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.

Comments

whodathunkit

[JustNiz]

So much for the government enacting the will of the people.

Re:whodathunkit

[Anonymous Coward]

Corporations are The People. You're a peon.

Re: whodathunkit

[AntronArgaiv]

You know, it's not really fair to expect the average citizen to be able to phrase his viewpoint in legal terms. Nor is it reasonable to expect that he would spend the money to hire a lawyer, simply to express his opinion. For example, constituents routinely make their views known to their elected representatives, using plain language. Why should the FCC require a higher standard?
I'd really like to see Pai get sued over this.

Re:whodathunkit

[war4peace]

Fear the true will of the people. Usually "the people" are a bunch of semi-primitives who have no clue what the fuck they are doing or whether whatever they seem to want is even achievable. Yes, everyone would love lots of money, free booze and no work to do, but besides that I don't think "the people" (as a whole, mind you, not those of them who have neurons in other places than their own gonads) are any good at deciding anything.

Governments never enacted the will of the people; they did what they thought was best for the country and their own pockets, with priorities varying from "most for my pockets" to "most for the country", with the former being more prevalent throughout history.

All voting processes are flawed in one way or another, so you can't even argue successfully that the ruling people were "chosen by the people". Most times they aren't. They're usually chosen by a group of people with power, and then the candidate is shown as "this is the one you should all vote!" and that's it. That's a lack of choice rather than a choice, much like "mouldy bread or spoiled meat" could be considered "choice".

Re:whodathunkit

[geekmux]

Corporations are The People. You're a peon.

We the People, fund the Government.

Essentially, all taxpaying citizens represent the largest and most powerful American Corporation.

Unfortunately, the Government runs on Corruption now. Corruption is the reason the People are no longer relevant. Corruption highlights why Government must be replaced.

Re: whodathunkit

[dgatwood]

Wouldn't matter. They made their decision already. This is just for show. After all, lots of us did make plenty of serious legal arguments, and they ignored us, too.

Re: whodathunkit

[tlhIngan]

You know, it's not really fair to expect the average citizen to be able to phrase his viewpoint in legal terms. Nor is it reasonable to expect that he would spend the money to hire a lawyer, simply to express his opinion. For example, constituents routinely make their views known to their elected representatives, using plain language. Why should the FCC require a higher standard?
I'd really like to see Pai get sued over this.

Easy. If you can afford a lawyer, then you're rich enough that the FCC is interested. If you can only speak in plain language, then you're just a prole and can't possibly understand government. Government's too complicated for simple minded folks. Those who can afford lawyers, well those people understand how government works.

Re:whodathunkit

[Trailer Trash]

So much for the government enacting the will of the people.

There's a process for the government to enact the will of the people, and it involves Congress. Not the FCC: Congress. That's how it *should* have been done, and if Obama and the Democrats cared so much about this they could have done it. It's like DACA, only not quite as bad.

Re: whodathunkit

[AntronArgaiv]

What, then, is the purpose of requiring a "public comment period"?

Re:whodathunkit

[ravenshrike]

Bitch at your congressperson. The FCC's remit is not the opinion of the people.

Re: whodathunkit

[rtb61]

Doesn't matter well over ten million pissed of computer geeks and nerds does not matter, boy will the US government find out how much 10 million pissed off geeks and nerds matter, it took way less than that to fuck over the US election and turn it into a blame Russia joke. The US government will be feeling a whole lot of digital pain for this action, across the board.

Re: whodathunkit

[ravenshrike]

Because the comment period can introduce angles they may not have thought of. Guess what a mass mailed form letter rather explicitly doesn't do.

Re: whodathunkit

[novakyu]

On the other hand, how much should form-letter activism count? It's just deserts for people who waste other people's time, that they end up getting ignored.

Re:whodathunkit

[war4peace]

Maybe (I'm not American) but the point is that you believe the choice STARTED there, whereas I believe the choice ENDED there.
And that, right there, is the result of "the will of the people", when people are dumb as a whole. They are willing to support a candidate, no matter how inane because it is pushed by the party they support - or the other way around, they're willing to support a whole political agenda because the person pushing it is a celebrity of sorts (magnate, singer, sportsman, etc). Whether it's the former or the latter depends on country and culture.
But very rarely, if ever, will you see the best candidate being chosen out of a pool of many (IMHO 100 is the bare minimum number) through objective train of thought and valid data analysis. THAT would be true choice: the freedom to look at objective information and filter data based on what's objectively best, ousting candidate after candidate until the best one remains, no matter the political party that stands behind him.

I know this is just utopian daydreaming and it would never happen (cue human nature), however if you want to talk choice and freedom, there they are.
What you have, politically speaking, are two colossal turds facing each other. One is blue and one is red, whatever that may mean, and they're orbited by specks of shit (the other political parties) which change allegiance according to their own largely irrelevant political agenda. It's a deadlock - and you call it "choice". Sorry, it ain't. But hey, be happy, it's "the will of the people", boo-hoo-fucking-ray!

Re:whodathunkit

[war4peace]

Here's the thing: IT DOES NOT MATTER.
What happens in the USA right now is half the country fighting the other half, each saying their rotten meat piece is better. Quite sad, really, if you ask me. Luckily, nobody asks me anyway :)

Re:whodathunkit

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you Republican trolls right back to Moscow in a pine box.

Re: whodathunkit

[mark-t]

This.

So much this.

If the EFF had wanted people to write letters, they could have provided all the information that a person would need to know to understand what is going on, and then a mailto link that opened up as a blank slate except for the "to" field. This would force any user who was remotely serious about writing a letter to have to take the time to compose it, in their own words, and would not basically create a set up for this situation to be all but completely certain.

Form letters do dick-squat. If you want people to write letters, then you inform the people, but you do *NOT* tell them or even suggest to them exactly what they ought to write because 9 out of 10 people, however well-intentioned they might have otherwise been, will just not bother trying to put it into their own words when something else already exists. You'd get less people sending letters, but you wouldn't get a situation where 90% of the letters get ignored.

Re:whodathunkit

[Anonymous Coward]

Where are my mods point when I need them.

Re: whodathunkit

[war4peace]

Isn't that what everyone says about their rotten piece of meat?

Re: whodathunkit

[easyTree]

Why should the FCC require a higher standard?

It's an elegant way to ignore all comments with trait 'a' (disagree with the desired outcome), by selectively excluding comments with trait 'b' (not written by a lawyer). That the traits have strong presentation-correlation is 'purely accidental.'

Re:whodathunkit

[CanadianMacFan]

It's enacting the will of the people. The people who have a lot of money to throw at politician campaign fundraising. If you aren't one of those people then the government is probably not going to listen to you. And then it's probably a case of you were saying what they wanted to hear rather than them valuing your expertise.

Re: whodathunkit

[TheGratefulNet]

I'd like to see ...

oh hell. I don't want to get in trouble. but you can imagine what I'd like to see.

(we live in a world where the chilling effect silences our true thoughts online. this is one such case. what I -think- has no bearing on real action, but again, we are in a witch-hunt kind of world, now, and things you say can and WILL be used against you.)

but yeah, you can imagine how I feel about this. I'll leave it at that.

Re: whodathunkit

[Ogive17]

I wrote a letter to my Congressman. He didn't care about my view, he only cared to toe the party line. The form letter I got in return was full of political bullshit.

My initial letter was basically "since when have the telecom companies worked for the people?"

Re:whodathunkit

[liquid_schwartz]

In the most recent Presidential election, we were given the choice between a candidate that was absolutely unacceptable and one whom we were willing to vote for, even if we had to hold our noses as we did. Which one was which is something that I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.

I have seen some buyers remorse on the R side. The D side seems preoccupied with reliving the past and speculating what small detail could have tipped it their way - ignoring the more obvious point that if they had only run a decent candidate it would have been an easy sweep.

Pro tips for 2018:

1) >50% of the population is white. Stop hating on white people and putting down whole states as racist deplorables.

2) Almost 50% of the population is male. Constantly criticizing men won't help your cause either.

3) Economics for the 99% is >330 times more important than corner cases like transgenders in the military. Focus on broad issues of real importance.

Citations:

https://www.urbandictionary.co... https://townhall.com/tipsheet/...

Re: whodathunkit

[mark-t]

You are making the assumption that the organization that needs to sort through the emails is any less lazy than the people who were too lazy to formulate their own opinion.

The better thing for EFF to have done would have been to inform people, and get them to write their own letters in their own words. Providing an email address to send to, but absolutely *NONE* of the content.

As I said elsewhere.... I've seen this sort of thing happen before, where millions of responses were received on a matter, and over 90% of them were just a copy-paste of some open letter that a well-meaning person had posted publicly as an example of what sort of letter might be good. However benign that person's intentions were, they hopelessly backfired.

Re: whodathunkit

[mark-t]

Just double-checked my facts on the point.. I was misrembering, and I apologize for misstating. They did not receive millions... they received just under 9,000 submissions, a response level that astonished the organization that was soliciting the responses. Very fewof these submissions were original, however, which completely offset the significance of the response.

