FCC Proposes Changing Comment System After WSJ Found Thousands of Fakes
wsj.com
wsj.com
28 senators, and the New York Attorney General, had to tell Pai to stop the FCC voting on new rules last year because of all the fraudulent comments. The fake comments were made apparent over a year ago. https://www.cnet.com/news/net-neutrality-fcc-ajit-pai-bots-s...
The FCC refused to provide records to the NY AG in order to investigate the possibility of fake comments. In other words, the NY AG was the only part of the government investigating the fake comments, and the FCC actively worked against investigating them. https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/12/10/0037222/fcc-refuses...
Pai's office issued this response to calls to delay the vote:
This is just evidence that supporters of heavy-handed Internet
regulations are becoming more desperate by the day as their effort
to defeat Chairman Pai's plan to restore Internet freedom has stalled.
The vote will proceed as scheduled on December 14.
And now, 7 months later, the FCC is saying there were fraudulent comments, and maybe they should redesign their website.
>`Complaints filed through the Consumer Complaint Center are categorized as "informal" complaints. There is no fee for filing an informal complaint.
If you are not satisfied with the response to your informal complaint, you can file a "formal" complaint. Your formal complaint must be filed within six months of the date of the response to your informal complaint. The current fee for filing a formal complaint is $225.00, but it is subject to change.
Formal complaint proceedings are similar to court proceedings. Each party must comply with specific procedural rules, appear before the FCC and file documents that address legal issues. Parties filing formal complaints usually are represented by lawyers or experts in communications law and the FCC's procedural rules. No attorneys fees may be awarded.`[0]
Question is, does this jive with similar methods of launching court-proceedings in civil-court as an example?
[0]https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/articles/2050828...
> The Commission will forward informal complaints to the appropriate carrier for investigation and may set a due date for the carrier to provide a written response to the informal complaint to the Commission, with a copy to the complainant. The response will advise the Commission of the carrier’s satisfaction of the complaint or of its refusal or inability to do so.
US consumers have zero rights because the sheriff is completely in bed with the people they oversee. The CFPB and the paltry legislation passed at the height of the financial crisis are some of the only remaining consumer protection left. The reason why the CFPB had to be set up with a dubious structure under the Fed and an unchecked director is precisely because only a hammer could bring about some semblance of equity. It shouldn't have to be this way to begin with. I don't know why this hasn't turned into a bigger cross-party issue, it affects everyone.
I've always felt that was wrong, but that is how it works, and it's not fascism, so yes, you are being hyperbolic.
High government fees aren't really fascism. They're bureaucracy.
Industry-wise, fascism is authoritarian governmental control. [1] By that measure (and it's 100% stupid hyperbole) Net Neutrality is more "fascist" than non-NN.
See also: Corporate tax breaks at a time of record profits, arguments against universal healthcare or family leave, stagnant national minimium wage, increasing barriers to unionization and weakening bargaining ability, selling public lands to private energy companies, weakening EPA regulations, the for-profit prison system, tying education directly to job training.
I don't think corporate fascism fits. Corporations would need to use force to suppress you. They would need to control religion.
Not sure why the word fascism has come back into common language. We needed a new word to describe Trump but instead we recycled this word.
Add "to the benefit of corporations and the extremely wealthy" at the end of this definition and you have Corporate Fascism. Who do think is donating the money to these politicians?
Corporate Fascism is exactly the new phrase needed to describe what is happening. Your argument was essentially "your phrase doesn't exist" followed by "someone needs to make up a new phrase".
The term I found in Wikipedia, that to me seems to describe the fear being expressed, is inverted totalitarianism. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism)
Tragic that you have enough insight to realise you might be misusing either "literal" or "fascism" and not enough to pull yourself back from the brink...
I know "fascism" has been misused to the point of meaninglessness but can we all agree there has to be at least a small amount of - I don't know - death or torture involved - before we wheel out the big guns?
Politically, the Manifesto calls for:
Universal suffrage with a lowered voting age to 18 years, and voting and electoral office eligibility for all age 25 and up; Proportional representation on a regional basis; Voting for women (which was then opposed by most other European nations); Representation at government level of newly created national councils by economic sector; The abolition of the Italian Senate (at the time, the Senate, as the upper house of parliament, was by process elected by the wealthier citizens, but were in reality direct appointments by the king. It has been described as a sort of extended council of the crown); The formation of a national council of experts for labor, for industry, for transportation, for the public health, for communications, etc. Selections to be made of professionals or of tradesmen with legislative powers, and elected directly to a general commission with ministerial powers.
