The language of the law clearly ends with internet service being an information service just as the bipartisan legislation dictated that the US government would take a light touch approach to regulating our internet access.
There should be no struggle here. The FCC's Open Internet Order was clearly in violation of the text of the law, and it's on the right side of the statute in fixing that error today.
Outlets like Ars Technica and Slashdot could do a better job of representing the stakes in this controversy. If we need to update the laws then we can push our representatives to do so, but to push the FCC to ignore the clear requirements of the law is the wrong way to go.
Saying the problem with UBI is how to pay for it is like saying the problem with my perpetual motion waterwheel is finding a way to get the water back uphill: it glosses over the most important point.
UBI would carry a cost to society. Maybe the people would be up for bearing that cost because the program's benefits outweigh the costs, and maybe they wouldn't. If they'd make that trade then Great! They'll be up for the taxes needed to pay for it, all transparently and reliably.
It seems to me this entire writeup is about ways of hiding the costs, though. It proposes all sorts of accounting schemes to make sure the costs stay off the books where the people won't have a say in it.
That's the wrong way to go about public policy. It's both opaque to the population and inefficient in its middlemen.
So focus on getting more people convinced that UBI is a worthwhile trade. Convince them to accept higher taxes to pay for it. And then let them write their checks honestly for the program they support.
As a public company, their balance sheet is made public, and it shows they paid hundreds of millions in taxes every year. You can read for yourself at the link below.
So Amazon paid taxes to governments, and the governments decide how to allocate those tax revenues around programs that help the people. That's the right way for this to work as that allows policy makers to do their best to design programs to best help those who need it while not laying a cost on those who can't afford to pay it.
These sensationalized stories don't do society any good.
So we had observations where the temperatures weren't rising as fast as theories predicted.
When observations don't bear out predictions, science would have you look for a new theory. Bridenstine merely joined in with those pointing out that the data didn't agree with the theory, thus engaging in the scientific process.
Maybe the guy doesn't have a background in science, but then he's a bureaucrat running a department with a focus on aerospace engineering. Even so, he was promoting the scientific perspective with his stance.
Yes, there was a pause in temperature change that wasn't and still isn't completely explained. Researchers are employing different methods to try to make sense of it, studying both the data and the theories to see how they might be reconciled. It's anti-scientific to try to paper that over, especially in the course of personally attacking a politician.
The point of scientific journals is not to communicate findings to the public but to record findings and share them with other members of the scientific community.
The papers are full of jargon because that's the state of the discipline. And it's not a bad thing. The people reading the papers will be up to speed on the jargon, so that's just how it's most effectively communicated.
Journals just wouldn't work if every paper had to start with a multi-year course on the topic to get the reader up to speed. It's up to the reader to have the background needed to understand the paper.
It need to be stressed that the FCC is an independent commission of the United States and is therefore not part of the administration.
It is not part of the executive branch, and so no president has authority over it. It's not in the executive branch chain of command.
This may sound like a minor detail, but I think it's worthwhile for us to insist that the FCC remain independent of the president as it was designed. No matter who is in the White House, the FCC was set up to prevent any president from having authority over the US communication systems.
If you read the report, it goes through times when it's including cell data and times when it's not. It also lays out exactly why it's making those two choices as required by the laws that tell the FCC what to do.
If you read the report it details the many ways the FCC is actually working to address those imbalances, as is required by law.
The chairman has been very active over the years in promoting things like funding for rural broadband. In fact he's been critical of the previous FCC for not spending more to address these issues.
I know it's not popular on slashdot to report these things as it doesn't fit the black and white narrative, but there is room for coming together behind some of these efforts.
Anyone interested in this topic needs to read the actual report. There the FCC goes through the numbers behind its conclusions and the legal requirements that it faces when going about its analysis.
But more importantly, the FCC report simply doesn't come to the conclusion that Slashdot reports here. In fact it explicitly says that there is more progress to be made, and that it was a lot more than Network Neutrality stuff going on last year.
The report is a fine report that we should be able to get behind, as it promotes efforts to expand Broadband to more people.
Firstly, The Open Internet Order of 2015 was itself illegal. It would be bizarre for Congress to insist that the FCC should do something that Congress bars the FCC from doing.
It would be Congress ordering someone to violate the law.
