Senate confirms Biden FCC pick as 5 Republicans join Democrats in 55-43 vote. Anna Gomez confirmation means “FCC can act swiftly to restore net neutrality.”::Anna Gomez confirmation means “FCC can act swiftly to restore net neutrality.”

  • Creddit@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    That Cruz quote is insane. Net neutrality will not be easily sold to the public as “radically left-wing”. Nobody is going to believe that shit.

    It literally has neutrality right in the name!

    • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s not the name that makes it a centrist policy, it’s substance.

      Hell, if policy names reflected their substance, then the GOP’s “protect children” initiatives would prioritize gun violence and not hating on RuPaul.

    • NateNate60@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      T-Mobile, a US mobile carrier, currently throttles video streams to 480p. It’s a pretty bad experience and I look forward to seeing it end.

        • NateNate60@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          During “peak hours” certain unlimited plans are throttled to 480p. It doesn’t always happen.

      • Natanael@slrpnk.net
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        1 year ago

        The prior rules didn’t say much about mobile carriers, and the new ones probably won’t either

    • FireTower@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It will get a new name given to it. Each perspective develops their own terminology in order to make their opponents stances seem less appealing.

      The Affordable Care Act became Obamacare, because the name instills a partisan lean. And gun control became gun violence prevention because politicians realized advocating for “_____ Control” sounds authoritarian.

  • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    “If confirmed, she would give the Democrats a majority at the FCC that would enable them to impose a radical left-wing agenda, including investment-killing and job-killing so-called net neutrality rules, otherwise known as Obamacare for the Internet,” Cruz said.

    What the fuck jobs does this sack of butter think will be killed

    • vzq@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      “Obamacare for the Internet”

      For all its flaws the ACA has worked out relatively well for most people. Is that a tactic that finds any purchase with anyone not already in the bag?

      I understand its primary reason and you play to the base, but this seems short sighted even for the zodiac killer.

    • nxdefiant@startrek.website
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      1 year ago

      In Ted’s defense he can’t craft his statements from anything else. He’s a horse shit man with horse shit thoughts using horse shit hands to do a horse shit job of anything he touches, which turns to horse shit.

      His heart escapes this fate by not existing.

  • LetMeEatCake@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Hopefully we’ll see the return of net neutrality. It was implemented the last time that the FCC was 3-2 dem, then it was revoked when that switched to 2-3. This is the first time that dems are in charge since that revocation.

    • visor841@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      For it to really stick, it needs to be enshrined in law. Until then it’s just a temporary FCC policy that could get easily removed at some point in the future.

      • LetMeEatCake@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        That depends on how long FCC is able to keep it implemented for, IMO.

        Something that gets lost a lot in policy discussion is that once you implement a business regulatory policy like this, you create a constituency for that policy. It’s an advantage in preserving hard fought gains but that also means the timelines need to work for it. The problem net neutrality faced the first time is that it was (a) late in Obama’s presidency, (b) held up by court cases, and (c) reversed early on by Trump’s FCC. There wasn’t much time for the internet business community to build a business model around it.

        If net neutrality is regulated into existence for 5+ years, at that point businesses will have come to rely on its existence. Taking it away will be harder, especially for a big pro-business party if it’s getting an earful from megacorporations that want things to stay as they are.

        Of course, I do agree that legislating it is the most robust option and would be the best course of action. I just don’t see legislation as the only option with any longevity. FCC rules can be that if the timelines work.

        • Romanmir@lemmy.today
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          1 year ago

          I’m pretty sure that the GOP keeps a list of things that the Dems do expressly for the purposes of nullifying it the next time they have the chance. It may take them 50 years, coughRoecough but they just keep at it.

          Imagine where we’d be if all that energy was turned to a more productive endeavor. Like, well, anything really.

  • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Confirmation means she can, until it becomes clear that she isn’t going to.

    Then the excuses will start. And centrists will say that anyone who remembers this article “doesn’t know how government works.”

    I’m saying this now because I intend to link back to this comment when it happens.

    • ImFresh3x@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      The only time we ever had net neutrality it was under a “centrist.” And yes, we will have it again, until another republican wins because actual centrists - people who equate both parties at every opportunity - didn’t vote, and encouraged people not to because it’s all “pointless.”

      (Btw you are the enlightened centrist)

      Also, people who reliably vote tend to get the policies they want. People who don’t vote tend to complain the most about not getting what they want.

          • teuast@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            What’s your take on separating an ideology from its proponents? Because while centrism in principle isn’t necessarily bad, I most frequently see self-described centrists equating people, usually on the left, protesting against a bad thing with people, usually on the right, doing the bad thing that’s being protested against, as a way of arguing that nothing should be done about those bad things. And that is a position that ultimately only runs interference for people doing bad things.

