Biden Still Hasn't Picked An FCC Boss, But He Just Tagged A Comcast Lobbyist As Ambassador To Canada

from the priorities-priorities dept

We've noted a few times how consumer groups have grown annoyed at the Biden administration's failure to pick an FCC boss six months into his term. After the rushed Trump appointment of unqualified Trump BFF Nathan Simington to the agency (as part of that dumb and now deceased plan to have the FCC regulate social media), the agency now sits gridlocked at 2-2 commissioners. That means it can't do anything of any real substance, like reversing Trump-era attacks on basic telecom consumer protections, media consolidation rules, or the FCC's authority to hold telecom giants accountable for much of, well, anything.

It will take months to appoint and seat an FCC boss. It will take additional months to get that person settled in place to even start working on serious policy proposals. In other words, by the time the FCC is fully staffed, a full year may have been wasted that could have been spent on tackling the not insubstantial problems in the telecom space. While Biden certainly has been aggressive on other fronts (appointing Lina Khan head of the FTC), fixing the mess in telecom clearly hasn't been a top priority.

What has been more of a priority? Appointing former Comcast lobbyist David Cohen to the U.S. Ambassador to Canada, apparently. Cohen held the very first fundraising dinner for Biden's Presidential campaign back in 2019, and has now been amply rewarded for his loyalty:

"Biden has nominated David Cohen, a former senior executive vice president at NBCUniversal owner Comcast, to serve as the U.S. ambassador to Canada. Cohen is currently a senior advisor to Comcast CEO Brian Roberts."

Comcast historically gets very angry when you call Cohen a lobbyist, despite the fact he spearheaded the company's lobbying and policy efforts for the better part of the last decade. After the U.S. updated its feeble lobbying rules in 2007 to require lobbyists to register if they spent any more than 20% of their time lobbying, Comcast simply called what Cohen did...something else. More specifically the company's "Chief Diversity Officer," despite Cohen's actual lack of any, you know, diversity. Cohen was a huge architect of gaining government approval of Comcast's massive 2011 merger with NBC Universal.

Making an aging telecom retiree and loyal fundraiser happy in his twilight years certainly isn't the end of the world. But it's still not a great look when you've prioritized rewarding telecom lobbyists over properly staffing the agency that oversees telecom.

Previous FCC boss Ajit Pai spent four years studying how the FCC worked as a Commissioner, then when appointed agency Chairman by Trump, set about using that knowledge to ruthlessly dismantle not just consumer protections, but state and federal oversight of telecom in general. Usually, Pai operated in perfect symmetry with large regional telecom monopolies like AT&T and Comcast, embracing some extremely ruthless behavior along the way. Reversing those policies requires a certain level of urgency from team Biden that so far really hasn't been particularly apparent.

How tough Biden will be on telecom remains an open question. While his executive order contained some interesting promises, most can't be accomplished without a properly staffed FCC, or an agency head with a backbone. I can still see things going either way here. I can see him appointing a tougher, Lina-Khan esque type interested in genuine reform. But I can also see him making a safe pick that chirps all the right notes (5G is great! damn that digital divide!) but, like so many in DC, isn't willing to truly acknowledge monopolization and corruption are the primary causes of U.S. telecom dysfunction.

Filed Under: ambassador, canada, competition, david cohen, fcc, joe biden, political favors, soft corruption

Texas School District's Facial Recognition System Capable Of Capturing A Single Student's Image More Than 1,000 Times A Week

from the Panopticon-ISD dept

Facial recognition tech is making its way into schools, subjecting minors to the same tech that still hasn't proven its worth in the adult world. Like many other surveillance encroachments, this acquisition and deployment was prompted by violence and fear.

Alfred Ng of The Markup has obtained documents detailing a system in use in some Texas schools, one acquired as a potential answer to a uniquely American existential threat.

The school district originally purchased AnyVision after a mass shooting in 2018, with hopes that the technology would prevent another tragedy. By January 2020, the school district had uploaded 2,967 photos of students for AnyVision’s database.

This seemingly small number only covers a few months of use by the Santa Fe (Texas) Independent School District. Prior to its official rollout, the district ran a short test using an even larger set of photos.

