Big Telco’s fury over FCC plan to infuse telecoms policy with facts
I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library on Monday, November 13 at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!
Reality has a distinct anti-conservative bias, but conservatives have an answer: when the facts don't support your policies, just get different facts. Who needs evidence-based policy when you can have policy-based evidence?
Take gun violence. Conservatives tell us that "an armed society is a polite society," which means that the more guns you have, the less gun violence you'll experience. To prevent reality from unfairly staining this pristine ideological mind-palace with facts, conservatives passed the Dickey Amendment, which had the effect of banning the CDC from gathering stats on American gun-violence. No stats, no violence!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment
Policy-based evidence is at the core of so many cherished conservative beliefs, like the idea that queer people (and not youth pastors) are responsible for the sexual abuse of children, or the idea that minimum wages (and not monopolies) decrease jobs, or the idea that socialized medicine (and not private equity) leads to death panels:
Fortunately for conservatives, not every Biden agency is led by competent, honest brokers – the finance wing of the Dems got to foist some of their most ghoulish members upon the American people, including a no-fooling cheerleader for mass foreclosure:
And these same DINOs reached across the aisle to work with Republicans to keep some of the most competent, principled agency leaders from being seated, like the remarkable Gigi Sohn, targeted by a homophobic smear campaign funded by the telco industry, who feared her presence on the FCC:
The telcos are old hands at this stuff. Long before the gun control debates, Ma Bell had figured out that a monopoly over Americans' telecoms was a license to print money, and they set to corrupting agencies from the FCC to the DoJ:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/14/jam-to-day/
Reality has a vicious anti-telco bias. Think of Net Neutrality, the idea that if you pay an ISP for internet service, they should make a best effort to deliver the data you request, rather than deliberately slowing down your connection in the hopes that you'll seek out data from the company's preferred partners, who've paid a bribe for "premium delivery."
This shouldn't even be up for debate. The idea that your ISP should prioritize its preferred data over your preferred data is as absurd as the idea that a taxi-driver should slow down your rides to any pizzeria except Domino's, which has paid it for "premium service." If your cabbie circled the block twice every time you asked for a ride to Massimo's Pizza, you'd be rightly pissed – and the cab company would be fined.
Back when Ajit Pai was Trump's FCC chairman, he made killing Net Neutrality his top priority. But regulators aren't allowed to act without evidence, so Pai had to seek out as much policy-based evidence as he could. To that end, Pai allowed millions of obviously fake comments to be entered into the docket (comments from dead people, one million comments from @pornhub.com address, comments from sitting Senators who disavowed them, etc). Then Pai actively – and illegally – obstructed the NY Attorney General's investigation into the fraud:
The pursuit of policy-based evidence is greatly aided by the absence of real evidence. If you're gonna fill the docket with made-up nonsense, it helps if there's no truthful stuff in there to get in the way. To that end, the FCC has systematically avoided collecting data on American broadband delivery, collecting as little objective data as possible:
This willful ignorance was a huge boon to the telcos, who demanded billions in fed subsidies for "underserved areas" and then just blew it on anything they felt like – like the $45 billion of public money they wasted on obsolete copper wiring for rural "broadband" expansion under Trump:
Like other cherished conservative delusions, the unsupportable fantasy that private industry is better at rolling out broadband is hugely consequential. Before the pandemic, this meant that America – the birthplace of the internet – had the slowest, most expensive internet service of any G8 country. During the lockdown, broadband deserts meant that millions of poor and rural Americans were cut off from employment, education, health care and family:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/12/ajit-pai/#pai
Pai's response was to commit another $8 billion in public funds to broadband expansion, but without any idea of where the broadband deserts were – just handing more money over to monopoly telcos to spend as they see fit, with zero accountability:
All that changed after the 2020 election. Pai was removed from office (and immediately blocked me on Twitter) (oh, diddums), and his successor, Biden FCC chair Jessic Rosenworcel, started gathering evidence, soliciting your broadband complaints:
