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Dead People Mysteriously Support the FCC's Attack on Net Neutrality
- excalibur 9y ago> However, if you go to his house on 11 Tee Pee Row, you will unfortunately speak to a kind person who will tell you that John has been passed away since 2016 and no one else there has the same name. This is my new favorite name for a residential street.
- twothamendment 9y agoI'm partial to Five Card Draw. The street, not the game. Now how do I get dead people to vote for things I want?
- d-sc 9y agoFunny you say that. I used to drive by that street on the way to school.
- __jal 9y agoEasy! Browse this database to select the telecom firm you find most compatible with your ethical standards: https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/issuesum.php?id=TEC https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/issuesum.php?id=TEC Drill down to find a list of firms who can recruit dead people and random special interests (see here from some of the interest groups who will rent you their outrage: http://stopthecap.com/2009/10/02/special-report-astroturf-overload-broadband-for-america-one-giant-industry-front-group/ http://stopthecap.com/2009/10/02/special-report-astroturf-ov... ). Handily enough, you also get an idea of what it costs right on Open Secrets. I wish medical price lists were this easy, and I bet there are some dead people who think so, too.
- brightsize 9y agoIf net neutrality is axed I'm moving to Berlin to live on Max-Beer street. With HN throttled I'll need a new addiction.
- curiousgal 9y agoHN is so fast I use it to test my internet issues. It’ll be hard to throttle it.
- epmaybe 9y agoAdditionally, why would any ISP throttle a site with as little traffic as HN? Edit: I say "little" in comparison to the seriously high traffic sites like Netflix or Google.
- yebyen 9y agoThey're not doing it for bandwidth conservation, it's a way to extract rent from companies that are (already paying someone for) using the internet to reach their customers.
- brightsize 9y agoI'm imagining a situation where Susan Startuper wants her HN fix 20x a day just like everyone, but refuses to pay for the "Hacker Channel" subscription with her ISP. She still gets access but only at 128kb/s. In some areas there's just one ISP and it doesn't offer the Hacker Channel. DNS resolution of news.ycombinator.com fails for all of its customers. Max-Beer street would start looking pretty good, especially if Max-HN was also available there. I'd be interested to know what, if any, effect the demise of net neutrality would have on American service providers with foreign customers.
- jogjayr 9y agoYou may also like Lake Jackson, TX where you can shop at the Aldi on This Way St or eat at the Wurst Haus on That Way St.
- King-Aaron 9y ago> This is my new favorite name for a residential street. There's a "Wildgoose Chase" in the Clarence Valley, Australia.. I find that one pretty good
- nnfy 9y agoI'd just like to point out, hopefully without being accused of shilling, that part of Net Neutrality legislation involves the quiet reclassification of ISPs as title ii common carriers. These are regulations designed for phone companies in the 1930s. Why should you worry? Because all network traffic will be subject to extremely broad obscenity laws. I will try to find the legislation shortly, but effectively, causing "offense" or transmitting "obscene" material gives the federal government an excuse to prosecute you. Suddenly, posting on 4chan can get you thrown in prison. Edit: found it[0], I dont understand why no one is aware of this. I plead that you take a moment to check the link, as this is a dangerous extension of government power, especially in combination with current surveillence. [0]https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/223 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/223
- GauntletWizard 9y agoI've been trying to tell people this for a while - I do believe in net neutrality, but the title II classification is a boondoggle, and those laws need serious rewrite. I'm not seriously concerned about getting arrested for downloading pornography - When was the last time you heard of someone getting arrested for shouting "Fuck!" over the phone? - But I am concerned that those laws were written for Bell Telephone, and survived the breakup and re-integration of the Baby Bells. I don't think they're at all a good fit for how the internet works.
- nnfy 9y agoThese laws are dangerous because they are vague enough to give the government a free pass to legally target almost anyone who uses the internet. It is another means to possibly silence whistleblowers and/or opposition.
- moron4hire 9y agoExcept these laws already apply to every other form of media and they aren't being used to silence whistleblowers or political opposition. The sky is not falling.
- upofadown 9y agoWell if dead people can come up with insightful comments, then great. These are comments, not votes. Once all the possible ideas have been presented, there is no point in further comments. In the end only actual politics matters. If you want to do a petition then do a partition. If you want to complain then target a politician.
- tabtab 9y agoBut what if the FCC is counting the quantity of citizens making a given point when deciding? In that case the quantity matters even if it is a restatement of the same argument.
- upofadown 9y ago>But what if the FCC is counting the quantity of citizens making a given point when deciding? That is an interesting theory but ultimately the FCC answers to Congress. They are not allowed to do their own politics (although sometimes they try). They are in the end just a regulator. They do make a nice scapegoat so as to allow the actual politicians to avoid criticism of the policies those politicians created.
- DiThi 9y agoBoth FCC and congress are composed of people. People can easily be biased just by the amount of data they encounter on one side or the other, especially if arguments on both sides sound compelling and most of those people don't really want to spend too much time into the topic.
- tabtab 9y agoMy statement was not really about who controls the FCC, but about how they will or are ACTUALLY considering public comments currently.
- tabtab 9y agoBeing we've had foreign governments messing with our democracy using social media and hacking, this should be fully investigated. I'm not claiming they are interfering, only saying we should rule out the possibility using our best forensics.