With more than 5,000 student photos uploaded for the test run, AnyVision called the results “impressive” and expressed excitement at the results to school administrators.

“Overall, we had over 164,000 detections the last 7 days running the pilot. We were able to detect students on multiple cameras and even detected one student 1100 times!” Taylor May, then a regional sales manager for AnyVision, said in an email to the school’s administrators.

It seems like the perfect tool to track students individually as they go about their school day. The 1,100 hits for a single student is considered a sign of the software's effectiveness, something administrators seem unhealthily enthusiastic about.

And that's not all the district did with its new tech. It also lent it to local law enforcement officers who were trying to identify a suspected drug dealer they believed was a student. The school's cops contacted AnyVision which uploaded the provided photos and ran it against images captured by its system.

The company says the software is watchlist-based, limiting users to targeting persons of interest. Private retailers use it to keep shoplifters and other criminals out of stores. Schools can target suspected sex offenders by using publicly available mugshots from law enforcement databases.

But this trial run suggests the district isn't interested in limiting itself to watchlists. The user guide [PDF] obtained by The Markup makes it clear the software can log all faces that pass by equipped cameras. It's this kind of broad collection that enables more than 100,000 "detections" in a single week and allows students to be pinpointed 1,000 times during a five-day school week.

There are controls available in the software, but it's not clear the district is using any of them.

The software offers a “Privacy Mode” feature in which it ignores all faces not on a watchlist, while another feature called “GDPR Mode” blurs non-watchlist faces on video playback and downloads. The Santa Fe Independent School District didn’t respond to a request for comment, including on whether it enabled the Privacy Mode feature.

As for AnyVision, it says hey, it's just the provider.

“We do not activate these modes by default but we do educate our customers about them,” AnyVision’s chief marketing officer, Dean Nicolls, said in an email.

This lack of clarity or comment suggests the district is using the tech for all-purpose surveillance rather than utilizing it in the targeted fashion idealized in public statements and marketing brochures. The public statements by the district's board claim there's no invasion of privacy here, just another layer of protection. While the first part of the statement may be technically true given the lack of an expectation of privacy on school grounds, the latter is much more difficult to quantify as a justifiable offset for always-on surveillance.

Filed Under: anyvision, facial recognition, schools, surveillance, texas

Learning About Content Moderation From Ghosts In Virtual Reality

from the ghosts-in-the-machine dept

Content moderation in virtual reality comes with its own unique challenges. What works for the moderation of text and video doesn’t neatly translate into VR. In late June, Facebook’s Horizon, a VR social space still in beta testing, released an update to prevent its blocking feature from creating ghosts. That might sound hyperbolic, but it is a perfectly apt description of the feature’s effect in Horizon prior to the update. In the earlier build, both the blocker and the blocked were made invisible to one another, but allowed to continue interacting with the same virtual world. While they couldn’t see one another, they could see each other’s effects on their shared environment. If someone blocked you, your obscene gestures might be invisible to them, but you could still move the furniture about and rattle chains – practically becoming a poltergeist.

Improvements to Blocking in Horizon

We’re beginning to roll out changes to how blocking works in Horizon. These changes are based on people’s feedback, and are designed to improve people’s experience and make Horizon a safer and more welcoming place.

Previously, when you blocked someone in Horizon, both you and the person you blocked became invisible to each other. We heard feedback from people that this was confusing, for example when the other person continued interacting with objects in the same space.

Now, both the person who has been blocked and the person who blocked them will be able to see each other’s username tag, while keeping their avatars invisible to each other. This update allows both people to know they’re present, but blocked and muted.

You’ll also be able to see the people you’ve blocked in your menu (such as in the People Nearby list) instead of them being completely hidden. This means you can see who you’ve blocked without having to interact with them. You can also visit the settings page and see a block list, where you can see people you’ve blocked and choose to unblock them if you want.