In labor and social policy, the Manifesto calls for:
The quick enactment of a law of the state that sanctions an eight-hour workday for all workers; A minimum wage; The participation of workers' representatives in the functions of industry commissions; To show the same confidence in the labor unions (that prove to be technically and morally worthy) as is given to industry executives or public servants; Reorganization of the railways and the transport sector; Revision of the draft law on invalidity insurance; Reduction of the retirement age from 65 to 55.
In military affairs, the Manifesto advocates:
Creation of a short-service national militia with specifically defensive responsibilities; Armaments factories are to be nationalized; A peaceful but competitive foreign policy. In finance, the Manifesto advocates:
A strong progressive tax on capital (envisaging a “partial expropriation” of concentrated wealth); The seizure of all the possessions of the religious congregations and the abolition of all the bishoprics, which constitute an enormous liability on the Nation and on the privileges of the poor; Revision of all contracts for military provisions; The revision of all military contracts and the seizure of 85 percent of the profits therein.
You have to take the whole story here. If I create a document that describes my system of governance as X but execute it as Y isn't it disingenuous to ignore Y?
1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.
2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.
3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.
4. Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.
5. Rampant Sexism - The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.
6. Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.
7. Obsession with National Security - Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.
8. Religion and Government are Intertwined - Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.
9. Corporate Power is Protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
10. Labor Power is Suppressed - Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.
12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.
13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.
14. Fraudulent Elections - Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.
Copied from: https://rense.com/general37/char.htm
Definitions by historians differ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism#Definitions
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: it looks like you've been breaking the guidelines in other places too (like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17494098). We ban accounts that do that, so please re-read the rules and use this site as intended from now on.
Not your fault, I asked for it.
Thanks
What Ars is worked up about is footnote 14, which revises 47 CFR 1.717:
> 14 We also clarify rule 1.717, which addresses informal Section 208 complaints. See 47 CFR § 1.717. In addition to wording revisions that do not alter the substance of the rule, we delete the phrase “and the Commission’s disposition” from the last sentence of that rule because the Commission’s practice is not to dispose of informal complaints on substantive grounds.
Contrary to the Ars article, the FCC is not "drop[ping] unofficial complaints." The current wording suggests that each complaint will result in an investigation and a "disposition" (i.e. formal agency decision). In reality, the FCC does not necessarily start an investigation and reach a formal disposition in response to every complaint. Rather, it handles informal complaints exactly how you'd expect an agency to handle informal complaints--based on the complaints, it may or may not initiate an investigation and an enforcement action. But it is not obliged to investigate and formally dispose of each and every complaint. The wording update simply reflects that.
A "formal" complaint is not just an "official" complaint. It is a lawsuit in the FCC: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/47/part-1/subpart-E. The telecommunications provider is required to show up and defend the lawsuit, there are motions, briefing, discovery, etc., and if a violation of the law is found, the respondent can be held liable for damages to the complainant. The filing fee reflects the fact that a formal complaint initiates court-like proceedings in the FCC.
We should be demanding policies that encourage ISP competition instead of demanding policies that would ultimately suppress it.
I'm not going to respond to the part where you don't believe that the federal government has the power to regulate interstate commerce in non-physical goods, because that's so far into crackpot territory that nobody on either side of the net neutrality issue cares about your stance on that issue. It's hard to take you seriously when you're so against net neutrality that you also advocate for getting rid of federal wire fraud statutes.
And yet, you wrote:
> I don't see how light crossing state borders is construed as commerce.
You're not convincing anyone when you pretend to be unable to understand how paying someone to carry information across state lines on your behalf is commerce.
edit: spelled “held” as “elf”... autocorrect
It does give Google incentive to try creating Google Fiber. But the incumbent ISPs already have existing infrastructure deployed that constitutes a natural monopoly. The free market is not enough to overcome the uphill battle any initiative like Google Fiber faces, and digging multiple trenches along every residential road and driveway is not the kind of competition anyone wants.
Why should your right to information change because you moved 5 miles in one direction?
And yes, robust ISP competition would be awesome. But there are parts of the country that realistically could not support more than one ISP. Do those people not deserve neutrality in their internet service? What do you say to them if their ISP suddenly decided to fuck with their traffic? There would never be anyone else to turn to.
Who is going to impeach him, exactly? If you haven't noticed, our government is corrupt from the top down. Everyone has their hand in the cookie car, from Trump to Pruitt (well, not anymore but for long enough he did) to Pai. The head of state sets the tone for what is acceptable.
That's just not true and it doesn't help anything. There are hundreds of thousands to millions of civil servants doing good work at mid/low levels. The top level is as dirty any anything in my lifetime by orders of magnitude.