Secondly, the CRA requires joint resolutions to be passed like other legislation, with both houses of Congress and a signature of the president, or an override of his veto.
This is a particularly misinformative post, even considering how bad Slashdot reporting is these days.
The OIG report didn't debunk the suspicion that Obama had undue influence on the FCC's processes. They simply didn't come across any proof of it in the email records kept by the FCC. They did, though, restate that Wheeler and the president had had conversations about topics like this.
So it still leaves unexplained the FCC's decision to make such a sudden break with longstanding, bipartisan, and legal consensus that the Internet shouldn't be regulated like this.
The FCC is an independent agency of the US government, not part of the executive branch, and so not part of the Trump administration.
This is a bright line that needs to be preserved. We don't want presidents to be able to order the FCC to act, especially the current one. And Obama's pressure on the FCC to regulate the internet was part of the history that got us in this mess in the first place.
Anyway, The Hill had a level-headed and short description of the action here. It was really nice to get a break from sensationalized--and factually off--articles screaming about the world coming to an end.
I'd say their language suggests otherwise, even here where they suggest stolen identities would have interfered with the FCC rulemaking process. By law it would not.
So maybe I'm misinterpreting NY's comments. Fine, but let's just be clear that investigation of stolen identities is one thing, but it doesn't affect the rulemaking itself.
"It's easy for the FCC to claim that there's no problem with the process, when they're hiding the very information that would allow us to determine if there was a problem."
The reason there's no problem with the process here is that the information at hand has nothing at all to do with the process.
NY State is suggesting otherwise, contrary to the Administrative Procedure Act.
The FCC is pointing out the rules under which it's legally obligated to operate.
This notice and comment procedure is specified in law, and the FCC cannot legally deviate from it. Under the law, neither numbers of comments nor identities of commenters really matter. A regulatory body is required to address concerns raised in comments as they make their rules, but it doesn't matter who is bringing those concerns so long as they're addressed.
The FCC is merely pointing out that there is a legal process here, and the NY State suit isn't exactly in line with the federal law.
YES, there have been so many articles going around the internet that suggest this is some sort of voting process, that sending in form comments matter, but legally they do not. The FCC gets its orders from Congress, not from people submitting comments on the internet. Those articles were pretty damaging, misleading people about how this part of the US government is designed to operate, and leading them to misunderstand when things don't actually go the way they're told they should go.
So we're at a place where we need to correct that misinformation. People who are interested in the functioning of a body like the FCC now need to know just how the notice and comment process works.
By law numbers and identities don't matter for notice and comment, exactly as the FCC is pointing out. NY State should probably stop joining in on that rhetorical bandwagon suggesting otherwise.
Fortunately, the FCC isn't empowered to make such decisions on their own. The tech companies need to be speaking to Congress if they want the laws changed, and legislators will work on legislation to change the US government policy.
I assume the tech giants, knowing how our government is set up, understand this and are just using their letter as a publicity stunt.
In any case, we absolutely should not promote the idea that regulatory agencies have such a free hand to implement whatever policies they can be convinced to implement.
The FCC was always involved. It chose to take a more active role in 2015 despite the Telecommunication Act not asking it to, and despite its means of involvement kicking the FTC off the case.
That's one of the huge problems with how the FCC acted under Wheeler: they removed the FTC and its consumer protections. Pai has now been pushing to get the FTC back on the case, and their proposal of regulation lays out clearly that restoration of FTC protections is one of the key elements of his plan.
"The problem for Mr. Pai is that government agencies are not free to abruptly reverse longstanding rules on which many have relied without a good reason"
Well no, he gets this exactly backwards. Network Neutrality was EXACTLY such a reversal, and here's Pai simply undoing what the FCC wasn't free to do in the first place. Pai is correcting the very transgression Wu is citing here.
It was previously a longstanding rule--supported by law--that the FCC would have a hands off approach to the internet. Wheeler reversed that policy drastically. Pai is saying the FCC can't make such reversals.
Anyway, in the end Wu is complaining that he's not getting his own way. It's akin to throwing a tantrum when he's just not managed to convince lawmakers that his perspective is the right one.
Pai also sat down with Reason a few months ago to discuss his goals as FCC chairman and his argument for reversing the Open Internet Order. You can see that interview here.
