Didn’t the FCC use this to justify their decisions against net neutrality? This is wholesale manipulation of our democracy and they get a slap on the wrist? I demand jail time for any broadband executive that knew of and approved this scheme.
Banks speculating, manipulating reports, ramming the economy into the ground - bailout, slap on the wrist, all managers involved still pay themselves huge bonuses. Some Canadian dude circumventing Nintendo's copy protection - make sure the rest of this guy's life is completely fucked up.
A true 2 class justice system and jurisprudence doesn't even address unjust imbalances like this. Although to their defense, we have seen a vast increase in political trials and the legislative certainly takes part in this.
This is what government overreach looks like. What unelected officials can give with no oversight, they can just as quickly take away with no oversight.
The FCC is not a democracy. Net neutrality needed to be a law.
Net neutrality is not law. There are valid arguments to be made against it - like with your cell plan, everyone can or perhaps should, pay for the bytes they use, and how much infrastructure (CPU) those bytes use to get delivered fast. There are also arguments for net neutrality.
But as with any agency, and agency is not a direct democracy. What if people in urban centers decided for the country that property tax should be based on acres of land? All of a sudden living on a cheap farm costs millions in taxes. But most people are in the city, so they outvote the farmers.
So we don't have a direct democracy for most things.
The solution is not law. Making up a thousand laws for every little thing is that government overreach you speak of. Repealing laws is literally the opposite of overreach.
What we need is more competition, so I as a user will pick the ISP that does not slow down traffic for me to sites I want to visit, instead of choosing between people who want to screw me with vs without lube.
Countries like France did it right. Cables go through public land, towers are on public land, radio frequencies are public. A company can't buy that.
So they put in cables and any company that wants can rent them, but never buy them. That's why in France, I had GbE at my house for 8EUR/month, with a free router, a decade ago, and cumblast here charges me $50/month for 50Mb/s today. Choice and competition. Capitalism.
> Net neutrality is not law. There are valid arguments to be made against it - like with your cell plan, everyone can or perhaps should, pay for the bytes they use, and how much infrastructure (CPU) those bytes use to get delivered fast.
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.
> Government overreach is... repealing regulations
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.
> What we need is more competition, so I as a user will pick the ISP that does not slow down traffic for me to sites I want to visit, instead of choosing between people who want to screw me with vs without lube.
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.
Call it what you like but the FCC decision-making is not democracy. They are at least three steps removed from the voters, write their own regulations, and are not really accountable to voters.
This is part of the independent agency problem in our scheme of governance. The better system would be for the elected legislature to actually write regulations. That's representative democracy rather than democracy but closer to accountability.
Independent agencies are completely accountable to congress. The idea that they are unaccountable is nonsense. They can only ever do things in the bounds of what congress has said they can do. Congress can change what is allowed at any time.
Your proposal is to give congress the authority to write regulations without independent agencies. I got news for you, congress already has that power! They created the agencies because they recognized their limitations when it comes to creating regulations that require technical expertise and/or detailed particulars.
Congress can also pass a law nullifying ANY existing agency regulations or, in the extreme, dissolving the agency. If a regulatory agency interprets a law one way, congress can pass a law saying that isn’t what we meant, stop doing that, do it this way instead.
This is perfect accountability. If congress can’t do those things, how do you expect them to write effective regulation? What more do you want?
It might be perfect accountability [1] but under this supreme court it might be found unconstitutional. It's not actually clear whether congress is allowed delegate their power to another branch of government. In fact if you take the constitution in context with the British law it was inspired by it's explicitly prohibited.
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.
Definitely possible. The FDIC has almost a hundred years under its belt though. That is a lot of precedent.
It is strange that textualism or republicanism is associated with small/weak government. That reputation is unearned imo.
To wit, the independent agency stuff is about who can do what, not what can be done. It is not, in any way, a meaningful limitation on the powers of the government as a whole, just a change to the distribution of where those powers lie.
In Chevron, the Supreme Court set forth a legal test as to when the court should defer to the agency’s answer or interpretation, holding that such judicial deference is appropriate where the agency’s answer was not unreasonable, so long as Congress had not spoken directly to the precise issue at question.
This is the SCOTUS ruling that gave administration so much power in 1984, so it's relatively new. The validity of it is currently being heard in:
> Your proposal is to give congress the authority to write regulations without independent agencies. I got news for you, congress already has that 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.
