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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.
That is not what the New York AG is investigating.
The investigation is into whether or not the anti-network neutrality comments involved fraud.
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
I guess, then, I'd have to agree with you.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
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.
The public comment process at the FCC is absolutely not a poll. That's not it's purpose. NOBODY at the FCC counts up the number of public comments on each side of an issue because that's not the information the public comment process is designed to get.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The FCC public comment process is for information gathering purposes only
Then why did it bend over backwards to make sure the counts were distorted and the data unexamined?
Simple answer, it wishes to create an illusion that it has acted in accordance with the will of the people. This is something the FCC values even if it is a lie. If you don't like when the government lies to you, it is best to expose the lies for what they are.
Like a corrupt NYC mayor
https://nypost.com/2016/04/13/...
Or Jobs creation programs that don't create jobs but line the pockets of the governor's friends
https://www.manhattancontraria...
Oh wait, he's a democrat and this is called prosecutorial discretion.
I'm not speaking to anything else in your comment, only to the following:
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.
That is incorrect. The term "repeal Net Neutrality" is just a catch all, as there was no one "net neutrality" regulation. It was a combination of amendments on existing rules, and took other amendments to undo. Nor does the Administrative Procedures Act, the law that defines how these things are done, make an exception for repealing rules -- including a clean repeal of an entire, stand-alone rule.
However, in everything I read, it looks like Agencies aren't required to listen to comments. Review and analyze, yes, but the comments are not binding at all.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Lots of "Public Opinion" is generated by non-citizen actors, that is, people hiding behind anonymity and money. Laws could fix this, but, alas, there is more money than there are people with guts.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
Whataboutism 101
Said the Wizard to Dorothy
1) I for one would love to find out who wrote comment-bots and publicly shame them. If the NY AG wants to bring them to court to make the point, even better.
2) If anyone at the FCC was involved or aware, then that is a real scandal and those individuals should be removed from their posts at least.
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.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Yep - this is someone setting up the ground floor plans for a run for some higher office. I'm guessing Congress and not the President since the 2020 field for Democrats is huge, but that's all this is. It's someone trying to make a name for himself.
And failing, because neither Slashdot nor the NYT article bothered to mention his name. Oops. Gotta make sure you get name recognition when pulling stunts like this.
And yet, where normally such actions are pretty much ignored, within seconds of these comments being posted, astroturfers like yourself and the grandparent are out desperately trying to make it seem like this is of no consequence. Continuously repeating "ITS_NOT_A_POLL!!" as if there's no difference between a single crank's opinion and something widely believed by the public. It's almost like some of the senior management at one of the telecos is suddenly realising that he might go down for years in prison. He's suddenly remembering that Trump has no power of pardon in New York State.
I don't understand how a normal person can be against net neutrality. Can someone explain?
As someone who thought the need for "common carrier" status for broadband Internet access communication services to the home was fairly obvious, I share your confusion. There are a couple of issues at play, I think:
Once the conversation strays from classifying broadband Internet access communication services as a "common carrier" service to Net Neutrality, the various definitions of what Net Neutrality is, and how it would be protected and guaranteed, get into the mix. A key factor here is "network management" concerns, sometimes expressed as (1) "Net Neutrality" would block all possibility of managing traffic flows and (2) without managing traffic flows certain types of traffic would naturally overwhelm other types of traffic and then (3) service would go to hell and (4) there would be nothing a carrier could do about it so (5) we would all suffer. So a normal person might become concerned that Net Neutrality will cause their quality of service to become significantly degraded. At least, that is what some of the major telecommunications service firms have implied.
Some telecommunications vendors claim that Net Neutrality would hamper their ability to deliver "innovative" types of services. Without knowing what this means, and without having any experience to draw upon to guess what this might mean, a normal person could come to conclude that a lack of innovation would be bad, and keep them from enjoying the future benefits of these innovative services.
So there are two reasons why a normal person could be against Net Neutrality. I'm sure that there are others.
I happen to believe that these two reasons, and other arguments that I have heard, are all self-serving justifications from greedy near-monopolies that are seeking to maximize their profit and have determined that they can best do so by avoiding/undoing the commoditization of Internet access. They didn't bring about the innovation that was the Internet, the innovation of making Internet access ubiquitously available to practically every household, nor the innovative services on the Internet that drives Internet usage even higher, but they damn well want to be the gatekeepers that "innovatively" control our ability to make use of all of these innovations. They do their damndest to convince everyone that the wealth of good that comes from the Internet is there by their doing, despite the fact that the range of services provided by ISPs has steadily declined from the days of the neighborhood dial-up ISPs to today.
