The FCC on Thursday once again voted along party lines to restore popular net neutrality rules stripped away during the Trump administration in a flurry of protest and sleazy industry behavior.

You might recall the 2017 repeal was so unpopular that telecom giants were caught using fake and dead people to create the illusion of public support. The Trump FCC was also caught making up a DDOS attack to explain away public outrage. And the repeal was a flurry of debunked lies, such as the claim that net neutrality would “stifle broadband investment” and represented “draconian government overreach.”

While years of disinformation from the GOP and telecom industry have muddied the water, the fairly modest rules are a stopgap effort to prevent telecom giants from abusing their regional market power and dominance of the broadband market to hamper competition and abuse consumers.

Under the rules your ISP can’t block you from accessing the service of your choice, or charge a startup extra money if they want to receive the same network priority as a giant company. These are basic protections ensuring the internet remains relatively open (assuming the FCC enforces the rules) and driven by decades of big ISPs (like AT&T and Comcast) trying to tilt the playing field in their favor.

“These net neutrality policies ensured you can go where you want and do what you want
online without your broadband provider making choices for you,” FCC boss Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement. “They made clear your broadband provider should not have the right to block websites, slow services, or censor online content.”

While broadband providers have already started whining about the rules and threatened to sue, privately (just like last time) broadband industry executives doubt the rules will have any meaningful impact on their businesses. The rules aren’t onerous, won’t likely be enforced with any consistency, and big companies like AT&T and Comcast have never, ever really had to worry about serious FCC penalties for any of their various predatory, anti-competitive, or illegal behaviors.

What big ISPS are mostly worried about is that if you allow fairly tepid basic regulatory oversight, it could escalate more significantly into meaningful antitrust enforcement and rate regulation, neither of which they’ve ever actually had to worry about given widespread corruption and regulatory capture. That they might someday experience real accountability is something they enjoy whining about anyway.

Net neutrality experts like Stanford professor Barbara van Schewick had expressed concerns that the new rules were somewhat weaker than the original. She was particularly concerned that the rules opened the door to allowing ISPs to charge consumers extra if they wanted particular apps and services to operate in priority fast lanes, opening the door to anti-competitive behavior.

She and other telecom policy lawyers are still dissecting the final order, so it’s not yet clear if those concerns have been addressed (I’ll write a follow up post on loopholes once legal experts have had some time to digest the legal fine print).

In a statement, FCC official Brendan Carr (R, AT&T), made it abundantly clear that Republicans hope the Supreme Court’s looming plan to lobotomize what’s left of the federal regulatory state (see: Chevron) boxes the FCC in and prevents them from being able to protect consumers and open markets. Though legal precedent may protect the FCC more broadly than other agencies when that hammer finally falls.

I tend to think the Rosenworcel FCC knows they needed to pass these rules to be in the good graces of critics and consumers, but will be happy to have this political hot potato in the rear view mirror. I doubt the rules will ever be meaningfully enforced, though the broader Title II authority under the Telecom Act that the ruling restores will certainly help the agency’s consumer protection efforts on other fronts.

Public Knowledge Legal Director John Bergmayer tells Ars Technica ISPs will still try to push their luck in terms of tilting the playing field and nickel and diming consumers, and it’s important that the FCC remains diligent in enforcing the rules:

“Broadband providers will continue attempting to re-brand their old plans for internet fast and slow lanes, hoping to sneak them through. The FCC will need to diligently enforce its rules, including clarifying that discrimination in favor of certain apps or categories of traffic “impairs” and “degrades” traffic that is left in the slow lane, and that broadband providers cannot simply take apps that people use on the Internet every day and package them as a separate “non-broadband” service.”

It’s possible the Rosenworcel FCC, staffed with the kind of careerist revolving door folks who aren’t particularly interested in protracted political fights with deep-pocketed campaign contributors, doesn’t really enforce the rules. And the Trump FCC in a second Trump term would at best not enforce them and at worst turn around and eliminate them all over again.

