Despite millions of comments — many of them faked — a lawsuit and calls from the New York state attorney general, more than two dozen senators and more than 50 mayors for a delay or reversal, the Federal Communications Commission seems fixed on Thursday for its vote on repealing net neutrality rules, expected to pass.
The issue generated almost 23 million public comments, shattering previous records for comments on a government policy issue. A study by Pew Research called into question millions of comments, as researchers identified bots that could be used to generate fake comments. Bloomberg reported Russian sources for hundreds of thousands of comments.
Millions of comments included the same messages — probably from form letters from organizations on both sides, although of the top seven most-repeated messages, six included anti-net neutrality sentiment. The failure of an FCC scheme to verify email addresses caused the researchers to despair of using comments to determine the majority’s view on the issue of whether internet service providers can discriminate on the treatment of content online by controlling bandwidth speeds.
"As public opinion researchers, we found it a little bit hard to really make sense of the public’s opinion on this issue," says Aaron Smith, one of the authors of the study.
Rep. Sean Maloney, a Democrat who represents the Hudson Valley of New York has introduced a bill in Congress to prevent the FCC from striking down net neutrality rules.
But the FCC refused to turn over documents about the decision when asked by the New York attorney general who wanted to investigate the process.
Some starry-eyed futurists thought the Internet could bring about real democracy because citizens could tell the government their thoughts on every issue. But with scammers, special-interest groups, bots and even foreign governments, it seems a hope for the internet that will not be realized.
Old, but still thrusting. The Voyager 1 spacecraft successfully fired up thrusters after 37 years without use, NASA said. Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is the only human-made object in interstellar space, the environment between the stars. The unused thrusters were needed to turn the spacecraft toward earth so it can communicate. The thrusters designed for that degraded.
Shazam, you’re Apple. Apple confirmed it has acquired Shazam, the popular app that lets people identify any song, for $400 million. After listening to an audio clip, Shazam takes you to web content relevant to that song.
Jiminy cricket. Microsoft has announced a major renovation of its Redmond, Washington, campus that will take seven years to complete, ZDnet reported. The new campus will have a two-acre open plaza that can host 12,000 people, retail space, new jogging and walking trails, two soccer fields, a cricket field, and its own light rail station. The cricket field is for the firm’s many employees from India and other cricket-playing nations, including CEO Satya Nadella.
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