New York Attorney General Expands Inquiry Into Net Neutrality Comments (nytimes.com)

The New York attorney general subpoenaed more than a dozen telecommunications trade groups, lobbying contractors and Washington advocacy organizations on Tuesday, seeking to determine whether the groups sought to sway a critical federal decision on internet regulation last year by submitting millions of fraudulent public comments, according to a person with knowledge of the investigation. From a report: Some of the groups played a highly public role in last year's battle, when the Republican-appointed majority on the Federal Communications Commission voted to revoke a regulation issued under President Barack Obama that classified internet service providers as public utilities. The telecommunications industry bitterly opposed the rules -- which imposed what supporters call "net neutrality" on internet providers -- and enthusiastically backed their repeal under President Trump. The attorney general, Barbara D. Underwood, last year began investigating the source of more than 22 million public comments submitted to the F.C.C. during the battle. Millions of comments were provided using temporary or duplicate email addresses, others recycled identical phrases, and seven popular comments, repeated verbatim, accounted for millions more.

Comments

Re:Sorry, liberals

[bobbied]

I don't understand how a normal person can be against net neutrality. Can someone explain?

First thing you need to understand is the name isn't all that descriptive of it's actual effect or it's reason for being. Net Neutrally would have had some effects you wouldn't expect from it's name. It did little for networking and was anything but neutral about granting access. What it actually ended up being was the creation of a HUGE regulatory organization at the FCC that was going to required a lot of money, people and resources it didn't have budget to acquire. The whole system was set up to be rife with corrupting influences between the FCC and the big ISP's they where regulating, and really looked for all the world as a way to get payoffs and bribes more easily hidden.

The network routing rules where going to be a huge disruption to network performance, drive up costs for customers and lower performance by not allowing data filtering, requiring equal priority and treatment of packets regardless of the payload. It was basically routing rules written by people who didn't understand how network routing worked.

It had it's good points, but in what I think was a fair analysis, the bad outweighed the good. Your mileage may vary I suppose, but just don't take the name at face value. Names of laws hardly ever convey an accurate picture of the actual content of the law/rule.

Take the ACA (Affordable Care Act) [aka Obamacare] as an example. It didn't lower healthcare costs or make healthcare more affordable, quite the opposite. In the end it added costs by mandating a minimum coverage which was over and above what average people had, AND part of the law took money from one group (as in a tax, but not a tax) and paid insurance coverage costs for others. This is certainly NOT implied in the ACA's name.