FCC Refuses Records For Investigation Into Fake Net Neutrality Comments (variety.com)

"FCC general counsel Tom Johnson has told the New York State attorney general that the FCC is not providing information for his investigation into fake net-neutrality comments, saying those comments did not affect the review, and challenging the state's ability to investigate the feds." Variety has more: The FCC's general counsel, in a letter to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, also dismissed his concerns that the volume of fake comments or those made with stolen identities have "corrupted" the rule-making process... He added that Schneiderman's request for logs of IP addresses would be "unduly burdensome" to the commission, and would "raise significant personal privacy concerns."

Amy Spitalnick, Schneiderman's press secretary, said in a statement that the FCC "made clear that it will continue to obstruct a law enforcement investigation. It's easy for the FCC to claim that there's no problem with the process, when they're hiding the very information that would allow us to determine if there was a problem. To be clear, impersonation is a violation of New York law," she said... "The only privacy jeopardized by the FCC's continued obstruction of this investigation is that of the perpetrators who impersonated real Americans."
One of the FCC's Democratic commissioners claimed that this response "shows the FCC's sheer contempt for public input and unreasonable failure to support integrity in its process... Moreover, the FCC refuses to look into how nearly half a million comments came from Russian sources."

Comments

He's not lying

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

The FCC guy is right, though. Millions of fake comments had no bearing on the outcome at all, which was preordained.

Re: He's not lying

[TheReaperD]

Even if it had no effect on the outcome, evidence shows massive, organized identity theft, which is a crime regardless of how much impact it had on the process.

Re:Consequences or Endless Loop

[Baron_Yam]

>Either we break up the companies doing this

You need a new anti-monopoly law that doesn't depend on investigating complaints. I like the idea of raising their taxation based on their market share.

And then you have to nationalize common infrastructure, because it's really a bad idea to have every private company laying their own fiber or cable just like it'd be a bad idea if all roads were toll roads and different companies were not allowed to connect to each other.

Something tells me both those ideas run very much contrary to deeply-held American economic ideals and will never happen.

Re:Fuck Communists

[RazorSharp]

And yet, we are still richer than most of those Socialist paradises you listed.

For all your disdain for the collective and praise for the individual, I find it odd that you measure wealth based on GDP rather than the spending power and economic freedom of the poorest of the poor. Socialized medicine frees. Capitalist medicine makes one a slave to their own health. Market regulations free consumers from predatory lenders and inhumane working conditions.

I save citations for research papers and extreme claims. Nothing I claimed warranted such a waste of time. However, you may want to read more carefully before you waste your own time refuting something I didn't say (there's a huge difference between "one of the last to abolish slavery" and "the last").

The fact that you believe the U.S. is an example of a laissez-faire country demonstrates your ignorance. Have you ever heard of the U.S. Postal Service? Do you know what a grant is and how they have propped up higher education and are the main reason U.S. innovation was unsurpassed in the twentieth century? Social Security? Medicare? The who article is about the FCC, A REGULATORY AGENCY.

Laissez-faire is a myth. It's never existed and never will. Just like communism. All countries are socialist, they just have unique ways of structuring it. Your equivocation of all collectivism and the U.S.S.R. is a silly fallacy. That's why no serious intellectuals take Ayn Rand seriously.