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One Day Left To Comment on the FCC's Plan To Kill Net Neutrality (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quote The Verge: After four months of debate, the FCC is nearly ready to stop accepting feedback on its proposal to kill net neutrality. Final comments are due this Wednesday, August 30th, by end-of-day Eastern time. Once the comment period closes, the FCC will review the feedback it received and use it as guidance to revise its proposal, which if passed, would reverse the Title II classification that guaranteed net neutrality just two years ago. The commission is supposed to factor in all of the feedback it received when writing its final draft, so if you do have strong feelings on the matter, it's worth leaving a comment...
To leave a comment, you'll have to go to this site, click "+ Express," and then fill out the form it opens up to. Make sure you leave the proceeding number "17-108" in place, as that's what ties it to the net neutrality proposal. Also, be aware that everything filed is public, so others will be able to see your name and address.
"ISPs shouldn't be gatekeepers," wrote the EFF in a tweet sharing tips on the way to write effective comments. The number of comments matter because "the commission will very likely have to defend its changes in court," according to the article. And the commission has now received a record 22 million filings -- nearly six times the previous record of 3.7 million comments (when the net neutrality rules were first implemented).
To leave a comment, you'll have to go to this site, click "+ Express," and then fill out the form it opens up to. Make sure you leave the proceeding number "17-108" in place, as that's what ties it to the net neutrality proposal. Also, be aware that everything filed is public, so others will be able to see your name and address.
"ISPs shouldn't be gatekeepers," wrote the EFF in a tweet sharing tips on the way to write effective comments. The number of comments matter because "the commission will very likely have to defend its changes in court," according to the article. And the commission has now received a record 22 million filings -- nearly six times the previous record of 3.7 million comments (when the net neutrality rules were first implemented).
... that everyone agreed were ineffective at actually enforcing net neutrality anyway.
Not everyone agreed with that.
Since I do not pay a surcharge to Comcast for Netflix and Amazon content, the current rules are working effectively for me.
I expect that to change.
The toll booths will be going up soon.
Hillary showed no indication of killing it, and as someone one the progressive / centrist side she advocates for regulations which benefit Americans.
The problem is you hide behind smarmy nonsense like "both sides are screwing you", while you fail to vote for the candidate who would protect your interest, and thus empower the politicians that actually are harming you.
Worst of all, you empower America's traitors and enemies the most obnoxious, faux intellectual way possible.
Can't stop it. We have limited choices on who to elect, and they're all corrupt.
That is Bullcrap. No politician is 100% pure, but it is absurd to say they are all equally corrupt. Denmark is not as corrupt as Nigeria, and Minnesota is not as corrupt as Louisiana. We can do better, and by just giving up and apathetically saying we "Can't stop it" you are part of the problem.
I'm currently subjected to having Comcast. If they start that bullshit of which you speak, I'll be hastily looking for a different ISP, and I'll be damned well telling them exactly WHY I'm dumping them, when I go in person to their customer service office with the cable modem in hand, demanding a receipt showing I returned it, and paperwork showing I no longer do business with them.
If Clinton indeed didn't give a fuck about net neutrality, that means she was a better choice on that issue than Trump.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Let's see if you can tell the difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump's positions on net Neutrality:
citation provided
Hillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton has indicated support for net neutrality. She gave two thumbs up to FCC chairman Tom Wheelerâ(TM)s proposal for strong net neutrality rules, though admitted it was only a âoefoot in the door.â
Donald Trump
Donald Trump does not support net neutrality. Actually, he thinks it will lead to the censorship of conservative media. âoeObamaâ(TM)s attack on the internet is another top down power grab. Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine. Will target conservative media,â he tweeted in 2014.
Question:
How can you be so wrong, and so smarmy in your fucking ignorance, and not at some point examine your idiotic and wrong "both sides suck" worldview, which has you actively assisting the people who actually are screwing you.
