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Big Telecom Is Using Robocalls To Fight a Net Neutrality Bill in California (vice.com)
A group with financial ties to AT&T is sending automated messages claiming the law would raise cell phone bills. From a report: Big Telecom is once again trying to disrupt a net neutrality bill in California, this time by robocalling seniors to spread misinformation about the bill. "Your Assembly member will be voting on a proposal by San Francisco politicians that could increase your cellphone bill by $30 a month and slow down your data," says a voice on an automated call paid for by legal reform group the Civil Justice Association of California (CJAC). "We can't afford higher cell phone bills. We can't afford slower data. We can't afford Senate Bill 822 (more popularly known as SB822)."
The call urges constituents to contact their state representative and ask them to vote no on the bill, which passed a senate committee last week and will be heard in the Assembly this week. It even provides an option to automatically connect to the recipients' Assembly member. At the top of the call, it cites the non-profit Congress of California Seniors, leading many -- including state senator Scott Wiener, the net neutrality bill's author -- to believe the calls are targeting senior citizens specifically. "The industry has engaged in a massive misinformation campaign around this bill for months," Wiener told me over the phone.
But the claim that cell phone bills will go up is not based on anything in the actual bill, which would simply restore the federal rules that telecom companies operated under from 2015 until the 2017 repeal, which only went into effect a few months ago.
The call urges constituents to contact their state representative and ask them to vote no on the bill, which passed a senate committee last week and will be heard in the Assembly this week. It even provides an option to automatically connect to the recipients' Assembly member. At the top of the call, it cites the non-profit Congress of California Seniors, leading many -- including state senator Scott Wiener, the net neutrality bill's author -- to believe the calls are targeting senior citizens specifically. "The industry has engaged in a massive misinformation campaign around this bill for months," Wiener told me over the phone.
But the claim that cell phone bills will go up is not based on anything in the actual bill, which would simply restore the federal rules that telecom companies operated under from 2015 until the 2017 repeal, which only went into effect a few months ago.
wanted to put an end to 'Net metering'. That's a fancy way of saying they pay you for the electricity your solar generates. Well, that's a pretty popular thing in my neck of the woods. So it didn't seem possible for them to do it. They needed a law, you see.
So they ran ads. The ads had a bunch of old folks sitting around a table talking about something scary. They didn't say what, just that it was scary as hell. The ad ended with an impassioned reminder to vote yes (or no, I can't remember) on proposition such and such. At no point in time did they discuss what the proposition was. It passed in a landslide.
Don't get me wrong. I'm still in favor of democracy. But something has to be done to counterbalance old folks with dementia being manipulated into voting for things they don't actually want because they can't understand. I'm in favor of mandatory voting. Force everyone to the polls with a few exceptions (e.g. if you're declared mentally unfit, and no, being convicted of a crime or even in jail shouldn't keep you from voting, that's the oldest voter suppression trick in the book).
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We recently saw how throttling helped fire departments communicate while by-standers were streaming their videos to Youtube and Facebook during fire emergencies. The entire idea of net neutrality resides on the false belief that bandwidth is unlimited, up for grabs by anyone. With Net Neutrality, the streamers would have eaten up all the bandwidth...
"sniff, sniff...if... IF we don't get what we want...we'll charge you more!!!!!!!!!!!"
That's all it is. They're going to fucking charge you more anyway. In fact, I'm sure they see other companies outside of north america and are like fuck yeah, I want to charge an extra 15$ for facebook access on top of what we charge. It's legit in other countries, they itemize specific website / traffic access.
When we're like no fuck that system, they turn around and go WELL FUCK YOU WE'LL CHARGE YOU MORE IF YOU DON'T GIVE US WHAT WE WANT.
Fuck them, let them raise prices and throw their usual tantrum, let them fuck their business up so someone else who wants a piece of the pie can sack them by offering decent services. Well, for awhile anyway as the cycle repeats.
