Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the speak-up dept

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a response to another commenter claiming they “occasionally post the censorship highlights of the week”:

No, you don’t. You whine about “conservative views” being “censored” from Twitter, then you disappear (which I expect you to do now) when asked about the exact and specific “conservative views” to which you’re referring. You also disappear whenever asked One Simple Question (“Do you believe the government should have the legal right to compel any privately owned interactive web service into hosting legally protected speech that the owners/operators of said service don’t want to host?”); to date, I’ve never gotten a straight yes-or-no answer out of you on that point.

You want to do a drive-by complaint about conservatives being “censored” on social media, but when pressed on the details, you up and disappear like a fart in the wind. Once⁠—just once!⁠—we’d all like you to stick around and answer our questions so we can have the conversation you always say you want.

But you’re going to be a coward and run as usual, because you know that most of us regular commenters can out-argue you and your fellow trolls every day of the week. And because you know that honest answers to our questions will do you no favors in terms of credibility⁠—especially since we can always link back to your answers and hold you to account for them.

So run along, child. The grown folks are talking now.

In second place, it’s James Burkhardt with a response to the idea that Netflix’s recent nickel-and-diming is just a matter of the company wanting to get paid for its services:

I was going to come here to post this as a reminder for people who would make the same comment they always make, but I wasn’t fast enough, so you’ll do.

The short response: I was under the impression the monthly charge I pay for Netflix was paying Netflix for its services. What am I paying for?

The long response: I have a 4 screen netflix subscription. I could play netflix 24/7 in my home on 4 simultaneous streams and it would incur no extra cost on my part. But if I go on a business trip and both I and the other members of my household want to watch a few hours of netflix, my membership costs 3 extra dollars a month.

This fee is not about Netflix “…[getting] paid for its services…”. The fee is completely disconnected from the financial burden it supposedly generates. If it is profitable to run 4 US streams simultaneously 24/7 to the same household, its profitable to run 4 US streams simultaneously 24/7 regardless of geographic location within the US.

Moreover, as you look at pricing options you see netflix forces me to pay for 4 simultaneous streams even if I only need 3. Forcing me to pay for more streams and denying me the ability to capitalize on what I paid for (4 simultaneous streams) is not about getting paid, its about intentionally forcing me to pay more for less.

I had no issue with Netflix cracking down on simultaneous streams back in 2012. That was a sensible decision, and pricing which allows me to pay for only 1 stream and pay more for 2 or 4 simultaneous streams is great consumer choice option. An additional $3 for Netflix to be available on my lunch break isn’t.

And given that households are increasingly not single families but shared spaces of adults as living costs increase but wages do not, The likely hood that a household could end up, temporarily, with significant geographic separation due to not taking joint vacations beyond the traditional issues of work travel that would leave the rest of a single family household at home, means this policy would regularly require non-password-sharing households to nevertheless pay the $3 password sharing fee. Because this isn’t about password-sharing households breaking the rules.

And that leads me to the point that Techdirt has been highlighting the shift in Netflix messaging not simply because it is anti-consumer, but because it is a real time case study of a company responding to fiscal issues in a way that in the past has lead to a death spiral and how that is being caused by the market and capitalist demands.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with Anathema Device and a response to someone claiming online privacy concerns are overblown:

So, no worries about someone tracking your period, or your pregnancy, or your transition, or your movements, or your purchases, because the power of the state is on your side, not against you?

Let me guess – you’re a cisgendered white man. If you honestly think in the current period of history, your online movements and purchases and activity won’t ever be used against you, you must be in that powerful minority.

The last person on earth I want having, let alone using my data is Elon Musk, and that goes for any company he owns. I’m not happy about Zuckerberg either, but at least we know what the little bastard is up to, and where he stands. Musk is a loose cannon.

Next, it’s ah Clem clarifying the idea that social media platforms could deal with Texas’s insane new law by offering a special Texas mode:

Well, providing a “Texas View” would seem to run afoul of the statute:

(a) A social media platform may not censor a user, a user’s expression, or a user’s ability to receive the expression of another person based on…
(3) a user’s geographic location in this state or any part of this state.

