The language of the law clearly ends with internet service being an information service just as the bipartisan legislation dictated that the US government would take a light touch approach to regulating our internet access.

There should be no struggle here. The FCC's Open Internet Order was clearly in violation of the text of the law, and it's on the right side of the statute in fixing that error today.

Outlets like Ars Technica and Slashdot could do a better job of representing the stakes in this controversy. If we need to update the laws then we can push our representatives to do so, but to push the FCC to ignore the clear requirements of the law is the wrong way to go.

Saying the problem with UBI is how to pay for it is like saying the problem with my perpetual motion waterwheel is finding a way to get the water back uphill: it glosses over the most important point.

UBI would carry a cost to society. Maybe the people would be up for bearing that cost because the program's benefits outweigh the costs, and maybe they wouldn't. If they'd make that trade then Great! They'll be up for the taxes needed to pay for it, all transparently and reliably.

It seems to me this entire writeup is about ways of hiding the costs, though. It proposes all sorts of accounting schemes to make sure the costs stay off the books where the people won't have a say in it.

That's the wrong way to go about public policy. It's both opaque to the population and inefficient in its middlemen.

So focus on getting more people convinced that UBI is a worthwhile trade. Convince them to accept higher taxes to pay for it. And then let them write their checks honestly for the program they support.

It's simply false that Amazon didn't pay taxes.

As a public company, their balance sheet is made public, and it shows they paid hundreds of millions in taxes every year. You can read for yourself at the link below.

So Amazon paid taxes to governments, and the governments decide how to allocate those tax revenues around programs that help the people. That's the right way for this to work as that allows policy makers to do their best to design programs to best help those who need it while not laying a cost on those who can't afford to pay it.

These sensationalized stories don't do society any good.

Amazon filing: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/ph...

So we had observations where the temperatures weren't rising as fast as theories predicted.

When observations don't bear out predictions, science would have you look for a new theory. Bridenstine merely joined in with those pointing out that the data didn't agree with the theory, thus engaging in the scientific process.

Maybe the guy doesn't have a background in science, but then he's a bureaucrat running a department with a focus on aerospace engineering. Even so, he was promoting the scientific perspective with his stance.

Yes, there was a pause in temperature change that wasn't and still isn't completely explained. Researchers are employing different methods to try to make sense of it, studying both the data and the theories to see how they might be reconciled. It's anti-scientific to try to paper that over, especially in the course of personally attacking a politician.

The point of scientific journals is not to communicate findings to the public but to record findings and share them with other members of the scientific community.

The papers are full of jargon because that's the state of the discipline. And it's not a bad thing. The people reading the papers will be up to speed on the jargon, so that's just how it's most effectively communicated.

Journals just wouldn't work if every paper had to start with a multi-year course on the topic to get the reader up to speed. It's up to the reader to have the background needed to understand the paper.

That's not obsolete; it's cutting edge!

It need to be stressed that the FCC is an independent commission of the United States and is therefore not part of the administration.

It is not part of the executive branch, and so no president has authority over it. It's not in the executive branch chain of command.

This may sound like a minor detail, but I think it's worthwhile for us to insist that the FCC remain independent of the president as it was designed. No matter who is in the White House, the FCC was set up to prevent any president from having authority over the US communication systems.

If you read the report, it goes through times when it's including cell data and times when it's not. It also lays out exactly why it's making those two choices as required by the laws that tell the FCC what to do.

It's all spelled out in the report.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fapps.fcc.gov%2Fedocs_pub...

If you read the report it details the many ways the FCC is actually working to address those imbalances, as is required by law.

The chairman has been very active over the years in promoting things like funding for rural broadband. In fact he's been critical of the previous FCC for not spending more to address these issues.

I know it's not popular on slashdot to report these things as it doesn't fit the black and white narrative, but there is room for coming together behind some of these efforts.

Anyone interested in this topic needs to read the actual report. There the FCC goes through the numbers behind its conclusions and the legal requirements that it faces when going about its analysis.

But more importantly, the FCC report simply doesn't come to the conclusion that Slashdot reports here. In fact it explicitly says that there is more progress to be made, and that it was a lot more than Network Neutrality stuff going on last year.

The report is a fine report that we should be able to get behind, as it promotes efforts to expand Broadband to more people.

Missreporting like this is not helpful.

Here's a link to the report:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fapps.fcc.gov%2Fedocs_pub...

Firstly, The Open Internet Order of 2015 was itself illegal. It would be bizarre for Congress to insist that the FCC should do something that Congress bars the FCC from doing.

It would be Congress ordering someone to violate the law.

Secondly, the CRA requires joint resolutions to be passed like other legislation, with both houses of Congress and a signature of the president, or an override of his veto.

This is a particularly misinformative post, even considering how bad Slashdot reporting is these days.

But absence of proof is not proof of absence.

The OIG report didn't debunk the suspicion that Obama had undue influence on the FCC's processes. They simply didn't come across any proof of it in the email records kept by the FCC. They did, though, restate that Wheeler and the president had had conversations about topics like this.

So it still leaves unexplained the FCC's decision to make such a sudden break with longstanding, bipartisan, and legal consensus that the Internet shouldn't be regulated like this.

The FCC is an independent agency of the US government, not part of the executive branch, and so not part of the Trump administration.

This is a bright line that needs to be preserved. We don't want presidents to be able to order the FCC to act, especially the current one. And Obama's pressure on the FCC to regulate the internet was part of the history that got us in this mess in the first place.

Anyway, The Hill had a level-headed and short description of the action here. It was really nice to get a break from sensationalized--and factually off--articles screaming about the world coming to an end.

See it here: http://thehill.com/opinion/tec...

I'd say their language suggests otherwise, even here where they suggest stolen identities would have interfered with the FCC rulemaking process. By law it would not.

So maybe I'm misinterpreting NY's comments. Fine, but let's just be clear that investigation of stolen identities is one thing, but it doesn't affect the rulemaking itself.

"It's easy for the FCC to claim that there's no problem with the process, when they're hiding the very information that would allow us to determine if there was a problem."

The reason there's no problem with the process here is that the information at hand has nothing at all to do with the process.

NY State is suggesting otherwise, contrary to the Administrative Procedure Act.

The FCC is pointing out the rules under which it's legally obligated to operate.

This notice and comment procedure is specified in law, and the FCC cannot legally deviate from it. Under the law, neither numbers of comments nor identities of commenters really matter. A regulatory body is required to address concerns raised in comments as they make their rules, but it doesn't matter who is bringing those concerns so long as they're addressed.

The FCC is merely pointing out that there is a legal process here, and the NY State suit isn't exactly in line with the federal law.

YES, there have been so many articles going around the internet that suggest this is some sort of voting process, that sending in form comments matter, but legally they do not. The FCC gets its orders from Congress, not from people submitting comments on the internet. Those articles were pretty damaging, misleading people about how this part of the US government is designed to operate, and leading them to misunderstand when things don't actually go the way they're told they should go.

So we're at a place where we need to correct that misinformation. People who are interested in the functioning of a body like the FCC now need to know just how the notice and comment process works.

By law numbers and identities don't matter for notice and comment, exactly as the FCC is pointing out. NY State should probably stop joining in on that rhetorical bandwagon suggesting otherwise.