I'm currently subjected to having Comcast. If they start that bullshit of which you speak, I'll be hastily looking for a different ISP, and I'll be damned well telling them exactly WHY I'm dumping them, when I go in person to their customer service office with the cable modem in hand, demanding a receipt showing I returned it, and paperwork showing I no longer do business with them.
Sucks to be you. For high speed internet I've got Comcast, xfinity, and shipping a big pile of hard drives by usps.
It's just a simple web form. It'd be child's play to astro turf it to kingdom come with anti Net Neutrality comments. Wasn't somebody already caught doing just that?
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You are a fucking moron.
A democrat enacted net neutrality in the first place!
Now you want to throw out a bunch of smarmy bullshit about how democrats are just like republicans, when a republican is repealing the net neutrality protections that a democrat passed.
How can you be so fucking blind, that you seriously can't even see the obvious reality of democrats supporting and enacting protections for your interests like net neutrality?
America believed the smarmy bullshit that you are selling here (enough for electoral college anyway), and that's the reason why we have the worst president in history. Examine your conscience and consider the real harm that your ignorant worldview has done to this country, such as the elimination of net neutrality.
Well, he pissed YOU off enough to de-anonymize yourself unwittingly, so I don't think it can be fairly said he's evidently done NOTHING today. Just food for thought.
Akamai State of the Internet Report 2017Q1 has United States average (IPv4) home Internet connection speed at 18.7 Mbps, up 22% year-on-year.
I'll be hastily looking for a different ISP
You are missing the point. Without NN, the ISPs will be able to charge arbitrary fees precisely because they are monopolies or near monopolies in most areas where they operate. If you are actually able to take your business to a competitor, then you are in a small minority.
Sadly these are not trolls, there are actual people living in the U.S. who don't seem to value that they live somewhere where they're not only allowed but encouraged to speak their minds about how things are done. By the way if that attitude from people doesn't piss you off too then I'm telling you: it should. BTW I was never AC or even meant to be.
If they reverse Net Neutrality, I saw we start a GoFund me to buy out all of the ISPs and then de-prioritize all government traffic as well as the personal traffic of Ajit Pai. Since it will then be legal to do, we might as well work it in our favor.
One more day to be ignored by my government.
Oh, wait. That's just like any other day now.
Ajit has pretended to listen to the people, but he's already been paid. His biggest problem now is how to phrase "90% of the American public think you suck, but you're gonna suck anyway". We need independent courts to look this kind of corruption and send the fuckers responsible to prison. Ajit, you deserve 5-10 years, you asshole.
We have to vote agaisn't our own self interests as those guys on AM radio and Fox make seem voting for anyone who favors us as pretty scary. If we give them some more free money they will be nice to us.
Our side has been actually doing something about it.
Lots of Republican congress seats are coming up in 2018, and many of them realize that if they don't get off their butts and do something, they're going to be voted out. There's a mood running through the population right now to that specific effect: people are saying "do something or we'll kick your butt to the curb in next year's elections".
Many Republicans are worried that they'll lose to a challenger in the upcoming primary if they don't start doing things.
Some are planning to use the upcoming debt-limit deadline (end of Sept) to force the Democrats to fund building the wall(*).
And Trump is being selective with his support for certain campaigns, with the result that not having POTUS support makes it increasingly difficult to win reelection. Karma for RINOs.
All these things are putting pressure on Republicans to start making decisions that favour the American people.
You might try asking your side to do that as well. I'd *love* to see the two sides compete for the role of "best leadership".
Here's a hint: marketing tag-lines such as "a better deal" without specific policies to back them up simply won't work.
(*) But with Hurricane Harvey in Texas there's talk of putting that off a few months so that the government doesn't shut down and leave Texas in the lurch.
Unless you're running a website that some people don't approve of.
Hillary Clinton panders to her base, but when the money rolled in and her position secured, what would she have really done?
She wouldn't be able to risk losing part of her base on an issue like that. And I don't think Net Neutrality is an issue that really gets conservatives to the polls, in general. So it wouldn't be like she was going to win over any moderates by scrapping it anyway.