So, the only way out seems to be to have no business presence in Texas, and even then the company probably gets hauled into court over and over again.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous comment about a Malibu Media blaming Chicago for its legal woes:

She blames Chicago? The city? Possibly the musical? The band? Maybe the band.

In second place, it’s Rocky with a response to the claim that Twitter should ban Joe Biden for being incoherent if it’s going to ban Donald Trump:

I’ll just leave this here as a rebuttal:

“Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart —you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you’re a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?), but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it’s four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.”

Part of a campaign speech given by Donald Trump in July 2015

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with an anonymous response to the idea that political affiliation should be incorporated into civil rights laws:

So you’re going to make ‘asshole’ a protected class?

Finally, it’s That One Guy with a comment about Elon Musk’s plan to fix Twitter by only moderating tweets that are “wrong and bad”:

Well holy crap, how come no-one thought of that before? All you need to do is get rid of the bad tweets and leave the good ones up. With this sort of brilliance on display no wonder so many people are enamored by Musk and think he’s brilliant, who could have ever thought of something that revolutionary but him?

That’s all for this week, folks!

This Week In Techdirt History: May 8th – 14th

Techdirt

from the so-that's-what-happened dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2017, Europe was putting free speech at risk as it struggled to figure out what to do with the GDPR, but stateside the big fight was over net neutrality. A John Oliver segment on the issue appeared to cripple the FCC website for a second time, but the agency claimed it was actually due to a DDoS attack — and then people noticed that a bot was flooding the website with anti-net neutrality comments. At the same time, the FCC was using garbage lobbyist data to defend its stance.

This was also the week that Donald Trump fired James Comey, and that we wrote about the first hearing and the ongoing filings in the lawsuit against us.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2012, the jury in the Google-Oracle trial was very confused, Twitter was challenging a court ruling saying users have no standing to protect their own account info, Verizon was similarly fighting for consumer privacy but in this case against copyright shakedown attempts, and a key ruling about copyright termination rights suggested big trouble might be coming for record labels. The TPP was falling apart while the USTR was insulting the intelligence of its critics, MP3Tunes declared bankruptcy in the face of legal costs, and Perfect 10’s case against Google was dismissed (in the same week it filed a new one against Tumblr).

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2007, NBC was still in a love-hate relationship with YouTube, Thailand was more firmly on the hate side and followed up its YouTube blocking order with plans for a lawsuit (and passing new regulations to allow even more site blocking), and Australia extradited the head of a software copying ring to the US. Uri Geller was abusing the DMCA and filing lawsuits to silence critics, while we noted how bogus DMCA complaints can be a way to generate publicity. And as bloggers were beginning to face more legal threats, we reminded them that they can benefit from anti-SLAPP laws.

Filed Under: history, look back

NYPD Lawyer Forged Emails, Lied To Courts, Withheld Information From Lawsuit Plaintiffs

Legal Issues

from the service-these-particular-employers-expect dept

The NYPD has long been a stalwart opponent of transparency and accountability. It has spent years trying to rebrand as a national security agency, drafting on former mayor Rudy Giuliani’s unearned reputation as the post-9/11 savior of New York City.

Journalists have noted the NYPD is even more secretive than the CIA and NSA, two agencies whose secrets have only been revealed by leakers. Not even its own oversight can crack this extremely thick blue line that separates the NYPD from everyone else. And its own union has stated the public deserves the silence and opacity it gets because, without it, New York City would become a hellhole overseen by the criminal element.

Rick Pinto, writing for Hell Gate, says at least one member of the thin blue line between transparency, accountability, and (apparently) compliance with court orders has (finally) been kicked to the curb by New York City’s Law Department.

Last week, in an effort to avoid sanctions for failing to turn over evidence, Dara Weiss, the NYPD’s lead lawyer in the cases, was found to have lied to the federal judge and to have forged multiple documents, mocking up fake copies of an email that she had claimed to send, but never had.

