Former FCC Boss Ajit Pai Gets Handsomely Rewarded For Years Of Broadband Policy Falsehoods

from the whiplash-from-the-revolving-door dept

What's the career penalty for spending four straight years lying repeatedly about the illusory benefits of mindless telecom deregulation? None, apparently.

Surprising nobody, former FCC boss Ajit Pai and his giant goofy coffee mug are headed to private investment firm Searchlight Capital Partners, which often invests in the telecom sector. He's also been rewarded with a new gig at the American Enterprise Institute, where he'll be given a platform to spend another twenty years falsely claiming that lobotomizing U.S. telecom regulators, turning a blind eye to the perils of telecom monopolization, and generally ignoring consumer welfare results in telecom investment Utopia:

"As FCC chair, Pai justified his deregulatory agenda by using faulty data and taking credit for broadband deployments that were planned before he became chairman. Pai claimed that the Title II common-carrier regulations he repealed had prevented broadband-network investment, even though ISPs themselves told investors that wasn't true. He never raised the FCC's broadband-speed standard and claimed on his way out of the FCC that Americans still only need download speeds of 25Mbps and upload speeds of 3Mbps."

There was also that time that Pai blocked a law enforcement inquiry into the broadband industry using fake and dead people to generate artificial support for policies the public (and most objective experts) aggressively disagreed with. And there was also that time his office made up a DDOS attack to try and explain away the fact the agency website crashed in the wake of millions of pissed off John Oliver viewers. But again, Pai was mostly known for just making up data that supported policies that, with the occasional exception, largely just benefitted the industry's most dominant players.

Pai's entire policy schtick was that if you obliterate both state and federal oversight of regional telecom monopolies, magic happens. But while deregulation can sometimes help functional, healthy markets, there's twenty years of evidence showing that when you neuter oversight of Comcast and AT&T, these natural monopolies just double down on predatory behavior. It's why Americans pay some of the highest prices in the world for spotty, sluggish broadband and terrible customer support. While there's a large contingent of industry-allied folks and free marketers who want to pretend this is a debate, it isn't.

US broadband is mediocre in nearly every major broadband metric because our policy makers have spent twenty years crafting policies that prioritize one thing: the revenues of the biggest, most politically powerful telecom giants. That the revolving door undermines public trust and results in policies that coddle these monopolies won't even enter the conversation, since we stopped caring about that stuff years ago. After all, former FCC boss Michael Powell, also a huge fan of baseless claims that deregulation fixes everything, has enjoyed a long, healthy stint as the cable industry's top lobbyist without anybody batting an eyelash.

The same goes for a bipartisan assortment of other FCC officials, whether it's Mignon Clyburn (immediately left the FCC to go lobby to help T-Mobile's merger), Meredith Attwell Baker (wireless industry, Comcast), and countless others. And the U.S. press, ever desperate to cover complicated policy subjects from the view from nowhere, is more than happy to parrot the positions of these folks while either downplaying or ignoring any conflicts of interest.

When you can spend four years spreading obvious nonsense about the benefits of coddling natural monopolies and the only penalty is...a big wad of cash and a big platform to continues spreading falsehoods... it's not hard to understand why the U.S. telecom sector has spent the better part of two decades stuck in a state of perpetual, expensive, dysfunction.

Filed Under: ajit pai, fcc, private equity, revolving door
Companies: searchlight capital partners

Putin's Crackdown On Demonstrators Adds A Sadistic Twist: Using Surveillance Cameras To Identify People, But To Arrest Them Only Days Or Months Later

from the waiting-for-the-knock-on-the-door dept

It's hardly news that Vladimir Putin is cracking down on supporters of Alexey Navalny, or on the journalists who are brave enough to report on the wave of protests in support of the imprisoned opposition leader. But there are some interesting wrinkles to how this is happening. For example, in a move that will not surprise Techdirt readers, Moscow's massive facial recognition camera network -- supposedly set up to enforce quarantine restrictions, and to catch criminals -- has been re-purposed, as Bloomberg reports:

Police tapped the surveillance system to identify and detain dozens of people who attended last week's protests in the Russian capital in support of jailed Kremlin foe Alexey Navalny. More than 50 were picked up over the following days, including several journalists, according to OVD-Info, an independent human-rights monitoring group that gathers information on detentions.

