Remember the millions of fake net neutrality comments? They weren't as kosher as the FCC made out One of the key arguments behind the Federal Communications Commission's decision to repeal net neutrality was the number of supportive emails it had received for its proposals. But an investigation has shown that a huge number of these were faked by lobbyists. What's more, the company responsible – LCX Digital – used a dataset …
rightwing lobbyists ? Never left wing lobbyists who seem to be more feted by the remnants of media. Why does a description harking back to the dysfunctional French monarchy get dredged up when only current choices seem to be between different flavours of lying totalitarian bureaucracy ? In short, whats the difference between them ?
"People with lots of money tend not to support left-wing positions, and therefore don't fund lobbyists to promote those views."
That's the single biggest crock of shit i've read today. Anyone with money will lobby for any thing, regardless of political affiliation, and yet i can name many many more on the left than the right.
Here's a selection that most people have heard of just off the top of my head: George Soros, Tony Blair, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sundar Pichai, All the Clintons, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey, Richard Branson.
The listed examples are awful, but it's hard not to agree with the premise. "Powerful people will use that power." The whole left-right thing is just red (and blue) herrings, and it's working so well we debate it as if it's a real thing and get totally sidetracked from, you know, whatever it is we were just talking about. Who wants lunch?
Sticks and stones.
Maybe it's all about the wording. To me a true leftist can never be rich, because that's somehow the point of being a leftie: Taking the money from the rich, feeding the poor, overcoming boundaries, appreciating individualism (at least if we talk about the newer left-wing groups, communism is a different beast).
The word "conservative" does literally mean to preserve, to maintain (a certain state or course of action). This is typically tied to having an elite group vs a poor group, maintaining traditional boundaries and more often than not the "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" mindset.
Now how are those people you listed left-wing? OK, I'll give you Soros, but Bill Gates who helps the poor.. agriculture organizations and their profits? Or Mark "gimme-all-you-data" Zuckerberg? Not really.
And when they do they get called all sorts of nasty things, by the right and left. e.g. Soros who funds all sorts of liberal and humanitarian causes and is accused of leading a world wide (Jewish) conspiracy, by both the far right and far left (n.b. Rees-Mogg recently)
Anyone who donates money to a cause seems to be open to those accusations. Even donating to existing charities leads to some people being accused of supporting everything that company has ever done. Bill Gates seems immune to this, so perhaps it's better to create a charity...
Everyone seems to be arguing over the political persuasion of the lobbyists.
Given those involved (FCC and telcos), the "lobbyists" were likely to have been created to make the evidence that the FCC needed for their argument.
Now for tin foil hat time: given the FCC is basically a sock puppet for the telcos and the telco's wouldn't want to get their hands dirty, I suspect an investigation would trace the source back to the FCC. If I'm wrong and the FCC were concerned they might be caught using manufactured, half-assed evidence, then it's possible that some insignificant US telco was involved - the big guys only dirty their hands if they really look like losing.
TL;DR: stop arguing about the political persuasion of the lobbyists, its an irrelevant side issue. Reform the bureaucracy so that it is transparent and vaguely neutral. And maybe send Pai for an x-ray to see if he's human or just has a telco's hand inside him working the limbs and mouth.
"The left tends to be more centred on honesty and fairness."
Communism or socialism are the ultimate left-wing, 'fair' (as in sharing resources) systems - look how well they work out once actual humans are involved in running them. Power over others tends to attract power-fixated nut jobs.
That said, the cnuts involved in this farce deserve to be staked out in the sun and left for the ants, proper Wild West style - that'll learn them!
Communism or socialism are the ultimate left-wing
That's assuming that the left/right wing thing is a sort straight line or bar.
Might as well say the earth is flat.
Left and right are on a curve and meet at the far end, a safe, liberal, permissive society is a very narrow strip in the ring.
A one party communist state only differs from a one party nationalist state in the rhetoric of the propaganda.
• Political thinking lives on a 1-Dimensional line. No wonder it promotes the most ignorant of human thought.