But Slashdot is doing a disservice conflating two issues here. Submitters' abuse of the online comment process has nothing to do with the propriety of reversing the last chairman's effort to regulate the internet.
It needs to be emphasized loudly: regulatory bodies are not democratic. Congress is the place where representatives hash out the direction of the US government, and commissions like the FCC are to follow the direction decided upon legislatively. They are not to act as a shadow legislature overriding and undermining the decisions made by Congress.
If you don't like that Congress decided we should have a light-touch approach to the internet, then great! Write your congressman and work to change the law. Meanwhile, the FCC will address the issues brought up in its comment period regardless of who submitted them as the law directs it to do.
Here's just one example of a release from 1999 about the FTC's activity in protecting consumers online, showing that it was a concern of the FTC before.
This is a longstanding issue, so I've seen analyses in the past that detail the FCC's weaker protections than those of the FTC. It may even be a legal matter, that the FTC had more authority to go after companies misbehaving online, and when the FCC revoked their jurisdiction, the FCC just didn't have the same broad legal tools to replace those of the FTC.
We need a quick review of the history here to see that the Slashdot article misses key parts of the story.
Previously, the Federal Trade Commission regulated tech companies to protect consumer privacy.
Then the last chairman pushed forward Title II classification which stripped the FTC of their jurisdiction, killing those privacy protections and replacing them with weaker protections under the FCC.
Pai is pushing to revert that change, working with the FTC to restore the stronger consumer protections. Technically yes, he proposes to end the weak FCC protections, but it's not giving an accurate picture to present that without mentioning that he's trying to restore stronger protections in the process.
If the country was evil, then why would it be seen as out of order to have an evil president be answering to the evil population?
But practically, a president acting unilaterally is doing so without the institution behind him. It doesn't work in our system of government, as our system is specifically designed not to recognize authority that doesn't reflect the wants of the people.
In this way a president with good ideas is forced to work with society, bringing them at least somewhat toward those good ideas in the process, which is a good thing!
The Obama administration was marked by a guy pushing society away from what might have been good ideas by his insistence on bucking consensus instead of contributing to it.
The job of president is to faithfully execute the laws of the country. That is, yes, it is his job to to be a follower, to follow the direction that our representative body comes to consensus around.
Yes, Obama did run afoul of many laws, as confirmed in court over and over again. This is just the latest example of an action that was so far outside the law that it blocked by courts even before going into effect. The EPA's draft spells out exactly how Obama's Clean Power Plan broke with the Clean Air Act.
Of course a president probably should work to sway consensus in the directions he sees best for the country, but when he loses the argument--no matter how right his side of the argument may have been--then it's his job to grit his teeth and work within the results of the deliberation. Or he can quit.
This mess is what happens when a president decides to go it alone. Our system doesn't allow for such unilateral authority.
To be clear, a president can't put in place something that wasn't authorized by Congress.
Every executive order has to gain its legitimacy through authority granted to the president by law, normally mandated by law. With some exceptions, the executive branch gets its orders from Congress, so the president can only do what he was told to do, and he must do those things.
For this reason courts look super skeptically on changes of regulation. If one administration is undoing what the past administration did, something's wrong seeing as the new administration would be just as mandated by the same laws as the last one. Presidents can't just undo the last administration's work willy-nilly.
However, in this case it turns out Obama put in place an awful lot of stuff that ran contrary to law. As the EPA document lays out, Obama's CPP violated the Clean Air Act's orders, and courts have tended to agree with that. Trump here is undoing what a president never had the ability to do in the first place.
I'd encourage everyone to actually read the EPA's document as it lays out the ways in which the Clean Power Plan doesn't follow the law on the books.
In short, the Clean Air Act, which Obama used to justify his regulation, authorizes specific ways of regulating pollutants. The regulation here wasn't in line with those authorized approaches, so it was without legal authorization.
Obama COULD HAVE put in place a policy that was actually legal. He didn't, for better or worse, and so his plan was found wanting by the courts before being corrected presently.
As for Trump, we should celebrate the moments where he recognizes the legal constraints of his office. With so many people worried about him being authoritarian, let's encourage these shows of legal restraint.
Slashdot Mirror
The language of the law clearly ends with internet service being an information service just as the bipartisan legislation dictated that the US government would take a light touch approach to regulating our internet access.
