai.

[Rob Y.]

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.