FCC Refuses To Release Text of More Than 40,000 Net Neutrality Complaints (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission has denied a request to extend the deadline for filing public comments on its plan to overturn net neutrality rules, and the FCC is refusing to release the text of more than 40,000 net neutrality complaints that it has received since June 2015. The National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) request in May of this year for tens of thousands of net neutrality complaints that Internet users filed against their ISPs. The NHMC argues that the details of these complaints are crucial for analyzing FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's proposal to overturn net neutrality rules. The coalition also asked the FCC to extend the initial comment deadline until 60 days after the commission fully complies with the FoIA request. A deadline extension would have given people more time to file public comments on the plan to eliminate net neutrality rules. Instead, the FCC yesterday denied the motion for an extension and said that it will only provide the text for a fraction of the complaints, because providing them all would be too burdensome.
So hard to copy the whole folder so I'm going to manually hand pick a few. So I'm going to do the same action many times and act like that easier than doing it once to the whole folder...
Incompetent fool should be fired.
Popular opinion to us and lies to them.
To run a script that only pulls the comment on a data set and then zip it?
So what? The FCC refuses to release lots of stuff.
The fraction supplied will however be carefully culled to put the best light on the FCC plan. All that time "selecting" that few leaves no time to supply everything.
Hey, don't you silly Americans say nobody needs regulations, you can vote for your wallets. You make fun of European consumer protections laws.
Well, vote with your wallets, cancel your ISP accounts. They need you more than you need them, right?
And most of all, enjoy your free country with it's freedom from all these burdensome regulations, where everyone if free to squeeze every penny of profit they can as they squeeze the life from the corpse of their once great country.
Make American Great Again. Yeah right. You're living in the land of profit for free, suffering for most.
The FCC has starving lawyers to feed.
just happen to be the ones that best reflect the *actual* thoughts from *actual* people, where over 80% of the population wants network neutrality-powered big dumb pipes and for the current fcc 'leadership' to 'fuck off'.
I'm not sure why this was modded down, I suspect it's a good representative sample of the complaints they received.
When I give this argument to my supervisor, he'll make sure I got tonnes of more burdensome stuff to do.
But as any parent would also tell you: 'Shut up and get to work ya lazy bum!'.
I really wonder how long it will take before the american public realizes how much they and their government get effed in the ass by big companies.
Shouldn't those complaints be a matter of public record? What's the rationale for holding back the release of the texts of those complaints?
Seriously mods? An Anon Coward modded up to +3 Insightful for what is obvious trolling?
It may read like trolling to you, but as an American who currently lives here, and has lived abroad in both Europe and Asia, I would say it's actually rather kindly put. We have no idea how far off the rails we've gone, how utterly ignorant and stupid we are, and sound, to everyone else, and how far we're falling behind the rest of the developed world in just about every metric (except willful ignorance and engineered stupidity). And that's nothing to what's coming in the next year or so.
We've earned this label. If we don't like it, maybe we should grow up, grow a brain, and stop acting the fool
What should be obvious for anyone with eyes is that Ajit Pai, the FCC Chair is on the take and is feathering his nest for a cushy job at one of the service providers after he is done destroying privacy and gilding the Internet at the FCC. He needs to be kicked out of the FCC and investigated for fraud.
Man: I want to complain.
FCC: You want to complain! Look at these shoes. I've only had them three weeks and the heels are worn right through. If you complain nothing happens, you might as well not bother. Oh my back hurts, it's not a very fine day and I'm sick and tired of this office.
In the US the notice and comment process isn't about voting or voicing opinion. It's about identifying specific concerns and then making sure they've been accounted for in finalized regulations.
Since this isn't a voting process, giving more people time to comment is not a relevant goal.
In short, since the notice and consent process is about identifying problems, it doesn't matter whether one person or one thousand bring up an issue. It's still only one issue. If a thousand people mention the one issue, then it's only a waste of resources as workers have to sort through and identify the duplicate comments.
All in all, the FCC is on the right side here, and the special interests trying to make political hay out of the formal process are at best misleading the public.
I really wish more Americans knew how these elements of their government actually worked.
So, why not a text dump? I mean, 50 _million_ comments can fit in less space than a typical HD movie, even without compression. Weren't almost all of the comments done electronically?
Let the crowd waste their time trying to sort through them all. XD