As the patch notes explain, when used in VR, the traditional approach to blocking caused unintended problems. Unlike static social media profiles, users embody their avatars. The user’s digital representation mimics their motions and gestures as it moves through a shared virtual world. On traditional social media, blocking another user hides your speech from their view and limits their ability to reply. Hiding your avatar from their view is a logical translation of this policy to virtual reality. However, because the invisible-to-one-another blocker and blocked still shared the same virtual world, a malicious user could potentially block someone to haunt them or spy unobserved. Tagging speech from blocked users would be unnecessary on traditional social media, as their speech is already excluded from the blocker’s conversations. However, in a shared virtual environment, it becomes a necessary component of a useful blocking feature.

While these are far from life-threatening abuses, they illustrate why best practices for traditional content moderation can’t always be easily applied to VR. In many ways, Facebook Horizon’s moderation challenges look more like those of a video game, especially a massively multiplayer online game (MMO), than those of a traditional social network. In both cases, players interact through avatars, and can simultaneously affect the same virtual world. In either a game or a shared VR world, the properties of the digital environment govern player interactions as much, if not more than, rules about players’ speech. This often introduces tradeoffs between antiharassment measures and realism or interactivity. If a game models fire realistically, a malicious player might kick a campfire into another’s tent and set it ablaze. This can be avoided by either limiting players’ ability to interact with fire (stopping them from kicking it), or the properties of the fire itself (preventing it from burning the tent). Environmental design choices in games or VR somewhat resemble architectural choices faced by traditional platforms - whether to create retweet or quote tweet functions, or to allow users to control who can reply to their tweets. However, creating an interactive virtual world requires making many more of these decisions.

MMOs are typified as either “theme park” or “sandbox” games. In the former, designers set fixed goals for players to compete or cooperate towards, justifying referee-like governance. The latter offers players a set of tools, and expects them to make their own fun, limiting the need for intercession by designers. Conflict between players with different goals is an expected part of the fun.

While platforms for knitting patterns or neighborhood conversation have purposes that recommend some rules over others, more open-ended platforms have struggled to justify their rules. YouTube is a home for video content. Which video content? Who’s to say? VR is, for the time-being, mostly used for gaming. However, as social and commercial applications of the technology become more popular, this question of purpose will become politically relevant, as it has for YouTube.

Horizon’s chief product is a framework for users to create their own virtual worlds. Horizon exists not to provide a Facebook designed environment, but to offer users the ability to create their own environments. This gives Horizon some guiding purpose, and relieves its designers of pressure to make one-size-fits-all decisions. Because most worlds within Horizon are created by users, these users can set the rules of interactivity. Facebook has neither the time nor the resources to govern the behavior and use of every virtual tennis racket across myriad virtual spaces. However, the creators of these little worlds know whether they’re creating a virtual tennis club or a garden party fighting game, and can set the rules of the environment accordingly. This will not be the first time Facebook finds that a rule that works for text and video publishing platforms falls flat in virtual reality. However, its response to the unintended effects of the block feature shows a willingness to appreciate the new demands of the medium.

Will Duffield is a Policy Analyst at the Cato Institute

Filed Under: blocks, content moderation, ghosts, oculus, virtual reality, vr
Companies: facebook

Telecom Industry Spends $320,000 Every Day Lobbying Against Policies It Doesn't Like

from the dirty-deeds-done-dirt-cheap dept

We've noted repeatedly that while "big tech" has faced intense scrutiny over the last few years, "big telecom" has largely seen the exact opposite. Despite being every bit as problematic as tech giants (worse in some ways given their natural monopolies over broadband access), in the last few years the media and telecom sectors (one in the same when it comes to AT&T and Comcast) managed to effectively lobotomize the FCC, obliterate longstanding (and bipartisan) media consolidation rules, gut countless consumer protections, and generally turn the U.S. government into a giant bobble-headed doll with a rubber stamp.

Such favors didn't come cheap. A new joint study by the top telecom union (CWA) and Common Cause found that during the last Congress alone the telecom lobby spent $234 million lobbying the government, or roughly $320,000 every single day. Comcast of course was the biggest spender at more than $43 million in lobbying expenditure, with AT&T not too far behind at $36 million. Money spent to gut oversight of the telecom sector while these same companies pushed for dramatically expanded oversight of the "big tech" companies whose ad revenues they've long coveted.

