We’ve long known so-called “predictive policing” is garbage. It’s the same old biased policing, except shinier and more expensive. Every system in place relies on data generated by policework — data instantly tainted by the things cops do, like hassling minorities, engaging in very selective enforcement, and treating people as inherently suspicious just because of where they live. These acts generate the garbage data that ensures that, when all the digital gears stop turning, more garbage data will be generated.
To highlight the worthlessness of predictive policing tools, criminal justice watchdog Fair Trials has mocked up an input tool of its own — one any site visitor can interact with and experience the faint horror of being prejudged a criminal by a set of seemingly innocuous questions.
Attend more than one school while growing up? Is your credit rating a bit too low? Have you ever witnessed a crime? Ever been the recipient of government benefits? Are you a minority? Ever spoken to the cops for any reason? Answer enough of these questions with a “yes” and you’ll head right up into “High Risk” territory — the sort of thing that tends to generate even more interactions with police officers utilizing predpol data… which then generates even more data ensuring you’ll remain on the “High Risk” list in perpetuity.
Sure, this is an extremely simplified version of software governments pay millions to purchase, but the risk factors presented are all used in predictive policing. And, as Fair Trials points out, these same sorts of systems are used by judges to determine bail amounts and sentence lengths — things that can be increased simply because a person has done nothing more than witness a crime or fallen behind on their bills.
Since it’s incredibly easy to rack up risk factors just by living your life, it’s no surprise even people with presumably the cleanest backgrounds can still find themselves listed among the troublesome by predictive policing algorithms. As Thomas Macaulay reports for The Next Web, Fair Trials’ predpol quiz has snagged a number of EU officials.
Politicians from the Socialists & Democrats, Renew, Greens/EFA, and the Left Group were invited to test the tool. After completing the quiz, MEPs Karen Melchior, Cornelia Ernst, Tiemo Wölken, Petar Vitanov, and Patrick Breyer were all identified as at “medium risk” of committing future crime.
As noted above, Fair Trials has presented a very simplified version of predictive policing software. But the questions used are very representative of how this software presents people to police officers, prosecutors, and judges. It takes a bunch of demographic data, conjures up networks of suspected criminals out of interactions, proximity and societal background, and spits out lists of high-risk people for cops to hassle. The end result is the laundering of biased policing via expensive black boxes that give the usual selective enforcement efforts a veneer of cold, hard science.
But underneath all the ones and zeroes, its basically still just cops going after poor people, minorities, foreigners, and anyone else perceived to be an easy target. Spending millions on proprietary algorithms doesn’t change a thing.
Recently, Walled Culture mentioned the problem of orphan works. These are creations, typically books, that are still covered by copyright, but unavailable because the original publisher or distributor has gone out of business, or simply isn’t interested in keeping them in circulation. The problem is that without any obvious point of contact, it’s not possible to ask permission to re-publish or re-use it in some way.
It turns out that there is another serious issue, related to that of orphan works. It has been revealed by the New York Public Library, drawing on work carried out as a collaboration between the Internet Archive and the US Copyright Office. According to a report on the Vice Web site:
the New York Public Library (NYPL) has been reviewing the U.S. Copyright Office’s official registration and renewals records for creative works whose copyrights haven’t been renewed, and have thus been overlooked as part of the public domain.
The books in question were published between 1923 and 1964, before changes to U.S. copyright law removed the requirement for rights holders to renew their copyrights. According to Greg Cram, associate general counsel and director of information policy at NYPL, an initial overview of books published in that period shows that around 65 to 75 percent of rights holders opted not to renew their copyrights.
Since most people today will naturally assume that a book published between 1923 and 1964 is still in copyright, it is unlikely anyone has ever tried to re-publish or re-use material from this period. But this new research shows that the majority of these works are, in fact, already in the public domain, and therefore freely available for anyone to use as they wish.
That’s a good demonstration of how the dead hand of copyright stifles fresh creativity from today’s writers, artists, musicians and film-makers. They might have drawn on all these works as a stimulus for their own creativity, but held back because they have been brainwashed by the copyright industry into thinking that everything is in copyright for inordinate lengths of time. As a result, huge numbers of books that are freely available according to the law remain locked up with a kind of phantom copyright that exists only in people’s minds, infected as they are with copyright maximalist propaganda.