All that evidence spurred Congress to act. In 2021, Congress ordered the FCC to investigate and punish discrimination in internet service provision, "based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin":
In other words, Congress ordered the FCC to crack down on "digital redlining." That's when historic patterns of underinvestment in majority Black neighborhoods and other underserved communities create broadband deserts, where internet service is slower and more expensive than service literally across the street:
FCC Chair Rosenworcel has published the agency's plan for fulfilling this obligation. It's pretty straightforward: they're going to collect data on pricing, speed and other key service factors, and punish companies that practice discrimination:
This has provoked howls of protests from the ISP cartel, their lobbying org, and their Republican pals on the FCC. Writing for Ars Technica, Jon Brodkin rounds up a selection of these objections:
There's GOP FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, with a Steve Bannon-seque condemnation of "the administrative state [taking] effective control of all Internet services and infrastructure in the US. He's especially pissed that the FCC is going to regulate big landlords who force all their tenants to get slow, expensive from ISPs who offer kickbacks to landlords:
The response from telco lobbyists NCTA is particularly, nakedly absurd: they demand that the FCC exempt price from consideration of whether an ISP is practicing discrimination, calling prices a "non-technical aspect of broadband service":
https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/110897268295/1
I mean, sure – it's easy to prove that an ISP doesn't discriminate against customers if you don't ask how much they charge! "Sure, you live in a historically underserved neighborhood, but technically we'll give you a 100mb fiber connection, provided you give us $20m to install it."
This is a profoundly stupid demand, but that didn't stop the wireless lobbying org CTIA from chiming in with the same talking points, demanding that the FCC drop plans to collect data on "pricing, deposits, discounts, and data caps," evaluation of price is unnecessary in the competitive wireless marketplace":
https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/1107735021925/1
Individual cartel members weighed in as well, with AT&T and Verizon threatening to sue over the rules, joined by yet another lobbying group, USTelecom:
https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/1103655327582/1
The next step in this playbook is whipping up the low-information base by calling this "socialism" and mobilizing some of the worst-served, most-gouged people in America to shoot themselves in the face (again), to own the libs:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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We can still win back net neutrality after the repeal goes into effect, and here’s how (IMPORTANT)
On June 11th, the net neutrality repeal that the FCC voted on in December will be going into effect. I know that sounds scary, and I bet a lot of you think we’re doomed, but don’t give up hope! Yes, there is a CRA to protect net neutrality that might be passed, but if it doesn’t there are other things we can do. Here’s how we can keep fighting for our free and open internet:
* Get a VPN. These bad boys will make it so that your identity is protected online, you are protected from hackers, and you will still be able to access any website, even the ones ISPS will try to block and throttle!
* Switch to local broadband if you can! The big mean corporations that want net neutrality dead want your cash, they’re greedy as heck. Don’t give them the money! If enough people switch to local broadband and they start to lose business big time, they’ll know how much they screwed themselves over and may feel like bringing nn back would be the way to save their company and gain their reputation back (but we all know that some injuries stay forever. Karma yo.) Not only that but you’d be supporting local businesses and that’s a dope thing to do!!
* Join a protest, but do it PEACEFULLY. I CAN’T STRESS HOW IMPORTANT IT IS TO NOT BE VIOLENT. Violence only leads to a worse conflict, people will think we’re a bunch of sjw weirdos and that will be used against us (also violence is just bad as a whole.)
* Go to libraries!!! They’re a good source of information for when you need it!!!
* Save as many things to your computer/phone/etc as you can before June 11th!!! If there’s any information/resources/etc from a site you want/need that you get the feeling might be blocked out/throttled, save it!!! Copy text into notepad or something!! Save images into your photo gallery!!! At least you’ll have it!!
* Keep checking in on what your states are doing!! I believe around 22 different states are trying to create their own laws protecting nn, (and even attempting to sue the FCC I’ve heard?? Someone pls correct me if I’m wrong on that.) And be sure to support those state protections!!