Re:whodathunkit

[Baron_Yam]

>IT DOES NOT MATTER.

Eh. I think the Democrats would have been a better choice for the average American than the Republicans in the last election, and that kind of does matter. Especially if you're transsexual, female, or non-white. Or maybe if you're expecting Trump's economic policies to benefit you (and you're not one of the 1%). Or maybe you're just worried about Trump's lack of decorum causing the US issues (up to and including starting a major war) on the international stage.

The underlying problem is the American political system pretty much inevitably leads to polarization, and then people start voting for their team rather than the best person to represent them based on their individual stances on the issues. And then you have a situation where a significant minority of one half the population can install someone like Trump in the White House.

Re: whodathunkit

[BlueStrat]

If they can make important decisions about technology policy then sorting out mass responses should be a fairly trivial task comparatively.

That's just it. The FCC doesn't decide anything. Those with wealth & power tell the FCC what they will do. All the rest is simply Kabuki theater to distract and mollify the masses into continuing to think they have some say in what government does or does not do.

Welcome to bipartisan Big Government Cronyism.

Strat

Re:whodathunkit

[murdocj]

Yes, IT DOES MATTER. You really can't tell when trump tries to crush the free press and intimidate judges who is worse? When trump appoints oil execs to demolish pollution regulation? I don't care what you thought of Hillary, Trump is clearly worse.

Re:whodathunkit

[Baron_Yam]

But... uranium deal, emails, err... HILLARY!

You know it boils down to team loyalty, right? I honestly don't know why they bother lying or trying to misdirect your attention when they don't care and will continue to support their team (or continue to act in the same way if they are the team).

Trump could pretty much come out and say, "Yeah, my team colluded with the Russians to spike Hillary. That's the way business is done, and that's why you elected me." Then there'd be a lot more screaming than there has been, and you'd find most of the Republican establishment would fail to act regardless. I'm pretty sure the only reason Trump hasn't done that is because it would lessen what he perceives as his part in his victory, and his ego won't allow it.

Holding power isn't about who is right or righteous, it's about who has enough power to hold onto their power; the appearance of being right or righteous is only maintained when it helps gain or maintain required support for holding on to power.

Re:whodathunkit

[arth1]

Da, comrade. I stand in bread line at American food bank. Thank you tax payer for lack of jobs to earn my own bread.

You paying for the bread doesn't make it any better. The baker making bread according to his ability makes it good. Corporations making it according to the rules of profit, targeting the price to what you make and how much of that they can get, doesn't.

Re:whodathunkit

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, the Government runs on Corruption now. Corruption is the reason the People are no longer relevant. Corruption highlights why Government must be replaced.

People are relevant, though it suits the powers that be for most to believe they are not. Enough people stayed home to elect almost anyone, if they could but agree. To an extent people need to wake up and do their job. Learn the issues and vote.

I'd like to see debate,reasoning, logic, science, and all the rest given a greater emphasis in school. Examine how politicians manipulate and deceive. Trump himself is worth a ton of discussion. Of course you could greatly limit his power of manipulation if you took away his supply of dead cats. He did it just today I guess. Yesterday he said basically it is a choice between a child molester and a democrat and you better vote for the molester, because the democrat would be worse. He said this, though in slightly different words. Today he tosses out rants against ungrateful fathers and the NFL protesters. In this way the child molester gets his support and Trump avoids most of the backlash.

There are plenty of valid reasons to impeach him, and plenty of reasons that make it urgent. Personally, I think he supports Moore because he needs to keep that solid vote against his removal from office. In short, Trump doesn't care if Alabama elects a child molester, as long as it helps him or rather protects him. I suppose it also could be a slippery slope theory. If Moore gets removed from the running, then to Trump's thinking that gives credibility to women accusing moore, and more generally to women accusing in general, and I believe he is at what 13?

Re: whodathunkit

[arth1]

I'm kind of surprised that no-one has comprehensively doxxed Pai yet.

Re:whodathunkit

[arth1]

Coming from the outside, I see the political parties in the US as two peas in a pod. They're so similar that any differences they have are near cosmetic, and only matter if you're in-between the two very similar points of view. The leaders, on the other hand, are very different. Do you want a smart power hungry crook, or a stupid bigoted crook?
The latter is what the Americans elected. Remember, you don't get the leaders you need, but the ones you deserve.

Re:whodathunkit

[Arzaboa]

Of course democratic tipped media will talk about how democrats should win the next election. One learns from past mistakes. What would you expect them to talk about?

There is plenty of time for our government to talk and handle large and small issues alike. They don't run on a 24/7 media schedule to keep folks entertained, in fact its fairly boring to the average citizen -- else CSPAN would be a thing.

--
"...look over there!" - B. Simpson

Re:whodathunkit

[arth1]

"This goes against case law of TITLE I and II and here are the cases ..." THAT will get you listened to.

Is there any evidence to that assumption?
I am fairly certain that no matter how well articulated a letter is, or whether it brings up legal issues, it's not read.

Re: whodathunkit

[Frobnicator]

You know, it's not really fair to expect the average citizen to be able to phrase his viewpoint in legal terms.

True enough. But if they keep ignoring them, the average citizen will phrase the viewpoints in pitchforks and torches. Those aren't legal terms but they are readily understood.

The classic "four boxes of liberty" hasn't gone away. "There are four boxes to be used in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use them in that order." If the FCC members refuse to listen to the soap box, and the ballot box is ineffectual and deadlocked between two extreme positions that refuse the will of the people, they better hope the judges who review the change will listen to the will of the people. That last one is unpleasant, and sadly political assassinations in the US has entered a sharp uptick. We're now averaging one every two years, and it's been two years.

Re:whodathunkit

[MangoCats]

I'm sure there's a dozen or more "serious legal arguments" here... so, why don't we copy-paste each one into a separate comment to the FCC so they can count the number of times they see each one.

Re: whodathunkit

[MangoCats]

They've got a clear read on the will of the people, especially people who use the internet.

They don't care, but they do know.

Re: whodathunkit

[MangoCats]

It's just as valid as form-letter responses from your Congressmen - the fact that somebody cared enough to copy a form letter and attach their name to it counts for more than the people who ignored the issue.

Re:whodathunkit

[techno-vampire]

Maybe (I'm not American) but the point is that you believe the choice STARTED there, whereas I believe the choice ENDED there.

No, the choice didn't start there, it started during the Primaries, where all of the other potential candidates were eliminated. Some of them weren't very good, some couldn't get their message out, some were outspent, and some were outmaneuvered. And by last November, there were only two left who had any realistic chance of winning, just like it's been every election since the early '50s.

Re: whodathunkit

[Anonymous Coward]

Some citizens are lawyers.
Maybe it's time to petition local bar associations to do their part?
There are 3142 counties in the US, At least one complaint from each should be filed.

Re: whodathunkit

[Anonymous Coward]

Americans are too lazy and docile to risk their lives overthrowing the government, and the Republican traitors know this.

They already fill radio and TV with their propaganda, so the Internet is next. Once you can only afford their websites, no one will know anything that is true, only the propaganda.

Now, how many Americans will hang those responsible? How many will hang those who are about to raise taxes on half of Americans?

None. Our apathy has given us the government we deserve.

Re: whodathunkit

[PopeRatzo]

The US government will be feeling a whole lot of digital pain for this action, across the board.

Why do you think they're trying to kill net neutrality?

Your internet is about to become the equivalent of cable TV. You will have freedom to choose, within a very specific set of parameters.

A non-neutral net is not just good for the internet's gatekeepers. It's also good for an authoritarian regime.

Re: whodathunkit

[Cinnamon Beige]

Form letters do dick-squat. If you want people to write letters, then you inform the people, but you do *NOT* tell them or even suggest to them exactly what they ought to write because 9 out of 10 people, however well-intentioned they might have otherwise been, will just not bother trying to put it into their own words when something else already exists. You'd get less people sending letters, but you wouldn't get a situation where 90% of the letters get ignored.

Actually, form letters do worse than nothing, because they show you've got at best a lot of people whose support isn't much past filling in a blank or two & clicking send at best. It's effectively spam. If you just want numbers, it's better to just get people signing a petition; you can provide the info needed for anybody who wants to write a letter on their own as well as sign the petition.

Re: whodathunkit

[macsimcon]

No, the people voted for Clinton. For only the fifth time in history, the Electoral College picked the popular vote loser for president.

Re: whodathunkit

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: whodathunkit

[Anonymous Coward]

People keep saying this "pitchfork and torches" thing. But should that happen, which I doubt, you'll be labelled a terrorist and brutalized by the police while the rest of people just shrug and say "you broke the law" and "you are not free of consequences".

Re:whodathunkit

[war4peace]

You might need to change your Constitution to allow Romanians to run for presidency.

Re:whodathunkit

[war4peace]

I can't tell and here's why: there is no actual information on what Hillary might have done, had she become president. We could be in the middle of a nuclear war for all we know. Or we could all hold our hands and sing Kumbaya while flying through the heavenly portals to another dimension.
So all I can do in order to directly compare the two is look at them as candidates, up to right when elections took place. And from that data, neither was better than the other. What happened afterwards was one-sided and can't be taken into consideration.