Weiss, an 18-year veteran of the New York City Law Department, which represents the City of New York and its agencies in lawsuits, was fired on Friday, according to court documents.

One down, but oh so many to go. Dara Weiss managed to make herself an unavoidable target for removal by brazenly defying court orders and, in the case examined by Pinto, forging emails in an attempt to claim she had actually complied with a court order.

This firing follows months of misconduct by the NY Law Department lawyer. She had been sanctioned five times in recent months by New York courts for refusing to turn over evidence and information requested by plaintiffs in civil rights lawsuits against the NYPD.

The final straw appears to have been an email Weiss forged in response to discovery requests targeting communications sent in response to former Sergeants Benevolent Association president Ed Mullins’ racist tweets. Weiss was ordered to turn over this information by March 3 by Judge Gabriel Gorenstein. Instead of handing over this information, Weiss apparently chose to forge an email showing she had already released this to the plaintiffs.

Gorenstein threatened the NYPD and its lawyers with sanctions for ignoring this order. Weiss tried to avoid this by sending a letter to the judge on April 26, claiming she had sent the info to the plaintiffs. As proof, she offered a PDF screenshot of an email she claimed to have sent to the plaintiffs disclosing the information the court had ordered her to hand over.

What she didn’t do was provide the original email, which plaintiffs claimed they had never received.

This perplexed the dozens of plaintiffs’ lawyers Weiss was claiming to have sent an email to—none of them had received it. That day, Rickner pressed Weiss in emails for evidence that she had indeed offered to meet. On the morning of the next day, April 27, she responded by sending them a PDF file she claimed was a copy of the email. Presumably confused why Weiss would send a PDF as proof she had sent an email, plaintiffs’ lawyers wrote back, asking her to “forward the actual email, as an attachment, so it has the metadata intact.”

Weiss wrote back that afternoon, this time including what she claimed was the text of the email, though not as an attachment with original metadata. But there were peculiar discrepancies between that email text and the PDF that Weiss said she had generated from the email, according to a letter Rickner later wrote to the court. For one thing, an email address was misspelled in the PDF, but appeared correctly in the second email.

The plaintiffs’ forensic expert pressed Weiss for the original email in order to examine the metadata. Weiss then claimed to have forgotten to send the original email, which explained why the plaintiffs hadn’t seen it. She called this an “error” but still refused to hand over copies of the draft email so the metadata could be examined.

The forensic expert arrived at this conclusion:

“Saying the email had been sent, when it had not been, was almost certainly not an accident.”

If this analysis is correct (and there’s nothing indicating it isn’t), Weiss not only lied to counsel representing those suing the NYPD, but also lied to the federal court itself. After the New York City Law Department’s request to meet with the judge in private to discuss this issue was rebuffed by the court, the Law Department did the next best thing: it fired the lying lawyer.

“This Office takes this matter very seriously and does not tolerate such conduct under any circumstances,” Miller wrote. “As a result, this attorney’s employment has been terminated. We sincerely apologize to the Court and all the parties for the inconvenience this has caused.”

That ends Weiss’s 18-year career at the NYC Law Department, during which she handled more than 80 civil rights cases involving the NYPD. But this isn’t her only misconduct. As mentioned above, she has been sanctioned multiple times by courts, including being sanctioned and fined for withholding documents from a plaintiff who was beaten while being detained on Rikers Island.

The good news is the NYPD has one less liar representing its rank-and-file liars. The downside is the New York City Law Department considers this termination to be the end of the line. It apparently has no interest in examining Weiss’s past efforts to see how often she ignored court orders, hid information from plaintiffs, or otherwise abused her position to give some of the most powerful people in New York City a leg up during civil rights litigation.

Much like other government agencies, the Law Department apparently feels riding to the rescue to do the unavoidable after years of apparent malfeasance is a form of accountability. It really isn’t. It’s nothing more than doing the right thing because doing the wrong thing is no longer an option.

