FCC Filings Overwhelmingly Support Net Neutrality Once Spam Is Removed
jeffreyfossett.com
jeffreyfossett.com
The value provided by the public comment process is a) an opportunity for the public to get their comments on the record, not because it will change the outcome, but just for the historical value of having their viewpoint officially represented somewhere and b) the opportunity for FCC commissioners to be surprised by a higher-than-normal flood of replies and realize they may need to back something out for political expediency.
This is the same way it works when you call your Congresspeople or do almost any other citizen interaction with the government. It's not like your Senator actually cares about your specific opinion and may find it convincing. The proposals supported or opposed by politicians are much larger than any single person's opinion or ideology (including the representative's own).
Since Oliver did a segment on net neutrality under the Obama administration (in which he analogized cable lobbyist and then-FCC chair Tom Wheeler to a dingo hired to babysit a child), it really probably doesn't surprise them that a large volume of comments would be directed from that type of source again. It's also probably not surprising that people more likely to fill out an FCC comment form are generally pro-net neutrality.
If people didn't believe things like this we wouldn't have staunch Democrats and Republicans who never vote across party lines.
Close enough to changing their mind for me.
It happened less than 2 years ago, on the topic of Net Neutrality. Remember? Tom Wheeler who was a known opponent of Net Neutrality? And the amazing flood of comments CHANGED HIS MIND?
Quit spouting off about how it's hopeless to change anything, and instead GO START REACHING OUT TO YOUR GOVERNMENT. (Your suggestion of calling congresspeople is a good one.)
Tom Wheeler was a supporter of net neutrality from his first day on the commission. The FCC majority he led didn't initially see common carrier classification as the best route to enforce neutrality after the 2010 Open Internet Order was struck down, and proposed a revised Order which sought to do that without reclassification, and on that point the comments changed his mind. But that's different than being opponent to neutrality regulations like Pai has been (and Pai was on the committee, and opposed to both the non-reclassifying and reclassifying version of the Open Internet Order, at the time of the last go around; if comments were going to change his mind, they already would have.)
Anyway the GP's point is that comments changed his mind, not that Wheeler and Pai thought exactly alike.
No, he didn't.
> "F.C.C., in a Shift, Backs Fast Lanes for Web Traffic " ... The proposed rules, drafted by Mr. Wheeler and his staff ... [1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/24/technology/fcc-new-net-ne...
My guess is that they're obligated to accept comments; lobbyists from both sides have already made all the points and the decision has already been made.
I don't think so. You know why they don't talk about this on r/the_donald? Because their propaganda attempts to raise the issue have resulted in people speaking out against the FCC's proposed policy.
I'd argue that current techies haven't become conservative enough to consider removing net neutrality. In 10-20 years, when we have more competition among ISPs, perhaps this will come up again and we'll finally gut it. I don't look forward to that, but it's happened to all other forms of communication. Eventually, money works its way in deeper and deeper, finding new markets and new ways to sell what we already have.
Anyway, my point is, politicians don't have a job without our vote, and when people speak out en masse about an issue, they do hear you. Trump is as big a politician as anyone. He cares what other people think and doesn't want to be viewed as the bad guy. He wants to get re-elected.
There's an entire school of conservative thought where government's only role in the market is maintaining a competitive market. It's unfortunate that this voice has been lost.
In 10-20 years, when we have more competition among ISPs
How's that going to happen if the current duopoly reinforce their position by removing net neutrality?
I have a hard time imagining that we remain stuck with the status quo for more than 20 years. Markets love to move money around. Comcast is already stale -- their customer service is crap.
I'm not saying that the change will come from markets, necessarily, or that the impetus for change comes from the government. I just think things will change and eventually we'll see more competition on the last mile, or, something that mitigates the current problems.
And, they'll change because we care and are working to do something about these issues, not because we sit back and wait for something to happen.
I disagree.
I don't think Trump would change his opinion based on what Democrats or people he view as the opposition says. He probably figures they'll attack him no matter what. (And I'm not sure he'd be wrong.)
However, if his core base is expresses concern, I do believe his attitude will change.
In fact, I would argue that's one of the best hopes we have.
Net Neutrality isn't partisan. Or rather, it doesn't need to be. There are reasons for both Democrats & Republicans to support it.