Re:whodathunkit

[war4peace]

Remember, you don't get the leaders you need, but the ones you deserve.

True words, my friend. Valid for every group and every leader out there.

Re: whodathunkit

[Wild_dog!]

Yep.

Form letters let people have a voice even if it seems rather mundane.

Re:whodathunkit

[TimothyHollins]

We the People, fund the Government.

I found the problem. If you want representation, you shouldn't fund the Government, you should fund the politicians. That's what the big boys are doing.

Look at it -
Google - taxes: $5.30. Politicians: Millions
Apple - taxes: $0 but requested $800 million in returns. Politicians: One Ireland worth of bribes.
Verizon - taxes: please, do we look like poor people? Politicians: Enough for complete ownership of one Ajit Pai and whatever lawmaker is willing to block fiber deployment to the local orphanage for hefty donations.

Re: whodathunkit

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm kind of surprised that no-one has comprehensively doxxed Pai yet.

Hell has no street addresses.

Re: whodathunkit

[dwillden]

Not true, it shows them by count alone that many people are concerned about the issue. Many people I know are concerned about this issue but don't feel confident enough in the details or with their ability to write a cognizant letter expressing their views on the topic. So a form letter allows them to indicate if only as a "Me Too" count, that they are concerned.

If we only allow unique individually composed letters or emails on a technical topic it allows the FCC and their corporate owners to claim that only a few geeks are concerned, as since the rank and file citizenry didn't complain they thus must be okay with it.

Form Letters have great value and should not be discounted. But they must be examined carefully to ensure each sender is unique.

Re: whodathunkit

[Chris Mattern]

Why should the FCC require a higher standard?

Well, there's the odd fact that almost all the comments meeting the "higher standard" will come from ISPs. Funny coincidence, that.

Re:whodathunkit

[GameboyRMH]

Take it easy on the deplorables man, ridiculous false equivalency is all they've got!

Re: whodathunkit

[mark-t]

That's just it. The FCC doesn't decide anything. Those with wealth & power tell the FCC what they will do.

Of course... it is much easier to form the conspiracy theory that they were always against you from the beginning than it is to assume that what essentially amounts to a signature on a petition, which is what sending a form letter basically is, is not going to count as high as the individual letters, and the difference in that significance can completely outweigh the volume of responses.

If more than 90% of the letters are basically just carbon copies of eachother, than they are basically just one letter with that number of signatures on it, like a petition. If the number of signatures on it is greater than the organization would have expected, they are not going to conclude that their expectations were necessarily wrong, they are going to conclude that the signatures don't really mean anything because it is too simple to sign something that the signers don't even necessarily strongly agree with, but are just not opposed to it strongly enough actually to refuse to sign. A letter, meanwhile, indicates a clear intent on the writer, and if even a very tiny percentage of those who had just sent the form letter had written their own, however lacking in the same elegance as the form letter it may have been, a greater level of consideration may have been given, particularly if the total number of real letters received actually exceeded their expectations.

When you have two things, a petition with 1000 signatures, and 100 individual letters on the topic, you wanna guess how significant that petition is going to be? Especially if the recipient was expecting letters and not a petition in the first place.

Re:whodathunkit

[arth1]

You're a pretty uninformed observer, then. The GOP is generally opposed to social progress, wants to dismantle government, and works almost entirely for corporations rather than the people. They feel that the poor and the helpless deserve their condition and the rich are the victors in life.

Say what you want about Democrats and their corporate sponsors but they vote much more often for social progress and legislation that benefits the poor or benefits all Americans equally. The GOP is simply not interested in governing anymore and only cares about sabotaging the other party's achievements and leveraging their government power to benefit their wealthy cohorts.

Yes, similar. Neither is willing to go for unalienable universal suffrage, nor complete disenfranchisement. Neither want to reduce the the presidency to a figurehead and add a prime minister, nor institute a theocracy. Neither wants to abolish privileges for religious institutions, nor put one in charge. Neither wants to allow public nudity and public sex, nor burkas and niqabs. Neither wants to reduce copyrights and patents to shorter time spans than they were originally, to reflect that the world moves faster now. Nor implement perpetual non-transferable ownership. Neither wants to switch to universal non-private-run healthcare and education. Nor switch the armed forces from mercenaries to conscription. Neither wants open borders, nor a market driven currency and abolishing the Federal Reserve..

It's a matter of perspective. If you stand right between two people, they will appear to be in very different directions, because they are to you. But if you look at it from an outside view, the proximity becomes more noticeable; the more so, the farther away you are.

I'll say it again -- one party still has some interest in governing and the other wants to dismantle government. They are not two peas in a pod.

One thinks short term profits for themselves and their cronies. The other one thinks slightly longer term profits for themselves and their cronies. I see a theme.

Re: whodathunkit

[mark-t]

it shows them by count alone that many people are concerned about the issue

True, but without a really *LARGE* number of signatures on that petition, it's still not likely to be taken very seriously. For a nation the size of the USA, You'd need hundreds of thousands of signatures, at least, and quite possibly even millions of signatures on a petition before you could have any measure of confidence that it is an accurate cross sampling of what the entire nation actually felt on a matter, and not simply a niche group of like-minded people. But to that end, it probably would still been more effective to have sent just a single letter, and attached people's names and addresses to it as signatories for those that wished their name to be sent than to have effectively spammed the organization with emails that are basically all just carbon copies of eachother.

Re: whodathunkit

[Bartles]

That's not what according to his ability means. Or at least the context is entirely wrong as it applies to marxism. The baker makes good bread because if he doesn't we will buy our bread elsewhere. Under marxism, the baker makes barely adequate bread because his state grown wheat sucks when he manages to get some, and if he doesn't make barely adequate bread he gets sent to a gulag.

Re: whodathunkit

[alexgieg]

I'm kind of surprised that no-one has comprehensively doxxed Pai yet.

Here in Brazil they did that to one politician who said he was in support of breaking net neutrality. As in, the very next day all his public data, including addresses, was already circulating, and some of the private data too. The guy quickly backtracked and said he was sorry because people "misunderstood" what he meant.

And when a grassroots movement began to emerge talking about organizing mas public manifestations of the kind that paralises huge cities, the ISPs pushing for it also decided it wiser to not go for it.

So! When are the US Internet users planning to begin interrupting all road traffic in New York City, Washington DC and every major city and State capital, plus all air travel on all major airports, plus the major commercial transportation hubs? The day of the vote and the whole month after that, until the FCC backtracks, right?

Right?

Done Deal

[Anonymous Coward]

The repeal of the net neutrality rules was a done deal the day that Donald Trump was elected. The third-world goat herder appointed to head the FCC is simply doing what he had already decided he would do if he ever got the job.

Re:Done Deal

[billyswong]

The repeal of the net neutrality rules was a done deal the day that Donald Trump was elected. The third-world goat herder appointed to head the FCC is simply doing what he had already decided he would do if he ever got the job.

Two party system means you always have to eat half the shit. While one party system means you always have to eat all the shit. So America is still better than China. China put a huge firewall to the whole country so people are forced to use local copycat brand/version of whatever popular online service/product outside. Recently VPN was criminalized. "Net Neutrality? What is it? Does it taste good?"

Re:Done Deal

[GameboyRMH]

Hey now, there are a lot of terrible things you could say about Ajit Pai. You could call him an anti-human money grubbing corporate whore, for example. You could call him the Internet's vile arch-enemy. But let's not resort to racism.

weighs a lot of different factors ?

[Anonymous Coward]

By 'a lot of factors' they mean the amount of money paid to the commissioners by Verizon and friends, apparently.

Re: weighs a lot of different factors ?

[AntronArgaiv]

Yeah, and by "balance the interests", they mean, compare the amount of donations.

They imagine it appears honest

[Baron_Yam]

They imagine it looks superficially honest to eliminate public comment based on a bureaucratic process. What they've overlooked is that the mob doesn't care about superficial appearances when they know you're just ignoring them... and the mob REALLY doesn't like it when you rub it in their face that you don't care about them.

I think they just told the American public to eat cake.

But of course they're doing what they want, and what the Republican party wants them to do... remove impediments to fleecing the commoners (who voted for them!) more efficiently.

So... is it time for the guillotines yet? When will the public turn on those who are betraying them? When will enough of them even realize they're being betrayed?

Re:They imagine it appears honest

[Anonymous Coward]

Three things keep these clowns in power:

* Citizens United ==> Unlimited spending by corrupt special interests to subvert the political process.

* Gerrymandering and voter suppression ==> to keep low income and non-white voters from having any representation.

* Fear mongering over hot-button social issues that have zero impact on most people's lives (abortion, gay marriage, transgender bathroom access) ==> bring out the social conservatives and get them to vote against their own economic interests.

It's a winning formula. Sad, but effective.

The Republican party sure knows how to extract wealth from the masses and hand it to their wealthy backers. A disinterested, ignorant population is easily manipulated.

