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from the public-servants-not-serving-the-public dept.
Common Dreams reports
Last Week Tonight host John Oliver on [May 7] issued another powerful rallying cry to save net neutrality protections, and, repeating the outcome of his 2014 plea, his viewers flooded the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) site, causing it to temporarily crash.
[...] Oliver said it's worth noting that [FCC Chairman Ajit] Pai is "a former lawyer for Verizon", a company which "won a lawsuit which meant that if the FCC wanted strong, enforceable protection, its only real option was to reclassify the ISPs, and yet he cheerily insists under questioning that there is just not evidence that cable companies were engaging in rampant wrongdoing".
"Title II is the most solid legal foundation we have right now for a strong, enforceable net neutrality protections", Oliver said, and urged "we, the people, [to] take this matter into our own hands".
To that end, Last Week Tonight bought the domain name gofccyourself.com, which redirects users to the official FCC page[1] where open internet advocates can leave a comment and call for these protections to remain in place. (Oliver notes that it simplifies the commenting process the FCC "has made more difficult since three years ago".)
"Everyone needs to get involved. Comment now, and then maybe comment again when the FCC makes its proposal official. Even call you representative and your senators", Oliver urged.
So successful was the start of his campaign, according to Motherboard, that there was such a high volume of traffic flooding the Federal Communications Commission that the site temporarily went down. As of this writing, it is up and running again.
[1] The fcc.gov page is almost entirely behind scripts.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Tuesday May 09 2017, @05:16PM (2 children)
Of course, it's not controlling thoughts that is their main goal.
It's robbing us fucking blind by deregulating in a way that's designed to kill the very competition they think makes free-market approaches to problems great in the first place.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 09 2017, @06:25PM (1 child)
they don't believe in competition. they are crony capitalists. just because they talk about free markets to lie to their base doesn't mean anything.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday May 10 2017, @11:15PM
No, free markets are *exactly* what they want, and they want it *because* they don't believe in competition. That's the whole point of all this deregulation, in every single market from net neutrality to mortgages. These massive corporations already own the market. They can easily crush any competitors -- they already produce at a larger scale, which often gives greater efficiency, meaning lower prices. If that doesn't work, they have enough cash in the bank and diversity of products that they can sell at a loss for a while. If that doesn't work they can sign exclusivity deal with retailers to lock the competitors out of the market. Or they can just buy the competitor. Or they spend some of those cash reserves to do real R&D until they're back on top (which would certainly be a nice change if they ever got that desperate...) Or they can try to eliminate the market entirely (like M$ did to browsers by bundling IE.) There's a lot of regulations preventing them from doing all of that. They want those regulations gone.
TL;DR: They do honestly want free markets, they just define "free" as the freedom to rape and pillage and murder.