Corporations are people deal with it
Why do people waste their mod points on AC's?
they're not realizing otherwise. They're getting scared of losing what little they have and turning conservative. Meanwhile the mega-corporations run their candidates on conservative rhetoric (all the while pushing radical policies like starting wars with nations that didn't attack us, forcing arbitration on us all and giving themselves massive subsidies while fighting against anything that would increase wages).
But even that's not really a problem. Polls show Americans support single payer healthcare. They support the "New New Deal" and ending the 8 wars we're fighting (again, against nations that have never once attacked us). But _voters_ OTOH... they're not so sure.
The point of mandatory voting isn't get get young folks to vote. It's to end voter suppression. I waited 3 hours in line to vote for Bernie in my primary. That was not an accident. In my state there were police stationed in riot gear outside polls in poor (and especially black) neighborhoods. And now we've got this Voter Id crap whree they just make it so you can't get an Id if you're not somebody who's "supposed" to vote.
Make voting mandatory and that goes away.
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Forget Russian boogiemen, this is the REAL disinformation campaign threatening our democracy, with hundreds of times the manpower and money put behind it. Forget cloak and dagger, spies, and autocrats on the other side of the world trying to undermine their rivals. Pure unbridled greed combined with free-speech protections covering wide-scale public manipulation campaigns are the REAL threat.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
ALL of the c-levels of any company that pulls this shit, ought to be sent to maximum-security prison for a minimum of one year. And 80% of of the company's profits, for the next five years, should be confiscated and used to feed and shelter the homeless. Shareholder dividends, and the price at which they can sell their stocks in the company, should be cut in half for five years. These measures would immediately put an end to this kind of behaviour.
If I was ever in the presence of any of the despicable psychopathic bastards who approved this criminal propaganda campaign, I would be hard pressed not to take keys in hand and sucker punch him at least once. If I came across one of them on fire, I'd be tempted to piss on him - but not so much that it might extinguish the flames.
Yeah, none of the above is ever going to happen. But fantasizing about it takes some of the edge off the anger I'm feeling right now ...
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Don't like it? Pay for your own fucking robocalls, you communistic libtards.
The efforts to fight Net Neutrality have really heated up here in California. There must be some huge money lining up to fight this thing, because there are non-stop anti-NN commercials showing up all over televised sports, on Hulu, and on every cable station and web video. These aren't cheap little local spots, but very slickly-made ads with dire music about how these rules will mean your bills will go way, way up, and your internet will slow down (!) and even how Net Neutrality is "bad for small business" and will probably give you flesh-eating disease. The ads are all paid for by organizations with anodyne-sounding names like, "California Families for Freedom and Morality", and it all smells to high heaven.
There happens to also be a very similar campaign being waged by PG&E here, who has been funding a shit-ton of commercials supposedly from an organization called, "The BRITE Coalition" (the acronym stands for Building Resilient Infrastructure for Tomorrow’s Economy). Every commercial tells you how wildfires are bad, m'kay? and if you don't want more wildfires, the solution is to a) give PG&E a hefty rate hike, and b) remove any liability PG&E has when their faulty equipment starts a wildfire. Again, the money being spent on this campaign is just huge. You can't watch anything without seeing one of their commercials about how these giveaways to PG&E will mean that you support those brave first responders, who gosh, are just trying to keep your kitty-cat safe from being burned the fuck alive. It's really something.
Further, I get the impression that the same ad agency is doing to spot buying for both of the above campaigns because they almost always run one after the other, and in some cases, fill every commercial slot in a 1-hour episode of Castle Rock.
So, in summary, fuck these guys. If your name is so toxic that you can't even use it on your own goddamn advocacy commercials, maybe you have more important issues to deal with as a company, you know?