Given our lobbying disclosure and campaign finance laws are garbage this tally is likely a dramatic undercount, and doesn't include all the dodgy nonsense the industry uses to influence policy, press coverage, and public discourse. You know, like the fake consumer groups or dead and fake people the telecom industry created to create the illusion of support for the net neutrality repeal. Or the money funneled into DC via so-called "dark money" groups:

"Under Citizens United and its progeny, ISPs, trade associations, and other corporations can make unlimited expenditures in federal elections and unlimited contributions to super PACs and dark money groups to be spent on supporting or opposing federal candidates,” the report said.

In addition to gutting the FCC, killing net neutrality, crushing telecom specific privacy rules, and generally demolishing federal (and state!) consumer protection authority, the report notes how telecom lobbying during the last Congressional period helped dismantle all manner of laws with bipartisan support. Including laws that would have shored up network resiliency in the wake of industry outages after Hurricanes Irma and Maria, laws that would have helped fund community broadband, and laws that would have restored basic consumer protections like net neutrality:

"The groups found that one of the industry’s top targets during the last Congress was the Save the Internet Act, which would have restored net neutrality and the FCC consumer protection authority stripped away during the Trump administration (amidst a flood of empty promises). Telecom lobbyists also fought against the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act, which includes money to help fund local community broadband. And they successfully derailed the RESILIENT Networks Act, proposed as an attempt to shore up Puerto Rico network resiliency after prolonged telecom outages from hurricanes Irma and Maria."

It takes a lot of time and money to keep the U.S. government appropriately feckless and slack-jawed in the face of obvious and rampant regional telecom monopolization. All propped up by a very elaborate ecosystem of think tanks, consultants, economists, academics, and marketing firms hired to pretend there's no actual problem that needs fixing. As such, you really can't fix the U.S. broadband problem (or any of a number of issues, like climate change) until you tackle the underlying corruption that enables it. But if you hadn't noticed, there's no real DC interest in actually doing that, so here we are.

The report recommends shoring up lobbying laws so that lobbyists can't just tap dance around requirements (see Comcast lobbyist David Cohen avoiding requirements by just calling what he did something else). The report also recommends passing the the For the People Act, which includes several provisions shoring up lobbying and campaign finance loopholes. But given the Congressional votes you'd need to pass such laws are compromised by the very lobbying these proposals want to fix, you're stuck with a chicken-and-egg scenario where dysfunction and corruption remains the norm.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, lobbying, telcos

COVID-19 Shows What Innovation Looks Like Without Patents (Spoiler: It Works)

from the innovation-doesn't-need-patents dept

This post is one of a series of posts we're running this week in support of Patent Quality Week, exploring how better patent quality is key to stopping efforts that hinder innovation.

The COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to a fascinating natural experiment: What does innovation look like when patents are largely out of the picture? For Patent Quality Week, I’ll be looking at the development of COVID-19 vaccines and what lessons can be drawn for reforming the patent system.

The development of COVID-19 vaccines has largely progressed without any noticeable effect of patents. None of the vaccine developers have sued competitors for patent infringement, and Moderna has even pledged not to assert patents during the pandemic. To be sure, patents have not been out of the picture entirely: the developers are getting plenty of them, and analysts are predicting the lawsuits to start as early as the first booster shots. But even in this world just partially free of patent threats, a few things are worth noticing.

Start with the sheer number of COVID-19 vaccine products. The two mRNA vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna coexist with each other and vaccines from Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, Novavax, and others. In any other situation, these companies would right now be in massive patent litigation, and many of the firms would likely have dropped their products or not even entered in the first place. Along with non-patent incentives such as government funding and social prestige, the absence of patent assertion has helped open the door to multiple similar vaccines being available on the market.

Similar, but not the same. Moderna’s vaccine can be stored at higher temperatures than Pfizer’s, J&J is a single dose, Novavax is based on more traditional vaccine technology. Each vaccine has distinct characteristics preferable for certain consumers and certain settings.

Multiple suppliers and product differentiation are hallmark features of many competitive markets. It’s simply good business sense for competitors to make slightly different products that serve different consumers, and vaccine manufacturers are no exception. As a result, economists find that “neck-and-neck” competition spurs innovation when multiple firms each try to outdo the others through incremental improvements and differences.