This kind of policy patty cake could be addressed if Congress would just pass a net neutrality law, but just like consumer privacy and countless other modern American issues, they’re too corrupt to do that. So Democrats use the ever-shrinking confines of FCC power to implement half measures while Republicans — in perfect lockstep with telecoms — have shifted focus toward exploiting a corrupt Supreme Court to lobotomize federal regulatory power almost entirely.

The central problem with U.S. broadband continues to be concentrated, local monopoly power nobody in either party wants to address. Cable companies dominate broadband access in most U.S. cities, resulting in privacy violations, net neutrality violations, high prices, slow speeds, and spotty access in a service market where consumers are unable to organically punish providers by voting with their wallet.

Republicans actively support telecom monopolization and consolidation. Democrats claim to be interested in fixes, but even Democratic FCC members can’t openly admit monopoly power is a problem in public facing statements. In part because many of these companies, as their role in domestic surveillance has shown, are effectively a part of government and above most meaningful oversight.

We’ll see what happens next. Given precedent (the courts have repeatedly declared the FCC has the legal right to restore or eliminate net neutrality rules provided they have solid factual justification) I doubt industry lawsuits will have much of an impact. But this Supreme Court remains much of a wildcard, and I still don’t think the press or public are taking their looming war on the regulatory state seriously enough.

Last month the New York Times’ Kashmir Hill published a major story on how GM collects driver behavior data then sells access (through LexisNexis) to insurance companies, which will then jack up your rates.

The absolute bare minimum you could could expect from the auto industry here is that they’re doing this in a way that’s clear to car owners. But of course they aren’t; they’re burying “consent” deep in the mire of some hundred-page end user agreement nobody reads, usually not related to the car purchase — but the apps consumers use to manage roadside assistance and other features.

Since Kashmir’s story was published, she says she’s been inundated with complaints by consumers about similar behavior. She’s even discovered that she’s one of the folks GM spied on and tattled to insurers about. In a follow up story, she recounts how she and her husband bought a Chevy Bolt, were auto-enrolled in a driver assistance program, then had their data (which they couldn’t access) sold to insurers.

GM’s now facing 10 different federal lawsuits from customers pissed off that they were surreptitiously tracked and then forced to pay significantly more for insurance:

“In 10 federal lawsuits filed in the last month, drivers from across the country say they did not knowingly sign up for Smart Driver but recently learned that G.M. had provided their driving data to LexisNexis. According to one of the complaints, a Florida owner of a 2019 Cadillac CTS-V who drove it around a racetrack for events saw his insurance premium nearly double, an increase of more than $5,000 per year.”

GM (and some apologists) will of course proclaim that this is only fair that reckless drivers pay more, but that’s generally not how it works. Pressured for unlimited quarterly returns, insurance companies will use absolutely anything they find in the data to justify rising rates.

And as the sector is getting automated by sloppy AI, those determinations aren’t going to go in your favor (see: AI’s rushed implementation in healthcare). That’s before the fact that consumers aren’t being told about the surveillance, and aren’t given a clear option to stop it. Or that the data is also being sold to a litany of dodgy data brokers who, in turn, see minimal oversight.

If this follows historical precedent, GM will pay out a relative pittance in legal fees and fines, claim they’ve changed their behavior, then simply rename these programs into something else after heavy consultation with their legal department. Something more carefully crafted, with bare-bones consumer alerts, to exploit the fact that the U.S. remains too corrupt to pass even a baseline modern privacy law.

Automakers — which have long had some of the worst privacy reputations in all of tech — are one of countless industries that lobbied relentlessly for decades to ensure Congress never passed a federal privacy law or regulated dodgy data brokers. And that the FTC — the over-burdened regulator tasked with privacy oversight — lacks the staff, resources, or legal authority to police the problem at any real scale.

The end result is just a parade of scandals. And if Hill were so inclined, she could write a similar story about every tech sector in America, given everything from your smart TV and electricity meter to refrigerator and kids’ toys now monitor your behavior and sell access to those insights to a wide range of dodgy data broker middlemen, all with nothing remotely close to ethics or competent oversight.

