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FCC Ignored Your Net Neutrality Comment, Unless You Made a 'Serious' Legal Argument (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The FCC received a record-breaking 22 million comments chiming in on the net neutrality debate, but from the sound of it, it's ignoring the vast majority of them. In a call with reporters yesterday discussing its plan to end net neutrality, a senior FCC official said that 7.5 million of those comments were the exact same letter, which was submitted using 45,000 fake email addresses. But even ignoring the potential spam, the commission said it didn't really care about the public's opinion on net neutrality unless it was phrased in unique legal terms. The vast majority of the 22 million comments were form letters, the official said, and unless those letters introduced new facts into the record or made serious legal arguments, they didn't have much bearing on the decision. The commission didn't care about comments that were only stating opinion. The FCC has been clear all year that it's focused on "quality" over "quantity" when it comes to comments on net neutrality. In fairness to the commission, this isn't an open vote. It's a deliberative process that weighs a lot of different factors to create policy that balances the interests of many stakeholders. But it still feels brazen hearing the commission staff repeatedly discount Americans' preference for consumer protections, simply because they aren't phrased in legal terms.
So much for the government enacting the will of the people.
By 'a lot of factors' they mean the amount of money paid to the commissioners by Verizon and friends, apparently.
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?
'Serious' legal argument = money
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)
I stole this Sig
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
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.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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.
We're not a democracy.
the usa started out as a federal republic but as since degenerated in to a corporate fascist kleptocracy
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
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."
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
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.
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.
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...
Real lawyers write in C++
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.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
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...
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.