> Net Neutrality isn't partisan
Sorry, that's just wrong. This is one of the most partisan issues where actual policy is being changed. There are near zero crossover votes on either side. There are good guys and bad guys, and your refusal to actually put your support behind the good guys is absolutely infuriating to those of us who can see the truth.
Parties don't have inherent values at all. They're just factions of people who hang out at the same clubs. Their values swing as the people attending the parties change over time.
This does not include that the new net neutrality we have now is not a true title 2. And has many loop holes inside of it. So what should be the conversation is getting a true title 2 on the books. Not a us versus them. As people I was talking about in the former do not hold the same beliefs of establishment Republicans
Citation? Because I don't know a single Dem or Rep who endorses removing Net Neutrality (although I think I just read the first comment to say so on HN above).
I think this citation needs to go the other way: which republican do you know who have come out in favor of the current net neutrality regime. I honestly can't think of one.
I completely agree. Most techies who support Trump see that removing net neutrality could worsen partisan media. The issue hasn't been raised on r/the_donald because they can't get enough people to support Ajit Pai's proposed "Internet Freedom" policy.
The only people who seem to support it are die-hard free-market folks who don't understand the internet, or, who are already invested in a business that would benefit from such a change.
Killing net neutrality will never benefit the consumer, only the big players.
That doesn't mean all of the above isn't simply my opinion and perception.
You can't expect free market theory to work when you take net neutrality with one hand while giving ISPs the right to practically pen state legislation, deny access to lines and sue up and coming competitors into oblivion with the other.
You end up with the worst of both worlds: government sponsored unrestrained monopolies.
Because we have virtual monopolies/duopolies across most of the United States, customers can't get away from any sort of shady stuff their ISP pulls, meaning we have to regulate it out of existence.
Often government regulation (not intervention) can be useful to get closer to such ideal conditions for the market to work efficiently. One example is taxes that cancel externalities. Can net neutrality also be justified in that way?
No, that's how democracy dies.
Please don't break the site guidelines by being uncivil, regardless of how right you are.
Unless the FCC fears public backlash, I think they're going to aggressively exercise plausible deniability on the spam counts, and push through their agenda using those counts as justification.
>there is some evidence of botting/spamming on the pro-NN side as well (though likely not to the same degree), which is not investigated in this post, and could shift conclusions.
I would like to know the number of unique sentences and the stats on these.
The only sane conclusion from this debacle is that these things are highly unreliable and better ways to get the population opinion are desirable.
I agree that it's possible, but seeing as the anti-NN template was used 440k times, and the top pro-NN template was used 26k times, I think it's fair to say that it's highly unlikely.
Think about how viral that John Oliver clip/story got, and it doesn't even contain a template (IIRC), and then try to think of an anti-NN template that somehow got 17 times more viral/engagement.
It's also relevant to consider who benefits from what side.
Internet service is also far more vital than Facebook.
Yes. So by lowering prices, more people will get access. I feel like you are adding a +1 here to the anti-net neutrality view (cue the internet.org initiative by facebook).
https://www.quora.com/Who-funded-and-built-the-infrastructur...
More so to see it be used to push politics.
Assuming 5G delivers on its promise of broadband quality internet (far from assured), most US consumers will immediately have far more options. Competition between service providers will be a much better check than regulation.
If all the other companies aren't doing fast lanes and are doling out more bandwidth, well, you better compete, because that's something people will notice pretty quick.
For example, suppose Verizon obeyed net neutrality whereas AT&T did not, favoring instead their own content. Consumers would naturally choose Verizon because their connections were not being throttled. If enough consumers move, it will force AT&T to respect net neutrality as well.
Competition does obviously not work, and Germany is still stuck with slow internet over copper wires and universally shitty mobile providers as a result.
Alternatively, is your suburb is 0.5 homes per acre and 20% of people are your customers that's one tower per ~136 square miles.
Note: These numbers are not accurate for several reasons including directional antenna on towers etc but they give a ballpark.
