<div dir="ltr"><div>Indeed Jack - a few things to balance - the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 (on which the idea of rulemaking is based) us about raising legal concerns that must be answered by the agency at the time the rulemaking is done. It's not a vote nor is it the case that if the agency gets tons of comments in one direction that they have to go in that direction. Instead it's only about making sure legal concerns are considered and responded to before the agency before the agency acts. (Which is partly why sending "I'm for XYZ" or "I'm against ABC" really doesn't mean anything to an agency - not only is that not a legal argument or concern, it's also not something where they're obligated to follow these comments - it's not a vote or poll). <br></div><div><br></div><div>That said, political folks have spun things to the public as if it is a poll/vote/chance to act. The raise a valid legal concern part of the APA of 1946 is omitted. Moreover the fact that third party law firms and others like to submit comments on behalf of clients - there will always be a third party submitting multiple comments for their clients (or "clients") because that's their business. <br></div><div><br></div><div>In the lead up to 2017, the Consumer and Government Affairs Bureau of the FCC got an inquiry from a firm asking how they could submit 1 million comments a day on an "upcoming privacy proceeding" (their words, astute observers will note there was no privacy proceeding before the FCC in 2017). When the Bureau asked me, I told them either mail us a CD to upload it or submit one comment with 1 million signatures. To attempt to flood us with 1 million comments a day (aside from the fact who can "predict" having that many daily) would deny resources to others. In the mess that followed, what was released to the public was so redacted you couldn't see the legitimate concerns and better paths that were offered to this entity. <br></div><div><br></div><div>And the FCC isn't alone. EPA, FTC, and other regulatory agencies have had these hijinks for years - and before the Internet it was faxes, mass mimeographs (remember blue ink?), and postcards.The Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) - is the body that is supposed to provide consistent guidance for things like this across the U.S. government. I've briefed them and tried to raise awareness of these issues - as I think fundamentally this is a **process** question that once answered, tech can support. However they're not technologies and updating the interpretation of the process isn't something lawyers are apt to do until the evidence that things are in trouble is overwhelming. <br></div><div><br></div><div>52 folks wrote a letter to them - and to GSA - back in 2020. GSA had a rulemaking of its own on how to improve things, yet oddly never published any of the comments it received (including ours) and closed the rulemaking quietly. Here's the letter: <a href="https://tinyurl.com/letter-signed-52-people">https://tinyurl.com/letter-signed-52-people</a></div><div><br></div><div>And here's an article published in OODAloop about this - and why Generative AI is probably going to make things even more challenging: <a href="https://www.oodaloop.com/archive/2023/04/18/why-a-pause-on-ai-development-is-not-the-answer-an-insiders-perspective/">https://www.oodaloop.com/archive/2023/04/18/why-a-pause-on-ai-development-is-not-the-answer-an-insiders-perspective/</a></div><div><br></div><div>[snippet of the article] <strong>Now in 2023 and Beyond: Proactive Approaches to AI and Society</strong></div><div><p>Looking to the future, to effectively address the challenges arising from AI, <a href="https://davidbray.medium.com/challenges-and-needed-new-solutions-for-open-societies-to-maintain-civil-discourse-part-1-b5ea95f8c679">we must foster a proactive, results-oriented, and cooperative approach with the public</a>.
