This is part of the independent agency problem in our scheme of governance. The better system would be for the elected legislature to actually write regulations. That's representative democracy rather than democracy but closer to accountability.
People with backgrounds in science and engineering can't run for Congress?
For the most part the regulatory agencies don't have the expertise either. It is almost all political in every country where I have ever lived, and most EU tech regulations is also absolute garbage.
Your proposal is to give congress the authority to write regulations without independent agencies. I got news for you, congress already has that power! They created the agencies because they recognized their limitations when it comes to creating regulations that require technical expertise and/or detailed particulars.
Congress can also pass a law nullifying ANY existing agency regulations or, in the extreme, dissolving the agency. If a regulatory agency interprets a law one way, congress can pass a law saying that isn’t what we meant, stop doing that, do it this way instead.
This is perfect accountability. If congress can’t do those things, how do you expect them to write effective regulation? What more do you want?
It's already something that has been legally contentious, overturning it has textualist support, and the textualists justices are also broadly Republican who want a weakened federal government.
[1] I mean not really perfect since they have to pass legislation to make those changes and it's easier to block legislation than to pass it. So a minority party in congress with presidential support can (and has) wielded undue legislative power.
Can you say more about this? It sounds very interesting.
In Chevron, the Supreme Court set forth a legal test as to when the court should defer to the agency’s answer or interpretation, holding that such judicial deference is appropriate where the agency’s answer was not unreasonable, so long as Congress had not spoken directly to the precise issue at question.
This is the SCOTUS ruling that gave administration so much power in 1984, so it's relatively new. The validity of it is currently being heard in:
https://cooleypubco.com/2023/05/11/chevron-deference-case-fi...
I hope it goes away.
It is strange that textualism or republicanism is associated with small/weak government. That reputation is unearned imo.
To wit, the independent agency stuff is about who can do what, not what can be done. It is not, in any way, a meaningful limitation on the powers of the government as a whole, just a change to the distribution of where those powers lie.
Nope. My proposal is that they must write the regulations or at least vote on them. You should be able to look at every single regulation and know whether your representative voted for it or against it. All regulation should be folded into the law and subject to vote.
Your proposal is to task congress with thousands of detailed decisions requiring deep and detailed knowledge of many areas. There is no way that could work better.
Congress turns over every two years. They can’t even authorize spending for the the things they have explicitly spent money on. Even if your congress person voted a specific way on a regulation what would it tell you? They would have thousands of such votes a year without enough information. The votes would quickly become bribe based.
An independent agency is simply an entity congress has created and authorized to interpret the details of legislation. Those interpretations are called regulations. They cannot just do whatever they want, there are many constraints. There is a process for making regs (including public comment). The interpretations are reviewable by courts. Congress can also address them.
This is definitely not a perfect system and I am sure there are better ones but it seems decent enough.
So yes they used the comments to justify their decision, but calling it a "wholesale manipulation of our democracy" is an overstatement as the decision never required democratic consensus.
… no?
> The proceeding generated a record-breaking number of comments — more than 22 million — and nearly 18 million were fake, the attorney general’s office found.
81% of the comments were astroturf.
It's the article-within-the-article, linked to at "second series of agreements secured".
>One of the first studies performed after the closure of the public commenting period, done on behalf of Broadband for America, which sought to repeal the Obama-era rules, found that 60% of the comments were in favor of retaining the current rules..
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Individual_Freedo...
Bad people get away with everything...
The companies generating fake comments were likely doing so precisely to ensure this federal law did not become an issue. The thing that really annoys me about this stuff is not the outcome - the comments in favor of net neutrality were change.org caliber spam for the most part, and so the FCC had every reasonable right to ignore them.
It's that these companies did absolutely engage in a conspiracy to "sidestep" federal law, and did so by engaging in defacto identify theft on a massive scale. Conspiracy, a few hundred thousand charges of identity theft, fraud, and more? If an individual did this, they'd be looking at jail for the rest of their life. But these companies do it, and things like this don't even classify as a slap on the wrist. Our legal system is just completely and utterly dysfunctional when it comes to companies.
Corporations not only have personhood, but super personhood. They not only get all the rights and privileges of individuals, but seeming immunity from the law, as long as they earn enough money. And it's not only the inequity that bothers me, but the fact that this is clearly and overtly encouraging ever more awful behavior from corporations. Because they have no ethics, and they face no consequences of note. So why not?
Just to be clear, it sounds like here you are talking about the comments other than the one discussed in the article?
You are saying that the responses in favour of net neutrality (the ones which were proposing to keep the bylaws) were also astroturfed?
Or are you saying that they were somehow low in quality in your opinion but still coming from real humans?
How do you know this?
People just treated it like an anonymous opt-in opinion poll, and the results are pretty much what you'd expect. Some copy paste, a vast amount of low content stuff, and then some very low content stuff.
This reads like "after listening to the people, they can explain why what they're doing is necessary and ignore their complaints.
I'm not arguing what was done wasn't scummy, I don't see it as manipulating democracy.
The FCC is not a democracy. Net neutrality needed to be a law.
Net neutrality is not law. There are valid arguments to be made against it - like with your cell plan, everyone can or perhaps should, pay for the bytes they use, and how much infrastructure (CPU) those bytes use to get delivered fast. There are also arguments for net neutrality.
But as with any agency, and agency is not a direct democracy. What if people in urban centers decided for the country that property tax should be based on acres of land? All of a sudden living on a cheap farm costs millions in taxes. But most people are in the city, so they outvote the farmers.
So we don't have a direct democracy for most things.
The solution is not law. Making up a thousand laws for every little thing is that government overreach you speak of. Repealing laws is literally the opposite of overreach.
What we need is more competition, so I as a user will pick the ISP that does not slow down traffic for me to sites I want to visit, instead of choosing between people who want to screw me with vs without lube.
Countries like France did it right. Cables go through public land, towers are on public land, radio frequencies are public. A company can't buy that.
So they put in cables and any company that wants can rent them, but never buy them. That's why in France, I had GbE at my house for 8EUR/month, with a free router, a decade ago, and cumblast here charges me $50/month for 50Mb/s today. Choice and competition. Capitalism.
The big question that net neutrality answers is which of the two communicating parties is “using” the bytes: The end user. Of course users should pay for the cost of the resources they use; otherwise, the connection provider would quickly become insolvent, and nobody wants that.
But users shouldn’t need to know the internal business practices of their connection provider in order to understand their billing. Instead, net neutrality says that the provider cannot charge different rates for different destinations; it’s their responsibility to amortize their variable costs into some kind of destination-agnostic price structure for consumers. This is basic risk pooling, where the actor in position to affect the costs (via infrastructure changes) is required to shoulder the pricing risk of their own actions.
Indeed.
> So we don't have a direct democracy for most things
Yes
> The solution is not law
I think no, in this case. Just as I don't want to have to buy a washing machine that only works with my water company, I don't want to have to buy the right internet to go to the sites I want to go to. Internet delivery, like water delivery, should be provided and priced independently of what it is used to do.
I agree, but once ISPs start dealing with expensive contracts to get preferential treatment we’ve already lost. No amount of competition will stop the oligarchs from consolidating even more power if NN is not put into law.
Imagine this scenario, national push to make Internet a utility, incredibly successful. Without NN, the new play for ISPs is to create exclusivity deals & priority packages with websites for access, not just segmenting the web but making it harder for smaller ISPs to compete with un-prioritized speeds to the websites everyone wants.
Choice and competition is important, but choice can only exist in a fair market. And NN is, in my opinion, the next step after turning the Internet into a utility.