• Real life for all of us is 3-Dimensional, including how we think.
Crazies to the Left of me. Crazies to the Right of me. I thought for myself and walked away...
Oh welp. Crazy left wings don't blow up city buildings or shoot up a school or mosque. Righties do this all the time.
But I see your point: Dying your hair, forcing a code of conduct upon some company and doing some camping to help refugees can be cruel in it's own special way.
Totally the same.
"The right wing is mostly in the pocket of people who put mking money above other stuff.
The left tends to be more centred on honesty and fairness."
For such a huge generalisation to be useful in any argument, you would need to provide some evidence to clearly show a trend. My bet is that for any evidence that you can provide supporting your arguments for left/right wing, I can provide counter examples that suggest that your evidence doesn't show a trend and therefore is more likely to be an unsupported opinion than actual fact.
The Left, for a defined value of Left, seek to redistribute wealth.
The Right, ditto,to aggregate it.
It's within the definition of these terms.
But it really only becomes a significant issue in the more extreme values.
Then we have Devil Take the Hindmost free marketeers who believe that any behaviour is acceptable to aggregate resources for themselves versus Pseudo-Egalitarian command economy.
In both cases though it's the people at the top that seem to have the fullest lunch boxes.
I was involved in student politics, and some of my friends were actual communist party members. I won't argue about their idea of fairness, but honesty was not a centre. They took the position that society as it exists is fundamentally corrupt, and that the overthrow of the existing order by any means was morally justified.
That's 'cos the right wing types automate the process (capitalism, mass production, etc), which isn't allowed.
The left wing types (value of labour, useful idiots, etc) just get a load of their agitprop sheep to post, which is allowed.
Botnet wrong, meatnet right (or left in this case).
Facade of democracy.
We're all talking as if "comments" were somehow equivalent to "votes", so what matters is how many you receive. That's a stupid idea on the face of it, it brings up all the problems we've always known about online voting, and with ZERO safeguards.
I have always treated comment periods as an opportunity to make points that hadn't already been answered in the official published reasoning, on the basis that they might have been overlooked. It follows that there is absolutely no point in sending the same message more than once. A point made by one person is just as valid as one made by a million.
So, while it's no doubt fun for Pai and his mates to troll their opponents like this, it's not necessary. It's just the "smoke" part of "smoke and mirrors". It's a distraction. All of it.
"A point made by one person is just as valid as one made by a million."
That's the scientific approach.
In government (I am in the UK so looking from outside a US perspective / knowledge), the fact there has been "so much feedback, most of it supporting our plans" is ideal for the body to use when responding to criticism or interviews by the media.
The media will perhaps still criticise but the general public, who will mostly remain ignorant of how fake support has been bought, might then be persuaded that the policy is an acceptable one, because the body, and many "interested parties" think it is a "good idea", even when we know it is complete garbage, and the "interested parties" are spoofed.
The public think of this as a vote "for" the proposition and if "public comment" is overwhelmingly supportive, then the policy (however good or bad - for them it was TL;DR) is "OK".
"conspiracy theory" - an unproved hypothesis about a group of people secretly manipulating the government
"current events" - a proved, openly visible group of people openly manipulating the government, and laughing about it on twitter
We, the people, are the pawns and are supposed to just follow along with what the corporates and, by extension, the politicians want. Politics here in the States have so full of BS, sound bites, etc. that truth is lost in the shouting by all sides. And let's add in that there are companies and people who will sell and do anything for the highest bidder. This appears to be one of them.
As the old saying goes: "We have the best government money can buy."
still believing the USA is the biggest democracy on the planet.
Neither in numbers (that would be India) nor in quality (Scandinavia and continental Western Europe, the Brits are out of it with that Brexit farce and their de facto two party system).
But the USA is still the biggest democracy if you measure it by, um ... GDP. Yeah, GDP!
Assuming you don't believe China's "people's democratic dictatorship led by the working class" line. And I don't, because China's fake democracy is clearly qualitatively faker than our fake democracy.