Think tanks and universities can engage the public in conversations
about how to work, live, govern, and co-exist with modern technologies
that impact society. By involving diverse voices in the decision-making
process, we can better address and resolve the complex challenges AI
presents on local and national levels.</p><p>In addition, we must
encourage industry and political leaders to participate in finding
non-partisan, multi-sector solutions if civil societies are to remain
stable. By working together, we can bridge the gap between technological
advancements and their societal implications. </p><p>Finally, launching
AI pilots across various sectors, such as work, education, health, law,
and civil society, is essential. We must learn by doing on how we can
create responsible civil environments where AIs can be developed and
deployed responsibly. These initiatives can help us better understand
and integrate AI into our lives, ensuring its potential is harnessed for
the greater good while mitigating risks. </p><p>In 2019 and 2020, a group of <a href="https://tinyurl.com/letter-signed-52-people">fifty-two people asked the Administrative Conference of the United States </a>(which
helps guide rulemaking procedures for federal agencies), General
Accounting Office, and the General Services Administration to call
attention to the need to address the challenges of chatbots flooding
public commenting procedures and potentially crowding out or denying
services to actual humans wanting to leave a comment. <a href="https://davidbray.medium.com/challenges-and-needed-new-solutions-for-open-societies-to-maintain-civil-discourse-part-1-b5ea95f8c679">We asked</a>: </p><p style="margin-left:40px"><b>1. Does identity matter regarding who files a comment or not — and must one be a U.S. person in order to file?</b></p><p style="margin-left:40px"><b>2.
Should agencies publish real-time counts of the number of comments
received — or is it better to wait until the end of a commenting round
to make all comments available, including counts?</b></p><p style="margin-left:40px"><b>3. Should
third-party groups be able to file on behalf of someone else or not —
and do agencies have the right to remove spam-like comments?</b></p><p style="margin-left:40px"><b>4.
Should the public commenting process permit multiple comments per
individual for a proceeding — and if so, how many comments from a single
individual are too many? 100? 1000? More?</b></p><p style="margin-left:40px"><b>5. Finally, should the
U.S. government itself consider, given public perceptions about
potential conflicts of interest for any agency performing a public
commenting process, whether it would be better to have third-party
groups take responsibility for assembling comments and then filing those
comments via a validated process with the government?</b></p><p>These same questions need pragmatic pilots that involve the public to <a href="https://davidbray.medium.com/challenges-and-needed-new-solutions-for-open-societies-to-maintain-civil-discourse-part-2-2f637c472112">co-explore and co-develop how we operate effectively amid these technological shifts</a>.
As the capabilities of LLMs continue to grow, we need positive change
agents willing to tackle the messy issues at the intersection of
technology and society. The challenges are immense, but so too are the
opportunities for positive change. Let’s seize this moment to create a
better tomorrow for all. Working together, <a href="https://medium.com/peoplecentered/the-need-for-people-centered-sources-of-hope-for-our-digital-future-ahead-ef491dd2703d">we can co-create a future that embraces AI’s potential while mitigating its risks</a>, informed by the hard lessons we have already learned. <br></p><p></p><p>Full article: <a href="https://www.oodaloop.com/archive/2023/04/18/why-a-pause-on-ai-development-is-not-the-answer-an-insiders-perspective/">https://www.oodaloop.com/archive/2023/04/18/why-a-pause-on-ai-development-is-not-the-answer-an-insiders-perspective/</a></p><p>Hope this helps.</p></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Thu, Oct 5, 2023 at 4:44 PM Jack Haverty via Nnagain <<a href="mailto:nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net">nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><u></u>
<div>
Thanks for all your efforts to keep the "feedback loop" to the
rulemakers functioning! <br>