Re:They imagine it appears honest

[Altrag]

I'm not sure that the population is as disinterested and ignorant as you believe. But when your choices are Trump or Clinton.. I'm still not 100% the alternative would have been significantly better. Less chance of a war with North Korea perhaps, but Clinton and many Democrats are just as deep in the pockets of the large corporations. In many cases the same large corporations -- nothing stops them from hedging their bet and just buying off both candidates. Its not like corporations have any political preference or morals -- they care only about profit. (And I don't blame them for that -- its their literal purpose for existing. I blame the corrupt politicians that let corporations essentially do their job for them, to the benefit of corporate profit of course, while they just sit around sucking up the bribes.)

There's plenty of polling that suggests had the Dems run Bernie Sanders instead of Clinton, he might have swung the vote. Of course much of that is after-the-fact polling when Trump's true nature became evident (and thus can't be directly taken as proof that Sanders would have won.)

And now there's reports coming out that within the DNC there was their own level of corruption in play in order to boost Clinton to the top over Sanders.

It just never stops. Its no wonder the Russians were able to produce so much propaganda and have it taken seriously -- it doesn't seem to matter how horrible the stories are, you can't just write them off as there's a good chance they're true when it comes to our public officials these days.

Re: They imagine it appears honest

[dhawton]

Options were more than Trump and Clinton no matter how much garbage the mainstream media portrays. The media showed signs of fear if the third parties this past year.

Re:They imagine it appears honest

[phantomfive]

So... is it time for the guillotines yet?

No. Mainly because it's a lot easier to vote them out of office. Oh, you can't vote them out of office? You probably wouldn't have won a revolution, then.

That's how the system is set up: to avoid a revolution by making power changes by other methods easier. It is not a perfect system, but it has solved the problem of periodic revolutions.

Re: They imagine it appears honest

[phantomfive]

What does that even mean? If they can decide who votes and who does not, and which votes are counted and which are not, then they can select whatever outcome they want. The American vote is nullified.

The FCC can be changed by changing the president. You're not going to get many people to fight a revolution over the FCC, sorry.

Re: They imagine it appears honest

[macsimcon]

Actually, the Senate confirms the commissioners, so if they hate who the president nominates, they just leave the seats empty...as they did with President Obama.

Re: They imagine it appears honest

[phantomfive]

So.....you think you could win a revolution over the FCC? Or are you just nitpicking?

Re:They imagine it appears honest

[GameboyRMH]

So... is it time for the guillotines yet? When will the public turn on those who are betraying them? When will enough of them even realize they're being betrayed?

I saw an interesting article on this the other day, from a 1%er apologist's perspective, but he raised some interesting facts and perhaps unintentionally made a good argument for something adjacent to his point:

http://fortune.com/2015/03/02/...

The reason Americans don't revolt can be summed up with a reference to the old dirty joke about "the barrel." Because the USA's economic system gives most people a day outside "the barrel" at some point in their lives, Americans as a group are apparently willing to accept a system where most people spend most or all of their lives "in the barrel." It's pretty fucked up.

Re:They imagine it appears honest

[GameboyRMH]

You're just looking at one tip of the iceberg. You might want to give this long essay a read:

http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/...

Conservatism in general is not just a misguided, arguably somewhat reasonable pro-business ideology. It's an ancient evil, dressed in a human skinsuit, dressed in a suit and tie, and even many conservatives are not aware of this. Our foe has thousands of years of experience vs. our <300.

Re:They imagine it appears honest

[Baron_Yam]

People are very poor judges of cost vs. reward, especially as you scale both up.

Take the lottery, for instance. We simply can't understand 'millions', and we know people do win the lottery, so it's very difficult to understand the chances of winning the pot. We think they're much better than they are, and few people consider how much even a ticket a week adds up to over time.

Or criminals. The average bank robber or corner drug dealer ends up with less than minimum wage (slightly offset by periodic offers by the state for free room and board). They're underestimating the costs of doing business while overestimating the chance of being one of the few to be extremely successful.

This is life - people are happy with rules that leave them living at a lower standard than objectively necessary for society's functioning because they imagine they will be the exception that will receive an exceptional benefit from those rules. And the really poor simply have no power at all, no say in the matter unless they're willing to revolt - and honestly, even people who are pretty poor in the West have something to lose in a revolution.

Who is left to change things? There aren't enough people with nothing to lose or idealists willing to lose what they have.

Re: They imagine it appears honest

[Altrag]

Not relevant options. Third parties in the US haven't been relevant for.. well I'm not even sure how long. Certainly not since I've been paying attention and I'm fairly . A two-party system is a pretty bad system to be sure, but the US has a hell of a long way to go before you can consider them anywhere even vaguely close to a multi-party system.

Hell, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., there's only 3 seats in all of Congress currently held by independents and less than a dozen since WW2. And even then, most of them flip-flopped between one of the two major parties and being independent.. not associated with actual third parties just got pissed off at their original party somewhere along the way.

Re:They imagine it appears honest

[Altrag]

Interesting.. though there's two things I'd bring up:
1) Trump may still be tweeting, but few people would care. We would have all forgotten about Hillary completely by now if Hannity and Trump himself didn't keep bringing her up as an attempted smokescreen over things that actually matter. Likewise if Hillary had won, Trump would have been pretty much irrelevant and gone back to talk shows or lion taming or whatever other scheme he'd probably fail at next.

2) No mention of Russian in that article. By the end of the campaign, Hillary was already calling out Russia in a way that sounded disturbingly like she was one step away from declaring war. Now maybe that was all just to promote the Trump/Russia scandal and she would have shut up after taking the Oval Office, but I'm not entirely sure about that. All-out war would maybe have been unlikely (MAD is pretty much still in effect should tensions flare up again..) but another round of proxy wars were definitely sounding plausible.

Re: They imagine it appears honest

[dhawton]

Third parties are only not relevant because people won't vote for a 3rd party because a 3rd party won't win.. but to win, people need to vote 3rd party. Doesn't make a 3rd party relevant at all, just means you're playing into the us vs them 2 party system by continuing to vote in the 2 party system.

Read between the lines

[burtosis]

'Serious' legal argument = money

Drawing a bullseye around the arrow

[quantaman]

Who wants to bet this justification only popped up after they looked over the comments? (and were forced to disregard all the anti-net neutrality bot opinions)

Re: Drawing a bullseye around the arrow

[quantaman]

That's literally the f'ing point of the article! They data mined the responses, and determined that 1/3rd of them were a form letter, and a good chunk were opinion and not an actual defensible argument. I know we can't be bothered to even comprehend the summary, but come on!

I think you missed the point of my comment.

I'm not claiming they looked over the responses, determined that the vast majority didn't fit their criteria for consideration, and then threw them out.

I'm claiming they wanted to kill net neutrality, so they reviewed the responses with the aim of justifying that conclusion, and then chose to interpret and apply their standards in a way that would ignore the overwhelming public support for net neutrality shown in the comments.

Re:Drawing a bullseye around the arrow

[Altrag]

Discounting the spambots is not really an issue.

Its when they discount the form letters produced by organizations such as the EFF and OpenMedia. Sure, the person sending them didn't actually put a whole lot of time or effort (or apparently the only thing the FCC cares about these days -- money) into it, but unlike the bots each one of those form letters still indicates intent by the person who clicked the submit button.

So ignoring those is basically the equivalent of telling millions of people that their opinion literally doesn't matter. Can you imagine what would happen if 2020 comes around and Trump's introduced a new law that states you can't vote without your own lawyer present? That may not be an exact comparison but its startlingly close to what the FCC is doing here by dismissing such form letters.

Re:Drawing a bullseye around the arrow

[mark-t]

The problem is really that organizations like EFF and OpenMedia should not be providing form letters to send in the first place. They should give the person an address to send their remarks to, but absolutely *NONE* of the content of the email should be provided or else they are just setting up a situation where this kind of thing is going to happen.

I've seen this kind of thing happen before, where a federal organization accepts public comments on an issue, and a well-meaning person or organization that wants people to send letters about the matter decides to supply an example of what such a letter should look like. Laziness on the part of the end-user kicks in and everybody just copies and pastes the darn thing, maybe changing only about 10% of it, and causing the organization to ignore all of them.

Re:Drawing a bullseye around the arrow

[quantaman]

The problem is really that organizations like EFF and OpenMedia should not be providing form letters to send in the first place. They should give the person an address to send their remarks to, but absolutely *NONE* of the content of the email should be provided or else they are just setting up a situation where this kind of thing is going to happen.

I've seen this kind of thing happen before, where a federal organization accepts public comments on an issue, and a well-meaning person or organization that wants people to send letters about the matter decides to supply an example of what such a letter should look like. Laziness on the part of the end-user kicks in and everybody just copies and pastes the darn thing, maybe changing only about 10% of it, and causing the organization to ignore all of them.

So did the EFF and OpenMedia make an obvious rookie screw up, or were they following the existing standard whereby form letters were considered?

Re:Drawing a bullseye around the arrow

[mark-t]

I'm not sure what "existing standard" you are talking about. It's common practice for comments that are obviously form letters to be ignored.