And despite the fact that this free for all environment is resulting in no limit of dangerous real-world harms, our Congress has been lobbied into gridlock by a cross-industry coalition of companies with near-unlimited budgets, all desperately hoping that their performative concerns about TikTok will distract everyone from the fact we live in a country too corrupt to pass a real privacy law.

When the Apple Vision Pro launched back in February, the press had a sustained, two-month straight orgasm over the product’s potential to transform VR and the world of spatial computing.

Downplayed were little sticking points like the lack of app support; the short battery life (despite a bulky external battery pack Steve Jobs would have never approved of); the need for expensive additional prescription lenses for glasses wearers (more complex issues like astigmatism weren’t supported); or the fact that VR makes about 40 to 70 percent of the target audience for these products want to puke.

Much like the Metaverse, the Apple Vision Pro roared into the tech press hype bubble like a freight train, then retreated like a bit of a simpering wimp. Reports are now that sales for the headsets are fairly pathetic:

“Some Apple stores are reportedly down to selling just a handful of Vision Pros in an entire week, according to Bloomberg. The hype around the Apple Vision Pro has fallen dramatically since the headset sold 180,000 units during its January pre-order weekend. Demand for demos of the technology is also reportedly “way down” since the product’s launch. Even worse, the report says, many people who book appointments to test Vision Pros simply don’t show up anymore.”

It was clear that this was basically a glorified prototype aimed at helping Apple figure out future iterations that people can actually afford and that can make it through an entire movie without having to charge the battery. But at the same time Apple wanted to present the impression that this was utterly transformative technology, available today that would transform the way you work and play.

This has all been fairly representative of a tech press that, over the years, has become more of an extension of tech company marketing departments than any sort of journalistic endeavor. The vast majority of the Vision Pro coverage implied this was a product that would be utterly revolutionary; yet as Bloomberg notes, even avid early adopters seem to have forgotten the headset exists:

“I had initially used the Vision Pro whenever I watched a movie or YouTube, or when I wanted a more immersive screen for my Mac at home. These days, with the initial buzz wearing off, it seems clear that the Vision Pro is too cumbersome to use on a daily basis. Going through the process of attaching the battery, booting it up and navigating the interface often doesn’t feel worth it. And a killer app hasn’t emerged that would compel me to pick it up. It’s far easier to just use my laptop as a laptop and watch video on either my computer or big-screen TV.”

So again you’ve got a tech press hype cycle that professed we were witnessing something revolutionary, only for the product to wind up being… not that. Lost in a lot of the tech coverage for the Vision Pro was the fact that people just generally don’t like having a giant sweaty piece of plastic strapped to their fucking face.

The first thing Vision Pro fans will say to justify a lack of public interest is that this wasn’t supposed to sell well. That it was a water-testing prototype designed to benefit future iterations. And maybe that’s true; maybe it isn’t. Maybe Apple (a company that’s shifted from Jobs-era risk taking innovation to quality-focused iteration) will be the company that nails the perfect VR experience.

But I think it’s equally possible they won’t be. That they’re supplanted by a hungrier, smaller, less risk-averse and younger company. In which case all early adopters will be left with is hype-filled memories and a very expensive relic.

I’m interested in VR. I still think it holds promise. I’ve owned numerous headsets. I’ve tinkered with most modern VR apps and gaming titles. And I still generally don’t think this tech truly becomes interesting until cords are eliminated, self-contained battery life becomes wholly irrelevant, weight is a non-factor, and the interfaces become seamlessly intuitive to the point of near-magic.

We’re still quite a way from all of that, no matter how much wish-casting the technology press tech industry marketing apparatus engage in.

We’ve noted repeatedly how the mass hyperventilation about TikTok is a giant distraction from the country’s broader failures on consumer privacy; namely our corrupt inability to pass even a baseline privacy law for the internet era, and our absolute refusal to regulate sleazy data brokers.