The other important lesson to be drawn from this work by the NYPL is that given the choice, the majority of authors didn’t bother renewing their copyrights, presumably because they didn’t feel they needed to. That makes today’s automatic imposition of exaggeratedly-long copyright terms not just unnecessary but also harmful in terms of the potential new works, based on public domain materials, that have been lost as a result of this continuing over-protection.
The automotive industry is entering into its own subprime crisis. Even before the COVID pandemic led to supply chain issues that vastly inflated car prices, lenders were starting to extend loan periods to make things easier for underfunded purchasers, moving on from the industry standard 3-5 year loans to 84-month baselines that ensure people could purchase cars… but for a price they’d be paying for a long, long time.
The underlying mechanics that led to the 2008 financial crisis are now at play at automotive dealers. But dealers still have the upper hand, for the most part. You can’t disable a house, but inexpensive tech allows dealers to disable cars when payments are overdue.
Starter interrupt devices are only the beginning. As loan periods extend to create “affordable” payments (ones that will not touch the principal for more than three years) and payments continue to be missed, despite this predatory lending tactic, automotive manufacturers are moving forward to protect their bottom lines.
Here’s the latest in dealer-on-driver financial violence, sent to us by Techdirt reader BentFranklin via our Insider Chat. Taking advantage of built-in smart systems, including autonomous driving features, Ford will seek to reclaim its property by any (electronic) means necessary.
The patent document was submitted to the United States Patent Office in August 2021 but it was formally published Feb. 23. It’s titled “Systems and Methods to Repossess a Vehicle.” It describes several ways to make the life of somebody who has missed several car payments harder.
It explicitly says the system, which could be installed on any future vehicle in the automaker’s lineup with a data connection would be capable of “[disabling] a functionality of one or more components of the vehicle.” Everything from the engine to the air conditioning. For vehicles with autonomous or semi-autonomous driving capability, the system could “move the vehicle from a first spot to a second spot that is more convenient for a tow truck to tow the vehicle… move the vehicle from the premises of the owner to a location such as, for example, the premises of the repossession agency,” or, if the lending institution considers the “financial viability of executing a repossession procedure” to be unjustifiable, the vehicle could drive itself to the junkyard.
Kudos to The Drive, which not only reported this news, but provided a link to the patent application [PDF], which includes helpful illustrations like this one:
Yikes. “Police authority.” That doesn’t bode well for purchasers who’ve fallen behind on their payments. They’re not actually thieves, not when the company has the option to repo the vehicle. But some irresponsible (or delayed) data reporting could lead to traffic stops predicated on the (incorrect) supposition the car is stolen, when it’s actually nothing more than delinquent.
The Drive notes no other car manufacturer has attempted to patent tech like this, putting Ford on the questionable leading edge of repo tech for the time being. Fortunately, prospective Ford purchasers won’t just find their vehicles autonomously commandeered should they fall behind on their payments. Advance notice will be given before vehicles wander off to return themselves to their maker.
There would be several warnings from the vehicle before the system initiated a formal repossession. If these warnings were ignored, the car could begin to lose functionality ahead of a repo. The first lost functions would be minor inconveniences like “cruise control, automated window controls, automated seat controls, and some components of the infotainment system (radio, global positioning system (GPS), MP3 player, etc.)” The next level is more serious, and includes the loss of things like “the air conditioning system, a remote key fob, and an automated door lock/unlock system.” Likewise, an “incessant and unpleasant sound” may be turned on “every time the owner is present in the vehicle.”
Should all of these inconveniences be ignored, the system would escalate to lock people out of their vehicles. It should be noted the patent exempts weekends from these escalating lockout tactics, perhaps recognizing it’s difficult to catch up on payments when you can’t contact the lien holder.
The semi-autonomous functions would be activated if none of the exceptions are met. At best, it would move the car out of someone’s driveway to a public street where it can be more easily towed. At worst, it would instruct the car to drive itself to the nearest authorized repo lot if possible.
But if the situation seems more dire than that, the onboard computer will opt for Mutually Assured Destruction. In certain cases, The Drive reports, the system will emulate The Bard, instructing the vehicle to “Get thee to a nunnery scrapyard.”