There should be no struggle here. The FCC's Open Internet Order was clearly in violation of the text of the law, and it's on the right side of the statute in fixing that error today.
Outlets like Ars Technica and Slashdot could do a better job of representing the stakes in this controversy. If we need to update the laws then we can push our representatives to do so, but to push the FCC to ignore the clear requirements of the law is the wrong way to go.
Saying the problem with UBI is how to pay for it is like saying the problem with my perpetual motion waterwheel is finding a way to get the water back uphill: it glosses over the most important point.
UBI would carry a cost to society. Maybe the people would be up for bearing that cost because the program's benefits outweigh the costs, and maybe they wouldn't. If they'd make that trade then Great! They'll be up for the taxes needed to pay for it, all transparently and reliably.
It seems to me this entire writeup is about ways of hiding the costs, though. It proposes all sorts of accounting schemes to make sure the costs stay off the books where the people won't have a say in it.
That's the wrong way to go about public policy. It's both opaque to the population and inefficient in its middlemen.
So focus on getting more people convinced that UBI is a worthwhile trade. Convince them to accept higher taxes to pay for it. And then let them write their checks honestly for the program they support.
It's simply false that Amazon didn't pay taxes.
As a public company, their balance sheet is made public, and it shows they paid hundreds of millions in taxes every year. You can read for yourself at the link below.
So Amazon paid taxes to governments, and the governments decide how to allocate those tax revenues around programs that help the people. That's the right way for this to work as that allows policy makers to do their best to design programs to best help those who need it while not laying a cost on those who can't afford to pay it.
These sensationalized stories don't do society any good.
Amazon filing: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/ph...
So we had observations where the temperatures weren't rising as fast as theories predicted.
When observations don't bear out predictions, science would have you look for a new theory. Bridenstine merely joined in with those pointing out that the data didn't agree with the theory, thus engaging in the scientific process.
Maybe the guy doesn't have a background in science, but then he's a bureaucrat running a department with a focus on aerospace engineering. Even so, he was promoting the scientific perspective with his stance.
Yes, there was a pause in temperature change that wasn't and still isn't completely explained. Researchers are employing different methods to try to make sense of it, studying both the data and the theories to see how they might be reconciled. It's anti-scientific to try to paper that over, especially in the course of personally attacking a politician.
The point of scientific journals is not to communicate findings to the public but to record findings and share them with other members of the scientific community.
The papers are full of jargon because that's the state of the discipline. And it's not a bad thing. The people reading the papers will be up to speed on the jargon, so that's just how it's most effectively communicated.
Journals just wouldn't work if every paper had to start with a multi-year course on the topic to get the reader up to speed. It's up to the reader to have the background needed to understand the paper.
That's not obsolete; it's cutting edge!
It need to be stressed that the FCC is an independent commission of the United States and is therefore not part of the administration.
It is not part of the executive branch, and so no president has authority over it. It's not in the executive branch chain of command.
This may sound like a minor detail, but I think it's worthwhile for us to insist that the FCC remain independent of the president as it was designed. No matter who is in the White House, the FCC was set up to prevent any president from having authority over the US communication systems.
If you read the report, it goes through times when it's including cell data and times when it's not. It also lays out exactly why it's making those two choices as required by the laws that tell the FCC what to do.
It's all spelled out in the report.
https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_pub...
If you read the report it details the many ways the FCC is actually working to address those imbalances, as is required by law.
The chairman has been very active over the years in promoting things like funding for rural broadband. In fact he's been critical of the previous FCC for not spending more to address these issues.
I know it's not popular on slashdot to report these things as it doesn't fit the black and white narrative, but there is room for coming together behind some of these efforts.
Anyone interested in this topic needs to read the actual report. There the FCC goes through the numbers behind its conclusions and the legal requirements that it faces when going about its analysis.
But more importantly, the FCC report simply doesn't come to the conclusion that Slashdot reports here. In fact it explicitly says that there is more progress to be made, and that it was a lot more than Network Neutrality stuff going on last year.
The report is a fine report that we should be able to get behind, as it promotes efforts to expand Broadband to more people.
Missreporting like this is not helpful.
Here's a link to the report:
https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_pub...
Firstly, The Open Internet Order of 2015 was itself illegal. It would be bizarre for Congress to insist that the FCC should do something that Congress bars the FCC from doing.
