Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side came in response to the common refrain of anti-net-neutrality advocates that it's all about letting the government "take over" the internet. One anonymous commenter racked up the votes by explaining the reality:

Net Neutrality is not about the government taking over the Internet, because it has nothing to do with content on the Internet, It is about preventing the ISP's from taking over the Internet, and controlling what sites you can visit and for how much, so that they can turn the Internet into cable T.V. version 2.

If the ISP service is classified as a telecommunications service, they are not allowed to decide which sites you use, but if they are classified as infomation services they can obviously control what infomation they allow over their networks.

In second place, we've got a response from aerinai to our post about FOSTA, the House version of SESTA:

This will be bad

I look at Section 230 the same as the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act(PLCAA) for gun makers. It protects the manufacturer of guns from selling a product that people can misuse. Prior to its passing... they had to deal with a ton of nuisance suits when people did stupid things with guns. This wasn't just individuals; but also states with axes to grind...

Thankfully, Section 230 was set up pretty well from the get-go so we didn't have to deal with these nuisance suits. People trying to sue Facebook and Twitter because ISIS used their platforms. People trying to sue because someone said something mean anonymously.... Section 230 protected against all that.

Now we are opening the floodgates to let politically motivated Attorney Generals like Jim Hood going after Google because a Sex Trafficking ad popped up once; and Kamala Harris bludgeoning Facebook because she saw a post propositioning sex...

This will not end here... it will get much much worse... wait until they add 'Stop Enabling Terrorist Attacks' (SETA) and 'Stop Enabling Online Bullying Attacks' (SEOBA)...

Good luck letting anyone put anything online after that; except for maybe a couple of pictures of puppies... everyone loves puppies.....unless those pictures of puppies have steganographic messages about sex trafficking hidden in them! Fine... no puppy pictures either... Thanks for ruining the internet, congress...

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from That Anonymous Coward, wondering why in the world a police department wouldn't want to use body cameras:

A bigger disservice happening is the amount of money his out of control department is going to cost the tax payers.

Cameras are everywhere, people have them in their pockets that shoot with a clarity you wouldn't believe.

So if you just want to have the only side of the story be the public's holding the camera more power to you. I guess the big reason would be what in the hell could possibly justify that officer hanging out the window pointing a gun at a citizen. So we have to draw our conclusions from the image we have, a reckless cop decided he might shoot someone for doing a wheelie. When questioned he deployed the age old cop defense of I was scared for my life... and somehow you let him write this in a report?

There is no possible threat posed by the biker heading away from you, the only threat is that officer holding a gun on an unarmed person he's not even trying to arrest for pissing him off.

Citizens in this town need to get their heads out of their collective asses & replace the chief. It hasn't happened to you yet, so its not really happening isn't reality. Do you want the change now or after the cop draws on your child & fires because he was afraid the 15 yr old was going to over power him and steal a nuclear weapon.

Next, we've got a short and sweet response from Doug Wheeler that works for a whole lot of silly anti-net-neutrality arguments (in this case, Mark Cuban's):

Net Neutrality isn't about the Internet. It's about the connection to the Internet.

Over on the funny side, we've got two winners that continue on the net neutrality topic. In first place it's JoeCool, who read the news about Twitter declaring the AT&T blog to be an unsafe site and wondered what the problem was:

But it IS unsafe! You might accidentally end up with AT&T service.

In second place it's That One Guy, putting to rest everyone's fears about Comcast removing its promise to avoid paid prioritization of traffic:

Obviously Comcast, being the most trusted company in america simply feels that it should be implied that they would never do something so blatantly anti-customer, and as such they don't want to waste people's times by forcing them to read it out.

I mean, would you expect them to write out 'We promise not to go door to door punching our customers in the face'? Same thing really. Since they would never, not in a million years do something like that, they're doing everyone a favor by saving time not explicityly saying it.

As for why they had it written down before, well I would guess that, as impossible as it would seem, people didn't quite realize what an absolutely amazing company Comcast was before, and as such, as insane as it was to contemplate, they felt the need to reassure people. As the trust between company and customer has grown, and their reputation as the most beloved company in america(if not the world, it wouldn't surprise me if other countries were desperately hoping that Comcast would start offering their world-class service elsewhere too) the need to waste time like that has lessened, to the point that they feel it's no longer necessary now.

For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out with a related story about New York's AG investigating the anti-net-neutrality comments submitted from dead people to the FCC. One anonymous commenter saw the implications:

Dead people are creating content on an FCC webpage?

Wow - copyright really does encourage the continued creation of content.

And finally, we've got a simple anonymous response to the government's accidental exposure of documents about NSA surveillance:

At least they're being consistent: they want backdoors into our data; in exchange, they offer backdoors into their data.

That's all for this week, folks!