Nothing too surprising there, perhaps. But the RFERL.org site points out an important shift in the Russian authorities' tactics. In the past, the police detained thousands of people who had participated in unsanctioned demonstrations. This time, a token two to three percent of the protesters at a rally were arrested, apparently allowing the rest to go free. However, this is actually part of a new, and even more cruel approach:

in recent days, Russian police have unveiled a new strategy, using surveillance-camera footage and other techniques to identify demonstrators and track them down, days after the event.

The opposition politician and political analyst Leonid Gozman explains:

"Now we have a different situation," he continued. "They are signaling to everyone: 'Go ahead and march, guys, but a year from now you can expect we'll come, expect a knock at your door. And we'll come or not as we wish....' Now they have placed everyone in that position."

It's a clever approach. It means anyone coming away from attending a demo is unsure whether they have been identified there. The absence of any immediate action by the authorities no longer means protesters have escaped notice. Instead, a kind of digital sword of Damocles hangs over them, waiting to fall at some future, unknown date. The painful uncertainty this generates will probably be enough to dissuade many people from taking part in future demos -- a big win for the authorities, obtained at very low cost.

This cat-and-mouse game with protesters is only possible thanks to Moscow's blanket surveillance cameras and advanced facial recognition systems. Where, in the past, police could only arrest people at a demonstration on the spot, because there was no sure way to find them afterwards, now their faces on CCTV are enough. Once photographed and identified, there is no need to arrest them immediately, which allows the authorities to create this new and debilitating anxiety among protestors that one day there will be that dreaded knock on the door.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: cameras, facial recognition, free speech, protests, russia, surveillance

Cable's Broadband Monopoly Continues To Protect It From TV Cord Cutting

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

One of the nice things about being a telecom giant in a country with limited competition, feckless politicians and hog-tied regulators is there isn't much in the way of accountability. As a major broadband provider like Charter or Comcast, you're allowed to monopolize the telecom market, jack up prices, elbow out competitors, then lobby state and federal government to ensure nobody does anything about it. Hell, thanks to a timid press that can't call a spade a spade, half the time nobody can even be bothered to point out that you're a monopoly in the first place.

In US telecom, regional monopolies like Charter and Comcast continue to dominate market share as residential telcos effectively retreat from network expansion in any areas that aren't profitable enough, quickly enough for Wall Street's liking. Unfortunately for them, they still have to deal with rising competition on the video end of their businesses.

But as the pay TV sector gets more competitive thanks to streaming, these telecom monopolies can simply extract their pound of flesh from captive broadband customers. Charter Communications, (which operates under the brand name Spectrum), lost another 156,000 residential pay TV subscribers in the first quarter, a notable uptick from the 70,000 pay TV subscribers lost during the same quarter a year ago. The reasons aren't mysterious: users are fleeing endless price hikes and some of the worst customer service in America for the cheaper, more flexible, more consumer friendly TV offerings of streaming operators.

Cable companies' broadband customers would be doing the same thing but they can't because there are no other options to flee to. This is then interpreted by cable executives as something caused by their own innate business genius:

"We continue to execute well in a market environment that has not yet returned to normal. We added 355,000 Internet customers in the first quarter, and 2 million over the last year, for year-over-year growth of 7.3 percent."He added: "Our value-driven operating strategy of providing multiple high-quality products at lower prices than sold individually continues to drive our growth."

