Slashdot Mirror
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.