It would be Congress ordering someone to violate the law.
Secondly, the CRA requires joint resolutions to be passed like other legislation, with both houses of Congress and a signature of the president, or an override of his veto.
This is a particularly misinformative post, even considering how bad Slashdot reporting is these days.
But absence of proof is not proof of absence.
The OIG report didn't debunk the suspicion that Obama had undue influence on the FCC's processes. They simply didn't come across any proof of it in the email records kept by the FCC. They did, though, restate that Wheeler and the president had had conversations about topics like this.
So it still leaves unexplained the FCC's decision to make such a sudden break with longstanding, bipartisan, and legal consensus that the Internet shouldn't be regulated like this.
The FCC is an independent agency of the US government, not part of the executive branch, and so not part of the Trump administration.
This is a bright line that needs to be preserved. We don't want presidents to be able to order the FCC to act, especially the current one. And Obama's pressure on the FCC to regulate the internet was part of the history that got us in this mess in the first place.
Anyway, The Hill had a level-headed and short description of the action here. It was really nice to get a break from sensationalized--and factually off--articles screaming about the world coming to an end.
See it here: http://thehill.com/opinion/tec...
I'd say their language suggests otherwise, even here where they suggest stolen identities would have interfered with the FCC rulemaking process. By law it would not.
So maybe I'm misinterpreting NY's comments. Fine, but let's just be clear that investigation of stolen identities is one thing, but it doesn't affect the rulemaking itself.
"It's easy for the FCC to claim that there's no problem with the process, when they're hiding the very information that would allow us to determine if there was a problem."
The reason there's no problem with the process here is that the information at hand has nothing at all to do with the process.
NY State is suggesting otherwise, contrary to the Administrative Procedure Act.
The FCC is pointing out the rules under which it's legally obligated to operate.
This notice and comment procedure is specified in law, and the FCC cannot legally deviate from it. Under the law, neither numbers of comments nor identities of commenters really matter. A regulatory body is required to address concerns raised in comments as they make their rules, but it doesn't matter who is bringing those concerns so long as they're addressed.
The FCC is merely pointing out that there is a legal process here, and the NY State suit isn't exactly in line with the federal law.
YES, there have been so many articles going around the internet that suggest this is some sort of voting process, that sending in form comments matter, but legally they do not. The FCC gets its orders from Congress, not from people submitting comments on the internet. Those articles were pretty damaging, misleading people about how this part of the US government is designed to operate, and leading them to misunderstand when things don't actually go the way they're told they should go.
So we're at a place where we need to correct that misinformation. People who are interested in the functioning of a body like the FCC now need to know just how the notice and comment process works.
By law numbers and identities don't matter for notice and comment, exactly as the FCC is pointing out. NY State should probably stop joining in on that rhetorical bandwagon suggesting otherwise.
Fortunately, the FCC isn't empowered to make such decisions on their own. The tech companies need to be speaking to Congress if they want the laws changed, and legislators will work on legislation to change the US government policy.
I assume the tech giants, knowing how our government is set up, understand this and are just using their letter as a publicity stunt.
In any case, we absolutely should not promote the idea that regulatory agencies have such a free hand to implement whatever policies they can be convinced to implement.
The FCC was always involved. It chose to take a more active role in 2015 despite the Telecommunication Act not asking it to, and despite its means of involvement kicking the FTC off the case.
That's one of the huge problems with how the FCC acted under Wheeler: they removed the FTC and its consumer protections. Pai has now been pushing to get the FTC back on the case, and their proposal of regulation lays out clearly that restoration of FTC protections is one of the key elements of his plan.
"The problem for Mr. Pai is that government agencies are not free to abruptly reverse longstanding rules on which many have relied without a good reason"
Well no, he gets this exactly backwards. Network Neutrality was EXACTLY such a reversal, and here's Pai simply undoing what the FCC wasn't free to do in the first place. Pai is correcting the very transgression Wu is citing here.
It was previously a longstanding rule--supported by law--that the FCC would have a hands off approach to the internet. Wheeler reversed that policy drastically. Pai is saying the FCC can't make such reversals.
Anyway, in the end Wu is complaining that he's not getting his own way. It's akin to throwing a tantrum when he's just not managed to convince lawmakers that his perspective is the right one.
