New York Attorney General Expands Inquiry Into Net Neutrality Comments (nytimes.com) 93
The New York attorney general subpoenaed more than a dozen telecommunications trade groups, lobbying contractors and Washington advocacy organizations on Tuesday, seeking to determine whether the groups sought to sway a critical federal decision on internet regulation last year by submitting millions of fraudulent public comments, according to a person with knowledge of the investigation. From a report: Some of the groups played a highly public role in last year's battle, when the Republican-appointed majority on the Federal Communications Commission voted to revoke a regulation issued under President Barack Obama that classified internet service providers as public utilities. The telecommunications industry bitterly opposed the rules -- which imposed what supporters call "net neutrality" on internet providers -- and enthusiastically backed their repeal under President Trump. The attorney general, Barbara D. Underwood, last year began investigating the source of more than 22 million public comments submitted to the F.C.C. during the battle. Millions of comments were provided using temporary or duplicate email addresses, others recycled identical phrases, and seven popular comments, repeated verbatim, accounted for millions more.
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"Wasn't this settled already? With the "all comments that weren't pro-NN were submitted by Russian bots" argument?"
No, not at all. Where comments come from doesn't indicate who payed for them, and in this case they're talking about more than a dozen telecommunications trade groups, lobbying contractors and Washington advocacy groups.
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The investigation is into whether or not the anti-network neutrality comments involved fraud.
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That is not what the New York AG is investigating. The investigation is into whether or not the anti-network neutrality comments involved fraud.
Why waste time with that? FCC comments are not some official polling device nor some way to throw a wet finger in the air and see what way the wind is blowing.
The FCC public comment process is for information gathering purposes only, nobody tabulates the pro/con counts at the FCC. What matters is the unique information or novel perspectives being presented in these comments, not the number of comments. Also, in this case, I'm told that the FCC public comment process isn't required to *remove* a regulation
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Yep - this is someone setting up the ground floor plans for a run for some higher office. I'm guessing Congress and not the President since the 2020 field for Democrats is huge, but that's all this is. It's someone trying to make a name for himself.
And failing, because neither Slashdot nor the NYT article bothered to mention his name. Oops. Gotta make sure you get name recognition when pulling stunts like this.
And yet, where normally such actions are pretty much ignored, within seconds of these comments being posted, astroturfers like yourself and the grandparent are out desperately trying to make it seem like this is of no consequence. Continuously repeating "ITS_NOT_A_POLL!!" as if there's no difference between a single crank's opinion and something widely believed by the public. It's almost like some of the senior management at one of the telecos is suddenly realising that he might go down for years in pri
Re:Executive Branch powers (Score:5, Insightful)
No self-respecting institution sits back and endures fraudulent misrepresentation (on an astroturf scale) if they can do something about it (and they can, because the government has entire agencies with the capabilities and powers to do exactly that).
Submitting false documents to the government is a form of trolling, and in many contexts is illegal. It can also be a form of identity fraud and doxing to slap other's people's personal names and private credentials on top. It can end up denying my legitimate input a proper voice (because my name is also on top of a fraudulent opposite).
Being illegal used to be fair cause to investigate something.
There may be elements of the present government wishing to normalize bullshit to such a degree that you now have to stop and ask "and what else?" before you investigate something merely because it appears to have broken a law.
There's a name for putting law and order in to your rearview mirror. It's called anarchy. I am not a fan.
I, for one, do not welcome our new bullshit overlords.
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The question I've got though - why did they allow themselves to be caught?
Telcos control how many email domains and IP addresses? Why exactly were there any duplicates at all? Every single one could have appeared to come from a customer IP, from a generic @telco.com email domain that you'd be
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The public comment process at the FCC is absolutely not a poll. That's not it's purpose. NOBODY at the FCC counts up the number of public comments on each side of an issue because that's not the information the public comment process is designed to get.
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The FCC public comment process is for information gathering purposes only
Then why did it bend over backwards to make sure the counts were distorted and the data unexamined?
Simple answer, it wishes to create an illusion that it has acted in accordance with the will of the people. This is something the FCC values even if it is a lie. If you don't like when the government lies to you, it is best to expose the lies for what they are.
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I'm not speaking to anything else in your comment, only to the following:
Also, in this case, I'm told that the FCC public comment process isn't required to *remove* a regulation anyway. The only time the process is required is when enacting new ones.
That is incorrect. The term "repeal Net Neutrality" is just a catch all, as there was no one "net neutrality" regulation. It was a combination of amendments on existing rules, and took other amendments to undo. Nor does the Administrative Procedures Act, the law that defines how these things are done, make an exception for repealing rules -- including a clean repeal of an entire, stand-alone rule.
However, in everything I read, it looks
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1) I for one would love to find out who wrote comment-bots and publicly shame them. If the NY AG wants to bring them to court to make the point, even better.
2) If anyone at the FCC was involved or aware, then that is a real scandal and those individuals should be removed from their posts at least.
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Why waste time with that?
Because fraud may have been committed? Investigating crimes is one of things Attorneys General do.
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Why waste time with that?
Because fraud may have been committed? Investigating crimes is one of things Attorneys General do.
Fraud? This is roughly equivalent to charging a 10 year old dressed up as a policeman with impersonating a police officer because he says "Your are under arrest!" or closing down the 12 year old's lemonade stand because they don't have a retail permit and are not paying sales taxes.
