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Not all government jobs are intended to serve the public, many of them exist at the request of businesses, in particular regulatory agencies. Some of them work

by cmurf 9y ago

Not all government jobs are intended to serve the public, many of them exist at the request of businesses, in particular regulatory agencies. Some of them work better than others, the FAA has a contrary agency in the NTSB that I think keeps it more honest than some of the other agencies. Ajit Pai's position on net neutrality is not news. It was not news when he was nominated by Trump, and confirmed by the Senate. And sufficient numbers of the public got those people elected despite their position on net neutrality. By being single issue voters, they are getting punished on everything else they might value.

stevew20 9y ago
I agree that some agencies are not intended to serve the public; I believe that many government agencies in our current regime are designed to keep the public sedentary and docile, at the tax expense of the public. In this case, the FCC attempted to placate the people by asking for comments to aid in the decision making process, then generated massive numbers of fake comments that supported the repeal of net neutrality. And I wholly agree with your second point.
- cmurf 9y ago
  We don't know the source of the fake comments, the FCC is expressly not cooperating with the NY AG on this issue and I suspect that it'll take a court order to get that information from the FCC. The question is why not cooperate, especially in a criminal investigation? It's very weird, and at a minimum looks bad.
  - stevew20 9y ago
    My statement that the FCC generated the fake comments is conjecture. Between the refusal to cooperate that you pointed out, and that the outcome of those comments is exactly in line with the intent that Pai has indicated (since well before his appointment), I think my conjecture has a high probability of being correct. I've worked on election campaigns and the like (software dev and sys administration), and observed the use of bot generated comments in EVERY one of them. Based on my experiences, it seems highly unlikely that they refrained from using them in this instance. It would be a deviation from standard operating procedure.

by cmurf 9y ago

stevew20 9y ago

I agree that some agencies are not intended to serve the public; I believe that many government agencies in our current regime are designed to keep the public sedentary and docile, at the tax expense of the public. In this case, the FCC attempted to placate the people by asking for comments to aid in the decision making process, then generated massive numbers of fake comments that supported the repeal of net neutrality. And I wholly agree with your second point.

cmurf 9y ago
We don't know the source of the fake comments, the FCC is expressly not cooperating with the NY AG on this issue and I suspect that it'll take a court order to get that information from the FCC. The question is why not cooperate, especially in a criminal investigation? It's very weird, and at a minimum looks bad.
- stevew20 9y ago
  My statement that the FCC generated the fake comments is conjecture. Between the refusal to cooperate that you pointed out, and that the outcome of those comments is exactly in line with the intent that Pai has indicated (since well before his appointment), I think my conjecture has a high probability of being correct. I've worked on election campaigns and the like (software dev and sys administration), and observed the use of bot generated comments in EVERY one of them. Based on my experiences, it seems highly unlikely that they refrained from using them in this instance. It would be a deviation from standard operating procedure.