You are welcome on my lawn.
time payout. I have a 415 area code number on my carphone so I've received several of their calls. I live in Seattle where this state doesn't require any vacation time to be paid out so we aren't allowed to take vacation time off. Most of my friends work for either Microsoft or Amazon, and unless they're Asian and returning home, none of them get any time off.
source: I know a few convicted felons. You typically need references plus a good chunk of money for court fees (something hard to do when you've got a conviction on your record). That's why it's called voter suppression. You never make it completely impossible to vote. If you did that then the jig is up. You just make it really, really hard.
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skynet bitch
robocalls. Especially from companies I hate almost as much as I already could.
Net Neutrality as imposed a president ago was fraught with a bunch of BS, it should have been one page long.
Someday maybe someone with less financial interests could actually do what needs to be done with telecoms, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
Consumers will pay one way or the other. These ads and lobbyists cost money too. Bills go up when there is inadequate competition.
You know they are. And for an industry benefiting from lots of technology, bills should be going the other way. And they aren't. And we are mad about it.
Big business: Scaring old people since 1982.
It's a dirty job, but someone has to do it.
In business terms, that would only mean that they would be making enough money from deals which weren't their business model to lower the costs for everyone else.
In terms of right of passage, I would look at the historical precedents of why there is a right to freedom of speech as well as why laws are written in a single language. Then I would consider the laws of travel in conjunction with a monetary system of work in relation to the growth of populations. At this point in history people are going to buy large plots of land, develop them, then sell smaller plots of land. That is why roads are built, so that people can get where they want to go, the person selling the subdivided lots cannot sell them unless there are free roads to access them o.
Communication is the same thing, albeit one could assume that language is the original road. Now the fact is that people are allowed to talk however they want, but they talk the same to understand one another for their mutual benefit. That is also the reality of the Internet, people have an open line of communication which happens through radio and wires. To explain it like an IT person, anyone can send whatever waveform they want down the cable, but if they use IP and whatever DOCSIS spec the cable company is using and have a registered mac address or layer 2 encryption scheme then they can access more because everyone is going to work with IP.
That is the reason IP and all of these other methods of communication are documented and used rather than controlled.
Now if control were to become a force in a method of communication or transportation then the only outcome would be a non nationalistic Fascism (a form of radical authoritarian ultranationalism, characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society and of the economy) or a destruction of the method of communication (because who would speak a language their intended recipient did not understand?).
Net neutrality is nothing more than an exploitation of ignorance in a new form of communication. There's no reason for it but this is the reality of all things that are new. Yes we should have freedom of speech, and that's why our constitution is based on it. However if you expect the biggest group to speak something other than the language of the country, you will have a problem because nobody will talk to you.
Now if you don't believe in countries or protocols then fine, but that just won't work. You can think about it like Facebook vs Twitter, Facebook decided to go down the route of control (via perception because people don't understand the non published algorithm) or you can think about it like Twitter where everyone understands the chronological format. The simplest fact for this argument is that if TCP weren't defined and used rather than controlled then you wouldn't even have Facebook or Twitter. Now Facebook and Twitter are taking it beyond the normal idea of actually controlling things because Facebook and rarely Twitter (in emails) are using confusion as a method of control rather than a direct control, but that is only a "farther down the line" step of control. It's the same thing that happened with a factory worker not understanding how a product came to be.
The point still remains the same, in all of these situations what ends up happening is that things become open then become standardized and then become normal and unbroken in the line of communication. What needs to happen is the prevention of the blocking of communication and the consideration that there are going to be people that want to be controlled via methods like "blocking it because our wizard of oz doesn't want us to know" and people who just want it to work. In a method of communication like the Internet, the only possible way that there would be the ability for both of those lifestyles to exist would be for free to route traffic and no blocking of traffic on the Internet. If people want to be censored then they can download a censure app.
Nah I just don't like projecting like you are.
I am surprised that robocalls are still considered to be effective this day and age. I stopped answering all calls not in my contact list years ago because 99% of such calls are either cold-callers or politicians trying to sell me garbage.