Man, this is reading a lot like Reddit all of a sudden. Citations please?
Key findings of the analysis:
> One pro-repeal spam campaign used mail-merge to disguise 1.3 million comments as unique grassroots submissions.
> There were likely multiple other campaigns aimed at injecting what may total several million pro-repeal comments into the system.
> It’s highly likely that more than 99% of the truly unique comments³ were in favor of keeping net neutrality.
The most important chart is here: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*Sc4-R2waeRrGnNL90...
> From this chart we can see that the pro-repeal comments (there are approximately 8.6 million of them) are much more likely to be exact duplicates (dark red bars) and are submitted in much larger blocks.
> On the other hand, comments in favor of net neutrality were more likely to deviate from a form letter (light green, as opposed to dark green bars) and were much more numerous in the long tail.
So how does this work, does Pai get a fat retainer for doing nothing from ATT after he is out?
This is why I don't believe people who have developed there political views(beliefs, ideology ?) working for special interests are good for the people when they need to start thinking about the whole forest; they can't get over their trees. Certainly not at the cabinet level, hopefully not at many levels below either. You see it with Pai, Devos, Pruit, etc. What a disaster.
> Through the bravery and foresight of Chairman Pai, freedom is preserved despite our enemies growing ever desperate.
The FCC, and other government agencies that require input from Citizens, need to know the comments they are getting are from actual citizens aka taxpayer id, aka social security #.
As a Citizen I'd want to submit comments with some superficial guarantee of anonymity. EG the bureaucrats can't attach my comments to my name, only my comments to a valid US Citizen. (1)
As a mechanism for verification there should be a preliminary "two-factor" registration system via postal mail to verified citizen addresses. And a secondary "two-factor" to execute comments.
Will this cut down on the discourse? Dramatically.
Will it improve the integrity of the comments? Absolutely.
Will the politicians still ignore the desires of its constituents vs special interests? No question.
This has been a paid ad by the People For Campaign Finance Reform.
(1) Of course the NSA is watching everything anyways, and probably reading our minds with lazer brain topography rays, but we'll leave that concern out for now.
https://www.cipheredtrust.com/using-irs/
Every citizen can generate cryptographic certs that they can verify their identities with, even anonymously.
Metadata might include simple yes/no statements or very short string tags.
* Country
* State/Provence
* County/Locality
* City
* Is Locally Contract Age
* Is Locally Unrestricted Purchases (alcohol/tobacco/etc)
* Is a Driver
* Is a Voter (might not be registered or might be serving time for crimes)
* etc
"These keys are X" (for each type of metadata flag).
If a given user keeps their metadata keys operationally separate from their full ID, and also updates them at random intervals, then it would be possible to have unique 'cards' (of sorts) for each given type of check.
The locality specific checks imply outer levels, obviously, but different keys might still be desired and it would be best practice for all to keep different keys to make it harder to de-identify by virtue of being one of the paranoid users.
The original problem is that it's too easy to make fake comments on a basic website. You're talking about users keeping their metadata keys "operationally separate from their full IDs" and "updating them at random intervals." How did we get here?
How could (should?) they use these things securely? You need to trust the hardware that's handling the keys too.
I can't escape the need for something like a no-closed-blobs dongle that /only/ does digital wallet stuff (and maybe storing files) which MUST have at least a method for the user to read the text of what they're signing, and if it has that use that to also control the 'presentation mode' of that device to the attached system.
The gap between engineering and regular human beings continues to widen. Passwords remain difficult for people, but don’t let me stop the whiteboarding of a solution to the problem that will undoubtedly involve machine learning, Facebook OAuth, and GKE at some point. Add blockchain and pitch it to USDS before Thiel guts them and you’ve got yourself a hot party!
This is equivalent to "Only some citizens are able to obtain the secret identifier that their government knows them as."
I'm not saying that's wrong or right, but just making an observation.
We had one problem. Now we have two problems.
I dunno, I want the FCC et al to know who I am when I comment. I want them to know I care and I'm willing to stand up and name myself, and that I'm not some internet bot.
It seems like none of this actually matters until we can solve that problem.
There are two basic primary levers in US politics. Money. Votes. That's pretty much it.
If you are able to organize a consistent voting bloc that reliably votes the way you promote, and that bloc swamps all money-based efforts to sway them in any other direction, your voice carries more weight than the money. Period.
Even more terrifying to career politicians is the ability to organize so many voters that you can successfully mount a recall and force the recall on demand; in the US, recall power only rises from local to state level, but does not hold at the federal level, though.
