FCC Chairman Ajit Pai accused of cherry-picking data to repeal net neutrality

One of the great quantitative results that has come out of political science in the last half century is the ability to model voter preferences, predict election outcomes within available uncertainties of measurement, and evaluate campaign strategies using the tools of linear algebra. The first-order approximation would be: assign a dimension to all issues on which candidates differ, for each voter assign a preference, and also for each preference assign a weight representing the priority the voter places of that issue over the others. Assume the candidate achieves all that they promise, so the outcome if they win is whatever their campaign platform says they will do. For each voter, calculate the magnitude of the difference between the voter’s preference vector and each candidate’s outcome vector, weighted by the voter’s priority vector. The candidate whose weighted outcome difference from the voter’s preferences is smallest gets their vote.

You’ll have to either trust me this works, or delve into the polisci literature yourself. Barack Obama was one of the first presidential candidates to seriously use quantitative modeling of this sort, and it helped him win the election. Donald Trump’s campaign took it even further. The current state of the art, exemplified by the Trump campaign, is able to aggregate data from many sources including especially social networks and advertising profiles to build ridiculously detailed and fairly accurate predicted preference vectors for most of the voting population. They then segment these populations and serve them hyper-optimized political ads, sometimes even individually tailored, aimed to emphasize points of agreement between the candidate and the voter and points of disagreement between the voter and the other candidates, for the purpose of generating a second-order correction where each voter has a different view of the candidate designed to make him/her more agreeable to them. All interesting tech, albeit somewhat Orwellian in its consequences.

Anyway, one outcome of this modeling validated by experimental data is that most voters’ priority vectors follow a power-law distribution, or something like it, meaning that a point of agreement or disagreement between the voter and the candidate on that issue trumps all others. If Alice thinks that abortion is baby murder, or if Bob is gay in a non-rainbow state and wants that to change ASAP, then it almost doesn’t matter on what other points the candidates differ. Alice will vote for the pro-life candidate, and Bob will vote for the gay-marriage candidate. Or as will often happen, voters who are suffering (no job, expensive health care, bad retirement benefits, etc.) will vote in the way that they think will better their lives, other factors be damned. These issues which dominate a voter’s choice, are hot-button issues.

So back to the point I was making. I’m not saying that net neutrality is not important. What I’m saying is that in an election there are many different issues at play, of which net neutrality is one. Nearly every voter is driven by a small number of hot-button issues, and these are often things like their jobs, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and foreign policy generally, taxes, immigration, cost of education, cost of health care, etc. You’re going to have a veeery hard time convincing me — or more importantly, Joe Q. Public — that net neutrality trumps these issues. And that’s what you have to do for net neutrality to matter AT ALL at the ballot box.

That’s not to say it can’t be done. That effectively what organizations like the National Rifle Association, or the National Right To Life have done with gun control and abortion, respectfully. Two issues which probably wouldn’t dominate the ballot box if not for some very clever and very expensive engineering of the public debate.

Science fiction authors already anticipated that. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_"П"

If Starlink can drive costs into the ground, relatively speaking, we can talk about other factors. The capital outlay for a satellite internet setup is currently astronomical. This is the allure of the Facebook balloons - minimal expenditure per home.