Your voice matters! This victory was largely because of collective action on behalf of the people making such a fuss. Anyone who wrote to California's Attorney General should feel really proud of themselves right now; letters like yours likely directly caused this.
My non lawyer understanding is that Attorneys General effectively have an infinitely long list of crime to go after. The volume of outcry is an incredibly effective way to get your cause pushed up that list.
I hope this doesn't stop the AG from completing their investigation of ICANN which is a non-profit based in California. They should still subpoena all the communications at ICANN related to the proposed ownership transfer of .org that is outlined in the original letter to ICANN.
Yeah, unfortunately, the truth is probably that they are regrouping and planning a different and more defensible path to the same outcome, and will just try this again in a few years.
"If PIR is able to provide additional information that resolves the concerns raised by the Board, PIR remains able to re-submit or initiate a new Change of Control Request."
That's how they concluded, leaving the door open if they can manage to get past this hurdle.
As someone who used to be a prosecutor, from society at large, I would have most appreciated the following.
a) Stop electing people whose platform is "tough on crime." These people come in with a mandate to do nothing but increase the number of cases on dockets and the numbers of years on sentences, both of which are extremely harmful to both the crim justice system and to society at large. This is why I would come into court every single day with an average of 6-8 trials scheduled (yes, every day), with some days bringing 14+. So what do you do with that? Well, you overcharge so you can plea them down. That's not justice. It's also why I was forced by the hand of the law to send a 20 year old with no priors to prison for 5 years after he was pressed into selling weed by the local gang and a gun was found in his room near the drugs. Someone wanted to appear tough on guns, so if a gun's found anywhere near drugs w/ intent to distribute, automatic 5 years. He was a good kid who made a mistake, his parents were crying and begging the court for mercy, his young sisters were in the back sobbing, and I had to stand there and be the representative of that law. One of the most shameful experiences of my life, and one of the things that directly led to me resigning.
b) Be okay with paying taxes. I can't even tell you the number of times every single week I would hear civilians in the courtroom complaining about how long they were stuck there. "This is where our tax dollars go??" Actually, this is where your tax dollars don't go, because there isn't enough of them to go around, so my office is stuck paying law school graduates with high loan burdens under $40k per year, and then burning them out in < 2 years because the case loads are so high.
I don't mean too sound harsh, but - the idea that other states should be funding another state's AG dept is frankly kind of ludicrous, it's not like it's a charity or nonprofit or something. The case volume they have is a direct result from the political forces at play in that state; that's true for any state. If they want more resources per case, they should lower the number of cases. That starts with the AG himself but includes the rest of the state-level government and the citizens making voting decisions.
> I don't mean too sound harsh, but - the idea that other states should be funding another state's AG dept is frankly kind of ludicrous, it's not like it's a charity or nonprofit or something. The case volume they have is a direct result from the political forces at play in that state; that's true for any state. If they want more resources per case, they should lower the number of cases. That starts with the AG himself but includes the rest of the state-level government and the citizens making voting decisions.
States pay the Pennsylvania Dept. of Food to regulate their food, and Pennsylvania has many bread and food companies. How are AGs and regulators different?
I had always read that prosecutors have near-total discretion about which cases to bring and how aggressively to pursue them. Did you have that kind of discretion? If not, how high up in the chain was it exercised?
Also, another question: how could you have 6 trials scheduled on the same day? Does that mean you had to be in 6 places at once, presented 6 cases to 6 juries? How does that even work?
Having an "effectively infinite" list of crime isn't the result of a lack of funding, but the size of the set of things that technically constitute "crimes". Quadrupling their funding would still leave them with an effectively infinite amount of crime they could deal with. (This being another place where "unbounded" is probably a better word than "infinite"... there isn't literally an infinite amount of crime, but it is the case that pretty much no matter what they do, when they reach for another crime to prosecute, there will always be one there.)
One of the subtle checks & balances in our system is that we don't even want prosecution to literally go after every crime... we want them to choose the things that are actually important. There's a lot of things labeled "crimes" today where the cost of enforcement greatly exceeds any value to society of that enforcement.