            • WhiteHawk@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I’m not sure what you’re asking here. Do you want to know whether I think that a proponent of an ideology having a view I don’t like means that their ideology is evil? I do not.

              • teuast@lemmy.ca
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                1 year ago

                It’s kind of a philosophical question, I guess. A concrete example would be during the 2020 BLM protests, people who self-describe as centrists argued (and still do now) that the protests, because they occasionally led to property damage and theft, were as bad as the police murdering unarmed black people, and all the other aspects of the criminal justice system that disproportionately punish black people for existing. This is a pattern common to most issues that results in centrists most commonly aligning themselves with the status quo, which, in practice, means they spend a lot more time fighting against the left than against the right.

                I think a lot of people associate centrism with, like, skepticism, the idea of which is that you apportion your beliefs to the ordinariness of the claim and the evidence available to support it. The problem there is that while a skeptic should not accept a claim without evidence, there should also be an evidence threshold at which they do accept the claim. For a small example, I as a skeptic am happy to take your word for it if you say you got a dog, because I know that’s a thing a lot of people do, though I’m always happy to look at photos of your dog; for a larger example, most people who practice skepticism do accept evolution and climate change, because of all of the evidence for them. Likewise, while it is good to not blindly base your values on what one side or the other tells you, after an assessment of the evidence on both sides of an issue, one should be able to come down on one side if that side is clearly right and the other is clearly wrong, and that is the step centrists appear to consistently neglect.

                Therefore, in a situation like BLM, or climate change, or following the rest of the world’s lead on healthcare, if rigid adherence to centrism leads the centrist to say both sides are bad, then I think that’s a pretty convincing case of centrism doing a bad thing. And because in practice, it does that bad thing consistently across a range of issues, I think a pretty strong case could be made for centrism in general being a bad thing.

                Here’s a longer-form dive into this idea.

                Sorry for talking your ear off. I have the day off work.

    • Maalus@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Let me steal someone else’s thunder then, “you don’t know how the government works!”. I don’t know either so me saying this is meaningless, but at least we skipped the “excuses” part lol

  • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com
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    1 year ago

    Five Republicans voted in favor of the Gomez nomination, according to the Senate Press Gallery. The Republican yes votes came from Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mike Rounds of South Dakota, and Todd Young of Indiana.

    Yes, they are Republican. They made the right choice, and should be named and thanked vs focusing news on Cruz.

    Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Jerry Moran (R-Kans.) did not vote.

    Why not? This is your job.

  • solstice@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Question: can we expect net neutrality rules to change every 4/8 years with each new administration?

    How will that impact everything, broadly speaking? Unstable rules and regs are hard to work around.

    People were sending Ajit Pai death threats. Were they aware his rules would be reversed in4-8 years? It sure seemed serious a few years ago (not violently serious but a major issue for sure). I feel misled for not knowing regs will change real quick.

    Just curious, I have no idea how this sort of thing works.

      • solstice@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I guess I meant I didn’t realize these things can and do swing back and forth with the political pendulum. It just felt more permanent ish than that, idk.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Biden tried again in May with the nomination of Gomez, a State Department digital policy official who was previously deputy assistant secretary at the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) from 2009 to 2023.

    “If confirmed, she would give the Democrats a majority at the FCC that would enable them to impose a radical left-wing agenda, including investment-killing and job-killing so-called net neutrality rules, otherwise known as Obamacare for the Internet,” Cruz said.

    The Republican yes votes came from Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mike Rounds of South Dakota, and Todd Young of Indiana.

    Annoyed at how many vote no on a candidate as qualified and non-controversial as this," commented Harold Feld, senior VP and consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge.

    Media advocacy group Free Press said the “unprecedented 32-month delay” that deadlocked the FCC "was the result of concerted efforts by the phone, cable, and broadcast lobbies to hamstring the agency that oversees their businesses.

    Gomez’s confirmation restores the agency’s full complement of commissioners and provides a tie-breaking vote on issues related to diversifying media ownership, promoting broadband affordability and protecting the rights of Internet users."


    The original article contains 556 words, the summary contains 196 words. Saved 65%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

    • qaz@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      “If confirmed, she would give the Democrats a majority at the FCC that would enable them to impose a radical left-wing agenda, including investment-killing and job-killing so-called net neutrality rules, otherwise known as Obamacare for the Internet,” Cruz said.

      This is complete nonsense and I fail to believe he isn’t aware of that.

      • underisk@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        It doesn’t need to make sense. Just vaguely associate the good thing with the bad trigger words and you’ve done all you need to do to convince the kind of people who think he’s on their team.

      • Bonesince1997@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Yet if he called it the affordable care act but for the internet he’d probably see an opposite reaction. People like their ACA. Years ago they found, people liked the ACA but not Obamacare. It’s just that they didn’t know they were one in the same. But they bought into the bogeyman scare tactics. Cruz knows what he’s doing and it’s definitely evil, again.