Filed Under: dara weiss, faked email, nyc law department, nypd, transparency

The Internet Has Opened Up The Creator Economy To New Heights

Culture

from the creativity-enhanced dept

One of the most dramatic differences between the traditional, analogue world of creation, and the modern, digital one, is the democratization that has taken place in this sphere. Until recently, writers, musicians, artists and filmmakers collectively formed a relatively select group that was hard to enter as a professional. Today, anyone with an Internet connection can spread the word about their work and make money from it. In effect, everyone who is online, to a greater or lesser degree, is a digital creator – even with the most ephemeral of posts on social media. Although it is clear the creative field has been opened up enormously, details are hard to come by. That makes a new “Creator Report” from Linktree particularly useful. Linktree describes itself as:

a tool for connecting followers to your entire online world – not just one feed.

A Linktree not only points followers in the direction of your choosing – to your other social profiles, eCommerce store, or content you want to share – but it helps hold followers within your online ecosystem for longer. It allows users to share more, sell more, curate more and grow more.

Linktree claims to have over 23 million users worldwide, which means that it should be in a good position to observe how the new world of digital creation works. Here are some of the highlights of the Creator Report.

Out of 4.2 billion social media users, Linktree says there are 200 million creators, which is defines as “individuals who use their influence, creativity or skills to aggregate and monetize their audience”. Naturally, most of those creators have a limited number of followers. Linktree says there are 23 million “recreational creators” with fewer than 1,000 followers; a massive 139 million creators with between 10,000 and 1,000 followers; 41 million in the next category, with up to 100,000 followers; and finally 2 million each of creators with up to a million and more than a million followers. Around two thirds of creators are active part time, with 43% who spend up to five hours per week creating material. Some 36% have been active for less than a year.

The other key aspect is naturally the money they make. According to Linktree, 12% of full-time creators make more than $50,000, and 46% make less than $1,000. Among the part-time creators, only 3% make more than $50,000, while 68% earn less than $1,000.

None of those figures is particularly surprising – you’d expect only a small proportion of creators to make a living wage, and for full-time creators to find it easier to do this than for part-time creators. The central message of this report is a positive one: that the Internet has unleashed creativity on an unprecedented scale. When the digital world is criticized for its flaws and failings, which undoubtedly exist, that’s something that should always be borne in mind – and celebrated.

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

Originally posted to the Walled Culture blog.

Filed Under: business models, copyright, creativity, creator report, creators, internet, the long tail

Because Of Course: Rightsholders Pushing To Turn Digital Services Act Into Another Anti-Piracy Tool

Content Moderation

from the they-can't-resist dept

It never fails. We’ve been talking about the EU’s Digital Services Act for a few years now, looking at how the EU’s technocratic desire to overregulate the internet is going to cause real problems. And while at least they took a more systematic process to figuring out how to write the law, the end result still struck us as a disaster in waiting. And, because this is how any internet regulation attempt always turns out, after all the back and forth discussions and careful weighing of different ideas, someone always has to come in at the very end and seek to make everything much worse. In this case, the issue is that the EU Parliament, which gave us the terrible and broken Copyright Directive, is now trying to sneak more bad copyright ideas into the DSA.

The note expressed support for the proposal of the European Commission, which defined search engines as an ad hoc category and introduces a notice and action (N&A) mechanism that would be required to take down illegal content once it is flagged to them. At the same time, Didier proposed a few changes to the Commission’s text.

The note asked to remove a part in the text’s preamble providing examples of ‘mere conduit’, ‘caching’ and ‘hosting’ services, categories with different liability regimes established in the eCommerce Directive, the predecessor of the DSA. These examples were overly descriptive for the rightsholders that prefer a case-by-case in court.

Another change would mandate that if illegal content is flagged, not just the relevant web pages but the entire website should be delisted, namely removed by the search results. In the most extreme case, that would mean that if a video is illegally uploaded on YouTube, Google would have to remove the entire platform from its search results.

Finally, a modification to an article would oblige search engines to remove all search results referring to the flagged illegal content, not only the specific website. In other words, the platforms would have to monitor all websites searching for unlawful content.