The presence of multiple, differentiated competitors has been a tremendous boon to the American COVID-19 response. Health care providers can opt for a vaccine technology that best fits their facilities, and some individuals have gotten to choose between mRNA or one-and-done. More importantly, competition means robust supply chains. Contamination of production batches and discoveries of serious side effects didn’t halt the flow of vaccines because other products were in place.

Patents could easily have upended vaccine deployment in the United States by constraining the market to a single supplier. For comparison, during the 2001 terrorist anthrax scare, the only approved drug for anthrax was Bayer’s patented product Cipro. Unlike the COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers, though, Bayer vigorously defended its patents and refused to allow competitors to make Cipro, which led to national panic and tense negotiations until the Bush administration pressured the company into major price and manufacturing concessions.

The word “monoculture” is sometimes used to describe how dependence on a product or company creates a potentially devastating single point of failure. Originally referring to agricultural wipeouts due to single-crop plantings, the term was popularized by computer security experts who credited a monoculture of Microsoft Windows with the catastrophic spread of computer worms. Others (including myself) have worried about monocultures of cell phone chips, encryption software, and global shipping canals.

The medicine for monocultures is competition to ensure that if one product fails, others will continue to meet the public’s needs. Multiple vaccine options and suppliers are plainly better than panic-buying the last boxes of Cipro on the shelf. Given the potential of patents to create monocultures, how can the patent laws be written to avoid them and foster valuable competition?

There are at least two answers. First, the patent system needs flexibility to deal with unexpected situations such as pandemics and national emergencies. A law called section 1498 already provides this flexibility by allowing the United States to authorize use of any patented technology, with compensation to the patent holder, and Chris Morten and I have argued that the government should be more proactive in asserting this authority. The need for flexibility also explains the importance of the United States’ support for international patent waivers. While the COVID-19 vaccine patent truce has resulted in sufficient supply for the United States, worldwide patents have helped to dissuade some foreign drug manufacturers from producing their own. An international waiver that overcomes patent barriers to competition could add more, diverse vaccines to the market. And in view of arguments that vaccine patents are irrelevant in view of manufacturing bottlenecks, it is worth asking whether new international entrants freed from patent restrictions might discover alternative ways of manufacturing vaccines, thereby pushing the bounds of innovation.

More important is to avoid granting patents that enable monocultures in the first place, and that’s where patent quality becomes important. Done right, patents should encourage product differentiation by restricting close copies of a technology while allowing alternate solutions to problems. Monocultures arise from patents on broad swathes of solutions or even on the problem itself—say, patenting the idea of vaccinating against COVID-19 versus a patent on the biochemical structure of a particular vaccine. Especially for computer software, broad problem-covering patents are far too common—patents on scanning to email, accounting for currency exchanges, and one-click online shopping, for example. At best, such patents fall into the hands of trolls who use them to harrass startups and other companies for money. At worst, they become tools that large, dominant firms can use to suppress competitors, setting the public up for the failures that monocultures can cause.

There are many options for enhancing patent quality and avoiding the dangers of monoculture: rigorously applying law that prohibits patents on computer algorithms and laws of nature, giving patent examiners sufficient time to review patent applications, and enhancing lower-cost ways for competitors to challenge patents issued wrongly. Many lawmakers have been receptive to these ideas, with the White House’s recent executive order and hearings in Congress both looking into how to keep patents from deterring competition. But some have pushed in the opposite direction of more patents regardless of quality. There have been recent efforts to change the law to allow for more patents on software and natural discoveries, patent examiners are overworked, and the Patent Office has made it increasingly hard to challenge questionable patents.

These seemingly backward steps are taken out of fear, a hypothetical worry pushed by patent-holding industries that a more rigorous patent system will destroy incentives to innovate. Perhaps the most important story to be learned from the COVID-19 vaccines is that this worry is unfounded. Multiple competing innovators not bogged down with patent lawsuits can function better, innovate more, and robustly serve public needs better than an industry of patent-backed monocultures. Bold steps toward patent quality should be cause for celebration, with an eye toward a competitive technological future.