Of course as we've long noted, broadband monopolization does give telecom giants like AT&T, Charter, or Comcast competitive leverage in the streaming space. They impose arbitrary and confusing usage caps and bandwidth overage fees (which are utterly unnecessary for any technical reason), then exempt their own content from those caps while still penalizing competitors like Netflix. That makes it cheaper for a consumer to use a telecom giant's streaming services, but results in all manner of added fees for consumers should they dare wander outside the gatekeeper complex.

Unlike AT&T and Comcast (which have both done this for years) Charter's technically forbidden from imposing caps right now thanks to conditions affixed to its merger with Time Warner Cable. But those conditions expire soon. And while some new state laws ban such behavior, the federal government during the Trump administration thought lobotomizing itself at monopolies' behest made better sense than doing absolutely anything about anticompetitive problems like this, or the myriad of other problems created by mindless sector consolidation and regional broadband monopolization.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, cord cutting

What If The Media And Politicians Tried To Hold A Techlash... And No One Joined Them

from the oh,-look-at-that dept

There's been plenty of talk lately about the "Techlash" which has become a popular term among the media and politicians. However, what if the general public feels quite differently? Vox, which is not exactly known for carrying water for the tech industry, has released a new poll that shows that the public is overwhelmingly optimistic about technology, and thinks that technology has been a force for good in the world. This applies across the board for Democrats, Republicans, and independents.

Seventy-one percent of likely voters agreed with the tech-optimist statement: “Technology is generally a force for good. Large tech companies have provided innovations like vaccines, electric vehicles, bringing down the cost of batteries that store green energy, vegetarian meat options, and other ways that have improved our quality of life.” Only 19 percent agreed with the tech-pessimist statement: “Technology is generally a force for bad. Large tech companies are bad for workers, inequality, and democracy. The technological innovations they produce are not worth the cost.”

When put into chart form, the results are really, really striking:

Obviously, "technology" covers a lot more than the big internet companies -- and the messaging that Vox tested highlights mostly non-internet innovations. But, still. The fact that the "control" group -- ones who didn't even receive the specific messaging -- felt even stronger about the good technology does in the world than those who were first primed with statements about other kinds of technology is really something.

There are plenty of examples, certainly, of tech gone awry, but it really seems that the general public recognizes all of the good that innovation and technology have done for the world, and feel optimistic about it. Of course, none of that will stop "the narrative" of the techlash, because it's just too useful for many pushing it.

Filed Under: big tech, polls, surveys, tech optimism, techlash

The Oversight Board's Decision On Facebook's Trump Ban Is Just Not That Important

from the undue-ado dept

Today is Facebook Oversight Board Hysteria Day, because today is the day that the Facebook Oversight Board has rendered its decision about Facebook's suspension of Donald Trump. And it has met the moment with an appropriately dull decision, dripping in pedantic reasonableness, that is largely consistent with our Copia Institute recommendation.

If you remember, we were hesitant about submitting a comment at all. And the reaction to the Board's decision bears out why. People keep reacting as though it is some big, monumental, important decision, when, in actual fact, it isn't at all. In the big scheme of things, it's still just a private company being advised by its private advisory board on how to run its business, nothing more. As it is, Trump himself is still on the Internet – it's not like Facebook actually had the power to silence him. We need to be worried about when there actually is power to silence people, and undue concern about Facebook's moderation practices only distracts us from them. Or, worse, leads people to try to create actual law that will end up having the effect of giving others the legal power to suppress expressive freedom.

So our pride here is necessarily muted, because ultimately this decision just isn't that big a deal. Still, as a purely internal advisory decision, one intended to help the company act more consistently in the interests of its potential user base, it does seem to be a good one given how it hews to our key points.

First, we made the observation that then-President Trump's use of his Facebook account threatened real, imminent harm. We did, however, emphasize the point that it was generally better to try not to delete speech (or speakers). Nevertheless, sometimes it might need to be done, and in those cases it should be done "with reluctance and only limited, specific, identifiable, and objective criteria to justify the exception." There might not ultimately be a single correct decision, we wrote, for whether speech should be left up or taken down. "[I]n the end the best decision may have little to do with the actual choice that results but rather the process used to get there."

