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Ajit Pai Backs Out of Planned CES 2018 Appearance (techcrunch.com)
New submitter sdinfoserv writes: Ajit Pai, the most hated person in tech since Darl McBride, backed out of a speaking engagement at CES 2018. Apparently he lacks the spine to justify himself before the group of individuals his decisions affect most. Consumer Technology Association head Gary Shapiro announced: "Unfortunately, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai is unable to attend CES 2018. We look forward to our next opportunity to host a technology policy discussion with him before a public audience."
Best case scenario, he would only get pelted with rotten tomatoes. I can't imagine why he wouldn't show...
>>Apparently he lacks the spine to justify himself before the group of individuals his decisions affect most.
I'm guessing it's more like he fears for his life at this point. Never underestimate what a group of angry people will do. If society can justify punching out people they disagree with then they can just as easily justify beating the crap out of Pai.
An individual in Federal agencies that has broad rule-making powers has unilaterally decided the freedom and business landscape for _the_most_revolutionary_method_of_communication_used_by_humans, and you bring race into this?
Piss off.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
Mediocrity requires aloofness to preserve its dignity. - Charles Gates Dawes
Ajit Pai and Martin Shkreli are very similar characters. Pai seems a little more eager to please his masters, whereas Shkreli would unabashedly throw a baby off a bridge for a dollar.
Pai has a family that might miss him, but who knows. Maybe not. Nobody in the world would miss Martin Shkreli. I'll bet his mother has his number blocked and changed her last name.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Prior to 2014 the FCC had the authority. Verizon spending a ton of money in court got the FCC's authority narrowed significantly because ISPs weren't common carriers. But that the FCC could reclassify ISPs under Title II, make them common carriers, and essentially gain back that authority.
Which is what they did. That has now be undone. There was only a brief window of 2014-2015 where ISPs weren't regulated. There is an extensive history of ISPs doing sketchy shit and getting taken to court by the FCC since the early 2000s to get it stopped. They no longer have this authority. This is a brand new world of unregulated internet and it's going to suck.
Or you just don't understand the far-reaching ramifications.
"Ajit Pai, the most hated person in tech since Darl McBride"
Evidence for this assertion? None.
No evidence? Millions of citizens voiced their disdain and advocated for him NOT to do the very thing he arrogantly went off and did after ignoring every damn one of them.
And then he rubbed it in by making an it's-all-good promotional video so vapidly stupid it makes reality TV look like a Nat Geo documentary.
If you can't see how he earned his moniker, you're as ignorant as he is.
Gosh, I hope instead of attending in person, he sends a humorous video which will calm the audience carrying torches and pitchforks...
Clearly, you don't understand the Wheeler shift to Title II, its impact, and why the change to a free-for-all model clearly sucks. Local monopolies have zero, nothing, nada, zip, and sweet fuck all to do with the decision and any connection or allusion to municipal utilities is a ruse and facade to carrier domination. This was bought and paid for.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
What the fsck are you talking about, dummy? You have absolutely no sense of context or what?
Godwin's new corollary says if people are comparing you to Martin Shkreli, you're a horrible person and should reverse what you've done.
stepped into a system that was working perfectly well with some occasional oversight by the FCC
Bullshit. They were classified as Title II by the pressuring of Verizon in court case after court case that the FCC took major ISPs to court over. Like seriously, the FCC IMHO gave ISPs every single chance they could to clean up their act and they just kept saying, "nope, we'll see you in court."
No, sir. No I will not. I will stand here forever, guarding against your toadying ilk that would destroy true freedom
You have zero clues. You lack so much knowledge on this topic, you literally have no clue what the term "freedom" means. You say these words with conviction and all I can say is that I'm glad you believe every word you speak but you have zero clue as to what you are talking about. There's no point in trying to show you where you are wrong, I've come across several zealots like yourself in this discussion and even when shown the court cases, the actions of the ISPs, and piece of evidence after piece of evidence that this claim that the Internet was "working great" before is purely false. It all falls back on the brain dead argument of "well I don't like the government telling me or companies what to do." To which I say, go fuck yourself and your uneducated arguments that lack any resemblance to actual fact.
