Ajit Pai says there’s no net neutrality problem—but keeps complaints under wraps.
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FCC refuses to release text of more than 40,000 net neutrality complaints
- Thread starter JournalBot
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So let's see if I understand this.....
It's perfectly OK for the Trump Administration to publish the contact info of people commenting about elections, but when it comes to Net Neutrality, it is perfectly OK to keep the actual comments under wraps.
It's perfectly OK for the Trump Administration to publish the contact info of people commenting about elections, but when it comes to Net Neutrality, it is perfectly OK to keep the actual comments under wraps.
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"providing them all would be too burdensome"
You are a government agency. a fucking COMMUNICATIONS agency.
If you can't be transparent with the people of the nation, then you are corrupt as fuck. You literally have no other reason to exist as a public service.
You are a government agency. a fucking COMMUNICATIONS agency.
If you can't be transparent with the people of the nation, then you are corrupt as fuck. You literally have no other reason to exist as a public service.
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It would not surprise me to learn that he (or a minion of his) has deleted the bulk of those that are complaining about NN being cancelled / phased out.
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How many times has Pai gone to Russia for guidance on handling the public's input to open democratic (well perhaps republican) processes such as rule making by one blind idiot?
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Well, no surprises here that Pai's mind is made up. If NN goes away, it won't be due to lack of trying from the opposition that's for sure.
-d
-d
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It's just a surprise, you'd be too jealous if you knew. Really, Comcast loves you. They'll even give Netflix a 50 buck toll discount if they go X1 triple-play. Customer service refuses to let you leave cause they love you. You just need to understand. https://youtu.be/v3IRfVA2_eA
Edit: Music will be on our upcoming service Listenable, as well as games on Playable, social media on Trackable, browsing on Browsable, and more. A world awaits my love.
Edit: Music will be on our upcoming service Listenable, as well as games on Playable, social media on Trackable, browsing on Browsable, and more. A world awaits my love.
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And when people are shouting about all the problems the lack of NN is causing he'll just shrug and go "Well none of you bothered to speak up about it, so I figured you'd all be fine about this outcome."
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Pretty sure with the bribes from the industry he could hire a competent programmer to make that a non-issue.
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Our government has the largest budget of anything, anywhere, ever.
Yet somehow they manage to charge 10¢ a page for information out of every agency. The most technologically advanced nation on the planet can put people on the moon, but when it comes to making basic public information public, they can't even figure out something like bit torrent
Play dumb and incompetent to keep themselves in power over the people.
Yet somehow they manage to charge 10¢ a page for information out of every agency. The most technologically advanced nation on the planet can put people on the moon, but when it comes to making basic public information public, they can't even figure out something like bit torrent
Play dumb and incompetent to keep themselves in power over the people.
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I recall submitting a comment in the previous round. The system displays author information in separate fields from the text of the comment, which suggests that they are each stored as different data elements.
In that case, redacting that information would essentially be trivial. Granted, there might be a need to do some keyword searches in the comments for specific patterns (email addresses, phone #s) just in case somebody screwed up during entry, but that's nothing that a few dozen regular expressions can't handle...
In short, this sounds like complete and utter bullshit to me.
EDIT: as pointed out a few posts down, this is about complaints not comments (which are meant to be publicly available). That said, the logic outlined above should be broadly applicable to complaints as well.
In that case, redacting that information would essentially be trivial. Granted, there might be a need to do some keyword searches in the comments for specific patterns (email addresses, phone #s) just in case somebody screwed up during entry, but that's nothing that a few dozen regular expressions can't handle...
In short, this sounds like complete and utter bullshit to me.
EDIT: as pointed out a few posts down, this is about complaints not comments (which are meant to be publicly available). That said, the logic outlined above should be broadly applicable to complaints as well.
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Wasn't it public anyway? If I go to the local city council, and make comments, everyone can hear my name, my comments, and probably even have a video of it all.
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ubercurmudgeon
Ars Tribunus Militum
It seems two different things are being discussed here: comments and complaints. The former are opinions on the proposed rolling back of net neutrality regulations, which Pai is happy to dump online with full contact details. The latter are actual examples of alleged infractions of existing net neutrality rules, which Pai et al are withholding presumably because they prove the problems they contend doesn't exist actually do exist. But the conclusion is the same though: the swamp is being filled to overflowing with industrial effluent.
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I want to see someone pie Pai in the face. I would donate to any legal defense for that person.
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Yeah, this is about complaints rendered to FCC during the years that the current regulations were being enforced. As in, John Q. Public sending a complaint that his ISP is purposefully slowing down his Netflix service or whatever.
Not comments about the upcoming change in said rules.
Not comments about the upcoming change in said rules.
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Emphasis mine. While I'm highly confident in our technical ability to put people on the moon, our dysfunctional government gives me great pause. Could we really send people to the moon again without the planning and final decision being stuck in perpetual bureaucratic deadlock?
