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Re:Prominent D.C. media firm implicated in fake FCC comments by rayiner on Sunday February 24, 2019 @05:13PM (#19240959)
Say you’re asked to head a team to build an operating system kernel. You will use your expert judgment, and that will include not just facts and data, but your philosophy. Agile or waterfall? Micro kernel or monolithic kernel? The decisions are not going to be a neutral function of the facts on the ground, but your overall philosophy. But you probably wouldn’t base those decisions on polling the general public!
Re:Prominent D.C. media firm implicated in fake FCC comments by snowwrestler on Sunday February 24, 2019 @05:51PM (#19241168)
Building an operating system kernel is not anything like setting public policy. Anyway, I'm not saying how things "should" be, I'm relating how regulatory policymaking actually works. Not that it's driven by public opinion, but that powerful participants are aware of its impact on public opinion.

Again: if that wasn't true, then why did people who supported the FCC rulemaking bother to pump in a ton of fake supportive comments? Why did people at the FCC try to cover up that that happened?

Re:Prominent D.C. media firm implicated in fake FCC comments by rayiner on Sunday February 24, 2019 @06:21PM (#19241310)
> Building an operating system kernel is not anything like setting public policy.

It absolutely is. You’re designing a complex and highly coupled system within a framework of rules and constraints. In the case of regulation, the rules and constraints come from economics, while in the case of operating systems they come from computer science. In both situations, there are no known optimal solutions—nobody has designed a mathematically optimal way regulate electricity prices, much less structure an electricity market, just like nobody has designed a mathematically optimal way to manage memory, much less structure a kernel. Thus, a lot of judgment and heuristics and trade offs are involved at every level, and the exercise of that judgment is going to depend heavily on personal philosophies. Margaret Thatcher approaches regulation very differently than Franklin Roosevelt, just as Linus Torvalds approaches operating system kernels very differently than Andrew Tanenbaum. If you hire Tanenbaum versus Torvalds to design you an OS kernel, you can expect a very different result, based on their expert judgment.

Unfortunately, a lot of people think of regulation as just picking from a menu of policy choices, and fail to realize that what you’re really doing is designing economic systems and markets.

Re:Prominent D.C. media firm implicated in fake FCC comments by snowwrestler on Monday February 25, 2019 @01:55AM (#19243598)
> Unfortunately, a lot of people think of regulation as just picking from a menu of policy choices, and fail to realize that what you’re really doing is designing economic systems and markets.

A lot of these people vote and donate to candidates! Some even get elected to office. Therefore you cannot dismiss their impact on the regulatory process, even if you would like to.

Because it is ultimately the political process that determines which people--which personal philosophies--will have the resources and power to make regulations.