For that matter, if you exclude China, we win by land area, too. (Canada is only bigger if you go by total surface area, according to Wikipedia, which is an unimpeachable source that is never incorrect in any detail.)
"[...] the Brits are out of it with that Brexit farce and their de facto two party system"
Not quite. The checks & balances against the Westminster Executive are holding. PM Johnson has lost every Brexit vote in Parliament - and a Supreme Court action - since he came to the position.
His possible game plan is to bypass the elected representatives and the judiciary by channelling himself as being the embodiment of "the will of the people" whose "simple solution only needs total power". Those are the well-worn catch-phrases of every dictator in the 20th and 21st centuries - and even go back to Julius Caesar's grab for power.
The BBC iPlayer currently has a programme that explores the resonance of those political periods with current times. "A Timewatch Guide Series 4: 3. Dictators and Despots" was made in 2017 - and is apparently even more relevant today.
"[...] the Brits are out of it with that Brexit farce and their de facto two party system"
Also I'd point out their isn't a British two party system currently, Northern Ireland has its own set of parties (and the DUP is even relevant at the moment), Scotland and Wales both have their nationalist parties which currently do exceedingly well in elections.
Even in England (where traditionally it has been a two party system and dominating the rest of the country) currently the lib dems in some polls are beating labour and the brexit party is not that far behind. The next election could be really interesting, although long term a two party system will probably re-establish itself (though which 2 parties?)
Why in the WORLD would you ever provide a bulk upload option for public comments? That's pretty much saying "please stack the deck". They should make it as manual as possible to post a comment, to avoid not only a third party writing comments in your name but you being able to simply cut and paste a comment off a website or Facebook page telling you to. Boilerplate comments that are cut and pasted should be automatically disregarded, as the people who post them put no thought at all into what they say and probably don't even understand what they're commenting on other than "Sean Hannity / Rachel Maddow told me to"
Much harder? Only for the plebs. The average Reg reader could surely script it within an hour.
Somewhat easier to detect? OK, that's fairer: a few thousand email addresses @mydomain would look suspicious even with a Turing-worthy bot generating the messages. On the other hand, email addresses are cheap, and if you could substitute @gmail and @hotmail for @mydomain without triggering abuse takedowns from those services ...
"Why in the WORLD would you ever provide a bulk upload option for public comments? That's pretty much saying "please stack the deck"."
Yup. That's why I point at the FCC for this farce.
The FCC have the history of supporting anticompetitive behaviour, the desire (to implement their masters bidding), the fact the same ruse appears to have been used for both telco purposes AND cable company purposes and that the FCC's only desire is to kill any inquiries.
Paper petitions.
The purpose of having a bulk upload feature was to allow for people to gather comments by hitting the sidewalks and getting people to make the comments on paper, then they'd transcribe them and upload them in a single go. This was typical back in the 1980s and early 1990s when the Internet was in its infancy and the FCC spent far more of its time regulating radio, television, and telephone.
However, now that Internet access is so prolific that not having access is extremely rare. But this is the FCC, trying to get them to move on from 1950's type thinking is an exercise in futility...
Which probably never should have been allowed back then.
If anyone didn't care enough to write a letter to the FCC themselves, their opinion shouldn't count. Or at least it should count for a LOT more than someone who just signs their name to a petition saying "stop the FCC from doing X".
Those old school paper petitions could be / could have been improved in two ways - one, allow people sending in public comments to the FCC or other governmental bodies do so for free without paying for a stamp (using a special zip code that's free to send letters to) and two, randomly choosing 1% of the people signing and sending them a letter at the listed address asking for confirmation that they signed the petition. If more than a certain threshold send in the free reply card saying "no, I did not sign that petition" then that entire bulk petition is considered to be fraudulent and ignored.