Filed Under: competition, covid-19, patents, vaccines

DOJ Makes It Official: No Gathering Of Journalists' Records During Leak Investigation

from the your-move,-Congress dept

For years, the Department of Justice has used its bespoke "balancing process" to decide whether or not to target journalists during investigations of criminal acts or to hunt down the source of leaked documents. This was intended to make the DOJ take into consideration the impact on protected speech and press freedoms when issuing subpoenas targeting journalists. Far too frequently, the DOJ has told itself it's ok to collect journalists' phone and email records in hopes of identifying the actual targets of leak investigations.

With Donald Trump in the White House (a self-avowed enemy of the press) overseeing a short procession of suck-ups holding the title "Attorney General," the DOJ seemed to feel the balancing test was more of a suggestion than a rule and proceeded to attempt to acquire journalists' communications records to sniff out a multitude of leakers.

The first half of this year has been filled with news about journalists caught up in DOJ leak investigations. Freed of gag orders applied during the Trump years, multiple news organizations reported their employees' phone and email records had been subpoenaed by the DOJ.

There's a new President in town, along with a new attorney general. And both made statements claiming the DOJ would stop seeking journalists' records when pursuing leak investigations. Attorney General Merrick Garland also claimed he would support legislation that would block the DOJ from targeting journalists.

We're no closer to seeing this legislation enacted. But the DOJ has finally made it official: it is abandoning the balancing test and wlll no longer seek journalists' records in cases like these. Here's how the Attorney General puts it in the recently-released memorandum [PDF] announcing the change in tactics.

The Department of Justice will no longer use compulsory legal process for the purpose of obtaining information from or records of members of the news media acting within the scope of ‘newsgathering activities, as set out below.

This new prohibition applies to compulsory legal process issued to reporters directly, to their publishers or employers, and to third-party service providers of anyof the foregoing. It extends to the full range of compulsory process covered by the current regulations, specifically, ‘subpoenas, warrants, court orders issued pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 2703(d) and § 3123, and civil investigative demands. Further, it applies regardless of whether the compulsory legal process seeks testimony, physical documents, telephone toll records, metadata, or digital content.

There are exceptions, of course. Journalists' records can be sought when they're the target of a DOJ criminal investigation. This includes criminal acts not related to their day jobs and also criminal acts committed to obtain government information, like breaking and entering or (one presumes) the number of things considered illegal hacking by the DOJ. The DOJ also has an emergency exception to exploit -- one that says the DOJ can ignore this new guidance if demanding journalists' records is "necessary" to prevent "imminent risk of danger or bodily harm."

But receiving and publishing leaked documents is not considered a criminal act and the DOJ says as much in its memo.

The prohibition does apply when a member of the news media has, in the course of newsgathering, only possessed or published government information, including classified information.

And the memo reaffirms the AG's commitment to backing legislation that would ensure this lasts past his tenure at the DOJ.

To ensure that protections regarding the use of compulsory legal process for obtaining information from or records of members of the news media continue in succeeding Administrations, the Department will support congressional legislation to embody protections in law.

So, this is obviously a first for the DOJ. And, of course, the offer only stands for as long as this regime is in power. Legislation could make it permanent, but there are still enough Trump fans littering the halls of Congress who believe to be a journalist is to be innately untrustworthy, if not an actual criminal, so pushing this past these obstacles might be difficult.

And, again, we're left to speculate who the DOJ believes is covered by this. Is it only members of large press outlets or clearly-defined press entities that are well-established? Or will it cover the constantly-expanding field of citizen/independent journalists who provide the same service, albeit without the masthead? Hopefully, the DOJ will recognize that journalism is an act, not just an occupation, and extend protection to those operating without editors and deadlines.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, 4th amendment, doj, journalism, journalists, leaks, merrick garland, records, surveillance, whistleblowers

Techdirt Is Fighting A New Lawsuit

from the slapp-suits dept

Techdirt was recently sued in Florida by Larry Klayman for an article that we published concerning the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit suspending his license for 90 days. We strongly believe that this case is entirely without merit, and is a clear attempt to silence opinion and criticism via the court system.

