FCC ignored your net neutrality comment unless you made ‘serious’ legal argument

Regulators hold public/industry consultations to gather evidence and arguments that need to be taken into account in coming to their final decision. They are not running popularity contests (which would be too easy to rig if that was the standard used). The arguments submitted are usually a mix of legal and economic (including models) based on data or clearly stated assumptions (ideally). For example, an industry stakeholder might make a legal argument that the regulator is making a decision beyond the remit of the legislation, or make an economic argument that if the proposed decision is adopted, then this will remove the infrastructure investment incentive for the stakeholder (including the data to substantiate this).

In making their final decision, the regulator should take into account all the arguments put forward, and respond to them in their final report. Submissions that are substantially the same (or sections within) will be grouped together and responded to as a single point. The regulator should explain why they reject or adopt each argument.

The criteria that a regulator uses to evaluate the different arguments and come to a final decision is set by the enabling legislation. I have not worked within the US legal framework, but I have both prepared submissions to and worked with numerous regulators in Asia and Europe. In most cases, the criteria is deals with the best interests of consumers with a consideration of both costs and benifits. Often a longer term view is required to be taken, which biases towards promoting investment in infrastructure over time rather than maximising short time utilisation of existing infrastructure.

(Context for our non-US readers at home: Grosse Point==wealthy Detroit suburb, Flint==nationally famous for lead-filled water.)

This is really the fundamental point of Pai's argument, at least so far as I can read it. Is that instead of creating an extensive set of 'preemptive' rules that are not necessarily forward looking. For throughout limited near future services like satellite or balloon internet, throttling/blocking/etc will almost certainly be necessary. The current rules, at least he ones written under Wheeler, had a completely undefined "reasonable network management" exception allowing companies to break any rule, but that's a somewhat uncomfortable clause to rely on when you're investing tens of billions of dollars.

So instead of writing hundreds of pages of static rules which can arguably interfere with competition or innovation, deal with bad behavior as it emerges through the proper channels. And in many cases that bad behavior would not be managed by the FCC - as you mention we already actually have pretty reasonable anti-trust law as well as consumer protections. And organizations like the EFF would certainly be on the forefront of making sure these protections are utilized to the max potential allowed by the law.

Pai has no valid argument. He basically says: "We should let monopolists run amok by removing current rules. Get lost if you don't like it". That's because dealing with monopolistic abuse through "proper channels" produced close to zero results in the past.

And somehow EFF are rarely involved in anti-trust issues. I wonder why.