The modern equivalent would to require bulk petition submissions include a home address for the person, which would be 1) checked against IRS records that the named person really lives there and 2) get the same kind of 1% snail mail verification. That would have shitcanned the bogus ballot stuffing activities around net neutrality which probably occurred on both sides. Though it is such a low bar to require someone visit the FCC and submit their own, allowing bulk submissions in this manner is just dumb.
"However, now that Internet access is so prolific that not having access is extremely rare."
Definitely not the case. Yes, 80% of the population lives on 3% of the land mass where broadband access is ubiquitous, but a majority of the 20% living on the other 97% of the land mass have no access to broadband service and a good many have no service of any kind. When 30 million people have little if any access it certainly cannot be thought of as a rare occurrence.
You don't have to register to submit a comment to the FCC via the Internet, but you do have to submit some personally identifiable information along with it. Just like you need on a paper petition. You need to submit at least enough information that they can verify it is a legitimate comment, or at least that is the intended purpose.
It is an ongoing source of shame on the legal system that these sorts of non-financial crimes (but which still have tangibly harmful impacts on the populace) go un-punished. Still, they don't even prosecute the charlatans, fraudsters and snake-oil merchants of quackery, mentalism, etc., so I guess my expectations should be as low as Chairman Pai's ethics score.
I wish folks could look beyond partisan politics around size-of-government, regulatory tightness and public vs. private funding questions and focus on the harm bad actors do, particularly to the levels of political engagement, levels of trust in institutions (both public and private) and hope in general.
"focus on the harm bad actors do, particularly to the levels of political engagement, levels of trust in institutions (both public and private)"
HEAR, HEAR!
Any bad actor for any side is a problem. Even if a door created for good is open to anyone then anyone can be a bad actor. While the alleged abuse by the EFF may have been proven false, it is entirely possible that a freedom organisation undertook similar tactics to the lobbyists and some of the anti-NN comments were fake (I'm making no allegation, just pointing out that if the opportunity exists).
And if you agree to the above premise that back doors created for good can be exploited for evil, this should be a HELLO wake up call moment to proposed government back doors in encryption!
"2. Why are they not being prosecuted, or at least investigated?"
From the article:
"Despite the New York Attorney General's office announcing an investigation into the misuse of his state's citizens' identities, the federal regulator that solicited and received the fake comments, the FCC, has persistently refused to look into the issue, and has even blocked others' efforts."
(there are links to sources to back this up in the original)
Citizens United? Come on, I know it's out of fashion to acknowledge anything that happened before your generation started using Faecebook, but that doesn't mean it's a bad idea to know your history if you're going to comment on politics. The actual decision in the US that conflated corporations and people was Santa Clara County vs Southern Pacific, and it was handed down in 1886. Had that case been decided differently, Citizens United (and much else) would have been either moot or unrecognisably different.
If you dig a little deeper, you see that the sentence about how corporations are people and thus deserving of the rights normally accorded to a person was not part of the original decision, but was added by a clerk "cleaning up" for publication. Sort of like how "some staffer" made a 'typo fix" that resulted in the legal definition of "work for hire" changing from defaulting to the performer owning the copyright to the publisher owning it, in the absence of explicit wording in the contract. Thus effectively changing the terms of many contracts after they had been signed.
But of course these sort of "mistakes" would not have gotten through the courts and congress if they did not have support among the folks best placed to whisper in judicial or legislative ears.
Oh yes, it's definitely fraud. Millions of counts of wilful identity fraud at the very least. Also, what appears to be good evidence of three perpetrators, Broadband for America, Media Bridge and LCX Digital. All perpetrated directly against the US Government. You'd think the Justice Dept. would be all over this.
Thats a great comment, you're right I'm gonna move to London! Screw the US! Oh right wait wasn't the internet supposed to get shut down if the FCC repealed Net Neutrality? Wasn't Google and Facebook in favor of NN? (as well as every other major tech company) Still waiting on all those nasty ISP's to lock down my access...... Maybe, just maybe you all took the bait in supporting NN. Lets try some critical thinking for a minute, a skill required in IT.