Last week, we asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit under Florida’s anti-SLAPP law, and we hope that the court will agree. Beyond that, while litigation is still ongoing, we'll have no further comment, other than to note our continued advocacy for the adoption of more state anti-SLAPP laws and a strong federal anti-SLAPP law.

Daily Deal: The 2021 Complete All-in-One Adobe Creative Cloud Suite Course Bundle

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

The 2021 Complete All-in-One Adobe Creative Cloud Suite Course Bundle has 12 courses designed to teach you about video editing, animations, photography, design, and more. Courses cover popular Adobe products like Lightroom, After Effects, Photoshop, and Adobe XD. The bundle is on sale for $34.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

Florida's New Law Against Blocking Roads During Protests Already Being Ignored By Cops Policing Protests The Governor Supports

from the behold-the-discretion-being-exercised-by-law-enforcement dept

Just a few months ago, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a broadly-written anti-protest bill that, among other things, criminalized the act of participating in a protest if other protesters did illegal things. It also criminalized the blocking of traffic and roadways by protesters, something that was already illegal but now was super-illegal with enhanced punishments that made this act a felony.

This was the Florida legislature's response to anti-police violence and Black Lives Matters protests in the state -- protests that became far more frequent and intense following the killing of Minnesota resident George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.

Failing (perhaps deliberately) to recognize a lighter law enforcement touch was needed to regain the trust of the public, DeSantis and likeminded legislators doubled down, making the very act of protesting police violence an opportunity to be hit with felony charges.

The new law is in the news because it very much appears it won't be enforced equitably. Miami's Local 10 wants to know why the new law wasn't deployed to stop Cuban solidarity protesters from blocking highways during recent demonstrations.

“All of a sudden you have people out there shutting down a highway. They start to do that, there needs to be swift penalties.”

Those were Gov. Ron DeSantis’ words back in April when he signed a controversial anti-riot bill.

On Tuesday?

“I think people understand the difference between going out and peacefully assembling, which is obviously people’s constitutional right,” DeSantis said on a day when South Floridians stood in solidarity with Cuban citizens’ protests by taking to the Palmetto Expressway and closing it down for hours.

The Associated Press also amplified questions about this apparent divergence from a law supposedly desperately needed to keep protests from shutting down cities.

Demonstrators on Tuesday in Miami, Tampa and Orlando temporarily blocked busy roads, chanting support for the Cubans who had taken to the streets in the communist nation Sunday to air grievances about poor economic conditions and other issues.

“When they protest for regime change, which aligns with the governor’s political viewpoint ... you see no enforcement from law enforcement,” said Michael Sampson, who co-founded the Jacksonville Community Action Committee, one of many groups that sprung up under the banner of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The governor had no real explanation for why officers were not only not arresting people for blocking roads, but waving people through police lines so they could head up ramps to access the highways they would soon be blocking. The only comment DeSantis offered was that this protest wasn't the kind of protest he felt needed to be shut down.

During a visit to Miami on Tuesday, DeSantis said the demonstrations in South Florida were “fundamentally different than what we saw last summer.”

The statement made by Christina Pushaw, the governor's spokesperson, wasn't any better.

“The legislation protects First Amendment freedoms, while ensuring that law enforcement professionals are empowered to use their discretion to maintain public safety,” Pushaw said. “The Governor has always urged all Floridians exercising their right to protest, to make their voices heard peacefully and lawfully.”

Well, ok then. I guess we'll see what happens the next time BLM protesters take to the streets and block a few of them off. If DeSantis doesn't want to look like he only respects the rights of people he agrees with, he'll need to keep cops from exercising their discretion and arresting people protesting against unequal treatment by law enforcement.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, black lives matter, cuba, different standards, florida, free speech, protests, ron desantis

The Government 'Fix' For The T-Mobile Merger Continues To Look Like A Convoluted Mess

from the synergies-indeed dept

Remember when the FCC rubber stamped the Sprint T-Mobile merger without even looking at impact analysis? Remember when a long line of economists and experts noted the merger would likely erode competition, raise rates, and kill jobs -- and both U.S. regulators and the court system completely ignored them? And remember when the FCC and DOJ both cobbled together a "fix" to this problem by trying to throw some spectrum at Dish Network, a proposal we noted was likely to fail?