2: Big telecoms are making a lot of spam to force democracy to their whim
3: People become aware of this and its talked about in news, "Well I heard the count was neck in neck, 'Oh well I heard that Comcast paid spammers'", deepening public hate of Comcast-esque companies
4: Comcast et al will get their way as usual and next week no one will care
Why aren't the big VC houses fighting this? This seriously hampers their ability to have their startups have equal access to the open internet.
Historically, regressive ideologies have funded think tanks at an order of magnitude higher than progressives. Good luck fighting old money dollar for dollar.
At least that's my hope. Just kind of clean house and start over.
Wow! Nice definition of spam. Remove the most popular opinion, and hey look! everybody supports NN.
> there is some evidence of botting/spamming on the pro-NN side as well (though likely not to the same degree), which is not addressed in this post, and could shift conclusions.
IMO, this is just a blatantly biased attempt to delegitimatize any anti-NN feedback. Many people send their comments thru websites with boilerplate text, but they do it in support of what they believe. The author has presented no evidence that the comments he removed from consideration are actually spam and no evidence that the second most popular phrase (in favor of NN) is not spam.
> To further investigate this hypothesis, I randomly sampled 1000 filings that used the repeated text and queried the HaveIBeenPwned API to retrieve a list of known data breaches that the associated emails were involved in. I found that ~76% of emails associated with the repeated comment had been involved in at least one data breach, and ~66% were part of the RCM breach specifically:
Edit: apparently the RCM breach occurred quite recently. So I guess there is some legitimacy to the hypothesis. I would still like to see the same number for the pro-NN repeated comments too.
Why do you think that would matter? You don't need to give the FCC your email password to post a comment to these proceedings.
All you need to post a comment on the FCC is: name, address, and email. They do not validate that the comment-poster actually controls the email address they used. You can request a filing conformation, but that's optional and only says they received your comment.
I don't agree with a few things the author says, but I agree with the overall sentiment of resenting government interference in private business.
Let's compare the Internet to a highway system, since that's the analogy politicians like. The Internet is all private roads. You pay your ISP for your road so that any traffic serving you can come across in either direction. I pay my ISP for any traffic serving me to come across in either direction.
Net neutrality says that if you and I send traffic to one another, your ISP can't charge me for my packets (trucks) carrying data (cargo) to you because you've already paid for use of the road. They also can't charge you more for a truck entering your road from my road than from their own other road, or from Google's road. It's all the same toll (or all included if you have an unlimited traffic plan) and you pay the same for your leg of the trip no matter how the truck got to your road.
Anti-net-neutrality folks think the government should grant the folks running the private toll roads we rent the right to waive tolls on those roads if they have a business relationship with one of the parties. They think the toll road operators should be able to charge you more rent or higher tolls if you do business with someone whose cargo came from a competitor's road to get to your section of road. At the same time, they say it's fine that the government itself has severely limited your choice in local road providers giving you no power to negotiate or find a suitable competitive road provider.
Then anti-neutrality folks call that an open, free market. Free for whom? Open for whom? Your state tells you who can install a road without a fair bidding process, that whoever installed the wholesale road doesn't need to allow a competitive resale market for retail use of the road, that you can't individually negotiate terms with the road operator, and that you can't build your own road to replace it. Now the federal government wants to tell you that the road operator under those terms set by your state can shut out cargo from its roads or charge huge surcharges based on who you bought the cargo from. What's free and open about that?
Net neutrality has no business dictating how an ISP wants to conduct business and what pricing structure it wants. If you or me don't like our ISP's prices, we can switch.
> At the same time, they say it's fine that the government itself has severely limited your choice in local road providers giving you no power to negotiate or find a suitable competitive road provider.
This is the real problem that has led to this issue. Instead of treating the symptoms, the government must ensure that there is healthy competition and customers are able to choose from multiple ISPs. We got to this place because the government granted some companies a defacto monopoly. That must be undone. Net neutrality is trying to solve the bad effects of government overreach with even more regulation!
Lastly, I see many people on hn and reddit implying that NN is an open and shut issue. That any sane person is obviously pro-NN and anybody who speaks against it is either dumb or evil. This is an absolutely wrong position to take. It fosters no real discussion and results in name-calling while politicians muck up the real problem even more. Thank you for being open to discussion.
Hah.
