Net Neutrality Comments Overtaxed FCC's System 32
Presto Vivace writes with news that the FCC has had trouble dealing with the sheer volume of comments submitted about net neutrality. There were millions of them, and they caused problems with the agency's 18-year-old Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS). When the FCC attempted to dump the comments into XML format to make download and analysis easier, problems with Apache Solr meant roughly 680,000 didn't make the transfer. The agency promised to release a new set of fixed XML files in January that include all of the dropped comments. Despite many reports that the comments were "lost," they're all available using the ECFS.
Need a slow lane (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm sure Comcast and AT&T would be more than willing to give the FCC a fast lane for comments arguing against net neutrality.
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I'm sure Comcast and AT&T would be more than willing to give the FCC a fast lane for comments arguing against net neutrality.
Comcast is pro-NN because Net Neutrality was imposed on them as a condition of their merger with NBC. They want their competitors to be hamstrung by the same NN rules that they are.
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Um, no. While they do have some conditions imposed on them until 2018, they have sued over FCC's regulations for net neutrality and won. Hell, these conditions were IMPOSED on them for violating the laws and regulations w.r.t. internet traffic.
And from Comcast directly: “we do not support reclassification of broadband as a telecommunications service under Title II.”
http://corporate.comcast.com/comcast-voices/comcast-files-open-internet-reply-comments [comcast.com]
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Way out on the wacko scale, you have people trying to impose the
I think the bigger issue (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I think the bigger issue (Score:5, Informative)
Dear Mr. Wheeler, As an American citizen, I wanted to voice my opposition to the FCC's crippling new regulations that would put federal bureaucrats in charge of internet freedom, and urge you to stop these regulations before they're enacted. If the federal government goes through these plans to regulate the internet, I know that the internet will change -- and not for the better. [ INSERT VARIANT PARAGRAPH COMMENT HERE ] Like many Americans, I believe that the internet should remain free of government control and unnecessary regulation -- just as it has for the last twenty years of unprecedented growth. Please stop the FCC's dangerous new regulations, and protect the future of internet freedom here in America. Sincerely, [APPLICANT NAME] [APPLICANT HOME ADDRESS]
As for the "VARIANT PARAGRAPH COMMENT", apparently you were given several selections to choose from, including the following:
The Internet is the biggest economic, intellectual, and artistic success story of the century, and it rose up because of free people, not stifling government. The federal government needs to keep its hands off the Internet. It is not broken, and it does not need to be fixed. It is the federal government, not the Internet, that is broken, and in need of fixing.
One can make an appeal to justice for persecuted cable companies:
Before our government can handcuff a citizen, it must have some reasonable evidence that they have done something wrong. Before the FCC places regulatory handcuffs on Internet providers, shouldn't the government present evidence that they have actually done something wrong?
Or maybe this is your style:
The ideological leader of the angry liberals calling for you to reduce the Internet to a public utility is Robert McChesney, the avowed Marxist founder of the socialist group Free Press. In an interview with SocialistProject.ca, McChesney said: âoeWhat we want to have in the U.S. and in every society is an Internet that is not private property, but a public utility...At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies. We are not at that point yet. But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.â In a country of over 300 million people, even an extremist like McChesney can find, perhaps, millions of followers. But you should know better than to listen to them.
Re:I think the bigger issue (Score:5, Interesting)
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I'm wondering how long until someone just finally snaps and tries to go after the Koches.
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Reading Between The Lines (Score:2)
If only there were some sort of magical agency that knew how to deal with communications and could actually design a decent transfer format for these guys. I bet that very same agency m
XML is being generous (Score:5, Informative)
They only store them for us to read (Score:5, Insightful)
The FCC already has its orders. The 'comments' thing is just a pacification measure.
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The FCC already has its orders. The 'comments' thing is just a pacification measure.
I'm guess it's more akin to "parallel construction" whereby if the comments provide sufficient cover for your existing orders, you can claim that it was a mandate of the constituency, and if not, then you have to do extra work to reframe it so that it is.
Still wondering why we can't have tax id used to authenticate messaging for such comment sites. I mean, like that's a guaranteed unique identifier, non? Its not like you're not putting your name/address on the comment anyway are you?
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Still wondering why we can't have tax id used to authenticate messaging for such comment sites. I mean, like that's a guaranteed unique identifier, non? Its not like you're not putting your name/address on the comment anyway are you?
Isn't the tax ID used for most individuals their Social Security numbers? Putting that on comments (which obviously need to be made public) is an invitation to identity theft.
It also doesn't solve the claimed problem. Groups putting out form letters would just include a field for SSN. Then you'd have a bunch of near identical comments with different social security numbers.
It also doesn't show that it's a real problem. The Constitution says that citizens are allowed to petition the government for a redre
Re:They only store them for us to read (Score:5, Insightful)
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Me? insinuate? Ohhhh no, never! It's just an observation of what invariably happens when people reelect corrupt politicians to 40 year careers in the expectation they will bring home some serious pork. It's what keeps the Great American Boondoggle alive. As far as democracies go we have nothing new here. The whole ordeal has become quite ordinary.
Now you have 2 problems (Score:1)
XML? Easier?
XML??? (Score:2)
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I'll admit that when I first used XML, I started trying to use it for as much as possible. (Blame "Shiny New Technology" syndrome.) I had written stuff to databases before but I thought this technology would make so many things easier. Years later, when I'm reviewing my old code, I'm finding that removing the XML and moving the data to a database improves everything. XML definitely has its place, but it also has limits. Trying to export a million comments as an XML file is almost guaranteed to run into
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There's nothing wrong with XML per-se and it's perfectly capable of million record exports.
The problem is stupid developers trying to load entire documents and manipulate them with DOM-like procedures when they should be using streaming parsers.