Re:Drawing a bullseye around the arrow

[Cinnamon Beige]

So did the EFF and OpenMedia make an obvious rookie screw up, or were they following the existing standard whereby form letters were considered?

It's an obvious rookie screw up, and I was outright mystified when the EFF directed me to where I could send one in via a helpful web app because it's a well-known one.

It's like they wandered in from some strange, strange alternate universe where form letters are considered and people really do get money from the Nigerian princes who randomly emailed them.

Re: Drawing a bullseye around the arrow

[dwillden]

Sure, insult your allies in this fight. That's always a smart way to lose a battle.

We need to work together across the political divide to fight this. There is extensive opposition to eliminating Net neutrality on both sides. But we can't work together they can divide us with petty political differences and ram this through.

Conservatives and Libertarians would like to see the regulations eliminated, but many/most recognize that the free market can only prevent abuses if it really exists and in much of the country there is not a free market thanks to the protected monopolies that the Cable companies have. Thus until we can kill those protected monopolies it is recognized that we need net neutrality rules to be kept in place. Our reasons for keeping it might not exactly align with yours but if we both want to keep the rules in place, why are you attacking us? They may have been Republicans, but the goal is the same: to protect the Internet. So stop insulting your allies. (ones who might have a bit(a very small bit) more pull with the party in power.

Re:Drawing a bullseye around the arrow

[dwillden]

Disagree. Many who are concerned about this don't feel confident in their understanding or ability to express their understanding of the technical and functional issues of these rules and the impact revoking them will have. A form letter allows those people to say "Me Too" far more eloquently than they could have. And without having a form to submit, they would likely just not submit any statement allowing the FCC to say they were not opposed to the change.

Such form letters allow the usually silent majority to speak up because they can do it quickly and without having to spend hours trying to compose a letter on a topic they might not feel fully comfortable addressing due to lack of in-depth knowledge of the topic.

Every one of those form letters needs to be counted as a statement on the topic. Discount the spambots and non-unique senders. But each letter from a unique individual needs to be counted.

Re:Drawing a bullseye around the arrow

[mark-t]

Such form letters allow the usually silent majority to speak up because they can do it quickly and without having to spend hours trying to compose a letter on a topic they might not feel fully comfortable addressing due to lack of in-depth knowledge of the topic.

In principle, yes... but if they were asking for public comment, then they were expecting public comment, not a public petition, which is actually just one person or one group's comment, with the support of some large number of people that they found who happened to be willing to sign it, because in practice, a mere signature on a petition does not in any way offer credibility that the signer genuinely wanted whatever the petition was, it only offers evidence that they didn't *not* want it badly enough to refuse to sign. The signer's actual opinion may have been far closer to indifference, while an individual letter says that the writer was deeply concerned about the topic. The number of signatures that you need on a petition vs the number of letters that you need to express the same level of concern is different by multiple orders of magnitude. Why is surprising that the FCC is essentially ignoring what they never asked for in the first place?

I don't side with the FCC's decision for a second, but I can't say I'm surprised by it. I didn't know about the form letters by EFF and OpenMedia before, but if I had, I would have stated something about it then.

Re:Drawing a bullseye around the arrow

[mark-t]

Because, quite simply, there weren't enough signatures on just that one letter to warrant giving it the same level of merit that even a fraction of that number of individual letters would have had.

Every individual letter received on a subject is generally going to be worth no less than *HUNDREDS* of such signatures. They asked for opinions, and most of what they got was essentially just a petition. I don't side with the FCC's final decision here for a second, but why is it in any way surprising that they ignored the people who essentially just signed such a petition when that's not what they asked for?

Re:Drawing a bullseye around the arrow

[Altrag]

A public petition _is_ a form of public comment. By your argument we shouldn't hold protests either because the people who care enough to do so will just set up a meeting with those in charge and argue their point directly and succinctly. Or for another analogy, we should can class action lawsuits because if you don't have the time and money to bring your case against a billion dollar corporation, its obviously because you don't care enough right?

Or to put it another way:
- Large company with vested interest in making these kind of changes: Usually have direct access to the decision makers, and can afford an army of lawyers to draft up letters for anything they can't deal with in person.

- Everyone who gets screwed: No direct access to decision makers, and definitely not enough money to hire lawyers.

Petitions are there to fill the gap between those two extremes, as there's precious little else playing around in the middle ground. Even your vote is basically just a petition (especially in the US where the electoral college can happily ignore you and pick whatever candidate they want.) Should we also ignore any voters who didn't draft a personal, in-depth level of intent?

Re:Drawing a bullseye around the arrow

[Altrag]

Maybe.. though I'd say closer to dozens than hundreds. Even taking the larger number though, we're talking about petitions that among them have several _million_ signatures. Do you really think there's tens of thousands of people on the other side who wrote personalized letters along the lines of "I don't pay enough for my internet and I'm sick of free speech so please screw me over some more cause.. freedom?!"?

that's not what they asked for?

Because apparently by your logic, and theirs, "what they asked for" amounts to "things that agree with us." Even ignoring the petitions I'd be extremely surprised to find that there were more people in favor of killing the internet than saving it, never mind by any sort of a significant margin. Shockingly, they don't bother releasing those numbers. They just tell you they're going to ignore you if you didn't happen to have the time and knowledge (and apparently a fucking lawyer) to draft a "legal" document stating your opinion.

Re:Drawing a bullseye around the arrow

[mark-t]

Because apparently by your logic, and theirs, "what they asked for" amounts to "things that agree with us."

That's an assumption that may very well be true, but there's no reason to assume that when an entirely plausible reason exists for ignoring what essentially amounts to spam unless you make the presumption that was their agenda the whole time, which, if anybody had actually believed, would have meant that nobody would have written letters at all.

Clearly there is a demographic that was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

That said, it's also fairly obvious that is still the direction they were leaning toward, and it would have fallen to the respondents to convince them otherwise. But discounting the ignored letters, there simply wasn't a sufficient response to merit such reconsideration. If nobody had made up a form letter for people to send, and if even just a tenth of those people who may have otherwise submitted the form letter would have instead written their own, we may very well have seen a very different outcome by now.

We'll never know for sure... but it's not rational to conclude that they were never really interested in people's views simply because of how things turned out because a very reasonable explanation exists for why it has happened, and this is quite far from the first time this sort of thing has happened, where mass mailings of a form letter completely backfired on the people who bothered to send one.

FCC ignored your comment

[rsilvergun]

unless you asked for NN to be abolished. I have no idea why anyone is surprised. We put a political party in charge that is against the government regulating private enterprise. They never made any secret of this, ever. It's a central plank of their party. They control the House, Senate, presidency and soon the Judiciary. They control the State and local legislatures. They control literally all of government except a few parts of NY & CA.

Fact is the vast majority of people oppose gov't regulation except when it's something they want regulated. But it doesn't work that way. You can't have a functioning government except when you don't. You can't have a gov't that looks out for your interests but not your neighbors (well, not unless you're very, very rich). Elections have consequences. Here's one right now.

Re:FCC ignored your comment

[QuesarVII]

Like it or not, that's not the way it works with our electoral voting system.

I voted for Bernie since the DNC stole the nomination from him. However, I did it in a state that was a practical guaranteed win for Hillary (which she did). Had I been worried that she had any chance of losing the state, I would have voted for her. I don't think I deserve any blame for what we ended up with from that choice.

Re: FCC ignored your comment

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry.. you don't understand voting if you blame people for not voting a specific way. Votes do not belong to certain candidates. I vote for freedom... If I didn't vote Johnson, I'd have voted for Keninston, then Castle. Hillary and Trump aren't worth voting for. Just because a third party person voted third party doesn't mean they'd have voted a specific way otherwise. Greens didn't steal from Democrats, libertarians didn't steal from Republicans or Democrats. The vote doesn't belong to any party, it belongs and is placed by the people. Self governance and freedom are two points that must be fought for by the candidate to win my vote. Hillary supports neither, she'd never get my vote in a billion years. Trump has his own flaws, he'd get it the year before Hillary but no sooner.

Aka, enough with the blame game.

Re:FCC ignored your comment

[JoeMerritt]

"They control literally all of government except a few parts of NY & CA."

should say:

"They control much of government except NY, CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, NV, NJ, NM, OR, RI, VT, and WA."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Doesn't sound as sensational though, after all we'd expect a two party system in first past the post voting, and we'd further expect those two parties to fluctuate between being in charge cyclically, as they have.

As for the meat of the article - saying opinions weren't weighed heavily when making a legal decision is exactly what they should be doing. We should not be ruled by opinions, but by fact and logical application of the law.

I believe internet service is in the same category as water/electric/sewer. In practice in the US you have no real option. If you want cable internet you have one provider, one DSL provider, one electricty provider, one sewer provider. I can't decline electric/cable internet/sewer service from my current provider and pay a different company, they don't exist. Any monopoly should be heavily incentivized to reorganize (legislatively if necessary) in such a manner that there is healthy competition. Failure to do so is on both parties.

Re:FCC ignored your comment

[Altrag]

Except in the case of NN, they aren't really regulating private industry. They're regulating public access to the internet. Just like they regulate what can be dumped into the public water supply for example. Sure the regulations negatively impact upstream businesses that now have to find other ways to dispose of their waste, but that's not the damned point.

