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this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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How about passing internet privacy laws? Or stopping the enshittification and commercialization of the internet? Or passing laws to protect youth from social media companies? Or curbing the reach of advertising companies? How about passing laws to keep our data from being sold to advertisers?
All cool, but not what the FCC can do.
To pass laws, look to Congress. Remember to vote for the candidates you think will help accomplish those sorts of things.
Congress is broken. Unfortunately a bunch of geriatric old fucks who care about corporate money are in charge. But yeah, the govt needs to do its fucking job.
You could run, but you would probably want them to raise their salary first. DC is expensive in of itself, let alone dual living residence.
Yeah, DC is expensive, but not unreasonably so. This article claims it's about 50% more expensive than US average. A US Congressperson, without any leadership positions, makes $174,000, which is ~2.5x higher than the average household income (~$71k as on 2021).
So income shouldn't be what stops you from running, it's more than sufficient for living in DC. However, for maintaining two residences, that depends on where that other residence is.
I mean the median income is like 90-110k depending on how you classify DC, thats hardly a huge pay bump for having to deal with national nonsense and the stress of the job. In my opinion minimum should be 250k. If we want to be real about rooting out corruption and voting for the public interest we need to pay them the appropriate wage to do so. We are talking about some of the most important people in the country, and they are making way less than easier jobs in other industries, given the education.
That may be a good idea.
However, you claimed that OP would probably not want to run because of the compensation, as in, they wouldn't be able to afford living there on that salary. $174k is plenty to live in DC (as you pointed out, it's kind 50% higher than the median income), so in terms of being able to live and work there, the income is plenty. It may not be enough to discourage corruption among other members of Congress, but that's not necessarily a concern here (OP didn't seem to be worried about becoming corrupted).
Compensation is set by Congress, so if OP found compensation issues leading to corruption, OP could be part of that solution.
Don't you still have to maintain another residence back home? Still confused on how thay works.
I think so, but they can expense their housing in DC this year.
You say this like restoring net neutrality prevents these things from happening. They're not mutually exclusive.
I don't want the gov. Touching the Internet. You're asking for a bad time if you do. Commercializing the Internet is from people using it as such. Build your own site and host it. The enshittification is coming not just from the companies that created/own these sites, it's the people who use them as well.
The government "not touching the internet" is how we got here when NN rules were rolled back by that shit eating, giant Reese's cup drinking, FCC chairman that we had under Trump.
Not sure if we can do anything about enshittification though. That is shareholders demanding the line go up and I don't think we can change people's desire for greed.
We absolutely can. Break up every company at 999 mil and we‘re golden. It’s the lack of competition that makes enshittification possible.
Yep. There needs to be a legally mandated market cap after which the federal government automatically supervises the company breaking into smaller competitors.
Or, ideally, liquidated and sold a department at a time to existing competitors, to ensure actual competition.
We have a sane person in this comment section! I love it. Can you please run for some public office?
Oh my sweet, summer child...
Yeah, yeah. Wishes not miracles, and all that. I'll take world peace and a pony, too.
But there's value in discussing where the target belongs.
As long as we're belaboring the point, mehacompanies should be require to sell divisions of their choice (cough Amazon Web Services cough.) to competitors to stay below the market cap. That way we don't create a cliff, but still see things broken up.
The laws and regulations that make these behemoths able to exist should be fixed. Stop putting worse regulations on top of bad ones.
Sounds like we agree in principle.
I'm willing to advocate for the kind of hammer that might scare some of these players into taking legal reform seriously.
I'm perfectly willing to accept other legal solutions.
I am also perfectly willing to support an administration bent on burning down the big players that are fighting for monopoly control.
So who is supposed to regulate corporations? I agree that the current government is not knowledgeable enough and is beholden to corporations. The problem we have is there is no agency that really governs and enforces any kind of rules.
The ‘build your own’ mentality is what got us to where we are. Just look at what Twitter has become under Musk. He is doing what he wants with a platform that was operating in a very different manner before he took it over and decided to make changes. It’s not a real answer to let everyone do what they want.
Btw, that’s how google and facebook get away with all the evil shit they do.
We need a governing body to make better rules for privacy amongst many other things. I agree that the government or even the FCC may not be the right fit. However, we need some kind of of oversight and regulation. Industry will never selflessly give up rights or power if it means they make less money. They only do what the laws tell them they can get away with.
You know what we need? The government sans Judiciary branch to be run by unpaid people. The President? Yeah, he also has to work a normal 9 to 5. Congress? Same deal. Judiciary branch is paid because they have to deal with the absolutely shitty job of interpreting legalese and ruling on major things. And Law school is expensive as fuck.
Maybe if Congress had to work with the layperson and deal with their struggles we would have significantly less shitty laws passed that benefit the people at the top, and hurt everyone else. Because Congress wouldn't be any different than a regular Joe.