Slashdot Mirror
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.
You see, the problem is when you don't have enough agreement in congress to pass a law, all you can do is resort to the phone and the pen, which unless you can control the next phone and pen user, they can totally undo things done by the previous user.
Unless, of course, you can control the courts and get the judges to come up with some way to cobble up a right or plausible set of mashed together laws to mandate your views, regardless of what the written law actually does or doesn't say.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
That is not what the New York AG is investigating. The investigation is into whether or not the anti-network neutrality comments involved fraud.
Why waste time with that? FCC comments are not some official polling device nor some way to throw a wet finger in the air and see what way the wind is blowing.
The FCC public comment process is for information gathering purposes only, nobody tabulates the pro/con counts at the FCC. What matters is the unique information or novel perspectives being presented in these comments, not the number of comments. Also, in this case, I'm told that the FCC public comment process isn't required to *remove* a regulation anyway. The only time the process is required is when enacting new ones.
The NY AG is wasting their time and NY's money.... And we all KNOW the reason and it has nothing to do at all with the FCC actions here.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism - is as much of your argument as anything related to Ajit Pai's FCC allowing botnets to "wag the dog" with BS comments, then trying to pretend it didn't happen and covering it up.
If you want to pretend NY and NJ are the ones on trial for wrongdoing here, you're going to need a few more stuffed animals and some type of biscuits to make it a proper tea party.
No self-respecting institution sits back and endures fraudulent misrepresentation (on an astroturf scale) if they can do something about it (and they can, because the government has entire agencies with the capabilities and powers to do exactly that).
Submitting false documents to the government is a form of trolling, and in many contexts is illegal. It can also be a form of identity fraud and doxing to slap other's people's personal names and private credentials on top. It can end up denying my legitimate input a proper voice (because my name is also on top of a fraudulent opposite).
Being illegal used to be fair cause to investigate something.
There may be elements of the present government wishing to normalize bullshit to such a degree that you now have to stop and ask "and what else?" before you investigate something merely because it appears to have broken a law.
There's a name for putting law and order in to your rearview mirror. It's called anarchy. I am not a fan.
I, for one, do not welcome our new bullshit overlords.