The point is not regulating it leaves the system wide open for abuse by companies that don't give a shit whether you live or die as long as they get paid. Sure the internet isn't as life-and-death as poisoned drinking water, but its still a pretty damned significant public good in the modern world.

Re:FCC ignored your comment

[Actually, I do RTFA]

have any of you comprehended that net neutrality as a policy (as it wasn't "law" it was just a policy) only started in February of 2015? How did we survive before that year?

Before that the FTC had similar rules. Then the courts decided the FTC didn't have jurisdiction, the FCC did. The FCC then implemented net neutrality rules. There was a brief period in between when a lot of shenanigans, esp. by Verizon, were started.

Re: FCC ignored your comment

[macsimcon]

Are you sure you are old enough to vote? Maybe you just do not understand voting in America.

In our system, one of the two major parties will win nearly every time, so you are wasting your vote when you vote for a third party.

Time to grow up and be practical.

Re: FCC ignored your comment

[macsimcon]

Why does the right always haul out the Tenth Amendment? It has no relevancy here.

Re: FCC ignored your comment

[macsimcon]

Sure. What if they charge less for Fox News because they own the website? Or, what if they slow down news sites in general to force customers into signing up for a cable bundle of several channels, all owned by their network, which is far more profitable than providing bandwidth?

Re:FCC ignored your comment

[misnohmer]

Is this government removing other related regulations, like the land easements that allow Telco's to plow through my property and lay they fiber there rent free? It is my understanding that they were granted those because they were a public utility, therefore regulated for the benefit of the public.If the FCC and the current political party get they wants want to deregulate the Telcos, great, let the Comcasts of the world negotiate with each individual property owner how much rent they want for running cables through their land. They want to charge more to carry traffic from EFF, no problem, I want to charge them unregulated rent for their fibers going through my property, or come dig it out and take it with you (it's only $10 per month for the first 6 months, regular rates apply after that, subject to change without notice).

I suspect than unfortunately that is no the case here. The government will deregulate what traffic the telcos carry and how much they charge, but they will continue to protect the Telco effective monopoly with regulation forcing me to allow them to use my land for their business. Oh yes, legally it's not a monopoly because there is more than one Telco, so I guess my argument is not legally sound.

Re: FCC ignored your comment

[djinn6]

By that logic, everyone should've voted Trump. After all, if you voted for someone who didn't win, it's a wasted vote!

Hold Music

[freeze128]

You know when you're on hold with a company's support line, and a reassuring voice tells you that "Your call is important to us", and you mutter under your breath "Yeah, right" because you know that they really don't care, but they have to make it look like they do?

Your call isn't important to the FCC, and they don't care if you know.

Re:Hold Music

[ScentCone]

Your call isn't important to the FCC, and they don't care if you know.

Because if your call is you reading from the same form letter that seven million other people have read to them over the phone, your call isn't shining ANY new light on the situation. How are you not getting this?

Re:Hold Music

[djinn6]

A single drop of water can't hurt you, but a billion drops of water will. Quantity has a quality all its own.

Title: FCC Ignored Your Net Neutrality Comment.

[whoever57]

The title should read:
"FCC Ignored Your Net Neutrality Comment."

The explanation is just a pretence. Remember how the FCC didn't want to investigate all those anti-net-neutrality robo-submissions?

There is simply no rational explanation other than malice under which robo-submissions with one point of view would be accepted while what appear to be genuine, but assisted, submissions with the opposite point of view would be ignored.

Re:Title: FCC Ignored Your Net Neutrality Comment.

[Anonymous Coward]

While the progressives are spinning up outrage, the law is very clear about the comments, and the FCC followed it. The campaign to get you to send comments was merely an effort to get you upset.

The comments period is specifically to get new information. If you do not provide new information or contest some data they used to make the decision, the agencies can not and may not use your letter. Robot-letters, in particular,, are useless as they're very easy to dismiss. Read the first one, toss the rest, no useful information. Reword the robot ether, the. You've spent $10 of bureaucrat time putting it in the same bin as the robo-letters. With a crank letter citing random parts of the law and made up data, then you burn several hours of bureaucrat time debunking it. Cite relevant parts of the law or sourced data? Then your argument gets presented to the board with either a concurrence and change, concurrence no change (very rare) or a counter argument to your point.

Dear FCC, this is your boss speaking..

[mrwireless]

Imagine if this happened..

The people rally: "we want you to forbid the use of lead in paint in childrens toys, as thousands of children have died!"
The EPA: sorry, but you didn't use the correct legal verbiage.

or

The people rally: "we think its morally wrong that black people are only allowed to sit in the back of the bus".
The transport authority: sorry, you forgot to fill out the form in triplicate.

Making this about following procedure displays a willing tone deafness to the larger moral debate the American people are trying to have. If the FCC takes the american people seriously, the very least they should do is offer a sincere response to the implicit but very real message they have been served. Optimally, they would understand that with an overwhelming response like this, you should interpret the situation as if it were a democracy.

This is like a clerk (FCC) telling the CEO (the people) that he doesn't feel obliged to take her wishes seriously, as the regular procedure is that orders come from middle management.

Re: Dear FCC, this is your boss speaking..

[macsimcon]

Maybe Congress should exercise its oversight authority over the FCC? You know, because that is part of their job and all.

Quid pro quo... Whom does the FCC serve?

[fustakrakich]

Will corruption ever be a serious election issue?

Re: No Surprise

[AntronArgaiv]

I decline to create joinder with you.

Restoring Internet Freedom

[bugs2squash]

Now all they need to do is pick a sarcastic name for the declaration

Re:Wrong address

[Osgeld]

why? they do fuck all of nothing

Did you vote for Bernie

[rsilvergun]

In the primary? If not you screwed up. I don't care what your reasons were, you done screwed up.

Re:Did you vote for Bernie

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, the Dems forced Hillary down everyone's throats and we flat rejected that. I hate Trump. Yeah worse than Hillary, but that doesn't mean I'm going to vote for what repulses me. Instead I voted for the only canidate still in the race saying the things I wanted hear. Sorry that wasn't your chosen bitch.

Re:Did you vote for Bernie

[sjames]

My vote in the Democratic primary literally didn't matter, there was a thumb on the scale. Either way, Hillary was the DNC candidate for president, so certainly nobody "failing" to vote for her in the primary changed anything.

Re:Did you vote for Bernie

[sjames]

You're missing it. Me voting for Hillary in the *P*R*I*M*A*R*Y* wouldn't have changed a thing. She did win that after all. My vote for Sanders didn't change anything, he didn't win.

My best hope is that the DNC has learned not to thumb the scale so next election when the GOP again offers up a rogue's gallery the Ds can pick someone who will win.

Re:Did you vote for Bernie

[sjames]

I didn't say my vote never matters. The subject was who is to blame for the situation we have now. My vote was for not the current situation and it literally changed nothing (or we would have a very different situation now). That doesn't mean I won't vote again next time or that it will be equally ineffective.

Had the DNC wanted a candidate with momentum, they would have given him the nod or at least not the brick wall. It was actually so blatant that some of the delegates were escorted out and others held a "fart in" in protest.

She won the primary and she was running against perhaps the most repulsive opponent possible without resorting to a convicted serial killer. If she had a chance, that was it for sure.

Re:Did you vote for Bernie

[kenh]

My best hope is that the DNC has learned not to thumb the scale so next election when the GOP again offers up a rogue's gallery the Ds can pick someone who will win.

You understand that the very reason the Democrats have "Super Delegates" is explicitly to keep Democrat Voters from nominating anyone they like - the Republican primary process allowed for literally anyone to wander in, capture the hearts and minds of the common voter and "steal" the nomination from the party's preferred candidate. Remember, the GOP didn't want Trump as it's candidate, it was forced to accept it when Trump won the primaries.

The Democrats picked someone that should have won, but she choose to ignore several staunchly democrat states and take the voters there for granted, costing her just enough votes to lose the election. Instead of campaigning in PA, MI, WI, etc. HRC repeatedly went back to CA to milk ever more campaign funds from rich Hollywood types... Now she has a fat bank account, but she lost the election.

Re:Did you vote for Bernie

[sjames]

In fact, I do know that. Nevertheless, I hope that they have learned that actually using that ability can cost them everything. That if they would like to win the general election, they will pick the person the rank and file like.

"Opinion" is the legal requirement.

[mutantSushi]

It's BS and flies in the face of actual function of FCC. FCC is not a court whose edicts are purely resolutions of existing law. They decide policy which is ultimately an expression of opinions and choices. Anybody who has purely legal opinion can express it by bringing the matter to court and judging FCC policy based on purely legal matters. Pure public "opinion" is precisely what the FCC is legally supposed to take into account. No federal agency required to consider public opinion has ever claimed this interpretation AFAIK. (and if FCC believes this is legal requirement, would it not overturn all past federal regulations which illegally took into consideration public opinions which are not strict legal arguments?) Never mind that FCC has not enunciated a clear objective standard to discern "legal argument" from non-legal "opinion". There just isn't such a sharp distinction when one considers the philosophical fundamentals of judicial process. Courts consider opinions ALL THE TIME which are not strict functions of law, even if the latter is prioritized.