And this sort of reasoning is basically at the heart of the Board's decision: Trump's posts were serious enough to justify a sanction, including a suspension, but imposing the indefinite suspension appeared to be unacceptably arbitrary. Per the Board, Facebook needs to make these sorts of decisions consistently and transparently from here on out.

On January 6, Facebook’s decision to impose restrictions on Mr. Trump’s accounts was justified. The posts in question violated the rules of Facebook and Instagram that prohibit support or praise of violating events, including the riot that was then underway at the U.S. Capitol. Given the seriousness of the violations and the ongoing risk of violence, Facebook was justified in imposing account-level restrictions and extending those restrictions on January 7. However, it was not appropriate for Facebook to impose an indefinite suspension. Facebook did not follow a clear published procedure in this case. Facebook’s normal account-level penalties for violations of its rules are to impose either a time-limited suspension or to permanently disable the user’s account. The Board finds that it is not permissible for Facebook to keep a user off the platform for an undefined period, with no criteria for when or whether the account will be restored.

The Board has given Facebook six months to re-evaluate the suspension in accordance with clear rules.

If Facebook determines that Mr. Trump’s accounts should be restored, Facebook should apply its rules to that decision, including any modifications made pursuant to the policy recommendations below. Also, if Facebook determines to return him to the platform, it must address any further violations promptly and in accordance with its established content policies.

As for what those rules should be, the Board also made a few recommendations. First, it noted that "political leader" versus "influential user" is not always a meaningful distinction. Indeed, we had noted that Trump's position cut both ways: as a political leader, there was public benefit to knowing what he had to say. On the other hand, that position also gave his posts greater ability to do harm. The Board for its part noted that context will matter; while the rules should ideally be the same for everyone, since the impact won't be, it is ok for Facebook to take into account the specific probability of imminent harm in making its decisions.

The Board believes that it is not always useful to draw a firm distinction between political leaders and other influential users. It is important to recognize that other users with large audiences can also contribute to serious risks of harm. The same rules should apply to all users of the platform; but context matters when assessing issues of causality and the probability and imminence of harm. What is important is the degree of influence that a user has over other users.

In general, the Board cited to general principles of human rights law, and specifically the Rabat Plan of Action "to assess the capacity of speech to create a serious risk of inciting discrimination, violence, or other lawless action." As for how long suspensions should generally last, they should be long enough to "deter misconduct and may, in appropriate cases, include account or page deletion." Facebook is therefore free to re-impose Trump's suspension as it re-evaluates it, if it feels it remains warranted. It just needs to do so in a more transparent way that would be scalable to other similar situations. As it summarized:

Facebook should publicly explain the rules that it uses when it imposes account-level sanctions against influential users. These rules should ensure that when Facebook imposes a time-limited suspension on the account of an influential user to reduce the risk of significant harm, it will assess whether the risk has receded before the suspension ends. If Facebook identifies that the user poses a serious risk of inciting imminent violence, discrimination or other lawless action at that time, another time-bound suspension should be imposed when such measures are necessary to protect public safety and proportionate to the risk. The Board noted that heads of state and other high officials of government can have a greater power to cause harm than other people. If a head of state or high government official has repeatedly posted messages that pose a risk of harm under international human rights norms, Facebook should suspend the account for a period sufficient to protect against imminent harm. Suspension periods should be long enough to deter misconduct and may, in appropriate cases, include account or page deletion.

As we suggested in our comment, the right policy choices for Facebook to make boil down to the ones that best make Facebook the community it wants to be. At its core, that's what the Board's decision is intended to help with: point out where it appears Facebook has fallen short of its own espoused ideals, and help it get back on track in the future.

Which is, overall, a good thing. It just isn't, as so many critics keep complaining, everything. The Internet is far more than just Facebook, no matter what Trump or his friends think. And there are far more important things for those of us who care about preserving online expression to give our attention to than this.