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Well, no, because there is no current requirement to build ICBMs. There was a military threat from Russia and an arms escalation that really pushed our space program then. Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about that.
For things that have political willpower, yes, the US can absolutely get it done.
We had trillions to hand out to banks, and trillions to spend killing people in Iraq and Afghanistan over a decade and a half. No problems there.
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Came here to say that exactly. If I had a penny for every inconsistency in how this administration applies policy, procedure, and logic I would have a nice little retirement fund.
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Pai, like Powell, has nothing to lose here, he is not accountable for his actions. he faces no penalties for lying, no sanctions for failure, absolutely nothing to hold him to facts, and the consequences of his actions. He will go from this job to a very high paying job in the industry and that's that.
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Yeah, that's a fair point about comments vs. complaints.
So if I go complain to the White House voter commission that they're a pack of idiots, I'm sure they'll keep all my contact info and complaints under wraps.
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Ha, that's brilliant. So all we have to do to bring attention to this is create a complaints on Twitter and use @realDonaldTrump and his ego will make sure it goes viral!
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None. He doesn't go to Russia, he goes to the NCTA and similar industry associations.
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The only hope now is to wait for a change of administration. Then Pai can take his *paid* retirement.
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I'll say this again, instead of constructive and well-reasoned argument against overturning NN let's just all send Mr. Pai a dollar bill because that's the language he speaks.
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well those 40,000 so called complaints make a compelling argument not to let the repeal move forward in court since he won't release them.
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How do they not have these responses stored in a SQL table, where they just can't do a select and return the results? Write a regex to remove out phone numbers, emails, and zipcodes (that should be stored in different fields anyway), and write to a csv.
Even if you need someone to review that completely by hand, 40k results at 10 seconds a review (you could just set ones with PI in the text aside) will take 3 interns just under a week to confirm. Even 1k results at 1 minute a review would take just over two days for one person. Just seems really lazy/obstructionist considering how long they've had.
It's also fairly mindbloggling that they don't have a script they can run for this already, it's not like it's a super weird request.
Even if you need someone to review that completely by hand, 40k results at 10 seconds a review (you could just set ones with PI in the text aside) will take 3 interns just under a week to confirm. Even 1k results at 1 minute a review would take just over two days for one person. Just seems really lazy/obstructionist considering how long they've had.
It's also fairly mindbloggling that they don't have a script they can run for this already, it's not like it's a super weird request.
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Actually, maybe that's the way the NN votes should have been filed? Public by default.
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However, following novel administrative procedures established by the White House, Pai would probably be happy to release the names and addresses of the complainants, so that interested parties can directly ask each of them for the exact text of their complaint.
Well, Comcast’s CFO said: “In terms of what actually happens (…) it's the fear of what Title II could have meant, more than what it actually did mean. (…) Hopefully that chilling effect is gone; both from how investors look at the space and businesses look at the space.” So, actually, it’s exactly the opposite of what Pai said: it is the strident opposition to Title II classification that was a response to “hypothetical harms and hysterical prophecies of doom”.
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Ask the Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to help. They'll get that info out the door so fast you won't know who hit you.
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Considering who our carriers are why would anyone believe that the complaints were resolved?
I have Comcast. I would never expect resolution from them, and they seem hell bent on never providing any - until specific problems get reported in the press. Those they respond to. All others, Hah! This is Comcast!
Find appropriate This is Sparta! gif.
I have Comcast. I would never expect resolution from them, and they seem hell bent on never providing any - until specific problems get reported in the press. Those they respond to. All others, Hah! This is Comcast!
Find appropriate This is Sparta! gif.
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Ah, the old Privacy Act chestnut.
Sorry, but I don't think redacting information that should have appeared in specific fields would be all that burdensome. Sounds like they've admitted to having the information in a form that makes conversion to Excel trivial, so CSV or whatever. From there, you just highlight the Name column and hit delete.
...and that's assuming there is a Privacy Act expectation in filling out information in order to make a public comment. This isn't a record of your trips into or out of the country, or your medical records. This is information you provided to a public entity for the purposes of public comment. I don't know that the Privacy Act applies.
And it seems like the Privacy Act is the only reason why they couldn't release the information in total. Its an easy fallback for FOIA-subject agencies that don't want to produce.
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This is what's referred to as becoming 'untouchable'. Once you obtain a sufficient amount of money/power, you no longer have to play by the rules established for everyone else (the little people), and you can retire into a guarded community where every problem you've caused can't come back to effect you.
And there is a significant percentage of the voting population who would love to join that club but are too stupid to realize that they will be forever locked out, yet they will vote for those inside the club over and over and over again.
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Hell, I'm pretty sure an incompetent programmer could do this. They're either hiding something on them, or they simply don't have them because "oops, we deleted all the bad complaints".
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Does that include drawn, quartered, put in the public square in stocks, then pied?
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To be fair, one has to agree that if nothing else is transparent (and there is nothing else in this agency since Pai was put in charge), his personal motives for doing what he's doing certainly are.
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