Wow! I was just searching the FCC site for recent comments on E-Rate reform, and discovered that since Monday, 225 comments have been filed! It seems that it was a bit of a miscalculation for the Chairman to have released his proposal shortly before the ISTE and ALA conferences. My unscientific poll shows many notes from schools (including a petition with 1500 signatures from ISTE) asking to have the funding cap raised, and from libraries asking for the library's C2 allowance to be increased. And a few statements of support for the Chairman's proposals.
Oooh, look! A little spat between SECA and SETDA. The State E-Rate Coordinators Alliance (SECA) proposed scrapping the tech plan requirement, and that made it into the Chairman's proposal. The State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA) thinks tech plans are good, and said so in a recent comment. SECA fired back. C'mon, SETDA, you've still got a day to respond!
Who's right? Well, maybe I'll just side with whichever one spells "E-Rate" correctly. Dang: both wrote "E-rate." I guess I'll have to decide based on the merits.
SECA, of course. I've advocated tossing the tech plans since 2007. Heck, the FCC has been waiving tech plan requirements since 2006.
I was so proud of the "blitz" of 225 comments filed, and then along come the Net Neutrality folks and crash the FCC comment system:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-fcc-website-net-neutrality-20140715-story.html
And it's not the first time they crashed it; the first time was after John Oliver compared Chairman Wheeler to a dingo babysitter:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/06/03/318458496/john-oliver-helps-rally-45-000-net-neutrality-comments-to-fcc
The Net Neutrality folks are apparently up to 780,000 comments.
But we may have some cause for pride. In the article cited above, NPR reports that "the next highest number of formal comments on an FCC measure is just under 2,000." But the total number of comments in Docket 13-184 is now 3,192. Did we just move into second place for most comments all-time? A distant second, but still....
And the Commissioner released a statement commemorating that more than 1,000,000 comments have now been filed in the Open Internet (Net Neutrality) docket:
ReplyDeletehttp://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2014/db0718/DOC-328342A1.pdf
Any time I see a million, I want to find a way to show how big that is. So here's a fun way to look at that pile of comments: if a person spent 1 minute looking at each of those comments, that person would work full-time for over 8 years to get through the pile. On the other hand, if all 1,800 FCC employees dropped everything and started reading comments at an average rate of 1 per minute, they could get through them in just over a day.