Companies to pay $615k in investigation over faked net neutrality comments

People with backgrounds in science and engineering can't run for Congress?

For the most part the regulatory agencies don't have the expertise either. It is almost all political in every country where I have ever lived, and most EU tech regulations is also absolute garbage.

It's already something that has been legally contentious, overturning it has textualist support, and the textualists justices are also broadly Republican who want a weakened federal government.

[1] I mean not really perfect since they have to pass legislation to make those changes and it's easier to block legislation than to pass it. So a minority party in congress with presidential support can (and has) wielded undue legislative power.

Nope. My proposal is that they must write the regulations or at least vote on them. You should be able to look at every single regulation and know whether your representative voted for it or against it. All regulation should be folded into the law and subject to vote.

>One of the first studies performed after the closure of the public commenting period, done on behalf of Broadband for America, which sought to repeal the Obama-era rules, found that 60% of the comments were in favor of retaining the current rules..

Just to be clear, it sounds like here you are talking about the comments other than the one discussed in the article?

You are saying that the responses in favour of net neutrality (the ones which were proposing to keep the bylaws) were also astroturfed?

Or are you saying that they were somehow low in quality in your opinion but still coming from real humans?

How do you know this?

This reads like "after listening to the people, they can explain why what they're doing is necessary and ignore their complaints.

I'm not arguing what was done wasn't scummy, I don't see it as manipulating democracy.

The big question that net neutrality answers is which of the two communicating parties is “using” the bytes: The end user. Of course users should pay for the cost of the resources they use; otherwise, the connection provider would quickly become insolvent, and nobody wants that.

But users shouldn’t need to know the internal business practices of their connection provider in order to understand their billing. Instead, net neutrality says that the provider cannot charge different rates for different destinations; it’s their responsibility to amortize their variable costs into some kind of destination-agnostic price structure for consumers. This is basic risk pooling, where the actor in position to affect the costs (via infrastructure changes) is required to shoulder the pricing risk of their own actions.

Indeed.

> So we don't have a direct democracy for most things

Yes

> The solution is not law

I think no, in this case. Just as I don't want to have to buy a washing machine that only works with my water company, I don't want to have to buy the right internet to go to the sites I want to go to. Internet delivery, like water delivery, should be provided and priced independently of what it is used to do.

I agree, but once ISPs start dealing with expensive contracts to get preferential treatment we’ve already lost. No amount of competition will stop the oligarchs from consolidating even more power if NN is not put into law.

Imagine this scenario, national push to make Internet a utility, incredibly successful. Without NN, the new play for ISPs is to create exclusivity deals & priority packages with websites for access, not just segmenting the web but making it harder for smaller ISPs to compete with un-prioritized speeds to the websites everyone wants.

Choice and competition is important, but choice can only exist in a fair market. And NN is, in my opinion, the next step after turning the Internet into a utility.

Is there any evidence that prison time for executives would help prevent such abuse in the future?

I personally think a harsher punishment is needed but I'd also prefer it to be effective towards the goal of helping prevent these abuses, rather than merely vindictive.

For example, it seems logical to me that a situation where the perpetrators were removed from, and unable to hold in the future, any executive or decision making position might better protect society.

Prison might be one way to effect that but I think we can probably do better.

And probably the financial penalties should be applied to all the individuals involved rather than the companies, otherwise consumers are the people paying in the end.

This isn't GDPR violation penalty, it's the US

It's also exactly the sort of fine that gov regulators compulsively seem to avoid.

The comments were likely just reactionary brigading of the misinformed as reddit, google, facebook, etc. sent mobs of people to flood the site.

I could not care less if comcast wants to charge FAANG extra for the disproportionate bandwidth they consume. They frame the issue like it's about keeping the internet neutral meanwhile google and facebook want to be the whole internet and actively discourage people from leaving their gardens.

I don't see the active question as: are there valid uses? Maybe. Perhaps. But how can we create a tech so overpoweringly capable of destroying privacy at such a large scale responsibly, in a way that doesn't have horrific side effects?

Ideally what I'd like & have suggested is that citizens be able to get attestation of their content at their desired level. I should be able to get anything I write signed by varying levels of government, federal, state, or county, or neighborhood. I should be able to opt into how much identity to share: name, initials, some rotating psuedorandom identitifer, age bracket , income bracket, other core data.

I've stated this repeatedly as I think the baseline of what I think a democratic society should offer, a way to enshrine real speech of citizens as citizens so desire. That would be a real service. What we have here is a vile screwing over of society by hostile powers thieving our liberties from us, locking down the world against humanity for their own sad shallow pathetic ends. These aren't pearls. These are basic rights to be human on this planet. Thanks.