In short, you've come to the wrong place on the Internet to spew this fiction that the Internet was "awesome and working perfectly" back in the day. Everyone here is well aware of what went down, we were all there. We all understand that once you peel the layers of your argument back it just reveals itself to be one of subjective matter on how you feel governments should work. No one gives a shit about how you FEEL things should work, we all saw ISPs give middle fingers to operators, protocols, networks, and other end nodes on the Internet that they felt just went against their business priorities. And that is the entire point. ISPs aren't created to make a business they're the gateway to the Internet, they are utilities not companies, but they want to convince folks that underneath they're businesses. They can all go suck a big cock with that idea. And then these companies bitch and moan about not being able to roll out because of regulation and how they welcome competition but when cities actually want to treat the gateway to the Internet like it should be treated "a utility" they start getting up in arms and suing the shit out of everyone, every where. That's the failure, that's the core point that people like you don't understand. Being an ISP is not a business. When you think of it like that, then you might as well privatize cops, fire departments, and the army itself. Because whatever made up line in the sand you want to create for why that isn't so, is just some subjective BS that a population of "just you" in that mindset.
To quote: The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.
(guess who said that....)
This is patently false. The FCC had in fact tried leaving well-enough alone, but, as it turns out, companies were going out of their way to screw their customers no matter how many times that they kept getting caught.
2005 seems packed but only because prior to this there wasn't really much investigating in that field at all. However, major telecoms had spent money they'd been paid for fiber and cable infrastructure - broken promises of fiber in half the homes of America by the early 2000s - on lobbying to deregulate and lower the standards. That's how you had fiber if anywhere at all somewhere in your connection it eventually became fiber, no matter your dialup speeds and broadband bill due to the bottlenecks.
Madison River in 2005. Comcast *SINCE* 2005 but only completely proven in 2007 by the AP and EFF. Telus in Canada blocking entire servers (with hundreds of different websites) just to snuff out leaks about a strike their workers were having. AT&T degrading and/or blocking VOIP traffic that competed with the service it was trying to push in 2007, continuing this practice when Google Voice appeared in '09. Windstream was using injection and browser hijacks on their customers to steal ad revenue from other search engines (a practice copied several times by other ISPs since then). AT&T, Sprint and Verizon vs Google Wallet. Verizon screwing with apps, AT&T as well both on phones and on PCs.
They never stopped. Every time they'd get caught, every time they'd bog down the legal system to keep any rulings from being achieved against them, and Wheeler only finally brought down the hammer with the classification after their lobbying had gotten every other bloody thing struck down, claiming all the while that there didn't need to be any rules on how they act because they were good companies.
The fact that the entire C-level of every last one of these companies hasn't faced the firing squad is a travesty of everything our country was founded on.
"... stepped into a system that was working perfectly well with some occasional oversight by the FCC.."
Working perfectly well for whom??
Let's cut to the chase, shall we? Corporations and their shills, like Mr. Pai, are not individuals. They should _never_ have a say in law or rule-making. That's the domain of flesh and blood humans with checks and balances to prevent a mob rule.
Ajit Pai is the voice of the 3 wolves in the 'democratic' discourse on what to have for dinner. Fortunately we don't live in a pure democracy.
Now, Piss Off and go away, or I shall taunt you a second time.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
All goods need not be allocated in response to the human-choice-driven price mechanism of the marketplace. Goods and services can also be allocated by political means. That is, states, employing coercive means can seize goods and services and allocate them according to certain political goals and the goals of people in positions of political power. There is nothing “neutral” about this method of allocating resources.
