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FCC Ignored Your Net Neutrality Comment, Unless You Made a 'Serious' Legal Argument (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The FCC received a record-breaking 22 million comments chiming in on the net neutrality debate, but from the sound of it, it's ignoring the vast majority of them. In a call with reporters yesterday discussing its plan to end net neutrality, a senior FCC official said that 7.5 million of those comments were the exact same letter, which was submitted using 45,000 fake email addresses. But even ignoring the potential spam, the commission said it didn't really care about the public's opinion on net neutrality unless it was phrased in unique legal terms. The vast majority of the 22 million comments were form letters, the official said, and unless those letters introduced new facts into the record or made serious legal arguments, they didn't have much bearing on the decision. The commission didn't care about comments that were only stating opinion. The FCC has been clear all year that it's focused on "quality" over "quantity" when it comes to comments on net neutrality. In fairness to the commission, this isn't an open vote. It's a deliberative process that weighs a lot of different factors to create policy that balances the interests of many stakeholders. But it still feels brazen hearing the commission staff repeatedly discount Americans' preference for consumer protections, simply because they aren't phrased in legal terms.
I voted for Gary Johnson this last election for exactly the reason that's becoming clear to a lot of people now....
I don't at all think the Democrats would have been a "better choice", given the fact they chose to run one of the absolutely worst possible choices for a candidate with Hillary Clinton. I mean, she was completely out of touch with what life is like for a typical American citizen. It was a unique experience for her just to try to do her own grocery shopping as a publicity stunt. And frankly? I think her husband was even trying to sabotage her campaign discreetly, because he probably had ZERO desire to get stuck living 4 years in the White House again, except as "first man" instead of the leader of the country.
To the credit of the Trump administration, they DID squash the the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), which Obama's administration kept pushing and which would have categorically been a bad thing for America had it passed. But absolutely, Trump is playing the uninformed fool that many of us fully expected him to be if he was elected. Essentially, he's treating the whole thing just like more reality TV and making up anything he thinks sounds good as he goes along. Even so? A lot of people voted for him more to counter the last 8 years of rule by a Democrat - including trying to avoid loading up the Supreme Court with another left-leaning Justice (which would have implications lasting far longer than a Trump presidency).
Ultimately though, yeah -- it doesn't matter anymore if you vote for the Democrats or the Republicans. Either way, you're going to get a leader who has an agenda that doesn't align well with anything resembling the intentions or purposes of the United States of America as it was originally designed by its founders. Republicans keep doing anything they can to help their friends and connections in big business or banking or the stock market. Democrats keep trying to design a government that "mandates equality" with taxation and legislation ensuring every minority group you can think of gets special recognition or privileges that enable them to force the majority to bend to their whims.
I'll put it to you this way.
Title II provides ISP's common carrier status. This gives them the ability to be completely ignorant of what's going on in their network and not be liable for it; without that status, they are now liable. Every Hollywood DMCA Staydown, every unsultry sex act viewed online that's illegal, every unsultry website that might break some arcane local statute, they are now criminally liable for all and in some states now obligated for it and don't think for a second munincipalities won't view these companies as a revenue source via fines. Heaven forbid browsing histories are sold with personally identifiable billing data; now we've got more criminal charges for slander and stalking children, or if they decide to sell traffic outright, then you have confidentiality issues as well. Why would a lawyers office provide any kind of consultation through the internet, ever, when its guaraunteed to them not to be private? Take the standard "We're going to update you on our terms of service by updating our website" to any competent class action lawyer that knows how to use waybackmachine, that's a complete disaster.
Then you have local and state governments wondering what happens to their 911 service. We used to have e911 but with this move, that's gone. And do understand, they make a significant change to the service they offer. For example, the first and obvious step here is you will get a choice between regular internet service for $99.99 a month "unlimited" (but really limited), or $59.99 a month for 500GB of data, or $39.99 for "unlimited" with no video or audio streaming or gaming traffic (except from our sponsors) for a landline with e-mail and web browsing only, and we're going to bundle that with your phone. The first challenge here is with such retrictions, since we're sending data via landline, is how you actually define "internet service". States AG will file anti-trust and RICO lawsuites to protect their state's and munincipalities interests and to force fair advertising and for the really limited services, those won't be able to be called "internet" and be fairly advertised. Now you have backend infrastructure being re-architected for each state or munincipality by court order onto of those rapidly consolidated companies dealing with operations issues due to disparate technologies, ERP systems, billing systems, monitoring systems, et-cetera.
And Finally, this doesn't take into account what happens when people begin really encrypting traffic heavily. Fact is, IPSEC was designed to encrypt all the traffic between all the endpoints and TLS is rapidly becoming IPSEC. You host off of AWS or Azure, and properly encyrpt your VM's, not only is AWS and Azure in the dark, but the ISP's are in the dark too; the Layer 3 data is useless and Layer 4 data is completely unreadable as you can rotate encryption mechanisms and keys for streams and it is not that computationally expensive. The application detection software on network gear depends heavily on being able to see un-encrypted traffic; you begin encrypting everything and about all they can see is the session being established then poof, in the dark. Google doesn't want the competition of ISP's selling data on what people are searching for; that's the entire reason they pushed the entire internet to adopt HTTPS, and I'm sure it's been effective. All that's left to do is to use DNSSEC and rotate DNS Servers to keep you from being tracked that way as well.
The only way this program is even remotely tenable is if crony capitalists pull off the impossible. Legally untenable doesn't even begin to explain the predicament they are now in.