Actually it's because the repeal of NN was essentially blocked and reversed using the congressional review act meaning so you never saw the loss of NN. Now most the states have enacted their own NN laws which the FCC would like to imagine it can repeal but the courts do not appear to agree. So you'll never see NN disappear because even if the FCC removed it from federal level now, it'll remain at state level in almost every stated.
So.... maybe just maybe, some critical thinking is a skill you shouldn't be preaching because you clearly didn't do your research.
"wasn't the internet supposed to get shut down if the FCC repealed Net Neutrality (NN)?"
No - NN was a largely irrelevant sideshow. While it affected some of the better off areas of the US that already had above average Internet connections and usually competition between suppliers, it was about keeping a few of the newer telco's/content provisders in their place. If NN passed, the Comcast's/Netflix and their ilk were allowed to play with the big boys on an even playing field where both sides would be encouraged to invest to improve the Internet. If it was repealed, they would struggle. Since then, the market has moved on - the concerns about content providers struggling to match competitors due to uncompetitive behaviour has been replaced by consolidation allowing competitors to engage in uncompetitive behaviour....
As for the real issues with Internet provision, lack of competition or outright uncompetitive practices/state-sponsored monopolies - they remain with no real end in sight except where new entrants come in and shake up the market.
The stench of corruption around the whole of the US government at the moment is breathtaking.
It's the kind of thing you'd expect to read about a dictatorship in a third world country. Is the US aspiring to be the next Nigeria*? They might even be setting their sights as high as China, or North Korea.
Shameful.
* - Other corrupt (former) dictator-led nations are also available.
"The stench of corruption around the whole of the US government at the moment is breathtaking."
Be careful extrapolating the FCC's behaviour to the current regime - they have been doing similar things under the last three regimes.
Trump disappearing from the White House won't address the telco or cable company greed and as their attack dog, the FCC see very little motive to change that.
> a benevolent dictatorship
Sorry, but along with the honest crook, the altruistic opportunist and the empathic bully, the "benevolent dictator" is an absurd theoretical construct. Even if it came to exist, it would have a shockingly short half-life: Everybody knows that power corrupts, so even if said dictator started as benevolent, he won't stay so for long.
And if he's really unfailingly benevolent, he will step down to protect the nation from himself and any unfortunate adventures his own vagaries might throw his country into (historic examples abound). So please don't dream about a reassuring father figure which will tell you what to do and think; You're better off doing so yourself.
Are you sure ? Speaking about historic examples, I believe China is quite close to a fully functional benevolent dictatorship. However I agree with you that you have 50% chance to get a baddie ruling the country with an iron fist as in banana republics. China had it with Mao but this time they're lucky.
"a fully functional benevolent dictatorship"
Yeah, but what about those who don't want to be dictated to? They quickly find out that the dictator is not so benevolent after all. And if a dictator is only benevolent to those who do exactly as they say... well that's just your bog-standard tyrant isn't it?
Yeah, but what about those who don't want to be dictated to? They quickly find out that the dictator is not so benevolent after all. And if a dictator is only benevolent to those who do exactly as they say... well that's just your bog-standard tyrant isn't it?
Read: Hong Kong
I'll give you one historic sample: Fabius Maximus Cunctator. He was a rather reluctant dictator (the title had to be forced upon him the second time) and he stepped down as soon as possible. He also saved Rome.
> I'll give you one historic sample: Fabius Maximus Cunctator.
Well, a roman "dictator" isn't really the same as a modern dictator. In ancient Rome this was a normal and planned state of the roman government in case of a major crisis (like Hannibal closing in on you in this case), et included limitations in power and scope, not to mention a dictator couldn't stay in office longer than half a year. So yes, they did step down, all of them, because that's what a roman "dictator" did when he had finished his appointed mission.
Not at all comparable with the all-powerful and person-based, sometimes even hereditary dictatorships of modern times. Sorry, can't accept that as an example of a "benevolent dictator" in the spirit of the OP.
China is quite close to a fully functional benevolent dictatorship
You cannot be serious!