Basically, throwing out whatever semi-balanced (not really, but they’d like to believe it is) intermediary liability rules they could come up with, and inserting a maximum punishment for sites and content deemed illegal (i.e. infringing). Incredible.

I mean, literally, they want this to say that if content is “flagged” (not adjudicated) as illegal, entire websites should be blocked from search results. That seems extreme, and extremely censorial, effectively giving tremendous power to silence speech to just about anyone who wants to take down some content.

Filed Under: content blocking, copyright, digital services act, dsa, due process, eu, rightsholders, search, site blocking

Boiling Elon Musk – Jumping Out Of The Pot Of Platform Law?

Content Moderation

from the giving-control-to-the-users dept

The boiling frog syndrome suggests that if a frog jumps into a pot of boiling water, it immediately jumps out — but if a frog jumps into a slowly heating pot, it senses no danger and gets cooked. Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook has been gradually coming to a boil of dysfunction for a decade – some are horrified, but many fail to see any serious problem. Now Elon Musk has jumped into a Twitter that he may quickly bring to a boil. Many expect either him – or hordes of non-extremist Twitter users – to jump out.

The frog syndrome may not be true of frogs, and Musk may not bring Twitter to an immediate boil, but the deeper problem that could boil us all is “platform law:” Social media, notably Twitter, have become powerful platforms that are bringing our new virtual “public square” to a raging boil. Harmful and polarizing disinformation and hate speech are threatening democracy here, and around the world.

The apparent problem is censorship versus free speech (whatever those may mean) — but the deeper problem is who sets the rules for what can be said, to what audience? Now we are facing a regime of platform law, where these private platforms have nearly unlimited power to set and enforce rules for censoring who can say what, with little transparency or oversight, even though they are fast becoming essential services. Are we to trust that to a few billionaire owners or Wall Street? Pseudo-independent oversight boards? The slowly and erratically turning wheels of government? “Self-sovereign” users or communities of users that may self-organize, but may also run wild as mobs? Or some new hybrid of some or all those that can offer both freedom and order?

Musk now brings this problem to a boil for all users to see. Either democracies will see the urgency and act, or they will die. Even if the boiling is slow and takes decades, leaving this power to control speech in this new public square in the hands of private businesses or governments will leave “a loaded gun on the table,” ready to be picked up by any would-be authoritarian.

It will take time and much sorting out, but some hybrid control is the only feasible solution that can preserve democracy. There are many ideas leading toward that rebirth — the optimistic scenario is that Musk could foster that.

Twitter has already begun to consider a step in that direction with Bluesky, an independent project funded by Jack Dorsey, and consistent with Mike Masnick’s proposals for “Protocols, Not Platforms.” Variations include Cory Doctorow’s adversarial interoperability, and Ethan Zuckerman’s Digital Public Infrastructure. A “middleware” architecture proposed by Francis Fukuyama’s Stanford group would let users select from an open market of delegated filtering services to work as their agents, to feed them what they want from the platforms. Any of these would shift power from the platforms to each user, to control what each sees – a variation on ideas also proposed by Stephen Wolfram, Ben Thompson, and me, among others.

Interestingly, it has been largely forgotten that the much-debated 1996 law that enabled the current legal regime, Section 230, also said “It is the policy of the United States… to encourage the development of technologies which maximize user control over what information is received by individuals.” True, there are significant challenges in this approach. The most fundamental is that doing filtering (ranking and recommending) well requires access to sensitive personal data from the platforms. But promising solutions are emerging.

A path to achieving this is outlined in a series in Tech Policy Press by Chris Riley and me. The central idea is to put primary control of what each of us sees in our own hands, choosing from an open market of composable sets of filtering services that suit our individual desires. Complementing that would be a light hand of regulation to ensure minimal constraints on illegal content, while leaving the criteria for handling “lawful but awful” content to services that the users choose.