Who got defrauded here? Somebody clogged up some public comment process with garbage spam? So? It may technically be fraud, but I'm going to bet there are more serous cases for the DA to be going after. The only reason the DA
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OK.
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Oh. Fraud is a partisan political thing now?
No, fraud is a crime. However making a big deal out of "investigating fraud" by a DA in a press release, when the "fraud" is as inconsequential as this is obviously a political move. But of course you cannot admit that because it might betray your political and ideological left leaning bias.
So if you want to waste time and money, have at it. I'm just laughing at the petty pointless waste that will produce no results legally or politically. The investigation will waste resources, end up charging nobody, i
Re:Executive Branch powers (Score:5, Insightful)
You see, the problem is when you don't have enough agreement in congress to pass a law, all you can do is resort to the phone and the pen, which unless you can control the next phone and pen user, they can totally undo things done by the previous user.
Unless, of course, you can control the courts and get the judges to come up with some way to cobble up a right or plausible set of mashed together laws to mandate your views, regardless of what the written law actually does or doesn't say.
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Pai straight up said that the majority of the legitimate comments were in favor of net neutrality. Now that is proven to be an obvious lie as we all suspected all along. Why would they be lying about this unless you're fundamentally wrong here?
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*weren't
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You can't just go around claiming all comments you disagree with are fake. How do YOU know your grandmother doesn't have strong feelings about net neutrality? You didn't even talk to her when she was alive, have you asked her about it since she died? Thought not. Grow up and realize nobody likes net neutrality. Regards, Jefferson Airplane.
But my Grandma started voting Democrat after she died... I make sure she get's her ballots in on time! We are going to win because the ends justifies the means and we got good memes....
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But my Grandma started voting Democrat after she died...
Pics or it didn't happen.
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I don't understand how a normal person can be against net neutrality. Can someone explain?
First thing you need to understand is the name isn't all that descriptive of it's actual effect or it's reason for being. Net Neutrally would have had some effects you wouldn't expect from it's name. It did little for networking and was anything but neutral about granting access. What it actually ended up being was the creation of a HUGE regulatory organization at the FCC that was going to required a lot of money, people and resources it didn't have budget to acquire. The whole system was set up to be ri
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What it actually ended up being was the creation of a HUGE regulatory organization at the FCC that was going to required a lot of money, people and resources it didn't have budget to acquire.
A huge regulatory organization... other than the FCC? How many people did the FCC hire for this? How many resources did it budget for enforcing network neutrality? I mean, heaven forbid the FCC does the job it's supposed to do.
But of course in 2016 the GOP slashed their budget [arstechnica.com] by $69 million, about 20%. If you're complaining that they didn't have the budget for it, the GOP is to blame.
Nice spin there.. Slam the other party for cutting costs for programs you like and slam them for running up the debt because they spend too much.. You do get how overtly partisan all that is right? Maybe not. Oh, and this was the budget PROPOSAL which was 20% less than REQUESTED by the FCC, and knowing NN wasn't going to be continued, this makes sense. :) In actual fact the FCC's budget only got hit by a few % of an actual cut, but you are going to quote me a number that includes the baseline increase to
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Found the telco shill.
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I don't understand how a normal person can be against net neutrality. Can someone explain?
As someone who thought the need for "common carrier" status for broadband Internet access communication services to the home was fairly obvious, I share your confusion. There are a couple of issues at play, I think:
Once the conversation strays from classifying broadband Internet access communication services as a "common carrier" service to Net Neutrality, the various definitions of what Net Neutrality is, and how it would be protected and guaranteed, get into the mix. A key factor here is "network manag
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The internet wasn't built that way. It actually could be easily changed to start charging more for "long distance packets" simply by counting hops, but thankfully that is not the case as of yet.
What frustrates me about "net neutrality" is that people don't realize is that shaping has been happening for years. Certain ports (like port 80, 443, 21 etc.) are given higher priority, what they want to allow now is shaping on a broader scal
Corrupt Government (Score:1)
New York is as corrupt as New Jersey.
Isn't that where Trump got his start? (Score:2)
I guess, then, I'd have to agree with you.
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Technically speaking, whether the FCC should enforce net neutrality, whether there were fraudulent submissions, and whether NY and NJ are corrupt are three separate issues.
Mebbe, probably, and definitely.
Good luck fooling NY AG with red herrings. (Score:3, Insightful)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism - is as much of your argument as anything related to Ajit Pai's FCC allowing botnets to "wag the dog" with BS comments, then trying to pretend it didn't happen and covering it up.
If you want to pretend NY and NJ are the ones on trial for wrongdoing here, you're going to need a few more stuffed animals and some type of biscuits to make it a proper tea party.
Not like he has crimes that need prosecution (Score:2)
Like a corrupt NYC mayor
https://nypost.com/2016/04/13/... [nypost.com]
Or Jobs creation programs that don't create jobs but line the pockets of the governor's friends
https://www.manhattancontraria... [manhattancontrarian.com]
Oh wait, he's a democrat and this is called prosecutorial discretion.
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Whataboutism 101
Said the Wizard to Dorothy
This NPC thing is too spot on (Score:2)
You just provided the New York Post which is a shit rag tabloid and a rightwing blog. Great citations. Have any others? Ones with actual facts not hyperbole and bullshit?
If(facts=="challenge worldview") {Deflect(); Name_Call();}
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If( argument == nil) { ignore(); ignore(); ignore(); }
You need to upgrade.
Lots of "Public Opinion" (Score:2)
Idiots (Score:2)