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With days to go before his repeal of net neutrality rules, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai issued a press release about five small ISPs that he says were harmed by the rules. Pai "held a series of telephone calls with small Internet service providers across the country—from Oklahoma to Ohio, from Montana to Minnesota," his press release said.
[...] But Pai's announcement offered no data to support this assertion. So advocacy group Free Press looked at the FCC's broadband deployment data for these companies and found that four of them had expanded into new territory. The fifth didn't expand into new areas but it did start offering gigabit Internet service.
[...] According to the ISPs' ex parte filings, the only FCC staffers who participated in Pai's meetings with the ISPs were his spokespeople. The absence of staffers involved in research or policy, combined with the timing of the calls and Pai's press release, suggest that "these meetings occurred for the sake of managing public appearances rather than obtaining meaningful record evidence," Wood wrote.
Source: Ajit Pai offers no data for latest claim that net neutrality hurt small ISPs
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @12:52AM
Trekkies, etc.
Each group once popular has been productized, pandered to the lowest demographic and then genericized until its original niche was diluted past the point of having any meaning whatsoever.
The real reason there are so many names for so many groups is because of dilution happening as groups become popular and people who have no right to call themselves by that name claiming it for themselves and redefining it until it has no meaning.
This can be thought of as the intellectual equivalent of the Land Grab. Americans taking over from Native Americans and as a result devaluing what it meant to be 'Native American'. Now that means you were born here, as opposed to your ancestors for 20+ generations lived in these regions, for instance. Other examples can be found in Japan, China, regions of Africa, etc. Hell even the Jewish/Palestinian conflict.
The same thing happens to words as happens to territory, creative thought, and intellectual property, it gets redefined bit by bit until someone else can claim it as theirs. A death by a thousand cuts if you will. A thousand cuts of morons occasionally lead by one or two malicious and brilliant individuals, but more often by a writhing mass of idiots or morons.