In case you are, may I respectfully draw your attention to:
Come on, you could attribute virtually every one of those to any major western power as well in varying forms and scale. The west used to be a bit more subtle about it than China, but in recent decades that veil has well and truly lifted and they barely try and hide it anymore, especially from the corporate side, because there's no consequences. They're are enviously watching China's ability to control populations and aspire to take us in a similar direction, especially something like the Social Credit system.
The failure to honour "two systems" for Hong Kong;
- Palestine/Israel
- Indonesia/Papua
Sabre rattling over Taiwan;
- almost every country in the world that disagrees. Iran/Russia/China/Venuzuela being current 'favourites'
Tibet;
- Iraq, Lybia, Syria
- 130 odd other military bases around the world. e.g. Chagos Islands
The Uighan genocide, sorry "re-education";
- Native Americans
- Quantanamo and other 'black sites' for 're-education'
- Opioid epidemic
The ongoing censorship and re-writing of history, e.g. of the massacre in Tiananmen Square in 1989;
- Look at virtually any US made movie with any historical content carefully massaged with CIA 'co-operation'. And that is about as deep as history gets for the majority of people.
- Israel's re-take on local history
- any western victor's take on history of conflict
The failure to protect worker's rights in industry from exploitation and abuse;
- Amazon/Google
- Hollywood
- an on...those are only the high profiles ones I can immediately think of...
Environmental destruction and pollution on an epic scale;
- look at any coal or other mining//fracking/oil/chemical site. Supporting other poor countries bad practices in environmental protection.
Systemic and entrenched corruption by CCP cadres;
- substitute CCP for most politicians, lobby groups and major corporate's from FIRE/Pharma, the Fed, WTO/IMF etc
Blatant disrespect and defiance of international norms, treaties and court rulings, e.g. territorial claims in the South China Sea
- US exiting the Iran nuclear deal and INF treaty, vetoing anything against Israel in the UN, ignoring UN mandates at will, Chagos Islands etc etc, refusing to join the ICJ, Climate Change Accord...an on
Of course you could. But that's "whataboutism". It does not move the CCP or its dictator Xi Jinping one inch closer to being benevolent, the point I was disputing.
The fact that there are democracies that are flawed is not in question. The embarrassing part is we citizens of so-called free nations bear more responsibility for the conduct of the governments we elect than the oppressed citizens of dictatorships do. We only have to vote to make a change; they need to rise up.
"Speaking about historic examples, I believe China is quite close to a fully functional benevolent dictatorship."
The millions that have died from either political decisions or the Chinese justice system might beg to differ. If you disagree with the CCP, you tend to disappear and, if lucky, are tortured. The less fortunate are killed. We only get to see high profile people or large communities affected by these actions because the media coverage and journalism in China is so tightly controlled.
What you currently see in Hong Kong is China wanting to act like China but trying to stay within the rules set by the International community. At some point, the mask will drop as Jinping loses patience with Hong Kong ruining Chinas 70th anniversary party.
Ref: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/09/china-up-to-one-million-detained/
Ref: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/17/chinese-journalist-disappears-fly-beijing-hong-kong
Ref: https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/07/20/china-widow-nobel-laureate-feared-disappeared
We need an Internet law that forces you to tell us whether you're Chinese when posting nonsense like this.
There is absolutely nothing benevolent about China or its government. Nothing. Every dictator in modern (and almost certainly ancient as well) Chinese history has been responsible for thousands or millions of deaths, systematic oppression based on ethnicity, religion, ideology, and nearly any other factor that serves his purpose, an arbitrary puppet judiciary, and widespread and persistent official corruption. Mr Xi has the blood of Uighurs and Hong Kongers on his hands, innocent Canadians in arbitrary detention as a favour to a petty-minded business associate, and those are just the obvious things we read in the newspapers. It's sad that the culture that pioneered some of the concepts of fair and honest government has regressed to nothing more than systematic thuggery while so much of the world has adopted and improved upon the original Chinese ideas.
