The Electronic Comment Filing System is about to graduate to version 2.0, and the FCC will unwrap its new version and display it to the rest of the world Friday 10/23/09 from 9AM-10:30AM at FCC HQ in Washington.
The FCC claims that the new version offers many advantages over the old, including “Section 508 compliance; the ability for users to file multiple documents to multiple rulemakings in a single submission; advanced search and query of rulemakings; ability to extract comments; RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds; and the ability to export data results to Excel or PDF formats.”
RBR-TVBR observation: What we’d like to see is a system smart enough to cache submissions that are all substantially the same as one another, save the signature. We are of course referring to click-and-send comments sent in by loyal members of some organization with an FCC axe to grind.
We hate clicking on John Doe’s comment only to find that it is an exact duplicate, down to the comma, of what John Q. Public said.
We recognize that even though it is easy to denigrate a citizen too lazy to state their complaint in their own words, it still does have some meaning that they cared enough to click twice.
Here’s what we ask: When the FCC is bombarded with yet another click-and-send campaign, show us the first one submitted, then keep a running tally of the total identical comments that follow it. That tells us everything we need to know.
Except for one more thing: It would be nice if we could learn the source of the campaign, if the FCC is able to find that out.