As a result there’s not a week that goes by where there isn’t some story about your personal behavior and location data being sold to data brokers, who then sell access to any nitwit with a nickel — or fail to secure it.

Like when Ron Wyden’s office recently revealed how a right wing activist group was able to purchase women’s abortion clinic location visit data, then use that data to send the vulnerable women targeted misinformation.

Or last year, when it was revealed that a group of conservative Colorado Catholics spent millions of dollars to purchase Grindr user location and browsing data to single out and shame priests that had used gay dating and hookup apps.

Now Grindr’s in the news for all the wrong reasons once again. The California-based company is now facing a new UK lawsuit that alleges the company sold private user information, including HIV status, with a range of third parties without user consent:

“According to the claim, the company shared sensitive data with third parties for commercial purposes, in breach of the UK’s data privacy laws It says it included information about the ethnicity and sexual orientation of users.”

The claims (more details here) stem from data transactions that occurred a while ago: namely between 2018 and 2020. Grindr, of course, claims they’ve dramatically improved their privacy practices since then, though this Washington Post story about the use of purchased Grindr data to expose gay priests suggests the behavior extended at least through 2021.

Grindr’s was also sued last year (with the help of a former employee) for promising to delete the data of cancelled accounts and then… just not doing that.

Grindr may have changed their behaviors, but they may not have. We can’t actually know because, again, we don’t have a meaningful privacy law with meaningful penalties for companies and executives that play fast and loose with consumer data.

And we’ve done this because policy leaders across the partisan spectrum have prioritized making money over market health and public safety (though a lot of calories go into distracting folks from this fact).

Some variation of what Grindr does is happening across many apps or services or networks you use. Your sensitive location, demographic, and behavioral data is too frequently sold to a vast array of dodgy international data brokers, who then in turn sell access to pretty much anybody (including domestic and foreign intelligence agencies). All under the pretense this is safe because the data was “anonymized” (a meaningless term).

But remember kids: TikTok is the only real modern privacy threat worth worrying about.

Major TV providers lost another 5 million paying TV subscribers last year, as users increasingly jump from fat and expensive cable bundles, to streaming. At the same time, a lot of the executives and bad ideas that plagued the traditional cable TV sector are coming along for the ride, resulting in a streaming sector that looks more and more like the kludgy cable sector.

Thanks to industry consolidation and saturated market growth, the streaming industry has started behaving much like the traditional cable giants they once disrupted. As with most industries suffering from “enshittification,” that generally means steadily worse service at higher prices as it tries to appease Wall Street’s demand for improved quarterly returns at any cost (even long term company health).

Netflix has started acting like password sharing, something it advocated for for years, is a dire cardinal sin. Amazon decided it would be fun to increase the number of ads it runs, charging Amazon Prime users even more money to avoid them. Consumers are paying more for streaming than ever as layoffs abound, streaming catalogs shrink, and the underlying products steadily get worse.

In response, customers are starting to be a little smarter about their shopping habits, increasingly cancelling streaming services when they’re not watching them. According to the New York Times, more than 29 million U.S. consumers — about a quarter of all domestic paying streaming subscribers — cancelled three or more streaming services sometime in the last two years:

“Among these nomadic subscribers, some are taking advantage of how easy it is, with a monthly contract and simple click of a button, to hopscotch from one service to the next. Indeed, these users can be fickle — a third of them resubscribe to the canceled service within six months, according to Antenna’s research.”

The reduced revenues from people cancelling for months at a time will create new pressure on streaming giants to deliver Wall Street those sweet quarterly returns. Streaming profitability was already a challenge (NBCUniversal’s Peacock lost $2.8 billion last year). In other words: improving service quality and expanding catalogs won’t be at the top of the executive menu.

So now the race will be on to thrill Wall Street and goose revenues in other ways. That means more price hikes, more pointless mergers (see: the whole AT&T Time Warner Discovery mess), and more bizarre restrictions. I’d also suspect they’ll soon take another terrible cue from traditional cable: cutting corners on customer service, and making it increasingly difficult to cancel service without headaches.