The trick is to continue as that voice, and not step into the ring to play politician. Thus far, no one who was able to organize votes has been able to resist that siren call. That's why vanity is listed as one of the sins. This is also why money steadily overtakes voting power on a long enough time span.
There's at least three: money, votes, and committed foot soldiers (it's easy to think the laaf two are the same, but they don't overlap more than any other pair—whilw commanding votes and commanding people that will work for the cause (and thus move money and other votes) are loosely correlated, they aren't the same thing. One of the particular values form which religious communities are targeted as such is that they often command foot soldiers at a level beyond what is true of groups that deliver similar committed votes.
Right now we're reliant on things like polls or the FCC's farcical comment system, which can easily be gamed.
I'm however kind of worried that the comments are sampled. I'm sure there are tools out there that will find duplicates, cluster similar comments together, etc
In my opinion we (as world citizen) should find a way to organize millions of comments rather than building barriers. Twitter probably already does it to some extend, it should be technologically accessible today.
Trying to deny the access to bots on the palteform can't hurt, but that's a temporary patch to the real problem of opinion aggregation.
Is there a complete dataset of the past comments freely downloadable? Some civic data scientist and dev may look at it to try new solution for comments aggregation
Edit : so, there are also works on comments aggregation. Even a Kaggle : https://www.kaggle.com/jeffkao/proc_17_108_unique_comments_t... and https://github.com/sajacy/fcc-ecfs-scrape
Immediate solution would be to restrict comments, but new methods of comment aggregation maybe used in the future
The only damage fake comments caused was to skew the ratio of opinion, and drown out real discourse.
Fake. Not fake. The comments wren't a vote -- they were comments. If anything they should be used to add ideas to the mix. Things that may have been overlooked. People who might be impacted but haven't been considered. And smart, well-meaning people should've synthesized those into useful and not useful piles to help inform their decision.
The core problem is that Ajit Pai was determined to ignore all signal from people who supported Net Neutrality.
Regarding the ignoring NN supporters — at least a few of those supporters engaged in credible death threats against Pai and his children. At that point, I’d be done. I would give no credence to the pro-NN side if they are going to threaten my children. As soon as some NN supporters started acting like racist jackasses, that point of view ceased to matter to me.
Thanks in advance for your hard and thankless work.
Beyond that, how did the net neutrality policy makes sense? If two parties want to communicate with each other, why does it matters which side gets what percentage of the bill? It makes sense for the health of the network for big companies like Netflix to have business relationships with the ISPs to push the servers closer to the edges. The main argument for net neutrality is they are monopolies so we should beat them up, but I fail to see how net neutrality does that.
You read a lot about the FCC chairman's bad motives (who can say, maybe true?), yet in the same opinion piece the author will want him to have more legal power over the conduits of free speech and media.
From what I've read, (I haven't followed it too closely as I'm not from the US) the issue is that repealing NN enables an ISP to throttle Netflix for users who don't pay more for (for example) a 'Media' plan WITHOUT even needing to make a deal with Netflix. Monopolies then become a problem because certain areas of the US can only get connection with one ISP, so there is no room for them to choose a better option if their only available ISP starts charging through the roof for access to specific websites.
I could be completely wrong, but this is what I took away from most of the pro-NN arguments.
I think that's become the poster child for the most accessible way of delivering a pro-NN argument to the masses; even if I think-personally-it's an incredible oversimplification of otherwise GOOD pro-NN arguments. Popcorn and circuses, etc. If you can explain it to people as "it's gonna hurt your ability to Binge Orange is the New Black Season 22" their ears perk up. If you start talking about "last mile" and startup competitiveness in an increasingly commoditized internet landscape, eyes glaze over.
Perhaps even to the point of possibly being the petard hoisted by the pro-NN crowd when the powers at be decide to focus their attention on that topic, artfully skirt the issue to seem conciliatory to average-joe users while implementing the very types of platforms and policies that have more or less demonstrable affects on the Internet as a platform for Enterprise.
Just my theory.
>> ...the issue is that repealing NN enables an ISP to throttle Netflix for users who don't pay more for (for example) a 'Media' plan WITHOUT even needing to make a deal with Netflix. Monopolies then become a problem because certain areas of the US can only get connection with one ISP, so there is no room for them to choose a better option if their only available ISP starts charging through the roof for access to specific websites.
These are essentially equivalent statements, no? On the one hand ISPs want Netflix to pay them, and on the other hand ISPs want Netflix to pay them.
Again I want to reiterate, for me this is all about the 1st amendment to the Constitution. I would love for the telecom monopolies to get broken up.