- mattnewton 9y agoI don’t know why we have to point fingers abroad, when there is so much incentive at home to fudge these results from the telecom companies about to be deregulated.
- sounds 9y agoIt seems the goal is to rule it out -- in other words, use the political will centering on interference from abroad to kick start the investigation Ajit Pai is so loath to initiate. It's a political gambit.
- shostack 9y agoI think the concern here is that the line between home incentive and foreign incentive has become indecipherably blurred by recent events with this administration. We're finding out that people across the entire breadth of the Trump administration have ties to shady Russian dealings. Given the criticism over certain media outlets, and how those are increasingly intertwined with the delivery of said media, it seems a fair question to raise.
- tabtab 9y agoBOTH are problems.
- curiousgal 9y ago>messing with our democracy The U.S. has had a flawed democracy regardless of foreign meddling. Americans do not even elect their president directly. Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#Democracy_Index_by_country_.282016.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#Democracy_Inde...
- charred_toast 9y agoCan we acknowledge we live in a dystopian era yet? What further has to happen?
- graphitezepp 9y agoI do not know about you but my peer group has been acknowledging that for some time now.
- peeters 9y agoIf we're in a dystopian era, that must be in comparison to something. What era was, on the balance of factors, better than today?
- shostack 9y agoA dystopian era is incredibly subjective in and of itself. I'm sure there are quite a few people in power right now who feel it is the dawn of a new golden (gilded?) age for them.
- labster 9y agoIt is the best of times, it is the worst of times. It is the age of rationalists, it is the age of complete morons in government. It is the epoch of incredulity, it is the epoch of fake news.
- chiaro 9y agoIn terms of sentiment, this came out yesterday: >More than half of Americans (59 percent) said they consider this the lowest point in U.S. history that they can remember — a figure spanning every generation, including those who lived through World War II and Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2017/11/lowest-point.aspx https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2017/11/lowest-point...
- deadmetheny 9y agoPeople have to have a measurably worse life now than they did before, for one. "I don't like President Trump" isn't a valid response, even if he is an idiot.
- antisthenes 9y agoIt is fairly clear at this point that FCC as an agency is a captive of business interests. It should be treated as openly hostile to the interests of the general public.
- r00fus 9y agoYou might say that of most governmental agencies and the Congress as well. The U$ is an oligarchy in all but name.
- tryingagainbro 9y agoAfter saying that, yeah, an investigation is due...maybe laws were broken, but I can say that I used a dead person name as a way to be anon. In the end this should not matter, FCC is not running a vote. If they count pro /against this way then it's their problem. Arguments should be the only deciding factor.
- thephyber 9y ago> In the end this should not matter, FCC is not running a vote. Perhaps. But would you expect the FCC to actually sift through millions of stuffed comments just to get to the few good ones? By stuffing the system with trash comments, the submitters effectively guaranteed that the FCC won't bother to read any of the comments.
- tryingagainbro 9y agoThey are, say 5 interest groups on the corp side and 5 known consumer organizations, each with their own connections and lobbyists. FCC will get their POV and virtually every good argument, especially in such a major case. The "send your comment" is essentially a sham, making us think we have a voice (that matters)
- Schizotypy 9y agoWhy doesn't someone do the same thing but for net neutrality? Just make a bot to spam with fake or dead names in favor of neutrality to balance it out. The FCC apparently won't do anything either way so why not
- sounds 9y agoThis is a technically creative approach, and I think the internet's future is unfortunately going to be something like this. But I for one would rather take the high road. Please call your senator(s) and representative(s) and let them know how upset this all is making you!
- ShabbosGoy 9y agoHow about ditching Web 2.0 entirely? It's time to head to Web 3.0, an era where the Internet will be truly decentralized and free.
- hinkley 9y agoSo we are talking about people pretending to be people they aren’t, and your solution is decentralize the whole thing?
- anigbrowl 9y agoYes, but how? I got really into Semantic web stuff maybe 5-6 years ago and I thought it would have taken over by now but it seems to have withered for lack of development. You're welcome to email me with your thoughts if you prefer.
- pavel_lishin 9y agoWill it be unicorn-fart powered, or are you thinking some sort of genie-based system?
- sounds 9y agoSorry about the others downvoting you. If you dig into my comment history, I've written about a few ways to do this. Great suggestion.
- khazhou 9y agoThis makes sense, actually. Dead people tend to be older, and have less stake in newer bandwidth-intensive applications.
- yebyen 9y agoIt makes sense, until you go search the comment database for your family members and find out how many of them have nearly identical opinions in support of repealing Title II. This site[1] will help you search the database. I read a number of comments that start out with some variation of "The unprecedented regulatory power the Obama Administration imposed on the internet is smothering innovation, damaging the American economy and obstructing job creation. I urge the Federal Communications Commission to end the bureaucratic regulatory overreach of the internet known as Title II..." It's amazing how many people spontaneously had the same opinion on a handful of days in May and July this year! /s [1]: https://www.comcastroturf.com/ https://www.comcastroturf.com/ Edit: You were making a joke, weren't you... (woosh)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- calimac 9y agoTo that effect, you might also assume dead people have un-proportionately high comment posting rate and user account creation rate across other regulatory and political issues! LOL!
- throwawaymanbot 9y agoThe Comment Thread has been hijacked. Its now debating Democracy in America, rather than the fact dead people are sending in messages to the FCC and the FCC is seemingly ok with that.