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New York Attorney General Expands Inquiry into Net Neutrality Comments
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- phakding 8y agoHopefully this act of deception gets punished. Not just a slap on the wrist few million dollar fine, but the criminal indictment of the head honchos.
- komali2 8y agoIf Ajit Pai goes to jail I'm going to throw the biggest party ever and everyone is invited. Everyone. I've made it a personal objective of mine to send him a Christmas card every year, forever, until one of us dies, reminding him that he's a knobhead for bending over for big telecom.
- tombert 8y agoAt the risk of coming off as some bleeding heart liberal, what's to stop corporations from doing this kind of stuff all the time? What percentage of it goes unnoticed? Everyone knows about lobbying, but until very recently, I didn't know about the whole "astroturfing" thing. EDIT: Not sure why I'm being downvoted for this... I didn't really intend to make my post partisan, though I realize that the self-deprecating "bleeding-heard-liberal" might appear that way.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoGovernment intervention and citizen activism. That's about it.
- dragonwriter 8y agoBecause regulatory comments aren't a vote or popularity contest, or even subject to much public attention, but are instead, in the normal case, subject to substantive review and response, ballot box stuffing in a way which makes them appear to come from less expert general public commenters doesn't really help the corporation. It only really helps on an issue where the regulatory process has public attention where the substantive outcome is a foregone conclusion but wants additional public political cover. This is quite rare for federal rulemaking. (A milder—in volume terms—version where you try to make substantive comments seem like they are coming from involved parties with a different interest than yours—say, on a healthcare reg, a payer presenting fraudulent provider comments, might be useful, except in that case there is a lot more risk that someone would follow up on the particular comment and turn up something fishy.)
- moorhosj 8y agoI think the recent tax cut is an example of a process with a predetermined outcome where politicians were seeking political cover to make a vote the majority of Americans disagreed with. It’s certainly possible that bots on twitter, Facebook, Instagram and reddit could be employed to amplify a particular message and provide that cover.
- dragonwriter 8y agoOh, sure, there's probably lots of that around political issues outside of the regulatory comment process.
- DoofusOfDeath 8y ago> At the risk of coming off as some bleeding heart liberal, what's to stop corporations from doing this kind of stuff all the time? This doesn't strike as being a conservative vs. liberal issue. Most of us can probably agree that it's an unacceptable attack on the foundations of a representative democracy. And as a social conservative with strong "law and order" leanings, the apparent fraud and identity theft make me very angry. The unwillingness of the federal government to investigate this only adds to my frustration and anger, because it smacks of (at least) passive corruption.
- forapurpose 8y agoI think we've come to accept government inaction, a display of helplessness, on these issues. We don't even ask for law enforcement to do its job or expect it to. We should expect more. Fraud on the Internet is just fraud, and government should be protecting us.