That’s not to say that streaming still hasn’t been a dramatic improvement over traditional cable television. But if the industry isn’t careful, and there’s no indication it wants to be, it’s going to be repeating the same exact trajectory and create openings for disruption of its own business models.

I’ve mentioned more than a few times how the singular hyperventilation about TikTok is kind of silly distraction from the fact that the United States is too corrupt to pass a modern privacy law, resulting in no limit of dodgy behavior, abuse, and scandal. We have no real standards thanks to corruption, and most people have no real idea of the scale of the dysfunction.

Case in point: a new study out of the University of Pennsylvania (hat tip to The Register) analyzed a nationally representative sample of 100 U.S. hospitals, and found that 96 percent of them were doling out sensitive user visitor data to Google, Meta, and a vast coalition of dodgy data brokers.

Hospitals, it should be clear, aren’t legally required to publish website privacy policies that clearly detail how and with whom they share visitor data. Again, because we’re too corrupt as a country to require and enforce such requirements. The FTC does have some jurisdiction, but it’s too short staffed and under-funded (quite intentionally) to tackle the real scope of U.S. online privacy violations.

So the study found that a chunk of these hospital websites didn’t even have a privacy policy. And of the ones that did, about half the time the over-verbose pile of ambiguous and intentionally confusing legalese didn’t really inform visitors that their data was being transferred to a long list of third parties. Or, for that matter, who those third-parties even are:

“…we found that although 96.0% of hospital websites exposed users to third-party tracking, only 71.0% of websites had an available website privacy policy…Only 56.3% of policies (and only 40 hospitals overall) identified specific third-party recipients.”

Data in this instance can involve everything including email and IP addresses, to what you clicked on, what you researched, demographic info, and location. This was all a slight improvement from a study they did a year earlier showing that 98 percent of hospital websites shared sensitive data with third parties. The professors clearly knew what to expect, but were still disgusted in comments to The Register:

“It’s shocking, and really kind of incomprehensible,” said Dr Ari Friedman, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “People have cared about health privacy for a really, really, really long time.” It’s very fundamental to human nature. Even if it’s information that you would have shared with people, there’s still a loss, just an intrinsic loss, when you don’t even have control over who you share that information with.”

If this data is getting into the hands of dodgy international and unregulated data brokers, there’s no limit of places it can end up. Brokers collect a huge array of demographic, behavioral, and location data, use it to create detailed profiles of individuals, then sell access in a million different ways to a long line of additional third parties, including the U.S. government and foreign intelligence agencies.

There should be hard requirements about transparent, clear, and concise notifications of exactly what data is being collected and sold and to whom. There should be hard requirements that users have the ability to opt out (or, preferably in the cases of sensitive info, opt in). There should be hard punishment for companies and executives that play fast and loose with consumer data.

And we have none of that because our lawmakers decided, repeatedly, that making money was more important than market health, consumer welfare, and public safety. The result has been a parade of scandals that skirt ever closer to people being killed, at scale.

So again, the kind of people that whine about the singular privacy threat that is TikTok (like say FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, or Senator Marsha Blackburn) — but have nothing to say about the much broader dysfunction created by rampant corruption — are advertising they either don’t know what they’re talking about, or aren’t addressing the full scope of the problem in good faith.

Last month Oregon state lawmakers passed a new “right to repair” law making it easier and cheaper to repair your electronics. The law requires that manufacturers that do business in the state provide users with easy and affordable access to tools, manuals, and parts. It also cracks down on practices like “parts pairing,” which often uses software locks to block use of third-party parts and assemblages.

It’s arguably the toughest state right to repair law yet. And it almost didn’t pass thanks to Apple, which (as it has in other states) lobbied to kill the bill, falsely claiming it was a threat to user safety and security.