* VOTE FOR PEOPLE WHO SUPPORT NN IN THE MIDTERMS IF YOU ARE OLD ENOUGH TO VOTE!!
* Do NOT stop fighting, they want us to give up, don’t let them have that victory.
* Have hope, be optimistic, but actually partake in the fight, don’t just sit on your butt!! And keep calm yet vigilant.
If anyone knows anything else we can do to help bring back nn, please add onto this!! We can still win in the end!! Even if we are without nn for a while.
Child pornography (which we'll just call "Ajit Pai" for the rest of this post) is a terrible thing.
However, when Verizon...uh, Tumblr pulls down NSFW blogs that have adult content but do not have and would never post Ajit Pai despite having adult content because Apple pulled their app from the App stoe beccause a few Ajit Pai creators posted their Ajit Pai online and violated the Tumblr terms of service, and then Tumblr (a subsidiary of Verizon, which used to be the employer of the FCC Chairman/scumbag lawyer) take a hammer to a scalpel problem where even the adult content creators are strongly against Ajit Pai content and often cooperate with the adminstrators to report Ajit Pai as well as sex trafficking and other stuff that breaks the rules.
Tumblr has broken its promises to users, which it's bad enough Tumblr users get a bad rap for being wannabe Williamsburg Hipsters for just having a Tumblr to like and talk about things they like that have a rare niche or provide an outlet for them to share things that interest them in a nearly uncensored environment even though there are more settings to control content to prevent underage users from finding porn. (Yeah, good luck with that. Kids will find everything, especially if they are not supervised by responsible mature adults!)
Tumblr has made a serious faux pas, which although their intent is noble, their actions have caused considerable collateral damage. Other social media networks where many of the Tumblr usrs have their less risque content or provide a channel of communication have been filled with people angry or sad that they lost a lot of the hard work they put into their work simply because some loser posted Ajit Pai or their ability to use the Internet was bastardly.
But Tumblr users are smart. They have been frustrated by the Pornbots that have made searching for even the most SFW content to which nobody really asked for a Rule 34 of it, to be runed by "Click here because she is waiting for you."
In my many years of being alive, I have yet to have some hot horny woman come to my door in the middle of the day and ask "Do you want to do it with me? I've also got pictures." I mean, something like that doesn't happen unless Ashton Kutcher, Chris Hansen, or the people of Candid Camera show up.
So why would I want my posts to be filled with unsoliticited offers for sex, Ajit Pai, or other shit I never wanted to begin with?
Tumblr needs to get their shit together. Apple's takedown of the app was a message to Tumblr "Get your shit together". To which Tumblr's response was sloven, irresponsible, and insensitive.
The only excuse for such behavior is someone AT Tumblr has enabled this egreous behavior for way too long, and rather than following the clues that somebody is doing this either to abuse the terms of service or to harm an otherwise harmless community where there are no victims and no people actually used, abused, nor exploited.
There is now a call to move some of the adult content creators, specifically artists, to back up their content and go to other websites, since Tumblr adminstrators cannot separate fiction from reality.
On the other hand, Tumblr's irresponsible actions will allow other site that had been doing what Tumblr had for years to see the return of users. Think of it as what happens everytime Facebook says "I accidently shared all your personal data, isn't that great?" and everyone asks "I wonder what Tom from MySpace is doing?"
There comes a time when every webiste becomes so big that their owners are willing to sell out their users to a large corporation just so that large corporation can destroy the site.
For MySpace, it was News Corp. Instagram and Whatsapp, Facebook. Tumblr, Yahoo and Verizon.
For artists who create adult content, it may be time to move.
Maybe by removing themselves from the equation, Tumblr will actually find out it was Ajit Pai all along.
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Because no one should pay for using a fucking social network and everyone's online privacy should be left unbothered and unexploited. So, make it trend, even if it does not fit your aesthetic blog or whatever the fuck and promote it. Let's make sure the slimy, goldplated hands of these corporate bitches stay far away from the Internet.
