Why Are The People Who Whined About Wheeler's Net Neutrality Rules Being '400 Pages' Silent About Pai's Being '539 Pages'
from the because-they're-fucking-hypocrites dept
Mike Wendy is an interesting guy. He's ever present on Twitter attacking pretty much anyone who is in favor of net neutrality and has a bit of a following. In his day job, he operates something called "Media Freedom" which is one of an astoundingly long list of astroturf operations parroting telco interests (nearly all of Wendy's prior career was spent working for telco industry groups). Over the last two years, Wendy has been one of the most vocal attackers of the Tom Wheeler's net neutrality rules -- and he had a pretty strong go to line about just how much of a "regulatory" burden the rules were. Let me see if I can find it... Oh, right.
Yes, as Wendy's repetition was designed to point out, over and over again, those old rules simply must be extra burdensome, because it's 400 pages and over 1700 footnotes. Of course, that's bullshit, and Wendy knows its bullshit -- but he wanted to misrepresent the rules and make them seem like a giant regulatory burden. The actual rules were just 8 pages. There were 392 other pages of legally required information including discussions of the various public comments and the various statements from the Commissioners, including lengthy dissent statements from the disagreeing commissioners. In the Wheeler ruling, Ajit Pai's dissent took up 64 pages and Michael O'Rielly's was another 15 pages. Yet, somehow, Wendy and others didn't bother letting people know that 89 pages of the 400 pages were explaining why the rules were (apparently) bad.
When the draft rules came out, at 210 pages, I wondered why Wendy and others were suddenly silent on the page length.
Last week, as you may have heard, Pai's actual final rules were released... and the full document weighs in at 539 pages. Again, those are not the actual rules. Those are just the rules, the legally required (and very detailed) explanation of the rules and all the Commissioners' statements. And guess who's suddenly angry about people misrepresenting why the new document is so long? Why, it's our old buddy, Mike Wendy:
Wendy is correct that a big chunk of the new document is Clyburn's appendix, which are Wheeler's original order (including all the required explanatory text), but remember, Wendy didn't bother to discount similar text appended to Wheeler's order at all. Instead, he used it repeatedly to falsely imply that the rules were a complicated 400 pages of burdensome regulations. Remember "400 pages, 1777 footnotes of "simple" Title II. Sure, Kev" from Wendy? But now, suddenly, it's nitpick, nitpick, nitpick about which parts are in favor and which parts are dissent. Fascinating.
To be fair, Fight for the Future similarly should not be playing up the "539 pages" for the same reasons that Wendy and other anti-neutrality folks shouldn't have played up the 400 pages. But at least unlike Wendy and others, Fight for the Future is just complaining about how bad the new rules are, not suggesting totally incorrectly, that the (false and misleading) length of the rules is somehow an indication of how "burdensome" and "complicated" the rules are.
Again, it's fine to make arguments about the actual rules (8 pages in the Wheeler order and 2 pages in the Pai order), but it should be quite clear that those who actually understand this stuff (like, say, someone who's worked in the telco policy space for decades) should acknowledge that they were absolutely full of shit in repeatedly arguing that the Wheeler rules were 400 pages. Or, if they're not willing to admit that, then why aren't they similarly complaining about the "539 pages" of the Pai "rules"? Maybe -- and I'm just spitballing here -- it's because they're total hypocrites who were happy to misrepresent the length of the rules when they didn't like them, but are now going to nitpick the specifics because using their very same argument against them would, I don't know, make them look ridiculous?
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Filed Under: ajit pai, fcc, mike wendy, net neutrality, rules
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How does this guy get compensated?
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Re: How does this guy get compensated?
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Re: Re: How does this guy get compensated?
There, fixed it for you.
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IOKIYAR
See also...
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No, the definition of political discussion today is [the unholy sounds of the damned emanate from your nearest local hellmouth].
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Fire and Fury has been released as an audio book?
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Yet again complaining about obscure persons complaining or not complaining about length of the rules?
I take the comment above on lack of creativity as pointed at Masnick, not his target. I think Masnick just forgot he'd already gone with this once. -- At least, I hope forgot. If he actually thinks this stupid premise is worth repeating...
Is this rather Freudian fixation on length ALL that you can come up with in this complex area? -- I guess it's technically better than your imagining FUD, but doubt will please those alleged 27 Bangladeshi who view the site every day!
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Re: Yet again complaining about obscure persons complaining or not complaining about length of the rules?
DMCAed.
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Re: Yet again complaining about obscure persons complaining or not complaining about length of the rules?
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Wendy and others: There are just way too many pages, this thing is absolutely insane! 400 pages?! Come on, that's ridiculous!
It's actually just 8, the rest are explanations, the dissents, stuff like that. The size of the thing isn't a good metric for how bad it is.