> Instead of treating the symptoms, the government must ensure that there is healthy competition and customers are able to choose from multiple ISPs. We got to this place because the government granted some companies a defacto monopoly. That must be undone. Net neutrality is trying to solve the bad effects of government overreach with even more regulation!
The net neutrality regulation is to mitigate a symptom. However, it is difficult for the federal government to override what state and local governments have done with franchise fees and line-run regulations. In order to claim authority to undo the disease, the federal government would need to reclassify Internet access as an interstate utility the states have no right to limit as they have. Net neutrality is a much lighter touch when it comes to the federal government overriding state regulations than telling the states who can dig where or who can run overhead lines.
Only 127 of those comments use emails that are lowercase. Over 300k of those comments have emails typed in ALL CAPS.
Every single one of those comments are exactly the same (ergo copy pasted). This means there's some form of automation. It's NOT people copy pasting manually however because nobody types their email in all caps. 300k people do not do that.
Websites will normally capitalize the email address, since they are case insensitive, when it's saved into the database. When something is case insensitive, you compare the capitilized version of both. Eg: Is 'Abc'.toUpperCase() == 'AbC'.toUpperCase().
So this means either:
1. A bot is submitting for other people without their permission, using a hacked database(s).
2. A bot is submitting for other people on the behalf of a very large anti-net neutrality community (which I've never heard of).
3. People are clicking links in an email that presents a form with their data already filled out, which they manually submit (requires a large anti-net neutrality community).
4. There's a form on another website which people are filling out, that is using javascript to capitalize the emails before submitting it to the FCC's website.
The first case is much more likely than the other cases.
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/6b4ouq/fcc_fili...
And the latest cache refresh last night points out that there is now 2 new "repeated" comments. There is (452143+220641+132240+15671 = ) 820k comments now, totalling 54% of the total comments.
https://www.reddit.com/r/netneutrality/comments/6ach2d/top_r...
https://medium.com/@csinchok/an-analysis-of-the-anti-title-i...
If he thinks that is hip or cool, he's completely out of touch.
Personally I agree with FCC's stand and keeping governments and elites who want everyone else to pay more for their "fair use" out of the equation looks like a good thing for me. I don't have time to comment on that document because I agree with administration.
That is not how democracy should work. We should counter his (missing) arguments. Sadly he/she/it did not provide anything substantial on that one could base a valid argument.
> We should counter his (missing) arguments. Sadly he/she/it did not provide anything substantial on that one could base a valid argument.
The last part is really the point though, isn't it?
"Free speech" is continually misused, in the sense that people expect everyone else to listen to mad ramblings. Presenting a "counterpoint" (on whichever platform/venue/outlet) in the quest to be fair when the original point is simply a fact isn't fair coverage, it's pandering to lunacy.
Free speech? Free speech doesn't exist so that people can make ridiculous comments like 'taking comments from the public into account when making policy is mob rule'. Free speech exists so that people can make those comments on policy and have them heard.
It's actually an interesting legal perspective. These are unelected officials, appointed by an indirectly elected official (albeit confirmed by directly elected ones) interacting directly with the public. It's a bizarre reversal of the Jeffersonian republic, like a direct democracy nested deep inside a republic. The fact that the poster is totally wrong does not alone make the idea worth censoring.
If you don't listen to people who disagree with you, how can you hope to engage them in debate? Case in point: you got downvoted so many times you were [flagged] and [dead], and I vouched for you. 1) You didn't deserve it. 2) I wanted to bring you back so I could make the point that, under your idea of free speech, you'd still be [dead].
[1]: https://www.thefire.org/a-reminder-about-shouting-fire-in-a-...
You are flat out WRONG.
Free speech exists for all sort of speech including mocking, ridiculing and being outright stupid and retarded too.
> Free speech exists so that people can make those comments on policy and have them heard.
Free speech has nothing to do with policy, government, state or laws. It is an independent right that exists for no specific purpose other than itself.
And in this case it appears to be "free speech for you as long as you voice your support for me".
I am pretty sure HN crowd will hound anyone who claims to agree with FCC on this point which I do.
What would have something to do with democracy, then?
It should be a motivator to hold the agency accountable, to get it to do the job for which it was created. Write. Call. Show up at meetings. Pressure them back in line.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14338291 and marked it off-topic.