But that alone is not enough. What traditionally kept “awful” content from us was neither a censoring authority nor direct user control — but a rich ecosystem of mediating services that did filtering the old-fashioned way: Publishers, communities, and other institutions served as an open network of curators serving more or less specific audiences — that we were free to choose or bypass. Now that open meditating infrastructure is being disintermediated by the social media platforms. We had freedom of impression — but are now losing it to platform control.

Real freedom of speech requires re-mediating that kind of infrastructure for indirect user-control. There are already legislative efforts in the US and Europe to mandate interoperability — and some include user “delegatability” — to open the platforms and break up monopolies of platform law. Creation of a layer of delegated user agents can create an opening for an open infrastructure of mediating services, to support filtering, as well as other aspects of social media propagation. This can enable traditional mediating institutions to re-integrate into this online ecosystem and regain their important role — for those who value what they can offer. It can also enable platform support for new breeds of mediating services to emerge and find an important place in our media ecosystem. Some fear that this user control might worsen filter bubble echo chambers, but how many of us really want to close our eyes and remain ignorant and stupid? Individual agency in choosing from a diversity of information sources has always been the hallmark of successful societies.

In this way social media can restore the original promise of the internet as a generative base for a vibrant and open next level of society.

Observers have dismissed Musk as a “mischievous trickster god” and naïve about freedom of speech. Maybe we are all cooked. But maybe (depending on how much pot he smokes?), he might support the nascent potential of Twitter to change the game for the better – or spur the rest of us to take the pot off the burner.

—-

Richard Reisman (@rreisman) is an independent media-tech innovator and frequent contributor to Tech Policy Press, who blogs on human-centered digital services and tech policy at SmartlyIntertwingled.com.

Filed Under: content moderation, control, elon musk, protocols
Companies: twitter

EU, UK, US Directly Accuse Russia Of Hacking ViaSat Satellites

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the easily-avoidable dept

For literally more than a decade researchers warned that global satellite telecommunications networks were vulnerable to attack. These attacks vary in nature but several allowed an intruder miles away to both intercept and disrupt satellite communications. In 2020 hackers again clearly demonstrated how these perpetually unresolved vulnerabilities were putting millions of people at risk.

Fast forward to 2022 and a major hack of Viasat’s satellite systems caused (gasp) massive problems for tens of thousands of users. The attack on Viasat’s KA-SAT satellite system, suspected at the time to be the work of the Russian government, was aimed at disrupting Ukraine communications in the lead up to war. But, as such attacks often do, it also managed to impact a very large chunk of Europe.

This week, the EU and UK formally accused Russia of the attack, pointing out that it occurred exactly one hour before the country invaded Ukraine:

“The European Union and its Member States, together with its international partners, strongly condemn the malicious cyber activity conducted by the Russian Federation against Ukraine, which targeted the satellite KA-SAT network, operated by Viasat.”

The full press release formally accuses Russia of several other attacks during the invasion, including the 13 January defacements of Ukrainian government websites, and the deployment of Whispergate malware. After it was released the US put out its own statement also directly blaming Russia.

There’s no limit of telecom infrastructure vulnerabilities (including those routinely exploited by the United States) we’ve addressed too little, too late. The SS7 flaw, for example, has been exploited for years by global intelligence agencies and criminals (assuming you see the two segments independently) despite repeated complaints by security experts.

Instead of taking these warnings seriously and genuinely shoring up overall privacy and security (be it a telecom network or election system), U.S. policymakers and the broader discourse brain trust spent several years… hyperventilating about TikTok.

Filed Under: eu, hacking, privacy, russia, satellite, security, telecom, uk, ukraine
Companies: viasat

Daily Deal: OMNIA Q5 5-in-1 Wireless Charging Station

Deals

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

The OMNIA Q5 power station is specifically designed to support iPads, Apple Watch, iPhones, AirPods, and Apple Pencil simultaneously while providing optimum charging ability, and storage convenience with the necessary safety features in place. The charging station & the charging pad can be used separately. It’s on sale for $70.