Pick an independent agency and look at their docket. The vast majority of the things are detailed technical minutia, not big things like net neutrality. Each item typically requires detailed knowledge of the law, regulations, and past regulatory actions. There are hundreds of such items a year per agency.
Your proposal is to task congress with thousands of detailed decisions requiring deep and detailed knowledge of many areas. There is no way that could work better.
Congress turns over every two years. They can’t even authorize spending for the the things they have explicitly spent money on. Even if your congress person voted a specific way on a regulation what would it tell you? They would have thousands of such votes a year without enough information. The votes would quickly become bribe based.
An independent agency is simply an entity congress has created and authorized to interpret the details of legislation. Those interpretations are called regulations. They cannot just do whatever they want, there are many constraints. There is a process for making regs (including public comment). The interpretations are reviewable by courts. Congress can also address them.
This is definitely not a perfect system and I am sure there are better ones but it seems decent enough.
The elected legislature doesn't have the expertise to write regulations in highly technical areas. Or really almost any areas, but certainly not the sorts of stuff that the FCC, FAA, SEC, etc. regulates. The representative democracy happens with their confirmation of the agency heads appointed by the executive branch.
I think you're right in a broad sense but this is the least bad situation. Because the alternative is that no laws that require expertise ever get passed or worse, legislators rubber stamp laws they don't really understand written by people in industry.
> The elected legislature doesn't have the expertise to write regulations in highly technical areas.
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.
A background is not sufficient and people should be humble enough to know when to take advice. That is not to say they should not be familiar with subjects, but relying on one person to write regulations for whole sectors is bound to lead to problems.
The FCC had already made their decision against net neutrality. They did use the public comments to help justify it, but that was PR, not decision making.
Kind of. They used the comments to show the decision had some supporters, but even with the fakes the majority of comments were in favor of keeping the Obama era net neutrality bylaws. Still, the FCC ended net neutrality.
So yes they used the comments to justify their decision, but calling it a "wholesale manipulation of our democracy" is an overstatement as the decision never required democratic consensus.
> but even with the fakes the majority of comments were in favor of keeping the Obama era net neutrality bylaws.
… no?
> The proceeding generated a record-breaking number of comments — more than 22 million — and nearly 18 million were fake, the attorney general’s office found.
>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..
It doesn't require democratic consensus but the FDA is legally obligated to take public feedback into consideration. [1] Section C: "(c)After notice required by this section, the agency shall give interested persons an opportunity to participate in the rule making through submission of written data, views, or arguments with or without opportunity for oral presentation. After consideration of the relevant matter presented, the agency shall incorporate in the rules adopted a concise general statement of their basis and purpose."
The companies generating fake comments were likely doing so precisely to ensure this federal law did not become an issue. The thing that really annoys me about this stuff is not the outcome - the comments in favor of net neutrality were change.org caliber spam for the most part, and so the FCC had every reasonable right to ignore them.
It's that these companies did absolutely engage in a conspiracy to "sidestep" federal law, and did so by engaging in defacto identify theft on a massive scale. Conspiracy, a few hundred thousand charges of identity theft, fraud, and more? If an individual did this, they'd be looking at jail for the rest of their life. But these companies do it, and things like this don't even classify as a slap on the wrist. Our legal system is just completely and utterly dysfunctional when it comes to companies.
Corporations not only have personhood, but super personhood. They not only get all the rights and privileges of individuals, but seeming immunity from the law, as long as they earn enough money. And it's not only the inequity that bothers me, but the fact that this is clearly and overtly encouraging ever more awful behavior from corporations. Because they have no ethics, and they face no consequences of note. So why not?
People just treated it like an anonymous opt-in opinion poll, and the results are pretty much what you'd expect. Some copy paste, a vast amount of low content stuff, and then some very low content stuff.
>After consideration of the relevant matter presented, the agency shall incorporate in the rules adopted a concise general statement of their basis and purpose."
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.
I genuinely don’t understand why government in the US is not being aggressively toppled by its citizens. Perhaps apathy, or fear of the unknown, fear of civil war?
> Instead, they each independently fabricated responses for 1.5 million consumers. The third, marketing company Ifficient Inc., supplied more than 840,000 fake responses.
So this is 3,840,000 incidents of 'falsifying comments' - not Identity Theft ?
Fine is $615,000.