(Expanding on that, one of the biggest problems, if not the biggest problem, with automated crime enforcement is that it removes this check & balance that almost nobody has even realized exists yet.)
That said, I will still take "biased human picking what to prosecute" over "a prosecution sufficiently funded to prosecute literally everything". I mean, sure, I'd prefer "real justice", but "biased human" is still constrained in their actions and has to produce enough results useful to society to be able to hide their corruption in, whereas totally perfect enforcement would be a nightmare.
If we can imagine perfect AD funding, we can imagine better legislation, can't we? You can't have perfect legislation (philosophy is not yet advanced enough) and you can't have perfect AD funding, but here is my proposed solution: every time you improve AD funding you improve legislation, so that they both converge in lockstep to perfect in the limit of infinite time.
I think first perhaps we should decide on a good way to measure legislation if you plan to improve it. Good luck with that, because now you're right back to the problem of people's biases affecting the outcome.
The world is made of individuals and groups with biases, and as long as they have even the tiniest amount of power, those biases cannot be removed from the process.
An open legislative process involving debate among many representatives is way less susceptible to bias than the personal priorities of a district attorney.
> here is my proposed solution: every time you improve AD funding you improve legislation
My point is that locking "improved funding" to "improved legislation" is impossibly without a way to usefully measure improvements in legislation. Improving funding has a few ways to measure it, but in the discussion we've been having I took improved to mean "more". As for legislation, I don't think we want more legislation, but any measurement is rife with problems. As a simple example, legislation if perpetual until changed (or created with an expiration), and laws created today with a beneficial effect may have a deleterious effect years or decades from now. Examples of this are abundant, such as patent and copyright laws not dealing with the nuance of the digital age, to privacy laws not taking into effect the ability to store everything that happens in a way that can be indexed and accessed because of computers.
A moderately good law today may become a real problem tomorrow. Given that, how do we measure legislation when the effect time is essentially unbounded?
Would it be possible to design a criminal justice system that recognizes only a bounded amount of crime?
I.e., a legal system where the "choosing" of which cases to go after, is somehow built into the letter of the law (maybe with a high bar in the indictment process?), such that everything that is illegal by the letter of the law is something necessary to go after (the societal equivalent of a showstopping bug—serial killers, for example), rather than just a "nice-to-have" that could be indefinitely deprioritized.
yah, besides decriminalizing large swaths of behavior to make case loads manageable, let's further strike down any law that's more costly to enforce than it provides in benefits (it's literally absurd to have them). instead, put those in a civics manual that guides people on how to be a good citizen and avoid conflict (and lawsuits) with others. and teach civics in school again.
that would only be true if the only benefits were financial ones to the municipality. that also requires a level of control and coordination that isn't present in many (especially larger) jurisdictions.
you'd instead be giving police the freed time and resources to both investigate real cromes like murder, theft and corruption, and also commit to community policing around observing, teaching and encouraging good civic behavior, rather than writing pointless jaywalking tickets.
On a related note, I often find that I don't know what to do if I want to help enact change at a level that's too far removed or high above me.
There are a number of factors at play here:
Sometimes, I'm not aware of the issue
I don't know if the offending party is amenable at any level to changing their mind
I don't know if something is possibly against the law (e.g. I didn't know the AG had a say until I say this post)
I don't know if the authorities or avenues of dissent that I have access to have any jurisdiction over or effect on the offending party
I often have very little insight into how others feel about the issue.
I don't know how much work needs to be done to shift proceedings (e.g. how many people need to contact the AG for them to change their priorities)
I don't know at what level I need to focus my efforts on (e.g. community, corporate, federal, ngo, etc.)
Everything is scattered all around the place.
For example, I saw this good idea in another HN post: "Would it be so hard to use less packaging on foods, especially snacks?". I have an opinion on this, but I don't know how to effectively voice it.