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

Biden Broadband Event Showcases Why U.S. Telecom Policy, Press Coverage Is So Broken

Broadband

from the band-aid-on-a-mortal-wound dept

Earlier this week, the Biden administration announced a “new” broadband plan that wasn’t actually new. The rose garden event featured executives from twenty ISPs who all got a pat on the back in front of the cameras for voluntarily and temporarily participating in a Biden plan to provide a $30 discount off of the broadband bills of low-income Americans.

The Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) is a temporary plan that provides $30 off low-income broadband bills using a limited pool of taxpayer money. The plan is voluntary, and participating ISPs can quit at any time. It’s a revamp of a previous “Emergency Broadband Benefit” COVID recovery plan that was extended (but reduced from $50 to $30) as part of the Biden broadband infrastructure bill.

To be clear it’s a good thing that low-income Americans get some temporary relief from high prices. But again, the Biden team seems completely unwilling to explain or address why U.S. broadband bills are so high in the first place. 20-40 million Americans lack access to broadband. 83 million live under a monopoly, resulting in high prices, spotty access, and historically terrible customer service.

The reality is that U.S. lawmakers and regulators, under both parties, have turned a blind eye as an essential utility was monopolized over 30 years. And when they do act, they routinely don’t target the thing causing the problem in the first place (Comcast, AT&T regional monopolies), they apply strange and convoluted band-aids, such as net neutrality or this temporary low-income broadband discount.

This was all nuance that was widely missed by the vast majority of news coverage on the Biden announcement. If you dug through the news coverage of the event, you literally could not find a single one that noted why U.S. broadband prices are so high in the first place. Broadband monopolies are often not and, instead, are replaced by a nebulous “digital divide” with no known cause.

This new Biden program doesn’t fix the U.S. broadband problem. It takes a wad of taxpayer cash, and gives it to ISPs (with a long history of misspending subsidies and who created the problem in the first place), who then pass the discount on to low-income Americans (hopefully, after they jump through numerous convoluted hoops). And again, ISPs can quit any time.

It’s also worth noting that several participating ISPs abused the plan when it was first announced to upsell struggling Americans to more expensive tiers. It’s also worth noting that several of the ISPs Biden held a press event with are busy trying to scuttle Biden’s belated nominee to the FCC, Gigi Sohn, an actual monopoly reformer Biden has yet to publicly protect from an ongoing telecom smear campaign.

Which is to say there’s some mixed messaging here. We care about low-income Americans, but not enough to publicly support an FCC nominee and reformer that could actually help them. We care about U.S. broadband, but not enough to accurately single out what’s really causing the problem. We care about the “digital divide,” but we don’t want to make the companies responsible for it mad.

The GOP adores telecom monopolies to a point where the two entities are indistinguishable.

The DNC often is notably better on the subject, but it also often likes to pretend that telecom monopolization doesn’t exist, or isn’t a problem. They talk endlessly about the “digital divide,” but they lack the political courage to acknowledge why it exists or genuinely do much about it (for example, try to find a single time either of the two existing Democratic FCC Commissioners clearly criticized monopolization specifically).

Biden did mention a lack of competition late in the event, but didn’t call out what causes that lack of competition (regional monopolization and the state/federal corruption that protects it). And the $42 billion we’re spending to expand broadband will help address some broadband coverage gaps, though there’s some big issues there as well (see this story on our crappy broadband maps, and this one on how states are trying to make sure this money goes largely to monopolies and not competitors).

So again, is a temporary $30 discount for poor people on broadband good? Yeah. But again it’s just a band-aid for a deeper problem we refuse to address. And we refuse to address it in large part because many of the monopolies causing the problem (Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, Charter) are bone-grafted to both our intelligence gathering apparatus and our first responder networks. They’re part of the government.

As such, calling them out for predatory, monopolistic behavior would come with political and campaign contribution costs many lawmakers and policymakers aren’t willing to incur. As a result, in very American fashion, we often focus on treating the symptoms, but not the disease.

Filed Under: biden, broadband, digital divide, dnc, fcc, gop, high speed internet, internet access, monopolies, telecom