The FCC Is a Symbol for a Corrupt, Broken American Government
The FCC somehow publicly lost public
comments on a petition they were mandated to create. It might not matter,
anyway. Telecoms are outlobbying net neutrality advocates 3:1. That's all that
matters in all of American government. But due to one provision, the FCC was at
least forced to talk about it.
In April, FCC Chairman Tom
Wheeler proposed a new rule that would
allow for corporations to discriminate against certain kinds of speech on the
web. By rule, the commission put the proposal up for public comment.
Yesterday, the FCC's website
somehow lost public access to signatures and public comments
for a petition to stop it.
Today, the commission said
it was vowing to give those people a chance to file again.
The FCC is extending the
deadline for initial public comments on Chairman Tom Wheeler's controversial
net neutrality proposal because of trouble with the commission's online comment
system, the agency announced Tuesday. The deadline was set for midnight.
The spokeswoman also
politely asked everyone to "please be assured that the commission ... is
committed to making sure that everyone trying to submit comments will have
their views entered into the record."
The record — if they can
keep the website up and running — will show that almost all of the comments are
against the new rules, which shouldn't be a surprise. As former FCC
Commissioner Robert M. McDowell pointed out
today, consumers stand to gain nothing by having increased FCC
oversight of the internet.
On the other end of the
influence game, telecoms lobbying for the new rules are outspending their opponents
3 to 1. So you know they stand to gain something.
What does that mean? It
means the FCC will have to take a side. Either it will allow Internet providers
like Comcast and Verizon to discriminate traffic and speech based on their own
private interests. Or it will say that this proposal ended up being wildly
unpopular and not worth pushing through for the sake of that founding idea that
this is a government doing things in Our Name.
Since Chairman Wheeler
proposed the rule, however, and since
money is power in Washington, we would be wise to prepare for the worst. Is
Comcast feuding with Netflix? Under the new rules, Netflix speeds will be
slower. Is a website publishing an unpopular opinion about Comcast's ties to
the FCC—like a customer service
call from Hell, or that its chief lobbyist
used to be an FCC Commissioner? Fine, slow traffic to that website
or its web host to a crawl.
Want assurances this won't
happen? You can't have any. There is no law for it or provision for it,
just Wheeler's word
on it. Feel slightly better, until you remember that Wheeler is the
former head of America's
biggest telecom lobby.
You may want to switch
providers in protest? It's likely you can't—the new Time Warner Cable/Comcast
merger would account for 30 percent of cable and Internet subscribers in the
U.S., for example—and it's also likely that help will not be
on the way.
One question frequently
comes out of this: Why
are we supposed to care about this? Why does the Internet matter so much?
That's the issue: It
doesn't. The speed of your Internet—as long as you're receiving it—doesn't
really matter. That's not what matters. What matters is that there is a
protected class at the top that has won immunity and permanent wealth and power
by turning its influence into money and jobs and kickbacks and cheating the
average consumer in the process. The Chairman of the FCC is the former head of
the cable lobby. The head of lobbying at Comcast is a former FCC
Commissioner.
America was invited to see
the inner workings of how greed has taken over Washington very nearly by
accident—an old bylaw mandates that the FCC hold a period for
public comment that lasts at least 30 days. Now, the way government
works is on display for everyone to see. The only difference between this case
and all of the other ones that would be just as upsetting is that one
procedural rule and the public's dissatisfaction with buffering on Netflix
forced Americans to pay attention.
We stood up and screamed
because we finally got to see, by mistake, the raw deal it was getting. Now we
will find out if the untouchable America is too big and powerful to even hear
them.
Note: The article initially
reported a loss of a half-million public comments, as reported in this Reddit
thread and corroborated by
the Wayback Machine. The FCC says the comments were only lost from view
publicly and temporarily in the Commission's blog post.
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