Not at all. On the one hand, ISPs want Netflix to pay them because Netflix is a source of high traffic volume. On the other hand, ISPs want Netflix to pay them because Netflix is a competitor to their own video services, and Netflix happens to be a source of high traffic volume because it's a better video service for the money. Metered pricing isn't the evil we're trying to prevent, discriminatory pricing is the problem.
If it's just metered pricing on the table, then the market will always choose the simpler option of the full bill being paid by the last-mile subscriber, rather than a needlessly complex system of trying to bill at both ends of the network.
If the pro net-neutrality position was something to break up the telecom monopolies, I'd be all for it.
No, they don't. They already have paying customers, and infrastructure to credit packets to those customers' quota/bill. There's no need to expend any effort tracking the other end of the connections, even if some targets are relatively easy to identify. They have everything they need to bill a responsible party for cost increases due to heavy traffic, without trying to single out (read: extort) companies like Netflix in a monopoly-abusing fashion.
What about extremely bloated news sites that clearly spend no effort decreasing data size? Should end customers just pay for that lack of incentive?
Last-mile ISPs are always a natural monopoly at the neighborhood level, regardless of whether they are part of a multi-state conglomerate or a local entity. The monopoly needs to be regulated no matter what the larger ownership structure is. Many local governments do not have the capital or technical capability to build, own or operate an ISP, and there are clear advantages to consolidating the ownership and administration of the network, provided that it is still subjected to effective regulation.
Why do you think it's alright to regulate this at the state or city level but not the federal level?
How do you feel about the federal government regulating telecommunications carriers?
I believe large parts of the various communications acts are unconstitutional and I don't see how light crossing state borders is construed as commerce.
The money crosses state borders also. ISPs are not state/local scale businesses.
No they are not! Many other countries have a wide variety of ISPs to choose from. This is purely due to collusion in the US. (And it's blatant, well-documented collusion.)
Some Internet applications are unidirectional and can in principle (and sometimes in practice) can use datagram-oriented communication, without necessarily including information about the sender IP address; in other words from the ISP's perspective it may not be clear who the other party even is. The Internet is designed to support applications in general, including applications that have yet to be invented and which we may not be creative enough to even imagine. New protocols and applications are deployed with regularity.
All of that innovation and generality is dependent on net neutrality. Without net neutrality it is possible that deploying a new protocol would require coordination with one ISP after another. It is possible that an application that works at my house will fail to work at your house because your ISP refuses to provide service for that application. Maybe your ISP refuses to forward packets without a return address, or only supports two-party protocols (nobody said we cannot have a three-, four-, or N-party application -- except maybe some ISP).
"It makes sense for the health of the network for big companies like Netflix to have business relationships with the ISPs to push the servers closer to the edges"
That has nothing to do with net neutrality.
"The main argument for net neutrality is they are monopolies so we should beat them up"
No, the argument is that the utility of the Internet to society as a whole is maximized by neutrality and that the benefits far outweigh the cost of possibly lower ISP profits. It makes no difference if net neutrality is achieved by a regulation or by a competitive market, but for the vast majority of Americans there is no competitive market for ISPs. If you think a competitive ISP market is better than regulating a specific outcome, you need to have some proposal for setting up that market -- for example, re-instating the line-sharing requirements that gave rise to a competitive DSL market in the late 90s (a market which completely disappeared when those requirements were rescinded).
If you are not going to impose a line-sharing rule, then for the majority of Americans who have to deal with a local monopoly there will be abuses. Before net neutrality regulations, this was happening:
http://www.practicallynetworked.com/news/comcast.htm
Yes, that is Comcast blocking VPN protocols for residential customers, because if you want to work from home you have to buy their "professional" service, where VPNs are not blocked, because VPNs are only for professionals. I do not want to "beat up" Comcast just because they are a monopoly, but I do want to stop them from abusing their monopoly power by arbitrarily limiting the Internet applications their customers can use.
"legal power over the conduits of free speech and media."
Net neutrality promotes free speech on the Internet. Why should your ISP allow you to visit independent media websites? Why should an ISP allow anyone to exercise their free speech rights on The Daily Stormer? Net neutrality, of some form, is the reason you can consume whatever media you want to consume and freely engage in whatever form of speech you wish to engage in on the Internet without having to get your ISP's permission or to pay extra for the privilege (or maybe just having your ISP say, "sorry, we do not support Hacker News; have you tried Reddit or Slashdot?"). Maybe you are lucky enough to have a competitive ISP market in your area and you would just find another ISP, but, again, most Americans have either no choice or a very limited choice (e.g. one can either have Cable or DSL, which are not comparable, and a duopoly is not even remotely a competitive market).