Well, this will certainly endear them to the public at large....
Then it will be a travesty that was brought down upon us by that secret Muslim Obama or that Crooked Killary.
If 5% of the country decide the outcome with 14x the voting leverage at the top vs the bottom...( thanks to jerrymandering and electoral college distortions and other hacks).
If 0.1% can hijack and control the agenda of those 5% with constant targeted disinformation (e.g. NRA, Fox, etc).
And 0.001% can hijack the 0.1% propaganda machine for money (Manasfort/Trump/Shelby/Kennedy/Hoeven/Rand Paul etc.).
It matters little what the wedge issues are, those wedge issues and propaganda will be spread and money will flow to the people who'll sell their country out.
"Pure unbridled greed combined with free-speech protections covering wide-scale public manipulation campaigns are the REAL threat"
$70 million for NRA was all it took to turn them against the USA. Dollars rubles yuan, greed isn't fussy.
Netflix should pay Verizon, or Verizon will slow down firefighters internet?
Perhaps Verizon shouldn't sell more bandwidth than it can deliver to customers.
There's some serious competition issues in telecoms, there should be breakups of the telcos till this double billing bullshit stops.
This could be your new job. Spewing lies and getting paid for it. Assuming you aren't already paid for you lies.
I think that says more about you than about liberals.
Do you think he's keen on support from people so stupid that, not only are the unable to spell the word "villain", they do so in CAPITAL LETTERS as if to EMPHASISE their STUPIDITY?
If anything deserves to massively backfire on the instigators, it's this. I really hope it does. It'll prove:
Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
... by robocalling seniors to spread misinformation about the bill. "Your Assembly member will be voting on a proposal by San Francisco politicians that could increase your cellphone bill by $30 a month ...
It's abundantly obvious that the telecoms themselves are who would be enacting the consequences that they're describing. As such, I wouldn't necessarily classify that as misinformation, so much as a threat -- nay, even blackmail.
They won't increase when California passes SB822. The market will continue to do its job, more so without manipulation by ISPs.
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Thanks for the heads-up telecoms, I'll make a point of calling my representative today -- to tell them to vote YES on this legislation. Fuck you Comcast, fuck you AT&T, fuck you Verizon, and fuck you to everyone else applicable.
would simply restore the federal rules that telecom companies operated under from 2015 until the 2017 repeal, which only went into effect a few months ago.
So we enjoyed a net-neutrality provided Nirvana for "a few month" last year?
In other words, we need net neutrality to re-establish the long-standing principles of a free and open internet, just like we had for a few months last year - never mind that these "absolutely mandatory regulations" only existed for a few brief weeks, we simply can't go on without them!
Ken
Big telcom is using robocalls to sway public opinion! That tool should only be employed by politicians and causes I support, not those I don't!
Ken
The telecoms were declared a monopoly a long time ago and broken up. Looks like it is now past time to repeat that process only just completely bury them instead.
Liberal chicks are total slutty freaks in the bedroom, when they aren't lesbos.
This is a Bill of Rights violation, and hence criminal conduct.
The First Amendment only limits Congress. The Bill of Rights is a higher legal authority: it can limit advertising - and it does.
The right to not be subject to unsolicited advertising in one's home is a right retained by the people under the 9th Amendment, and reserved to the people under the 10th.
It doesn't matter whether the advertising is junk mail, spam, or robocalls - and it doesn't matter whether it is commercial or non-commercials, for products, services, religion, or political causes.
The rights of individual's and families to not receive these advertisements supersede the lessor rights of businesses and other organizations to create them.
The telecom companies are violating the highest law in the land - and hence infringing fundamental rights "under the colour of law", a criminal offence. The lawyers working for the staff of these companies are appropriately viewed as accessories to criminal conduct. As all legal professionals are in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to the authority of the 9th Amendment, for a legal professional to continue to work for these companies for general legal business is also unethical practice of law.