The thing is, "the ballot box" you refer to was just a way for random people on the internet to submit comments. It isn't intended, I think, as a way to guide policy. I expect that they switched to web-based commentary because, historically, they've accepted letters and the web-forms are just an "upgrade". Who's going to hire staff to open, read and respond to letters these days?
These fake "grassroots" operatives merely abused the web-commentary system in order to keep the FCC leadership (and Republicans) from being completely humiliated by the sheer number of people in favor of net neutrality. Turns out, they got sloppy and went a bit overboard.
What is really disturbing, however, is that the company named, "CQ" is in the business of automating "campaigns" with software and data analysis. To them, it doesn't matter WHAT the campaign actually is as long as they get a paying customer-- smears and disinformation is just another day of work for them.
There's so many layers of slime here, it's hard to know where to start.
> It isn't intended, I think, as a way to guide policy.
Public comment is explicitly intended to guide policy. It’s not a vote but the entire point of the process is to get feedback before a policy is finalized and most agencies attempt to address common points.
It’s reasonable to question the inherent assumption of good faith with the current administration but we’re also in an unusual time where the most cynical view of previous administrations are now the smart money view of how things work.
Public comment is meant to surface arguments to be taken into account to guide policy. As such, having 1 or 10 million people make the exact same argument in the same words doesn't change anything.
This is only true in the most simple cases. If there’s any portion of a proposed policy which is balancing different interests - which is almost always the case - the ratio of comments is a useful metric because it would surface problems such as e.g. a policy which big companies are comfortable with but hit many small ones with substantial compliance overhead.
In this case, having tons of AstroTurf comments allows them to say that there’s public support outside of large ISPs. Given how anticompetitive the decision was, they needed that fig leaf.
No agency would be on firm footing pointing to a large number of identical form comments received for one side as a factor in a balancing of interests. It would not survive the “reasoned decision making” requirement. To the extent you’re talking about balancing the needs of small and large companies, for example, you’d have to point to concrete examples and data. That could come in comments (small businesses talking about real challenges they’ve faced), but relying on a large number of identical form comments wouldn’t pass muster.
If you assume good faith, yes. In the environment they were in where they knew that oversight was in friendly hands, however, I think they were just looking for enough to say the process was followed knowing that it’d be done before it’d get any critical examination.
Exactly. This is why the continued focus on "fake comments" in this process is so tiring... They didn't mean anything to begin with. Just as the comments opposing net neutrality didn't matter either. The FCC does not pass regulations by open voting and never did.
I suspect this incident demonstrates the scope of disinformation campaigns and the industry that enables them.
It is totally possible that cramming a couple million fake comments into the FCC was done solely for the purpose providing a politician a "talking point" in favor of getting rid of net neutrality.
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 and restore the bipartisan light-touch regulatory consensus that enabled the internet to flourish for more than 20 years. The plan currently under consideration at the FCC to repeal Obama's Title II power grab is a positive step forward and will help to promote a truly free and open internet for everyone.
That's how I think when relatively complex programs I've written blow up (blow up = user term for job failing). I expect them to blow up during testing. The errors are then corrected and the code is also reviewed to determine how the error slipped by to begin with. If the programs work without any noticeable errors, the code review does not happen and there's a much greater likelihood of subtle errors slipping into production.
With most these student loans the government guarantees the lender will get their money back, even if the loan is defaulted. Thus, the proliferation of bad loans as there's no risk to the lender.
Yes, you've hit the crux of the issue. The money lended has essentially no risk to the lender (assuming the US govt doesn't collapse). And schools can charge as much as they want. So since loans are riskless, anyone can get one, so schools just charge a bunch because, why not, why not have seventeen overpaid deans and a new recreation facility? The people who lose are the borrowers.
It was a long time ago, and I can't find anything to corroborate this on internet searches, but:
Didn't Borland attempt to charge for the use of a c runtime module? They attempted to profit from software developed using their c compiler. So, not only would they make money selling the compiler, but anyone that used programs written with their compiler would have to pay also.
Somewhere around that time, they lost the whole c compiler market, I think.
Not sure if it's the same thing you're talking about, but waaay back they did a license change for their language products that said something along the lines of anything produced with their compilers belonged to them. There was a huge outcry and pretty much right away they said "oops! our lawyers got a bit happy" and fixed it. I don't recall exactly when that was. Their Pascal was "Borland Pascal" at the time. I think that was an honest mistake, as I doubt anyone there at the time would have thought they'd get away with that.
There was a similar catastrophe at Jewel osco stores many years ago. Nightly, items added to the store pos were merged back with the main item file at each store location. The format of the merged data was exactly the same as loading a new file, except the first statement would be /EDIT instead of /LOAD.
One of the programmers decided to eliminate some code by combining the two functions, with a switch to control whether /LOAD or /EDIT was used for the first statement.
There was a bug in the program, and the edits were sent down as loads.
A guy I knew, Barry, was the main operator that night. He started getting calls from the stores after around 10 of them had been reloaded with 5 or 6 items.
Barry said it was the first time he got to meet the president of the company that day.
- Argument positions are named, help text, validity checking, special values, etc are defined for each argument.
- Command arguments can be prompted within the editor (intellisense).
As400 commands can also be prompted and executed by a user, thus providing a common user interface for running jobs as well.
I've seen nothing like this in the PC world. The two issues the Keli language is trying to solve were addressed 30 years ago on the as400.