Is there an existing system, or can we make a better system to most effectively turn our opinions on the matter into action?
It's usually more effective to have specialized interests, since it's very rare to have agreement on multiple issues across a large population (this should be intuitive to the HN crowd, where every issue you add doubles the number of potential positions, even though they're not random).
Find an organization that already exists and get involved in it. If one doesn't exist, create one.
For packaging, you'd have a few potential avenues:
1. Work to build support politically. Even small groups of 30-40 people (or smaller) are very attractive for local politicians to meet and speak with.
2. Reach out to companies directly.
3. Get earned media (possibly in conjunction with 1 or 2).
If you have small, achievable, reasonable goals, then it may even be a win-win scenario for all of the above, which makes it easier to make progress. For example, you could have a campaign goal of reducing x% of packaging to reduce y tons of waste.
It could be positive media attention for a company to say they've worked with a group like yours (or a small local company!) to reduce packaging and help save the environment (and it may even save the company money).
Finding ways for everyone to win and creating a big tent (as opposed to trying to influence by vilifying) tends to be more successful, in my experience.
well i heard it was because the AG was looking into PIR AND ICANN. And ICANN could not afford to get subpoenaed into handing over their financials- as any monopoly would.
TBH, it's nothing to do with those lazy petitions. This happened because the CA's AG chose to be a good guy, leveraged his power and put a lot of effort into fighting the bad guys. I'm sure he's been offered fat kickbacks and received thinly veiled treats. After this stunt he won't be offered a high ranked corporate position to scheme shady things and won't be able to buy yachts and helicopters left and right. That's basically the price he's paid. I think attributing this win to some "voices" would be dishonest.
So he made a sacrifice because, what, he just woke up one morning and felt like it? No. It's because the public brought it to his attention with enough public support to probably not hurt his career.
Sometimes it's because they woke up and felt like it. You don't immediately stop having having feelings about issues like you or me as soon as you're in the AG office.
If that's just too wild to consider, it probably also looks good come next election.
> Sometimes it's because they woke up and felt like it. You don't immediately stop having having feelings about issues like you or me as soon as you're in the AG office.
Maybe, but probably not in this case.
The idea being put forward here is the AG's actions had "it's nothing to do with those lazy petitions" and other kinds of activism. That's clearly false. There are literally millions of good causes and issues, and no one just wakes up and decides to help one in particular. They need to learn information about both the problem and the action, and that information needs to be brought to their attention. For instance, it's almost certain there's something like a charity that you'd certainly give money to, but you don't because you're totally ignorant of it. It'll take a news article, a conversation with a friend, etc. to bring it to your attention, first.
Petitions and activism are, among other things, ways of steering the attention of those in power. I doubt the AG would have taken action independently unless his attention has been so steered. Organizations like ICANN are not of perennial law enforcement interest.
> The idea being put forward here is the AG's actions had "it's nothing to do with those lazy petitions" and other kinds of activism. That's clearly false.
It's likely false, because I'm sure it had something to do with those petitions even if a very small amount, but there are many other possible reasons it could have become a priority to an AG. It's not either the petitions or he did it out of the goodness of his heart.
But my point wasn't to imply he did it because he's a good guy, but to point out he's a regular person with myriad motivations which likely includes doing what he thinks is the right thing in the calculation of what to do. There's no reason to assume that just because someone holds public office they're entirely self-serving. People are more complicated than that.
I think it's basically the theory of democratic elections though.
That someone has to present themselves as a non-sleazy person with non-sleazy plans to get elected, and if they do something different once elected or otherwise do something the voters recognize as super sleazy, they won't get re-elected. So a person in an elected position is responsive to public opinion, or does not remain elected.
Whether it's working out so well for us in the USA, I dunno.
Other than your cynicism about the effectiveness of petitioning for redress, why do you think this is true?
What in Becerra's background makes you think he's angling for a revolving-door job?
Other than you showing us that you "know" how the "game" is played, what can you back this view up with? Something seems lazy here, and it isn't the people writing letters.