Wendy and others: 400 pages!
**
Fight for the Future: This thing is 539 pages! This is ridiculous!
Wendy: Well you see, most of that is legally required stuff, and really, basing outrage on page count? What kind of buffoon does that?
Funny how that works, though it does make his glaring hypocrisy crystal clear.
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Re: Re: Yet again complaining about obscure persons complaining or not complaining about length of the rules?
Please remember to get out_of_the_blue's permission before writing anything in the future. Don't make him have to come here and call you out again.
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Re: Yet again complaining about obscure persons complaining or not complaining about length of the rules?
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Re: Re: Re: Yet again complaining about obscure persons complaining or not complaining about length of the rules?
Nothing will please this lunatic. Report and move on.
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Re: Yet again complaining about obscure persons complaining or not complaining about length of the rules?
... waaaaait a minute.
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Re: Yet again complaining about obscure persons complaining or not complaining about length of the rules?
Is that better or worse than obscure idiots who refuse to be named complaining about what obscure (according to them) persons are complaining about?
"those alleged 27 Bangladeshi"
Alleged by who? If you think there's only 27 people viewing this site, why are you so obsessed with commenting here?
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But when I have to read through legalese, as an end user, to try to figure out what access and do/don't have, no one seems to care about us getting bogged down in paper. And we are far less equipped to handle it than mega-corps with legal departments (or should I get all bootstrappy and figure out legal documents for myself?).
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Hypocrisy is An Accepted Tactic
The real problem is how ready people are to accept this hypocrisy when it is in their favor. I'm not outraged at the hypocrisy. I'm outraged at the lack of bipartisan outrage over any hypocrisy.
There's so many layers to this onion. No wonder I'm always crying.
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I was thinking more Lovecraft by way of Fox News.
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Re: Yet again complaining about obscure persons complaining or not complaining about length of the rules?
I think Masnick just forgot he'd already gone with this once.
Reading is not your strong suit. I refer to and link to the earlier article in the post. The reason I wrote another one was because the length of the final order is noticeably even longer than the original one, and since most people (you excepted!) are interested in seeing the hypocrisy at play, it was worth discussing.
But I'm so glad that you're paying such careful attention. What would we do with your constant trolling?
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Re: How does this guy get compensated?
Once you are more than 2 degrees away from something, the American public are trained like rats to call any linkage back a 'conspiracy theory'
And even 1 degree away doesn't really matter anymore.
We don't live in a Republic anymore, we live in a Corporate Monarchy.
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Bzzztttt....
Because there wasn't any. Attaching all 308 pages of a prior order in a commissioner's comment was bizarre and unprecedented.
But I'm sure Silicon Valley is pleased by the misdirection.
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(dumbass)
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Re: Re: Re: Re: How does this guy get compensated?
Cool, verifiable evidence was always one of the things that got this idiocy labelled as conspiracy theory. I'd be interested in reading the documented reliable proof you're basing your claim upon, once you link it!
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: How does this guy get compensated?
Aside from just wikileaks, we have numerous actual protest handouts and instructions given to paid protestor.This is from the group "Friends of Democracy" another Soros this time, his son's, group....
https://imgur.com/a/aJ2JP
In it we see the usual tactics:
- protesters are splpit in groups and roles to play. In other words "peaceful" protesters don't mix with the strange other group who mysteriously turned violent for no reason. (lol) ...so in this manny we the usual post-protest interview, where these a-holes claim they were there peacefully protesting, when all of a sudden, this mysterious other group came along and it turned violent.
- there are approved corridors and areas where the 'violent' protesters are allowed to become violent and/or vandalize property (apparently what happens is that business owners allied to the Soros cause are later compensated either directly or through insurance.
-protestors are instructed to not report money given to them as income.
etc etc etc..
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Yes, but nobody ever states which parts are the ones to look at. We just get obnoxious assholes attacking people when they ask for citations. Look at your reaction - I questioned your entire conspiracy theory, and your first reaction was to call me names and attack the disabled. That won't get you anywhere with intelligent honest people, even if your claims are true.
Thanks you for at least providing a link, as random and out of context as it is. Perhaps if the rest of you people were interested in such honest dialogue you might get somewhere with your claims, instead of name calling and ranting about a name nobody had ever heard of until the right decided they needed something to counter the documented claims against the Koch brothers.
If you want people to believe you, give them a reason to. Ranting and attacking those who question your uncited claims is not the tactic to use for this. Honest people should be civil and be willing to back up their own claims when asked.
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Wikileaks and the like can be useful, but far to many times partial documents presented out of context can be used to support false narratives. I'm not saying this is happening here, but the citation you provided does not stand on its own unless you're predisposed to rants about a certain type of conspiracy...
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