While you could say that she would do it for the campaign donations... well she had more money than Trump but still lost, so how would more campaign contributions in the next election really help her? Especially if she's not going up against the only candidate less popular than her (ever), but a "normal" Republican. I doubt it would be worth demotivating her base. Particularly on an issue that is probably more important to younger voters, who are already hard to motivate (and many of whom probably preferred Sanders, if they voted for her at all).
So, even if I accept the premise that she would act only in her own best interest, she doesn't hold any integrity or ideology but merely "panders to her base" when convenient... no, I still don't think she would have scrapped NN.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
It's called the Spoiler effect. It's why we need to scrap first-past-the-post and replace it with instant runoff voting. Then people are not punished in the way you describe by voting for a 3rd party candidate.
When approval ratings are historically low but the incumbency rate is historically high... something is seriously wrong.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
This. I wonder how many people who are for network neutrality at the same time support disconnecting someone they disagree with, such as white supremacists, racists, Nazis etc.
Really anything other than FTTP would be good. At this point one can make a pretty serious argument for choosing leaders by random lottery: at least it would "drain the swamp", right? Personally I think I would rather have range voting or approval voting. A five-star rating or a YouTube-style thumbs-up thumbs-down ballot would hopefully be familiar enough from daily use to be palatable to voters.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
You don't have to wonder, if you realize those are orthogonal issues. You see, hosting content on the Internet costs money, and it's not one of those universal government services. Therefore you are paying some private individual for this. Private individuals can generally conduct business as they choose within the bounds of the law. Businesses typically are able to refuse service for any reason, with the exception being if this decision is based on the customer's race, religion, sex, nationality, etc. So far, I don't believe anyone is claiming Nazism as a religion, and Nazis are not otherwise members of a protected class. The legal situation is pretty clear, barring motivated reasoning.
Net neutrality on the other hand involves not prioritizing traffic based on endpoint. So one would not be able to de-prioritize traffic to Nazi websites based on these rules. To the degree that there has been any unfair prioritization, this has been based on business concerns and not the content itself. Thus while there is a potential avenue for a First Amendment claim, the actual issue being addressed by these rules is monopoly abuse.
Nazis deserve all of the protections afforded to them by law, and not a damn thing more. In advocating genocide, you give up the protections afforded to you by common human decency. Freedom of speech does not imply freedom from consequences: if what you say makes people want to exercise their freedom not to associate with you, that's kinda a personal problem.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Maybe we could all take it in turns to act as a sort of... executive officer of the week? But all the decisions of that officer must be approved at bi-weekly meetings; by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more major affairs.
Or we just base our system of government on strange women lying in ponds distributing swords. Gotta be better than what we've got now.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
All this talk about open internet, ISPs not acting as gatekeepers, corporations not controlling the internet, etc. is a bit thin when people are openly celebrating corporations kicking websites off the internet with little notice for offensive (very offensive in these cases) content after having collected money from them for years.
You can abhor places like the dailystormer and stormfront, while also disagreeing with what happened to them, how it happened, and pointing out that this bodes very badly for an open, free internet.
We don't have enough time in any case. The next election cycle is next year.
I need more information on Net Neutrality. All I've been able to come up with is a jumbled mess about false choice: in theory, you just vote with your dollars and go to an ISP who doesn't throttle Netflix or whatever; in practice, Verizon and Comcast do it, and the other small players are either not carrying big enough pipes to make Netflix useful or not carrying enough customers to make Netflix profitable. Net Neutrality prevents the tyranny of false choice between capable suppliers who won't and willing suppliers who can't.
So far, I haven't been able to build a strong, defensible argument, though, so the best I've got is "Vote YES for Net Neutrality!" It's no good saying anything if I can't argue on it at-length.
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Thanks for this. Over and over again, people here made this charge that everyone was conspiring against Netflix when in fact Netflix was just trying to cut costs by deliberately seeking out companies that would load up settlement free links with Comcast.
Xfinity is Comcast...
Woosh
Good luck with that, you seem to be in poor control of reality.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.