Filed Under: appeals, donald trump, permanent suspension, policies, rules, suspension
Companies: facebook, oversight board

Daily Deal: Introduction to Coding with HTML, CSS, And JavaScript

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

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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

If You're Going To Defend A Satirical Song From A Copyright Lawsuit, Don't Try A Bunch Of Stupid Alternative Arguments First

from the bad-idea dept

Australian mining billionaire and former politician Clive Palmer has been hit with a $1.5-million judgement over unauthorized use of the song "We're Not Gonna Take It" by Twisted Sister. The suit was brought by Universal Music after, as part of a 2019 political campaign, Palmer made videos using a modified version of the song with the lyrics "Australia ain’t gonna cop it, no Australia’s not gonna cop it, Aussies not gonna cop it any more". Setting aside the rather questionable scansion, it's a pretty obvious modification of the famous song, giving it at least a chance of qualifying for the fair dealing exception for parody and satire that exists under Australian copyright law. But in a ruling today the court has rejected that argument entirely:

Justice Katzmann described the argument that the UAP works were for the purpose of satire as "ambitious, to say the least".

At first blush, this seems insane when the song is so obviously an attempt at some kind of satire or parody. But the background of the case shows why the court reached this decision — because Palmer originally tried out a bunch of different (and pretty crazy) arguments. First, he denied that his lyrics were even based on the song they are so obviously based on:

Mr Palmer was accused of lying during his evidence when he appeared before the court in October.

He claimed his lyrics, which included "Australia ain't gonna cop it", had nothing to do with the metal song but were inspired by a similar line in the 1976 film Network.

Justice Katzmann said that suggestion "appeared to take everyone else in the virtual courtroom by surprise".

Mr Palmer said he couldn't provide the notepad he originally scrawled his ideas on because it had been thrown out by his staff.

The judge was understandably extremely unimpressed by this, calling it "ludicrous" and "fanciful", especially when it was known that Palmer had sought a license originally:

But the trial also heard a representative for Palmer had originally sought copyright approval from Universal before baulking at the $150,000 fee.

In a scathing judgement, Katzmann rejected Palmer’s claims, finding that it was “ludicrous” of the mining billionaire to suggest his song was “created independently” of the Twisted Sister hit.

She found him to be “a most unimpressive witness” and that his evidence was “at times incredible”. She said Palmer gave “false evidence” during the trial including “concocting a story to exculpate himself”, indicating “that the need for both punishment and deterrence is high”.

Palmer's lawyers also threw in an attempt to invalidate the copyright on the Twisted Sister song for lack of originality, on the basis that it is similar to the Christmas carol O Come, All Ye Faithful. Only after all these arguments failed did Palmer invoke a fair dealing defense for parody and satire, which certainly explains the judge's characterization of it as "ambitious".

So while Palmer has nobody to blame but himself and his lawyers for this outcome, it's unfortunate for the rest of us that all their bumbling resulted in the fair dealing argument being so wholly and rapidly rejected. Twisted Sister's Dee Snyder has been loudly celebrating the win, after having appeared at one of the hearings last year to explain how Palmer's version "misrepresented the message" of the song and was "not good for my heavy metal image". But copyright isn't about protecting a musician's image, and parody and satire exceptions exist precisely to allow people to change the message of a work, which is a strange thing to describe as "misrepresentation" — and they don't just apply to people who change the message to something that the original artist (or anyone else) likes or approves of, as much as I can understand the frustration of having someone like Palmer use your work for his own political advancement.

It's impossible to say for certain whether Palmer's song would have qualified under Australia's fair dealing exceptions — as is so often the the case, they are narrower than they should be and leave a lot up to the judge's artistic discretion — but it would have been a lot better to get a ruling with an untainted exploration of this argument which is so obviously the most relevant one, and the one that should have been the focus of the case from the start.

Filed Under: australia, clive palmer, copyright, dee snyder, fair dealing, public domain, satire, twisted sister, we're not gonna take it