Edit - I realized that it's individuals in the first sentence, number of responses in the second. I will let this comment stay as is.
So about $ 0.16 for faking identity of an American and use it for lobbying purposes.
That's damn cheap.
This news piece won't deter people from doing this.
It is basically an advertisement for these companies.
See what you can do and get away with.
I think this net neutrality stuff is a big boondoggle, but people should go to jail for this. Thus is fraud, fraud is a crime in the US, this should be criminally prosecuted, and I would be very happy to see a judge sentence someone to some time in prison for this.
Cool and all but $615k is nothing to this companies. Slap on wrist, pay it off, and back at whatever scummy sh*t they want to do next. Classic America.
Was just thinking about this. Like Meta just got the EU data privacy one. It should be something like "You have to shutdown XYZ until you are audited in full meeting compliance and regulations."
Does prison time actually benefit society, other than in an emotional capacity?
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.
I think you would need a significant penalty aside from being unable to be a decision maker though. Perhaps the individual financial penalties you mentioned, if high enough, would accomplish this.
Otherwise some one found guilty of this could be replaced easily with another willing soul, be moved to another role in the company and paid a handsome salary as a reward, and or consult for others on how to commit fraud or run the company.
Jail time for executives in situations like this will definitely make other executives think about their actions.
Jail time for a drug addict or other small time desperate criminal who would otherwise be homeless and have no hope of a future will not make any difference to the actions of others in a similar situation.
I think it'd be dangerous for a business to assume that penalties are always this low. This is an example of the system getting things wrong in the eyes of the public more than a precedent that shows how penalties always work.
How much did the companies make for submitting the false comments? Also, no jail time and how are the people that hired them not guilty of anything? Could they have plausible deniability with saying they thought they were just buying advertising? But having 3 separate companies guilty of submitting the comments makes that seem a little unlikely.
For an issue that is worth billions, if not trillions, $615k is not even a slap on the wrist. It's more like a warm and encouraging pat on the back. Not good.
It should be relative to the size of the companies actually responsible for the fraud, as determined by a paper trail, not the middle-man sanitized third-party vendors:
“Two of the California-based companies, LCX Digital Media and digital marketing company Lead ID, LLC., were hired by the broadband industry…”
I don't think you quite understand what people are saying when they talk about scaling fines. The point is to make this behavior a net loss in profit, which works across any company scale. However much money they made given illegal behavior, fine them some multiple N where N > 1 (and preferably more like N > 3 or more). Even if that doesn't get implemented for some reason, you can have fines like "$max(X * company size, Y)" that also handle any company size.
Also focus on the people behind these decisions. Some senior execs getting real jail will have a greater deterrence than a company fine, plus doesn't punish shareholders.
> People have latched onto this idea that penalties should be relative to the size of the company. Well then, this is what you get. Penalties should be relative to the scale and severity of the crime.
It depends on whether your goal is deterring bad behavior or deploying revenge.
The reason the punishment has to be so extreme is that if it’s not they will discount by probability of being caught (and getting enough quality evidence etc). So it can’t be a reasonable punishment that is just a bit more than the benefit. It needs to be an extreme deterrent so as to prevent them even doing the calculation.
A fine so large that it sharply+persistently reduces dividend payouts and share value sends a strong signal about bad corporate behavior. It could be exampled after the sort of fines that govs like to inflict on the poor.
It's also exactly the sort of fine that gov regulators compulsively seem to avoid.
This had to be higher, they got what they wanted, at least take some of their GPT cash, so they can't fund Skynet or Roku's basilisk or worse, fill our elderly ears with perfect reproductions of our parents and children selling us plausible products, adding product placement in our photos in exchange for more storage as we weep helplessly in confusion until we step into the street and are pounded down by self driving cars who instantly and algorithmically spit out scripts so that our killers skate.
Or, don't fine them at all, but don't fine me either.
Comments were the the organic voice of the public. So we know this is happening. How many L's will it take before we leave the altitude sickness of the high road, and turn our democracies into Babylon? They could have just done ordinary marketing, but nah, better results if they snake it. 3 year moratorium on working in this space would be much better. Deprive the public of it's voice and the penalty is to be silenced.
>Comments were the the organic voice of the public
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.
Why such controversial questions as net neutrality or DMCA are not submitted to a referendum? In this case there would be no way for companies to lobby a decision they want. Is it because referendums are too expensive or because government doesn't want to let people make decisions?