Last week, The Washington Post proudly declared that Apple was slightly reversing some long-standing restrictions on repair and accessibility:

“Apple told The Washington Post it is easing a key restriction on iPhone repairs. Starting this fall, owners of an iPhone 15 or newer will be able to get their broken devices fixed with used parts — including screens, batteries and cameras — without any change in functionality.”

Notice this isn’t a full reversal of Apple’s restrictions, which (despite what it often claims) are designed to monopolize repair and accelerate the sales of new phones. And it takes the Washington Post until the seventeenth paragraph to inform readers that the changes are thanks in large part to Oregon’s new law.

And again, the Post never really informs the reader clearly that Apple lobbied to have the law killed. Or really properly frames the impact Apple’s restrictions have long had on the environment, consumer rights and costs, or the small independent repair shops Apple has a history of bullying. But it does let Apple falsely claim, without correction, that the law is a threat to consumer privacy:

“Neither Ternus nor Apple spokespeople commented on what changes may have to be made to abide by Oregon law, but the company said in an earlier statement that the bill’s language “introduces the possibility that Apple would be required to allow unknown, non-secure third-party Face ID or Touch ID modules to unlock” a user’s personal information.”

That’s just scare mongering. You can read in detail over at iFixit how “parts pairing” actually works and how it’s harmful. Apple (like John Deere and every other company angry that their repair monopolies are being dismantled) loves to pretend their interest here is solely in user safety. Their interest is in new phone sales and maintaining a profitable monopoly over repair.

Apple’s whole pivot is framed by the Post, which seems simply thrilled to even have access to an Apple engineering VP, as something Apple just came up with one day because it’s just that forward-thinking and courteous. It’s another example of how Apple’s widely proclaimed “180 on right to repair” is more of a drunken 45 degree begrudging and overdue waddle, propped up by a lazy press.

One of the key reasons the net neutrality fight even became a thing was widespread concern that big ISPs would abuse their power to behave anti-competitively, picking winners and losers across the internet ecosystem, and nickel-and-diming consumers in a variety of obnoxiously creative ways.

Verizon, for example, charges you extra if you want 4K video to work properly. T-Mobile spent years letting some key partners and services (namely large companies) bypass usage caps and network throttling restrictions. It’s not complicated: these kinds of gatekeeper decisions give historically unpopular telecoms power they shouldn’t have under the principle of an open, competitive internet.

We’ve noted how the Biden FCC will vote on April 25 to restore popular net neutrality rules stripped away during the Trump administration. Though we’ve also indicated there are some concerns among experts that the rules may wind up being weaker than the original 2015 edition.

Stanford law professor and net neutrality expert Barbara van Schewick has written a blog post noting that while the Rosenworcel FCC has shored up some concerns on this front (the FCC’s rules won’t “pre-empt” tougher California rules, for example), there’s still room for concern. Most notably surrounding the new rules’ treatment of so-called “fast lanes”:

“There’s a huge problem: the proposed rules make it possible for mobile ISPs to start picking applications and putting them in a fast lane – where they’ll perform better generally and much better if the network gets congested.”

Wireless carriers have made it clear that they plan to use “network slicing” to create 5G fast lanes for certain apps such as video conferencing, games, and video. The FCC’s new net neutrality rules allows such behavior, providing the service or app isn’t charged for them. So they can’t, say, extort a company into paying more if it wants its service or app to see baseline performance, which is good.

But the rules still allow ISPs to charge consumers all manner of fees if they want the most popular apps and services to work their best. And van Schewick notes, the rules still allow big ISPs to determine which companies and services get priority. That inherently creates a system whereby less popular and successful apps and services (as well as academia-related services and nonprofits) are relegated to second-class network status, putting them at competitive and performance disadvantage:

“And as we’ve seen in the past, programs like this favor the most popular apps, even when the program is supposedly open to all apps in a category and no apps are paying the ISP. So the biggest apps will end up in all the fast lanes, while most others would be left out. The ones left out would likely include messaging apps like Signal, local news sites, decentralized Fediverse apps like Mastodon and PeerTube, niche video sites like Dropout, indie music sites like Bandcamp, and the millions of other sites and apps in the long tail.”