I realize that such a person as could pull this off would be exceedingly rare and it would almost certainly fall into a typical dictatorship after they are gone. But it has nothing to do with needing a reassuring father figure, it's about being able to do what needs to be done regardless of what the lobbyists, corporations and even the general populace wants.
Instead we get politicians pandering to the masses in order to get elected, and particularly in the US big donors in order to get enough money to even run for election.
> I realize that such a person as could pull this off would be exceedingly rare [...] it's about being able to do what needs to be done
Sorry, but are you saying that the only way to get things done is to expect/hope that an admittedly "exceedingly rare" occurrence might happen when you need it? In this case praying might help just as well...
I admit there is an, as you say "exceedingly rare" chance for such a person to exist, but that would happen at best once in a century. You can't make politics on such a messianic expectation, this is the stuff of dreams, not reality.
Last but not least, even if that wise, benevolent and intelligent person did exist, no chance you would get him to be your dictator: The people who would compete for that position would be all the selfish, opportunistic, self-serving crooks you already have in the political arena, so better keep their powers stunted, thank you very much.
> take the CEOs of these companies out behind the chemical shed and shoot them
Are you kidding? Why do you think Justice is always represented with a blindfold?... They are all members of the same old boy network, they all used to get drunk together in [insert prestigious university name], they definitely won't hurt their old buddies. They'll scratch their back, and get their own back scratched in return later on, that's how things work.
Justice is only for the people without money and influence.
I salute your attitude on this, but surely the appropriate lesson to others would be by locking them in a soudnproof glass box (so everyone can see) and playing them an endless loop of Trump monologues until they tear their own head off to end it all?
Then have the remains devoured by thousands of bugs, Halloween style...
Failing that, then death by chemical waste, a la Robocop (80s version) sounds perfectly reasonable...
Upvotes all round on this one!
Why doesn't an organization like the FCC already have such systems in place? The answer is ...
Bloody obvious.
It happens that there's absolutely gargantuan shitloads of money to be made by the people who have Ajit Pai and his cronies sitting comfortably inside their pockets by blocking net neutrality.
These are the same people who also contribute generously (very) to the cause, be it with money, PACs or support through their network controlled news outlets.
To all of them it is only a win-win scenario.
It is indeed quite depressing and I give kudos to BuzzFeed for doing their very best to uncover this but we live in times where in the U.S. a sitting president can name absolute idiots for posts requiring people with proper qualifications, routinely use his office to drum up business for his companies and has a marked tendency to lie through his teeth while his party, a good part of Congress and millions of his voters choose to look the other way ...
¿What makes anyone think this can/will ever get fixed?
O.
LCX denied the connection between their filed comments and the hacked database, claiming that every one of the comments had been made by real people. Although it failed to say how it gathered those responses, or explain how dead people were able to access a system that doesn't appear to exist to send their comments, or explain why people listed as supporting the abolition of net neutrality rules have since said publicly that they did not send the comment and actually believe the opposite.
Welcome to the era of Doublespeak, where up is down, war is peace, we've always been at war with Eastasia, and ignorance is Donald Trump.
...Who knew the astroturfed 'positive' kill-net-neutrality feedback was FRAUD, I'm easily willing to bet. So much for "We The People" being in charge of our own government. FRAUD abuses the citizenry and benefits crooks.
If you can't win... CHEAT! <-- The con-job politician's motto. In this case, the con-job was perpetrated by irrational-right Republican corporate puppets.
Cut Their Strings!
Restore Real Net Neutrality NOW!
STATE enforced Net Neutrality is to free & open internet as PATRIOT Act is to Patriotism. One does not best Marxists by implementing their stated policy goals:
"Centralization of the means of communication in the hands of the STATE."
Plank Six
Communist Manifesto ca. 1848
Twentieth-Century FCC licensure of old-media created and fostered consolidation unto STATE's favored corporations raising barriers to entry and locking out competition.
1776> 1984.
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