Pai also sat down with Reason a few months ago to discuss his goals as FCC chairman and his argument for reversing the Open Internet Order. You can see that interview here.
But Slashdot is doing a disservice conflating two issues here. Submitters' abuse of the online comment process has nothing to do with the propriety of reversing the last chairman's effort to regulate the internet.
It needs to be emphasized loudly: regulatory bodies are not democratic. Congress is the place where representatives hash out the direction of the US government, and commissions like the FCC are to follow the direction decided upon legislatively. They are not to act as a shadow legislature overriding and undermining the decisions made by Congress.
If you don't like that Congress decided we should have a light-touch approach to the internet, then great! Write your congressman and work to change the law. Meanwhile, the FCC will address the issues brought up in its comment period regardless of who submitted them as the law directs it to do.
Here's just one example of a release from 1999 about the FTC's activity in protecting consumers online, showing that it was a concern of the FTC before.
This is a longstanding issue, so I've seen analyses in the past that detail the FCC's weaker protections than those of the FTC. It may even be a legal matter, that the FTC had more authority to go after companies misbehaving online, and when the FCC revoked their jurisdiction, the FCC just didn't have the same broad legal tools to replace those of the FTC.
https://www.ftc.gov/sites/defa...
We need a quick review of the history here to see that the Slashdot article misses key parts of the story.
Previously, the Federal Trade Commission regulated tech companies to protect consumer privacy.
Then the last chairman pushed forward Title II classification which stripped the FTC of their jurisdiction, killing those privacy protections and replacing them with weaker protections under the FCC.
Pai is pushing to revert that change, working with the FTC to restore the stronger consumer protections. Technically yes, he proposes to end the weak FCC protections, but it's not giving an accurate picture to present that without mentioning that he's trying to restore stronger protections in the process.
If the country was evil, then why would it be seen as out of order to have an evil president be answering to the evil population?
But practically, a president acting unilaterally is doing so without the institution behind him. It doesn't work in our system of government, as our system is specifically designed not to recognize authority that doesn't reflect the wants of the people.
In this way a president with good ideas is forced to work with society, bringing them at least somewhat toward those good ideas in the process, which is a good thing!
The Obama administration was marked by a guy pushing society away from what might have been good ideas by his insistence on bucking consensus instead of contributing to it.
The job of president is to faithfully execute the laws of the country. That is, yes, it is his job to to be a follower, to follow the direction that our representative body comes to consensus around.
Yes, Obama did run afoul of many laws, as confirmed in court over and over again. This is just the latest example of an action that was so far outside the law that it blocked by courts even before going into effect. The EPA's draft spells out exactly how Obama's Clean Power Plan broke with the Clean Air Act.
Of course a president probably should work to sway consensus in the directions he sees best for the country, but when he loses the argument--no matter how right his side of the argument may have been--then it's his job to grit his teeth and work within the results of the deliberation. Or he can quit.
This mess is what happens when a president decides to go it alone. Our system doesn't allow for such unilateral authority.
To be clear, a president can't put in place something that wasn't authorized by Congress.
Every executive order has to gain its legitimacy through authority granted to the president by law, normally mandated by law. With some exceptions, the executive branch gets its orders from Congress, so the president can only do what he was told to do, and he must do those things.
For this reason courts look super skeptically on changes of regulation. If one administration is undoing what the past administration did, something's wrong seeing as the new administration would be just as mandated by the same laws as the last one. Presidents can't just undo the last administration's work willy-nilly.
However, in this case it turns out Obama put in place an awful lot of stuff that ran contrary to law. As the EPA document lays out, Obama's CPP violated the Clean Air Act's orders, and courts have tended to agree with that. Trump here is undoing what a president never had the ability to do in the first place.
I'd encourage everyone to actually read the EPA's document as it lays out the ways in which the Clean Power Plan doesn't follow the law on the books.
In short, the Clean Air Act, which Obama used to justify his regulation, authorizes specific ways of regulating pollutants. The regulation here wasn't in line with those authorized approaches, so it was without legal authorization.
Obama COULD HAVE put in place a policy that was actually legal. He didn't, for better or worse, and so his plan was found wanting by the courts before being corrected presently.
As for Trump, we should celebrate the moments where he recognizes the legal constraints of his office. With so many people worried about him being authoritarian, let's encourage these shows of legal restraint.