The fact that they now openly admit refusing to consider public "opinion" that is not legal argument is in fact a great legal argument to overturn their NN decision for not following legal requirement to consider public OPINION. Of course, they can re-run process and say they came to same conclusion while taking into account the public opinions, but at least that delays them by some years and messes them up.

Re: Republicans don't like democracy

[dhawton]

We're not a democracy.

They made you jump through so many hoops

[Wild_dog!]

Who has the time.
The FCC made it so difficult for me to comment.
I can see why lots of people had to resort to form letters and spam-like tactics.

It took me about 15 minutes of life just to wade through the obstacles thrown in front of me to voice my displeasure with this decision.

And I am not a lawyer so framing things in a legal jargon context is not really in my wheelhouse.

But I do have an opinion as do the many other millions who voiced their opinions and those are as valid as anything.

This is all just smoke and mirrors, but if people remain angry enough about this sort of thing, then vote congress out and get a new congress which will actually pass legislation that betters things for the citizens over corporate interests in gouging every last waning cent our of a declining middle class.

Business can really invest when people just continue to lose ground and find themselves having to choose whether any service is worth their while.
A downward spiral on society does nobody any good.

Re:They made you jump through so many hoops

[kenh]

Seven and a half million people saying "ditto" just increases the workload and adds nothing to the argument.

But I do have an opinion as do the many other millions who voiced their opinions and those are as valid as anything.

Who cares what your opinion is, if you can't make a factual argument based on legal principles, don't waste your time.

This is like a town council meeting, and everyone in town wants to get up and read the editorial from the local newspaper into the record because it expresses their "opinion". How long must the council members sit there and listen to the same argument over and over again?

Re:They made you jump through so many hoops

[Wild_dog!]

"Seven and a half million people saying "ditto" just increases the workload and adds nothing to the argument."

Perhaps you miss the point of public comment. It is a chance for people to voice how they feel about the proposed changes.
And it isn't an argument. It is expression of support or not.

"Who cares what your opinion is, if you can't make a factual argument based on legal principles, don't waste your time."
Opinions and commentary is what they are asking for that is why it is important.

What do you mean about factual argument or legal principles exactly? Public commentary is virtually never about legal principles.

This is public commentary about a policy change. It is about what people want and how they feel about the policy change that they are expressing. This simply is not about having a novel approach to an argument. Certainly some may choose to elaborate extensively on the ins and outs of the legality largely out of ignorance, but if some people take a more succinct approach like "This sucks" they have every right to do so and it is a synopsis of their desire on the proposal. Why? Because these things affect our lives and it is important to acknowledge how people feel.

How many actual factual / legal arguments can be made anyhow? 2-3.... 5 possibly??? No matter how many factual/legal arguments there are.... each will be repeated hundreds of thousands to millions of times saying fundamentally the same thing. But public commentary simply is not about that. It is about registering whether one agrees or not. A tally of the sentiment of the population if it were. Thus it doesn't matter if people wish to jump ahead and put forth something which expresses their viewpoint such as a chain letter. That doesn't invalidate the fact that they chose to express themselves in such a way. How many people didn't express themselves at all because they found the process too tedious to do.

Ditto does add to the equation when individuals in the millions choose to say "Ditto".

"How long must the council members sit there and listen to the same argument over and over again?"

As long as it takes. That is part of their job... Otherwise why are they there? Why even bother with a public meeting? Why even listen to constituencies if the politician or policy maker doesn't need input by the citizens.
Why... because it matters and peoples voices should be heard.

Re: Republicans don't like democracy

[FudRucker]

the usa started out as a federal republic but as since degenerated in to a corporate fascist kleptocracy

Nonsense

[argStyopa]

".... it still feels brazen hearing the commission staff repeatedly discount Americans' preference for consumer protections, simply because they aren't phrased in legal terms...."

You mean, they should have instead set up a whole website to let people submit opinions that they simply ignored, instead? (cf https://petitions.whitehouse.g...)

Which is more disingenuous? Telling people you need to make a cogent POINT, and then they'll bother to read it? Or telling people they have a voice...but you actually ignore it completely?

Say freakin' WHAT?

[buss_error]

The FCC has been clear all year that it's focused on "quality" over "quantity" when it comes to comments on net neutrality.

That's like saying "We only count votes from quality people. The total of the vote doesn't matter."

Re:Say freakin' WHAT?

[ScentCone]

That's like saying "We only count votes from quality people. The total of the vote doesn't matter."

No, it's not like that at all. It's like saying, "We are a federal regulatory agency making policy decisions, and when we hear new information we think about it, and when we hear the exact same thing said for the seven millionth time, it sheds no new light and isn't any more persuasive in legal or constitutional terms than it was the first time we heard those exact same words from the exact same form letter."

Re:Say freakin' WHAT?

[kenh]

No, it's like saying we only count votes from people that can follow instructions and clearly punch the ballot, not dimple it or create a hanging chad.

It really is quite reasonable that the FCC reviews the comments and considers those that add something to the conversation, not treating all responses equally. I'm quite certain the majority of the non-unique comments were rambling, mis-informed statements of personal opinion which are, literally, meaningless to the discussion at hand.

Re:Say freakin' WHAT?

[Cinnamon Beige]

This was a request for comments, not votes. This is pretty much exactly what I expected when I saw that I was being offered a form letter instead of a petition.

What you should be offended by is the fact that the people leading the efforts on letting the FCC know that a lot of people would prefer net neutrality chose to do it by having us all spam them. A petition or donations to help pay for sending in a very nice, very well-done legal argument in its favor would have been more effective. I was pretty much expecting this result when I saw it was a form letter instead.

\o/

[easyTree]

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 big business

There were thumbs on the scale for Jeb too

[rsilvergun]

but Trump still won. He won because people came out for him.

Re:There were thumbs on the scale for Jeb too

[sjames]

Yes, but my vote for Sanders in the PRIMARY didn't contribute to that in any way.

OTOH, had the DNC not thumbed the scale, Sanders probably could have brought out the vote in the general election.

The GOP may indeed have tried to thumb the scale for Jeb but it slipped apparently (and the results weren't close).

If you want to blame someone for Trump, blame Trump voters and the leaders of the DNC and GOP.

Re: There were thumbs on the scale for Jeb too

[macsimcon]

An establishment candidate will not win against a populist, and that is where the DNC blew it: Clinton versus Trump, no contest.

They got their populist, while we were denied ours.

They control the state legistatures

[rsilvergun]

the House, the Senate, etc. There were a couple votes away from a constitutional convention and don't think they didn't notice that.

We're a two party system. And there are lots of folks in the other party who are basically Republicans with a 'D' next to their name (Dianne Feinstein, Joe Manchin & Chuck Schumer come to mind). So yeah, they control everything. They figured this shit out in the 60s when they started making Abortion & Gun Control into wedge issues to isolate the working class.

You're splitting hairs

[rsilvergun]

in a desperate attempt to find a way to get what you want without accepting the consequences. Trying to eat your cake and have it to. I've got a buddy who's a type-1 diabetic with right wing parents he idolizes who does the same thing. He desperately needs socialism because his illness means he can't hold a job. At the very least he need socialized medicine or he plain dies. He knows this, he's smart. But he's emotional, and doesn't want to go against those right wing parents of his (who kinda turn a blind eye to the whole 'socialized medicine is keeping our son alive' thing). So if you press him on his solution to health care he says he wants to force the insurance companies to sell him it at a price he can afford even if it's at a loss, and the government will make up the difference. Basically socialism by way of a private company getting 20% of the gross cost for literally no reason. I've pointed this out to him a few times and he conceded the point but didn't change his politics. That's your problem in a nutshell. Either we take care of everybody or we take care of nobody. When it comes to basic services, utilities and rights there can be no half measures. Anything less just gets picked apart over a few decades by greedy assholes.

Fake?

[Luthair]

Wonder how they consider the emails fake? A lot of political activism often involves form letters so its hardly surprising that they recieved a lot of duplicates.

Re:Fake?

[kenh]

A malformed email address is fake. An email address that bounces when an email is sent to it can be considered fake.

That 7.5 million "people" chose to send the same comment is really quite remarkable, that's one out of every three comment that added nothing to the discussion - it was 1 person expressing an idea, and seven and a half million other people said "Me Too."

The wording is confusing, it sounds like 45,000 fake email addresses sent 7.5 million identical comments:

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.

Re:Fake?

[Luthair]

Agreeing is hardly "adding nothing"

Nope ... it doesn't matter!

[King_TJ]

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.

Re:Nope ... it doesn't matter!

[GameboyRMH]

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.

Oh that would've been much worse than electing a hectomillionaire / possible billionaire who lives in a golden palace atop a skyscraper, flies around in a personalized large passenger jet, and has probably never been in a grocery store, even as a publicity stunt! Close call there!

quit trying

[WindBourne]

Seriously, 1-web, along with SpaceX, will be offering 1GB up/down with ~25 ms latency for $50/month.
That is cheap. And count on the fact that they will push neutrality.
Im hoping that Google will jump back into fiber in cities, but use SX as a CO for them.