Even without the Title II rules, the FCC still has the very legal power you object to; it is simply choosing not to exercise that power. The law as it is currently written allows the FCC to change the classification of ISPs back to Title II by following the same process used by Pai to reclassify ISPs under Title I. The courts found that the FCC had acted appropriately and within their power when ISPs were reclassified as Title II services. If you think that power is not something the FCC has then the burden is on you to change the law (good luck).
Exercising the legal power I object to is something I object to. It is on me to object and bring up my opinions in the forum in which this is being debated.
>>"It makes sense for the health of the network for big companies like Netflix to have business relationships with the ISPs to push the servers closer to the edges"
>> That has nothing to do with net neutrality.
How can an ISP get Netflix to pay it, or lean on Netflix to install new servers in their network, if it is illegal to use their own bargaining position?
>>"The main argument for net neutrality is they are monopolies so we should beat them up"
>>No, the argument is that the utility of the Internet to society as a whole is maximized by neutrality and that the benefits far outweigh the cost of possibly lower ISP profits. It makes no difference if net neutrality is achieved by a regulation or by a competitive market, but for the vast majority of Americans there is no competitive market for ISPs. If you think a competitive ISP market is better than regulating a specific outcome, you need to have some proposal for setting up that market -- for example, re-instating the line-sharing requirements that gave rise to a competitive DSL market in the late 90s (a market which completely disappeared when those requirements were rescinded).
So we agree that, 1) ISPs are monopolies, 2) monopolies find ways to abuse their power, 3) regulation could help achieve net neutrality. However, I do not agree that the current "net neutrality" situation is so bad so as to require a stopgap fix and I definitely do not think the federal government should be the level of government doing the fixing.
ISPs don't have to lean on Netflix to install CDN nodes within the ISP's network. If Netflix finds that it's cheaper for them to do so rather than buy transit to the last-mile ISPs from Netflix's existing ISPs, then Netflix will come to those ISP's offering money and begging for the rack space. If, on the other hand, it turns out that Netflix doesn't need the low latency that CDN nodes afford and that they can more cheaply obtain the necessary bandwidth indirectly through Level3, etc., then the last-mile ISPs should not be empowered to distort that market outcome.
They don't. It's purely your accounting fiction that is attributing those costs to Netflix instead of to the ISP's customers who are using Netflix.
If streaming video increases the ISP's operating costs, they can simply increase prices, preferably through a fair metered usage model that can address all of the video streaming usage costs together, instead of just the Netflix costs.
Separate metering for end users? Targeted agreements with large hosts? Same metering for all, screw those who are frugal with packets.
Expand that hypothetical a bit more, so that we can determine if the situation you're asking about is one that ever happens in the real world. Are you asking about traffic imbalances at peering points? If so, the agreements in those cases are between ISPs and do not include end users like Netflix as a party to the negotiations or payments. The primary purpose of an ISP is to ensure that their subscribers don't have to worry about whose lines their packets might travel on to get to their destination.
Beyond that, there is some "discrimination" I would be just fine with. For example why should the end consumer pay the cost of YouTube ad data?
The fear is of course discrimination on political or ideological grounds, not just economic. but it would be fairly obvious and nearly impossible technically for an isp to pull that off. And a net neutrality regulation or even ownership at the state or local level would be perfect. You only need net neutrality at the end points where there is no competition, not in the network at large
That's not what the cost structure looks like for ISPs, so you would need a pretty good justification for making the price structure look like that. It doesn't necessarily cost the ISP more to have packets travel across more hops within their network; it's more likely to reduce the ISP's expenses by reducing the amount of traffic they have to buy transit for. Where a packet is within the network really only matters and becomes worth tracking when a link gets congested.
Metering would be by bandwidth used, so those who are frugal with packets would inherently pay less.
Your grasp of the concepts seems confused.
That is not illegal under net neutrality, and it is basically irrelevant. Netflix, like any Internet user (yes, that is what Netflix is) must contract with some ISP (probably many ISPs given their scale). Net neutrality does not prevent ISPs from selling rack space in their data centers and allowing companies to colocate their servers with the ISP's routers.