<br>
I'd like to offer a suggestion for a hopefully politically
acceptable way to handle the deluge, derived from my own battles
with "email" over the years (decades).<br>
<br>
Back in the 1970s, I implemented one of the first email systems on
the Arpanet, under the mentorship of JCR Licklider, who had been
pursuing his vision of a "Galactic Network" at ARPA and MIT. One
of the things we discovered was the significance of anonymity. At
the time, anonymity was forbidden on the Arpanet; you needed an
account on some computer, protected by passwords, in order to
legitimately use the network. The mechanisms were crude and easily
broken, but the principle applied.<br>
<br>
Over the years, that principle has been forgotten, and the right to
be anonymous has become entrenched. But many uses of the network,
and needs of its users, demand accountability, so all sorts of
mechanisms have been pasted on top of the network to provide ways to
judge user identity. Banks, medical services, governments, and
businesses all demand some way of proving your identity, with
passwords, various schemes of 2FA, VPNs, or other such technology,
with varying degrees of protection. It is still possible to be
anonymous on the net, but many things you do require you to prove,
to some extent, who you are.<br>
<br>
So, my suggestion for handling the deluge of "comments" is:<br>
<br>
1/ create some mechanism for "registering" your intent to submit a
comment. Make it hard for bots to register. Perhaps you can
leverage the work of various partners, e.g., ISPs, retailers,
government agencies, financial institutions, of others who already
have some way of identifying their users.<br>
<br>
2/ Also make registration optional - anyone can still submit
comments anonymously if they choose.<br>
<br>
3/ for "registered commenters", provide a way to "edit" your
previous comment - i.e., advise that your comment is always the last
one you submitted. I.E., whoever you are, you can only submit one
comment, which will be the last one you submit.<br>
<br>
4/ In the thousands of pages of comments, somehow flag the ones that
are from registered commenters, visible to the people who read the
comments. Even better, provide those "information consumers" with
ways to sort, filter, and search through the body of comments.<br>
<br>
This may not reduce the deluge of comments, but I'd expect it to
help the lawyers and politicians keep their heads above the water.<br>
<br>
Anonymity is an important issue for Net Neutrality too, but I'll
opine about that separately.....<br>
<br>
Jack Haverty<br>
<br>
<br>
<div>On 10/2/23 12:38, David Bray, PhD via
Nnagain wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">
<div>
<div>
<div>
<div>Greetings all and thank you Dave Taht for that very
kind intro... <br>
<br>
</div>
First, I'll open with I'm a gosh-darn non-partisan, which
means I swore an oath to uphold the Constitution first and
serve the United States - not a specific party, tribe, or
ideology. This often means, especially in today's era of
24/7 news and social media, non-partisans have to "top
cover". <br>
<br>
</div>
Second, I'll share that in what happened in 2017 (which
itself was 10x what we saw in 2014) my biggest concern was
and remains that a few actors attempted to flood the system
with less-than-authentic comments. <br>
<br>
</div>
In some respects this is not new. The whole "notice and
comment" process is a legacy process that goes back decades.
And the FCC (and others) have had postcard floods of comments,
mimeographed letters of comments, faxed floods of comments,
and now this - which, when combined with generative AI, will
be yet another flood.
<br>
<br>
</div>
Which gets me to my biggest concern as a non-partisan in
2023-2024, namely how LLMs might misuse and abuse the commenting
process further. <br>
<br>
Both in 2014 and 2017, I asked FCC General Counsel if I could
use CAPTChA to try to reduce the volume of web scrapers or bots
both filing and pulling info from the Electronic Comment Filing
System.
<div dir="auto"><br>
</div>
<div dir="auto">Both times I was told *no* out of concerns that
they might prevent someone from filing. I asked if I could
block obvious spam, defined as someone filing a comment
>100 times a minute, and was similarly told no because one
of those possible comments might be genuine and/or it could be
an ex party filing en masse for others.