FCC is right

[Tolvor]

Like it or not the FCC is *right* in requiring only legal (informed) comments over mass quantity of how many people feel about the issue. The fact that a lot of people have an opinion on a matter doesn't make them right or authorized to speak on the matter.

To put this is terms you may understand more...

Programmer: So you need a program to process these data items, correct?
Clueless CEO: Yes, and I know that it should take only about a week. It can't be that complicated.
Corporate seatwarmer: I agree. Definitely true.
Corporate yesman: CEO, you are brilliant.
And 7 other corporate suits, well, follow suit and agree with CEO.
Programmer: It will take 2 months to program, testing will take several weeks, training will last about a week. Maintenance will last about an additional month.
All: We voted on it programmer. You have a week to make it work perfectly.

It's about law...

[SeattleLawGuy]

Suppose you are asked to come up with rules saying what publishers can and can't do. Should that be based on a vote of the people (risking suppression of political or religious dissent) or based on detailed critiques of the different options available to you and their consequences? Should your standards for IT security be based on a vote of your customers?

Public comment is sometimes incredibly useful and important, but it's not magic and it's not majority-wins. It's about having a group of experts with domain knowledge making policy. You can still ask Congress to change the law to override them.

Of course there's a problem with the distributed incentive to comment on the consumer side. If you don't have money riding on a regulation, you're not going to invest in comment. But if you want a comment to be meaningful, you need to either dive deep enough to make your comment be really good, or you have to hire (or get together with others to hire) someone to help you do that diving. A good lawyer can help you do that. The declaratory ruling, report, and order is a couple of hundred pages long--unless you are going to pay a professional to dig through it or spend a lot of time on it, the chance of critiquing it in a meaningful way that will make someone think about or modify their position is extremely low.

https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_pub...

Holy Hell, The Ferengi Print

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't matter. They made their decision already. This is just for show. After all, lots of us did make plenty of serious legal arguments, and they ignored us, too.

Indeed-

https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/7522219498.pdf
http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/view?id=7522219498 (previous url)

To be fair though, Wheeler ignored me for his entire leadership term. Their ignoring of me started a bit before that IIRC. Honestly at this point I think the best bet to facilitate any likelyhood of mainstream availability of reasonably priced ISP plans that allow one to operate an IRC server from home may well be this Pai/transparency thing. I laughed out loud as I think a comment on PBS NewsHour last night summed up the impact as "consumers will now have to pay more attention to the fine print". OMG, your internet service contract's 'fine print'. Holy hell.

Okay, here's a clear legal reason

[Khyber]

Civil War is always an option for us!

Re: Okay, here's a clear legal reason

[macsimcon]

It is not a boon to those corporations bribing our politicians, and so I can see a situation in which it costs $2,000 a month for a fixed number of unique visitors. Those large companies can afford it, but the little guy cannot, so he never gets off the ground.

Wow

[kenh]

The FCC received a record-breaking 22 million comments chiming in on the net neutrality debate [...] 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.

So 45,000 fake email addresses sent 7.5 million copies of the same letter, and the FCC didn't find that a convincing argument? I'm shocked!

One out of three comments were identical - that's quite an achievement from the "hashtag activisim" folks, a group best known for their "#BringBackOurGirls", but that isn't a convincing argument. Simple repetition renders the message meaningless.

Considering that the issue was the FCC was...

[MSTCrow5429]

...overstepping its legal authority by issuing the "Net Neutrality" regulation, in direct contravention to its previously stated position, and the bill from Congress itself, no one who is not somewhat legally literate cannot offer a serious or useful opinion on it. If you think "Net Neutrality" is a good thing, you need to contact your US Representative and Senators, they're the ones that can make it happen. Zealous but clueless supporters of this regulation are barking up the completely wrong tree. And then beyond being ignorant of the law, you have people that don't even know basic civics...

Re: No Surprise

[macsimcon]

Honestly, where do you come up with this drivel? Article I. Article II. Article VI. The Thirteenth Amendment. Each of these contains rules the Federal government imposes on the states, and the American citizens within those states.

Re: The FCC is a joke; we'd be better off ending i

[macsimcon]

Will the ISPs no longer enjoy common carrier protection? And if that is so, does that give them the right to install a certificate on my device so they can inspect all my HTTPS traffic? If they are now ultimately liable for everything on their network, they might have that right.

And now I wonder if this is all nothing but a ruse to eliminate the security of encrypted packets.

Nah, that is just crazy. I mean, what government agency could possibly want visibility into all data, everywhere?

I have to thank Trump for quashing the TPP

[HannethCom]

The only county that would have benefited from the TPP was the US. It would have given you the power to enact your draconian laws on all the other countries. It also would have forced us to use your joke of a patent system.
Thank you Trump for making a decision that cost America thousands of jobs and billions in unethical revenue and power to your country.

Re:I have to thank Trump for quashing the TPP

[djinn6]

The only county that would have benefited from the TPP was the US.

Nope. Japan is still pushing TPP after American withdraw:

"We have finally come to an agreement on the rules of free and fair trade. We hope to utilize that agreed framework. Unfortunately, the U.S. has declared withdrawal from the TPP. Since we have come thus far, we would like to capitalize upon the result of our long years of efforts," Abe said in Japanese. "Japan must now take on a leadership role and move the discussions forward."

Only the lawyers win

[skovnymfe]

Only the lawyers win when the government ignores the citizens in favor of legalese. Good luck USA, you dumb fucks. You deserve what you get. Ha-ha.

Re: legal terms

[mcfedr]

> 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. Lets face it, its nothing to do with legal terms or not, its about following the money, and the money says end NN.

Democracy corrects itself.

[robert.piskule]

I read a post from someone who said "Democracy will correct itself". Here's how I see that happening. AT&T (potentially) buys CNN. CNN provides a subsidiary website, AT&T News. AT&T decides you can get all your news from AT&T News, and you don't need Fox News, or Briebart. Fox News complains about Net Nuetrality, and thus the problem is solved. I really want to work on making this happen.

Oh lord, you don't vote Hilary

[rsilvergun]

in the primary, you vote Sanders, and bring your friends too. The DNC hasn't learned a damn thing because they're stuffed with corporate democrats who are just like republicans but don't want to oppress homosexuals and women (as much). On the economy they're the same bastards as the repubs.

Your primary vote matters. Yes, the scales were tipped, but there are limits to how far you can tip them and in a primary with so few people voting your vote counts for a lot more. Multiple right wing Dems just got primaried recently. It can work. But not if folks like yourself throw up your hands and give up at the first sign of trouble.

Re:Oh lord, you don't vote Hilary

[sjames]

Apparently you missed my numerous mentions that I DID vote for Sanders in the primary and that I intend to vote in the next primary as well, in hopes that it won't be rendered ineffective by a thumb on the scale.

I said (and I stand by it) that my LAST primary vote didn't change anything. Something I can only know in retrospect, so voting still matters in the future.

Net Bias: Antitrust & common-carrier violation

[redelm]

IANAL, but there are at least two violations of Federal law likely to flow from allowing net biasing:

First, most ISPs qualify under Sherman Antitrust as monopolies since they have "pricing power" in their markets. Net biasing allows illegal extension of that monopoly into other services.

Second, biasing traffic implies control and approval. ISPs are jeopardizing their common carrier immunity which is founded on an inability to control.

It would have been nice had the FCC announced what sort of comments they wanted. But in fact, they probably wanted none and just need a checkbox before proceeding corruptly. It is fortunate the much-reviled DJT got elected one year ago in that the Press was jolted awake from their 8+ years of sleep and syncopancy.

TTP

[FeelGood314]

TTP will likely go through. Canada is pushing to drop all the American Copy right and patient stupidity. Since Japan desperately wants it and Canada is now the second largest country in the TTP it will likely go through. With out the American provisions I see it as a pretty good trade deal. As a Canadian, who's country has lost most of the NAFTA disputes, I still see the dispute resolution system as a good thing. Canada really did deserve to lose those disputes. Now if we could only get softwood lumber included...

The Baptist and the bootlegger -- and the FCC

[eric_harris_76]

Not just now, of course. The Grant administration was notoriously corrupt, as was Tammany Hall. Teapot Dome. Transcontinental railroad. If someone isn't a millionaire when they enter the Congress, they sure are when they leave.

The more things government controls, the greater the opportunities for corruption.

Guess who likes so-called "Net Neutrality"? It's not just do-gooders.

Another instance of "the Baptist and the bootlegger".. Do-gooders and do-badders can end up as allies, unbeknownst to the do-gooders. Far too often, the bad guys have a better understanding of the issues involved and the actual consequences. And after the dust settles and the bad consequences arise, the do-gooders want more legislation. And the do-badders quietly help the new legislation along. https://duckduckgocom/?q=bapti...

The Super Delegates can't ignore a landslide

[rsilvergun]

they know they'll just lose in the General. Go vote.