There *might* have been glimmers of argument that ISPs were "information service providers" in the days when ISPs provided network news, web-site hosting, mail services, and more to their customers. Once the big telcos systematically gobbled up all of those ISPs and turned off most of these services, leaving just Internet access behind, the idea that they were anything but telecommunications service providers was laughable. CompuServe, America On-line, Prodigy and others from the 1990s provided actual information services in the days before the web. They sold you dial-up to THEIR hosted services and content. The Internet changed all of that... an Internet user could access everyone's content, not just the content of their provider. And that changed the game.
Pai straight up said that the majority of the legitimate comments were in favor of net neutrality. Now that is proven to be an obvious lie as we all suspected all along. Why would they be lying about this unless you're fundamentally wrong here?
*weren't
But my Grandma started voting Democrat after she died...
Pics or it didn't happen.
Why waste time with that?
Because fraud may have been committed? Investigating crimes is one of things Attorneys General do.
You just provided the New York Post which is a shit rag tabloid and a rightwing blog. Great citations. Have any others? Ones with actual facts not hyperbole and bullshit?
If(facts=="challenge worldview") {Deflect(); Name_Call();}
Found the telco shill.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
If the right political elite have been paid off though, then the astroturfing helps support their bought and paid for political position. aka the fake support makes their position look like listening to the voters.
The question I've got though - why did they allow themselves to be caught?
Telcos control how many email domains and IP addresses? Why exactly were there any duplicates at all? Every single one could have appeared to come from a customer IP, from a generic @telco.com email domain that you'd be unable to easily distinguish from a real one. They could use IP spoofing to mass sign up for Gmail accounts too...
Why waste time with that?
Because fraud may have been committed? Investigating crimes is one of things Attorneys General do.
Fraud? This is roughly equivalent to charging a 10 year old dressed up as a policeman with impersonating a police officer because he says "Your are under arrest!" or closing down the 12 year old's lemonade stand because they don't have a retail permit and are not paying sales taxes.
Who got defrauded here? Somebody clogged up some public comment process with garbage spam? So? It may technically be fraud, but I'm going to bet there are more serous cases for the DA to be going after. The only reason the DA is doing this is for the PR value.. Which in my book is using the DA's time and the state's money for campaign purposes, which sorta smacks of fraud too, maybe even campaign finance violations...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Oh. Fraud is a partisan political thing now?
OK.
Oh. Fraud is a partisan political thing now?
No, fraud is a crime. However making a big deal out of "investigating fraud" by a DA in a press release, when the "fraud" is as inconsequential as this is obviously a political move. But of course you cannot admit that because it might betray your political and ideological left leaning bias.
So if you want to waste time and money, have at it. I'm just laughing at the petty pointless waste that will produce no results legally or politically. The investigation will waste resources, end up charging nobody, it won't change that NN is dead, and it won't even change any votes in the upcoming election. It is truly pointless, much like building a sand castle below the tide line at low tide hoping to have a beachfront home for the weekend. There will be nothing left by this time tomorrow and it's only Wednesday. Shovel all the sand you want...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The internet wasn't built that way. It actually could be easily changed to start charging more for "long distance packets" simply by counting hops, but thankfully that is not the case as of yet.
What frustrates me about "net neutrality" is that people don't realize is that shaping has been happening for years. Certain ports (like port 80, 443, 21 etc.) are given higher priority, what they want to allow now is shaping on a broader scale, so Netflix data streams get automatically put into the "platinum" band because they pay more for it. Unfortunately it's already happened in my country with my current ISP. Netflix is watchable, so is Facebook, and YouTube, all other media sites there is endless buffering and timeouts - especially on a Friday night. I doubt they got a cent from Netflix, Facebook, or YouTube. They are doing it because a vast amount of their customer base only want or use those services, so they are catering for the masses.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
"Wasn't this settled already? With the "all comments that weren't pro-NN were submitted by Russian bots" argument?"
No, not at all. Where comments come from doesn't indicate who payed for them, and in this case they're talking about more than a dozen telecommunications trade groups, lobbying contractors and Washington advocacy groups.
Duh! A group will send you an email asking you to write to the FCC and they give you some boilerplate example of what to say and people cut and paste that into their message. That doesn't make it fraud.
J