You'll never guess how things are going.

First, T-Mobile's promise (still available on the company's website) that the deal would provide a flood of new jobs wound up being bullshit. The company has laid off 5,000 workers and counting -- likely more once they eliminate the second redundant Sprint headquarters. Deal critics estimated that the deal could result in anywhere between 10,000 to 30,000 lost jobs over a period of several years, and we're already well on our way toward that goal.

Second, the DOJ/FCC fix for the deal leaned heavily on the idea that T-Mobile would help Dish run a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) on T-Mobile's network while Dish spent the next seven years building its own, full 5G network. But the two sides immediately proved completely incapable of getting along, with Dish running to both state and federal regulators to complain that T-Mobile had already started reneging on several of its promises (like shuttering its 3G/CDMA network, still used by Dish wireless subscribers, earlier than Dish had expected).

This week those hostilities culminated in Dish effectively giving T-Mobile a demotion and hiring AT&T as the company's primary network partner. The 10 year, $5 billion deal gives AT&T wholesale revenue, and Dish customers access to AT&T's network in more rural and hard to reach places. That in turn gives Dish more time to try to complete a viable fourth wireless network and meet the deployment obligations set out by the FCC (reaching 70% of the population by 2025).

While telecom trade mags seem content to pretend this shouldn't be a big deal, other experts continue to express meaningful doubts that Dish will ever become a meaningful fourth major competitor. Or that they'll face any meaningful penalties should they fail to reach their deployment promises:

"If T-Mobile is able to shirk this regulatory obligation with impunity, what’s to prevent future consent orders from being ignored?” Hal Singer, an economist who testified against the merger approval tells The Verge..."The decree always gave Dish an easy out,” Singer says. “The real target of the regulation was T-Mobile. And now T-Mobile is getting to slither out."

Think about it. Dish is bleeding both TV and wireless subscribers at an alarming rate. It has little real experience in wireless. The company's CEO, Charlie Ergen, is purportedly a terrible boss. The company is routinely at the heart of industry feuds, be they the spat with T-Mobile, or a steady parade of retransmission arguments. Dish also has a long history of hoovering up wireless spectrum, promising amazing things, then not really delivering (just ask T-Mobile circa 2018 or so).

Yet for any of this to succeed, Dish needs to remain financially viable, deploy a top-shelf nationwide 5G network, ensure that network is popular with consumers, keep state and federal regulators happy by meeting all of its deployment goals on time, then nab meaningful market share from a U.S. telecom sector extremely resilient to being challenged in any way by upstart competitors or disruption. It's certainly possible, and a meaningful fourth competitor would be a great outcome were it to actually work, but history and the odds simply aren't in Dish's favor.

I still tend to think this entire transaction was intended from the start to be theater aimed at justifying approval of a deal that should have been blocked outright. Dish may genuinely think it can succeed here (given the collapse of its satellite TV business, its options are either shift to wireless or die), but I doubt AT&T would invest heavily in this venture if it thought that it would ever result in Dish becoming a meaningful threat to the company's market share. There are just too many things that need to line up for this to succeed at any real scale, including the need for competent and consistent U.S. regulatory oversight and accountability (good luck with that).

This could end with Dish stringing feckless US regulators along for six years (the window in which it's prohibited from selling its spectrum), then selling its vast and valuable spectrum troves when things get too hard--using a small portion of that cash to pay off its legal bills and whatever pathetic government fine results. Or, as some on Wall Street are speculating, Charlie Ergen could make a weak show of things before ultimately selling everything to AT&T as he retires and walks off into the sunset, leaving the wireless industry more consolidated than ever.

At which point, if telecom megamerger history holds, everybody who supported this deal or was involved with it in any way (regulators, think tankers, lobbyists, executives) will take their cut of the proceeds then walk off pretending none of this ever happened. And when the impact of consolidation directly results in endless layoffs and higher prices for consumers and businesses, all of those same folks will shrug and pretend that's just a very strange coincidence.

Filed Under: antitrust, competition, mergers, mvno, telco, wireless
Companies: at&t, dish, t-mobile