Net neutrality is really about the logic ISPs use for routing, and the basic requirement is that routing decisions should not be based on the sender address or the application. There is plenty of room for argument about how strictly that should be enforced e.g. some experts support different priority classes for different application types while others believe in a stricter form of net neutrality. The general idea is that the performance of Internet applications should depend solely on technical details and that ISPs should not be allowed to impose artificial or arbitrary restrictions. There are plenty of legitimate questions over what is truly a technical reality and what is artificially imposed by an ISP (e.g. if an ISP uses the same physical infrastructure for Internet and non-Internet services, is it artificially constraining the Internet users by denying them capacity that is not being used for the non-Internet services?) but for colocation there is no real debate and nobody is claiming that is a NN violation.
That's a thoroughly outdated QoS paradigm. It's almost impossible to make rule-based traffic classification neutral and fair, because it always privileges existing applications and protocols over upstarts that aren't correctly identified by the ruleset. It's also far too easy for ISPs to "forget" to properly classify their competitor's traffic when the ISP is also a content provider, and poorly-designed rulesets can be gamed by using protocols/applications on non-standard port numbers.
Fortunately, this QoS paradigm is no longer necessary and the state of the art for QoS has moved on to techniques that only need to look at the quantity and size of packets in order to correctly infer the correct latency vs throughput tradeoffs for each traffic flow. Packet scheduling is now much more like CPU scheduling, in that it works well enough out of the box without requiring manual tuning or prioritization.
It's inherently inter-state. My internet is through Cox. I'm in Connecticut. Data gets routed to me through Rhode Island, so geolocating sites often think I'm in Rhode Island.
How does state regulation help me if Cox throttles my bandwidth in Rhode Island?
Except that you still feel the need to talk about them. eyeroll
I think you troll topics masquerading as legitimate commentary (almost every assertion you made is an ad-hominem), because you don't really know the difference. This is a common problem with people who have superiority complexes.
Also, as someone who submitted a comment that was actually cited in the final order, I did consider the other points of view. In fact my comment addressed the anti-NN claims made in the NPRM, as did many other thoughtful, original comments submitted by other engineers and computer scientists, including a comment submitted by Vint Cerf (inventor of the Internet). By necessity I and those other experts had to think about the positions from the other side. All of us concluded approximately the same thing: that the anti-NN arguments were based on a poor understanding of how the Internet works and of the current state of the ISP market.
(That is being generous. In fact the NPRM was based on deliberate, dishonest distortions of the truth, meant to stretch technical facts to support the legal argument for what can only be described as a preordained conclusion. Facts were never really the basis of the anti-NN argument; the argument is mostly based on ideological opposition to any regulation of ISPs, even regulations that might encourage competition among ISPs e.g. line-sharing requirements. The goal is just to minimize regulation, regardless of the impact on consumers or on society as a whole, regardless of the state of the ISP market, regardless of the facts.)
What makes you think we haven't? What makes you think that we haven't thought about what the removal of net neutrality means, and that's why we feel the way we do?
"The pro-NN crowd is guilty of one-sided thinking"
This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. "The side that's for something is guilty of only wanting that to prevail!"
When have you given serious thought to having net neutrality and the benefits it will bring?
"at least a few of those supporters engaged in credible death threats against Pai and his children"
So because a few bad people are out there, we should fuck over the entire country? How many death threats have journalists received from GOP supporters? Does that mean we should abandon everything they stand for?
Great, so instead of costing $0 to post 100,000 fake comments, it costs $200 ($2/1000 solves is the going rate on captcha farms)
instead they should use the money/time/effort to do some accountability!
start by warning everyone that was incompetent enough to use blatantly false data at face value.
then, use the fact it was trivial to abuse the system and hope the malicious actores were not sofisticated, use that to try to trace back bad intentions and try to mount a case with a prosecutor.
those two things might not be the most efficient, but it will be required with the new system too, so better start with it.
Any discussion of security should include a discussion of the threat model. A captcha is quite effective at dissuading abuse by casual or unsophisticated parties. It's not at all effective against a sophisticated and well-funded adversary.
Done. All I had to do was Google it.
You really don't think that the kind of people who want to swing policies affecting a multibillion dollar industry wouldn't be able to get some office workers in India to solve Captchas?
I doubt there is any online comment system that could prevent people’s names from being misused really. It’s not like we have a national ID card with private crypto keys issued to every citizen or something.
How are you supposed to verify someone’s identity online without going through a laborious and expensive process (e.g. an in person interview, or requiring upload of a state or military ID number that is then used to send a postcard to the address on file asking for verification) that would then be criticized as discouraging public comment?
I think a slight inconvenience to signing up is better than having your comment drowned out in useless noise.
When I signed up for the IRS's website I had to verify my mailing address by receiving a letter in the mail. It's not a huge hassle but it delayed my account creation by about a week, and someone could argue (fairly, imo) that this would create a large enough barrier-to-entry to dissuade people from leaving their opinions.
