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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, @01:08AM
Are such integral parts of a Lawyer's workflow.
You know why? Because the government isn't required to annotate the laws with court cases which affect the interpretation of the laws, or amend the laws to more clearly reflect the law as determined by said court cases.
Furthermore the cases themselves do not have to be made available by the government in a publicly searchable form, unlike, depending on the state, the legal code. The result of this is that even having read the law as written, you might run afoul of laws which no rational being would interpret in the court interpreted manner without having read the defining court cases for a particular law.
As an example, I was tried with a 23109(c) a number of years ago. Said law explained as 'anything not covered in (a) (b) or other sections'. What wasn't defined ANYWHERE in the law was what that entailed. Apparently police interpreted tires squealing is enough for them to ticket you for it, a misdemeanor. So anyone in the state of California driving a pickup in wet weather whose tires squeal, lose traction, etc can be ticketed for a misdeameanor if a cop is present and needs to fill their quota, or just doesn't like you.
The irony of all this is that America was in part founded to get away from the baroque legal system that Britain had, which gave inordinate powers to the crowns equivalent of the judges, prosecutors and police, and yet 250 years later here we are with the same sort of opaque laws, arbitrary enforcement, and tipped scales being used against people, especially the poor, middle class, and weak again.
Perhaps it is time for lady liberty to throw down her scales and take up her sword once again...