In the net neutrality debate, it’s almost risible that some are suggesting that the FCC will somehow necessarily work in the “public” interest. First of all, we can already see how the FCC regards the public with its refusal to make its own proposals public. Second, who will define who the “public” is? And finally, after identifying who the “public” is, how will the governing bodies of the FCC determine what the “public” wants?
It’s a safe bet there will be no plebiscitary process, so what mechanism will be used? In practice, bureaucratic agencies respond to lobbying and political pressure like any other political institution. Those who can most afford to lobby and provide information to the FCC, however, will not be ordinary people who have the constraints of household budgets and lives to live in places other than Washington, DC office buildings. No, the general public will be essentially powerless because regulatory regimes diminish the market power of customers.
Most of the interaction that FCC policymakers will have with the “public” will be through lobbyists working for the internet service providers, so what net neutrality does is turn the attention of the ISPs away from the consumers themselves and toward the regulatory agency. In the marketplace, a firm’s customers are the most important decision makers. But the more regulated an industry becomes, the more important the regulating agency becomes to the firm’s owners and managers.
The natural outcome will be more “regulatory capture,” in which the institutions with the most at stake in a regulatory agency’s decisions end up controlling the agencies themselves. We see this all the time in the revolving door between legislators, regulators, and lobbyists. And you can also be sure that once this happens, the industry will close itself off to new innovative firms seeking to enter the marketplace. The regulatory agencies will ensure the health of the status quo providers at the cost of new entrepreneurs and new competitors.
Nor are such regulatory regimes even “efficient” in the mainstream use of the term. As economist Douglass North noted, regulatory regimes do not improve efficiency, but serve the interests of those with political power:
Institutions are not necessarily or even usually created to be socially efficient; rather they, or at least the formal rules, are created to serve the interests of those with the bargaining power to create new rules.
So, if populists think net neutrality will somehow give “the people” greater voice in how bandwidth is allocated and ISPs function, they should think again.
The older ones here will remember that this scenario is not new. Remember dial-up? In the good ol' days of the internet, landlines used to have flat rates. You could make local calls without being charged by the minute. Why? Because phone companies knew that you wouldn't do that 24/7. Who in their sane mind would be on the phone all the time? Well, except for some old hags who don't have anything better to do, but old hags were few and far between. They could easily oversell 50:1 or even 100:1 (50 phones sharing 1 line) because people simply didn't use the resource as much as they technically could.
Then came the internet and suddenly, being connected 24/7 became increasingly interesting. And that model of overselling phone lines was put under severe stress. To the point where telcos either had to run more cable or see their business fail. Some tried to return to metered lines but the resistance to something like this was immense, mostly because people felt the pain themselves, it cut into their own bottom line (unlike now where the loss of net neutrality mostly hits the other side directly, the content provider).
These unmetered, flat-rate phone lines had a very beneficial effect on the internet in general, though. Unlike in Europe where metered local calls were the norm, the adoption of internet use outside of universities took off in the US almost a decade before anything close to it happened in Europe, where only in areas serviced by cable TV providers you could get affordable internet at home during the 90s. It took well into the 2000s for Europe to catch up, mostly due to the standard of metered local calls (with prices of about 5 bucks an hour, you just couldn't stay online for more than a few minutes to check mail).
The second push, the move towards DSL, came from the telcos that wanted to get people off the overused and severely strained dial-up lines. The idea was that with faster speeds they could start introducing transfer limits, and the plan actually worked (mostly), until they had time to catch up with the hardware roll-out of more cabling and routing.
If phone lines had been metered all the time, the internet would probably still be the pastime of a few university students and people rich enough to not give a shit about 50-100 bucks a day for their hobby.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's amazing to think that this towering edifice of words is something you find genuinely convincing. I've got some really bad news for you: the vast majority of humanity prefer to live in societies where the goods we purchase are regulated. You go ahead and tell yourself that's because we're all dupes, if you like. Whatever gets you through the day.
You mean the tens of millions which were less than the millions that voted for her?
To quote: The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.
(guess who said that....)
Works as intended. Bug closed.