I don't know how good it is at preventing fake accounts, but in my experience, it does get the basics right, with no max password length or character restrictions, and 2-factor authentication through phone calls or texts.
isnt this bad? Tying to your phone number (while more convenient) provides another vector of attack (social engineering the telecoms to get device changed)
That's… why it's called two factor authentication? Or are you suggesting they'd let you reset your password with just the phone number?
There would still be some fraud, just as social security and the IRS both suffer from identity theft and fraud today, but the barrier to entry might be higher and in theory having a unified system would allow citizens to manage their identity and safety more easily.
Considering the FCC is having to ask for permission just to add a captcha I doubt our government is capable of anything like this right now though.
Whoever was responsible for pushing those fake comments deserves a couple decades in federal prison for mass identity theft. Instead, the FCC used those fraudulent comments to push an unpopular agenda forward, pretending that they were legitimate despite the mountain of evidence that they were not.
As far as I am concerned, Pai is an accomplice to the crime of identity theft, as he knowingly benefitted from it and used it to his advantage, despite not orchestrating it.
I think it was a lot more though. Something tells me I'll never know for sure.
> Whoever was responsible for pushing those fake comments deserves a couple decades in federal prison for mass identity theft.
I fully concur, and especially so if there's more than one person. Conspiracy laws, anyone?
> the FCC used those fraudulent comments to push an unpopular agenda forward, pretending that they were legitimate despite the mountain of evidence that they were not.
This is absolutely the problem here. Damn the cost to the economy and ISPs for uncertainty: this is a Very Serious Problem and Congress should seriously undo the changes that Ajit Pai has put forward. Or is the government not of, by, and for the people?
> As far as I am concerned, Pai is an accomplice to the crime of identity theft, as he knowingly benefitted from it and used it to his advantage, despite not orchestrating it.
I concur, but beware lynch mobs.
Good luck with that. Every so often it is suggested that voters should verify their identity when going to the polls. Just presenting a drivers license, passport, state ID or social security card should suffice. It's a similar policy as in many European countries. And every time, there is a huge number of people who oppose it. A very surprising amount of otherwise reasonable people fight tooth and nail against any forms of verification.
You're also comparing European nation-states to the United States which isn't fair in this case. US states have a great deal of autonomy and latitude. Since they issue their own IDs they can, and do, have their own requirements. First make a mandatory national ID a thing then you can complain about unreasonable people.
(I assume it's the more outspoken, more radical voters who do most of the objecting to ID laws- as it is typically those voters that get involved in just about any policy fight)
In Poland they have ceded the identity verification to banks since they do this anyway when you open an account and are quite diligent because, well, they are banks :)
If I need to send on-line communication to the government which requires my identity to be confirmed, I can sign it by going trough my on-line bank as if I were making a money transfer (login, password, 2FA using sms code).
What they really need to do is check to see if the referral header is also from the FCC site to make sure people are using the website and not just hitting the API.
/s
Either govt mandated or something the public embarrasses something commercial like twitter verified identities where posting anonymously no longer holds any weight vs. using your verified Twitter identity.
Next up: pay-to-play/kickback-dealing single source contractor (crony?) brought in to make a new system, over budget and years late.
[Insert dark patterns here]
* Sponsored by Comcast
There is no way to “rebuild” a comment system without solving more fundamental security problems first, as it is simply too hard to believe what you read online.
Some ideas:
- Costs have to be ingrained in the system. It can’t be “easy” to spout crap in forums, nor should the hurdles be resolvable through traditional advantages (like having enough money to pay lots of people). One example would be: in order to post, you must donate X CPU cycles to Y.
- Webs of trust, one of which would be run by the government itself, seem like a reasonable step toward being able to partially verify where stuff even comes from. The webs must be decentralized so they are hard to bias, where the reliability of a circle is decided by the network at large. If Anonymous Poster X doesn’t have many reliable circles associated, that is equivalent to “take this comment with a grain of salt” (if not “ignore this drivel”).
There seems to be a weird tendency to use the regulator (FCC) as a scapegoat and to give the actual people making the unpopular decisions a free pass. It's as if the actual political process has become entirely invisible...
America has become the kind of Govt the founding fathers hated for it to become.
The issue is, it’s the lesser of evils compared to other countries. We have a long way to go before we sort out better ways to govern nations of a planet.
Not internet comments or lobbyists or donors.
Note that this is an effort to post alernative sources when one is behind a paywall.
https://archive.is/https://www.wsj.com/articles/fcc-proposes...