Referenda are no panacea. As you say, partly they're expensive. But also, there's good reason to prefer representative democracy over direct democracy- for complex topics people aren't informed enough on a topic to decide, the referendum can be decided by a small group of highly motivated voters who don't agree with the what would be the majority view, and it's difficult to present a complex issue on a ballot paper. It's also very easy for highly motivated corporations to spend a huge amount of money to win a referendum on a topic that massively effects their profitability but has low salience to the general public.
Remember, the FCC determine these rules and they are run by presidential appointees, so it's not completely anti-democratic.
Yeah I absolutely hate it but yeah. Every time we feel sad & bad about the world, every time the Fear Uncertainty & Doubt is given places in our hearts, it makes us weak & susceptible. That's the premise of The Shock Doctrine & oh how sadly it's true.
The web has two horrific fronts right now on this. Google is creating two specs, one to only let Attested devices through, and one to transmit government ID. So only users on devices they can't control, with id by government, can participate at all. This is what fear is bringing us to. People will welcome this hell. The end of the War Against General Purpose Computing will come with applause, from those who have been sold the message to be afraid.
What's the argument against requiring a government issued ID to interact with government systems?
I mean I understand a case for anonymity for whistleblowers, etc. but it seems like if you want to file a complaint with the FCC then requiring you to prove that you're a real person who lives in the United States seems like a reasonable thing?
How do we discriminate on what use cases are acceptable or not? How do we prevent arbitrary sites from abroad soaking up gobs of very exact detailed government signed data?
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?
Yeah I’m sorry but a government ID seems like the solution to so many issues here. I want to be able to have online discussions about political elections while being sure the people on the other end are actual voters and not spammers being paid to swing elections. I want people who create accounts just to spam and run blackmail rings to be identifiable. We already have social security numbers, online IDs are not that big of a deal.
Or instead of pearl-clutching, how about suggesting something productive like a digital id that is only needed for public comments on work-in-progress legislation? There is quite a bit of daylight between that and 1984.
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.
> These are basic rights to be human on this planet.
Net neutrality and being free from government ids isn’t a human right ordained by god. That’s a whole new level of ridiculous. People will claim any policy dear to their hearts is a human right ffs
The comment I replied to stated that it was a basic human right on a human planet. Don’t pretend it didn’t and don’t go looking at account histories trying to write people off as trolls. Respond with substance or piss off, this ain’t Reddit
Lying liar lies. "It" (this entire thread) said & says nothing at all about net neutrality. This gets weirder & weirder, debating totally unmentioned topics, now with your absurd aggro & ad hominem assault.
"It":
> 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
So where again are we talking about what you & other dude jumped in with, seemingly out of nowhere?
I don't care where this is, this is indecorous of you & it's bizarre & unexplained. Blowing more smoke isnt helping.
Net neutrality, which allows Netflix to clog broadband pipes with entertainment, is a subsidy from broadband pipe provider to Netflix owners. Unlimited pipe cramming is not a human/corporate right.
The Minnesota State House, Senate and Governor seat are all controlled by the same party. That party is now planning to use their unchecked power to push through legislation for a program which will track all reported wrongthink:
Agreed. Though it’s not localized to cable. Most non-local news is designed to incite fear/anger in you and push you to their thinking, not inform you of what’s going on in the world. In fact most news orgs don’t even work for their own news, they buy it wholesale from news aggregators like Reuters, AP, etc and put their own spin on it.
In my case, I found no benefit to any national/international news orgs and focus solely on local news on the county/state levels.
I don't think they're proposing a system where you're required to disclose your political beliefs... if you weren't comfortable sharing your beliefs with the government, you could simply not submit public comments
Seems better than an alternative: where the ones with a voice are those who created the most-effective bot network.
I don't feel like I have much of voice when I submit one comment to my legislators, and a kid from California submits 10 million (as mentioned in this case).
> FILE - New York State Attorney General Letitia James participates in the Global Citizen NOW conference in New York, on April 28, 2023. Three companies that supplied millions of fake public comments using the identities of real people without their consent to support the 2017 repeals of net neutrality rules will collectively pay $615,000 in penalties to New York and other states. The penalties come after a previous investigation by James found the fake comments used the identities of millions of consumers, including thousands of New Yorkers, without their knowledge. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)