van Schewick provides some potential illustrative examples, several of which already exist in various forms:

So again, the problem is that big and influential services or games like Disney or ESPN will see network priority during periods of 5G wireless network congestion. While smaller competitors, nonprofits, and others get relegated into a sea of “best effort” network scenarios.

van Schewick notes the original Obama-era 2014 proposal restricted this stuff. As did, in her legal opinion, the 2015 final rules. Even the half-assed proposals floated by Republicans at various points prohibited ISPs from speeding up different apps and services arbitrarily. But she notes these new 2024 rules include an obvious silence on this front that seems clearly lobbied for by industry:

“The no-throttling rule that the FCC proposed in October explicitly prohibited ISPs from slowing down apps and classes of apps; it was silent on whether the rule also applies to speeding up. “

The original Rosenworcel FCC proposal unveiled last October didn’t include those restrictions, so public interest groups, startups, and members of Congress all reached out asking why. April came, and the FCC’s draft net neutrality order still didn’t restrict the speeding up of specific apps and services, outside to say it would address so-called “fast lane” issues on a “case by case basis.”

Opponents of net neutrality like to pretend that the rules are a “solution in search of a problem,” but industry has made it extremely clear that this kind of fractured internet, which consumers face ever-escalating nickel-and-diming, and the most popular apps and services get network priority over everybody else, is precisely the sort of future they have in mind.

Like any publicly-traded company, telecoms are obligated to shareholders to boost quarterly revenues at any cost. In telecom this routinely comes in the form of direct price hikes, cuts to service quality and broadband deployment, or substandard customer service. But it also increasingly comes in the forms of obnoxious monetization efforts that create entirely new obstacles you’re then charged extra to overcome; efforts you can’t avoid because you either have no competing broadband alternatives to flee too (market failure) or all of the competitors on offer are engaging in the same bad behavior (regulatory capture).

FCC bureaucrats have generally prioritized “not stifling innovation” (as if telecom giants have meaningfully innovated any time in the last quarter century) over protecting markets and consumers, and there’s evidence that kind of thinking is once again at play. I’d suspect, quite intentionally, none of this will be addressed by the time the final net neutrality rules are voted on at the FCC’s April 25th meeting.

The FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), part of the 2021 infrastructure bill, currently provides 23+ million low-income Americans a $30 broadband discount every month. But those 23 million Americans are poised to soon lose the discount because key Republicans — who routinely dole out billions of dollars on far dumber fare — refuse to fund a $4-$7 billion extension.

As a result, the FCC is informing struggling Americans that their broadband bills are all about to jump significantly as the program starts to wind down. There’s a last ditch effort to save the program, but it’s unclear if it has traction in one of the least productive Congress’ in U.S. history:

“Speaking at an event hosted by USTelecom on Thursday, FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks called the ACP “the most effective program we’ve ever had” for incentivizing low-cost internet plans, and he mourned the fact that its time could be running out.”

The ACP’s death is an interesting case because the telecom industry generally supports it, many Republicans support it, and many Democrats support it.

Big ISPs support it because it basically involves throwing money at them to temporarily reduce broadband prices that wouldn’t be high in the first place if big ISPs hadn’t spent the last 40 years lobbying to crush competition and regulatory oversight (usually with the help of corrupt centrist Democrats and Republicans).

But a handful of Republicans, nervous that the popular program could help Democrats during an election season, are engaging in obstructionism. House Speaker Mike Johnson appears to be slow walking the emergency funding proposal to death.

Most “both sides” news orgs, always wary of upsetting sources and advertisers, lack the courage to inform readers the program is being specifically killed by Republicans. And given these kinds of bread and butter issues don’t generate clicks and ad engagement in the attention infotainment economy, many outlets just won’t cover it at all.