<div dir="auto"><br>
</div>
<div dir="auto">For 2017 we had to spin up 30x the number of
AWS cloud instances to handle the load - and this was a
flood of comments at 4am, 5am, and 6am ET at night which
normally shouldn’t see such volumes. When I said there was a
combination of actual humans wanting to leave comments and
others who were effectively denying service to others
(especially because if anyone wanted to do a batch upload of
100,000 comments or more they could submit a CSV file or a
comment with 100,000 signatories) - both parties said no,
that couldn’t be happening. </div>
<div dir="auto"><br>
</div>
<div dir="auto">Until 2021 when the NY Attorney General proved
that was exactly what was happening with 18m of the 23m
apparently from non-authentic origin with ~9m from one side
of the political aisle (and six companies) and ~9m from the
other side of the political aisle (and one or more
teenagers). </div>
<div dir="auto"><br>
</div>
<div dir="auto">So with Net Neutrality back on the agenda -
here’s a simple <span>prediction</span>, even if the volume
of comments is somehow controlled, 10,000+ pages of comments
produced by ChatGPT or a different LLM is both possible and
probably will be done. The question is if someone includes a
legitimate legal argument on page 6,517 - will FCC’s lawyers
spot it and respond to it as part of the NPRM? <br>
<br>
</div>
<div>Hope this helps and with highest regards, <br>
<br>
</div>
<div>-d. <br>
<span class="gmail_signature_prefix">-- </span><br>
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature">
<div dir="ltr">
<div dir="ltr">
<div>
<div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10pt;font-family:"Courier New";color:black"><span></span></span></p>
</div>
<div dir="ltr">
<div dir="ltr">
<div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10pt;font-family:"Courier New";color:black"><span></span></span></p>
</div>
<span style="font-size:10pt;font-family:"Courier New";color:black">Principal,
<a href="https://www.leaddoadapt.com/" target="_blank"><span>LeadDoAdapt</span>
<span>Ventures</span>, Inc.</a> &
Distinguished Fellow <br>
</span></div>
<div>
<div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10pt;font-family:"Courier New";color:black"><a href="https://www.stimson.org/ppl/david-bray/" target="_blank">Henry S. Stimson
Center</a>, <a href="https://bens.org/people/dr-david-bray/" target="_blank">Business
Executives for National Security</a><br>
</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10pt;font-family:"Courier New";color:black"><br>
</span></p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Oct 2, 2023 at 2:15 PM
Dave Taht via Nnagain <<a href="mailto:nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net" target="_blank">nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net</a>>
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">All:<br>
<br>
I have spent the last several days reaching out to as many
people I<br>
know with a deep understanding of the policy and technical
issues<br>
surrounding the internet, to participate on this list. I
encourage you<br>
all to reach out on your own, especially to those that you can<br>
constructively and civilly disagree with, and hopefully work
with, to<br>
establish technical steps forward. Quite a few have joined
silently!<br>
So far, 168 people have joined!<br>
<br>
Please welcome Dr David Bray[1], a self-described "human flack
jacket"<br>
who, in the last NN debate, stood up for the non -partisan FCC
IT team<br>
that successfully kept the system up 99.4% of the time despite
the<br>
comment floods and network abuses from all sides. He has
shared with<br>
me privately many sad (and some hilarious!) stories of that
era, and I<br>
do kind of hope now, that some of that history surfaces, and
we can<br>
learn from it.<br>
<br>
Thank you very much, David, for putting down your painful
memories[2],<br>
and agreeing to join here. There is a lot to tackle here,
going<br>
forward.<br>
<br>
[1] <a href="https://www.stimson.org/ppl/david-bray/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.stimson.org/ppl/david-bray/</a><br>
[2] "Pain shared is reduced. Joy shared, increased." - Spider
Robinson<br>
<br>
<br>
-- <br>
Oct 30: <a href="https://netdevconf.info/0x17/news/the-maestro-and-the-music-bof.html" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://netdevconf.info/0x17/news/the-maestro-and-the-music-bof.html</a><br>
Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos<br>
_______________________________________________<br>
Nnagain mailing list<br>
<a href="mailto:Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net" target="_blank">Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net</a><br>
<a href="https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain</a><br>
</blockquote>
</div>
<br>
<fieldset></fieldset>
<pre>_______________________________________________
Nnagain mailing list
<a href="mailto:Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net" target="_blank">Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net</a>
<a href="https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain" target="_blank">https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain</a>
</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
</div>
_______________________________________________<br>
Nnagain mailing list<br>
<a href="mailto:Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net" target="_blank">Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net</a><br>
<a href="https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain</a><br>
</blockquote></div>