Republicans claim their concern is about costs but it’s not, really; you’ll recall the Trump tax cuts doled out $42 billion to AT&T alone in exchange for a bunch of layoffs. These same Republicans routinely throw absurd gobs of money at all sorts of ideological dipshittery and badly managed corporate handouts. The fiscal conservatism is a performance the press is happy to help parrot to the public.

Some ISPs, like Verizon, say they’ll continue to offer discounts to poor people for about six months even after the program ends. At which point poor Americans are just shit out of luck, and their monthly bill will return to its usual expensive state, potentially driving them offline.

The $42.5 billion in infrastructure bill broadband subsidies flowing to the states try to at least nudge big ISPs to offer a cheaper, low-income broadband plan if they take taxpayer money, but they’re lobbying to have those requirements killed.

Ideally you wouldn’t need such requirements or programs like the ACP (that temporarily and artificially lower rates) if we had policymakers with the political courage to take direct aim at the real problem: highly concentrated monopoly power and the corruption and regulatory capture that protects it.

That’s what causes broadband competitive market failure and high prices across much of the U.S., but Congress and the FCC can’t even admit it exists, much less propose a solution that might offend telecom giants closely tethered to our domestic surveillance systems. The ACP was a backup plan to do the bare minimum for the least fortunate; and Congress couldn’t even accomplish that.

When last we checked in with our friends at Roku, they had made the unpopular decision to effectively “brick” user streaming hardware and television sets if users didn’t agree to a typically draconian end user agreement that effectively bans your legal right to sue the company.

Eroding your legal rights using fine print isn’t new; it’s been a U.S. corporate standard since the Supreme Court gave AT&T the green light to do so way back in 2011, and part of Roku’s plans since 2019. Being extra annoying about it was a new wrinkle; but this too isn’t all that uncommon for publicly-traded companies trying to boost growth, revenues, and market share at any cost.

But such behavior has diminishing returns, of course. You can cross a threshold where you’re so focused on boosting revenues that you forget about the end user experience and drive users to the exits through sheer annoyance.

That’s the mode Roku’s clearly in now, as made evident by recent behavior and a new patent the company has filed that would help the company force ads on top of whatever you’re watching on your Roku TV, regardless of whether or not you have a third-party device or game console attached:

“A patent application from the company spotted by Lowpass describes a system for displaying ads over any device connected over HDMI, a list that could include cable boxes, game consoles, DVD or Blu-ray players, PCs, or even other video-streaming devices. Roku filed for the patent in August 2023, and it was published in November 2023, though it hasn’t yet been granted.”

So, in other words, if you attached a third-party streaming competitor’s device to your Roku TV, and the TV detected that you had paused playback, it would insert a static or video ad into the screen. Of course it’s just a patent and doesn’t mean this will be implemented, but it is kind of representative of the broader “smart” TV sector, which cares less and less about product quality as it pursues data monetization.

For years all I’ve ever wanted from TV manufacturers is an extremely “dumb” 4K 65 inch TV that has a whole bunch of HDMI inputs, but no “smart” internals. Since I know the real money is increasingly made from spying on users and monetizing their every fart (while failing to properly secure the collected data), I’ve even been willing to pay extra for simplicity, quality, and privacy.

Yes, I know I can simply not connect my TV to the internet. But that’s not fixing my problem. Even basic HDMI switching and settings are now tethered to clunky, bloated, smart internals and GUIs that take time to load, and get slower as the TV ages. Some manufacturers also block you from basic functions unless you agree to be tracked and monetized. And yes, I could also buy a business-class set, but such options are cost prohibitive and often lack features like HDR.

Instead of having a business segment that tailors to people who simply want a quality, dumb-as-a-box-of-hammers television, the market keeps heading in the other direction (like this TV that shows ads on a second screen, constantly, even when the primary TV is off).

I know why they’re doing it, but I don’t have to like it. And I know that given the tendency of publicly-traded companies to push their luck to please Wall Street’s incessant demand for improved quarterly returns, there eventually comes a point where user annoyance causes a revolt, and the company in question usually stumbles forth anyway, oblivious.