If it will cost the bank more to repo the vehicle as compared to what it could sell it for, then “the repossession system computer may cooperate with the vehicle computer to autonomously move the vehicle from the premises of the owner to a junkyard.”
That’s the future. Your car will run from you, if your dealer or manufacturer decides that’s the way things need to go. Never mind the fact that being without a car makes it that much more difficult to earn the wages needed to pay it off. Ford wants to do your driving for you if it feels you can no longer trust you. If that means you’re out of a car and still on the hook for thousands, so be it.
Over the last few years, we’ve written a number of stories about a (somewhat silly) trademark dispute between Jack Daniels, makers of whiskey, and VIP Products, makers of doggy chew toys, including one for “Bad Spaniels” that is a pretty clear parody of Jack Daniels.
When we had last mentioned the case it was in 2021, after the Supreme Court refused to grant cert, specifically regarding the question of whether or not the doggy toy was an expressive work, which would subject it to a different level of protection. The case continued, and after another round of back and forth in the courts, the Supreme Court was asked to weigh in again, specifically on the question of whether or not a “humorous use of another’s trademark” is subject to the standard “likelihood of confusion” test, or whether the higher standards of the 1st Amendment apply instead (and, separately, whether or not the humorous use, even for sale, made it noncommercial, which would bar reviewing it for “tarnishment” — an already questionable interpretation of trademark law).
Back in November, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, and amicus briefs have been pouring into the docket, mostly from big brand companies and trademark lawyers. So, you have folks like Campbell’s Soup (yes, the same Campbell’s Soup that Andy Warhol parodied) whining about the threats of allowing people to make parodies of brands.
These are all good and useful filings. But… there’s another one as well.
The artist collective/commercial drop pranksters known as MSCHF, who have had their own trademark battles along the way, decided to weigh in as well with… well… something different. You may recall that last fall, The Onion filed a hilarious amicus brief regarding the importance of free speech protections for parody, which, unfortunately, did not convince the Supreme Court to hear that case.
But the MSCHF filing takes this all to a different level. Actually, MSCHF filed its brief the same day as all the other briefs in support of VIP products, but it was initially rejected by the court (for unclear reasons). A corrected version was filed this past Thursday (unfortunately, I no longer have the original version which I had read when it came out. I think the revised version puts more of the legal stuff up front and the, um, nonsense, later).
The corrected full filing starts off with a well argued amicus brief regarding the importance of freedom of expression, and how trademark can interfere with speech. It, like many of the other briefs, highlights how just using the “likelihood of confusion” test can “contradict” the 1st Amendment. But, still, much of the filing is not what you’d expect, starting with the “interest of the amicus” part:
“Crackpots” might be how the Tinker Court would describe us. Far worse, one of the other amicus called us shoe manufacturers. Meanwhile, members of the art world named us “the future.” We call ourselves MSCHF (pronounced “mischief”). We are a collective who critiques and comments on American culture. The renowned Perrotin Art Gallery described our work as “elaborate interventions [that] expose and leverage the absurdity of our cultural, political, and monetary systems.” We start conversations about culture by participating in culture; so we agree with this Court that the freedom of expression is not limited to areas that a benevolent government provides as a safe haven for people like us.
The “crackpot” line, and the closing phrase, are references to the famed Tinker v. Des Moines Supreme Court ruling regarding the 1st Amendment in schools, which included the memorable line “freedom of expression does not exist if it ‘could be exercised only in an area that a benevolent government has provided as a safe haven for crackpots…’.”
The brief highlights just a few of MSCHF’s many commentary projects, and then suggests that the Justices (and their clerks) should begin by “turning to the Appendix.” (Again, I believe that the part that is now the Appendix was initially at the front of their original filing.) The filing also highlights many, many cases of big packaged goods companies appropriating iconography for expressive purposes within their ads, from Starbucks’ use of a medieval mermaid to Coca Cola’s use of Santa Claus.
There’s a lot more, and, again, it’s a really good amicus brief in highlighting tons of real world examples to prove its point. And they really try to prove their point, including showing the results of a (small sample size) survey they ran regarding, um, the taste of Jack Daniel’s Whiskey:
Followed by this bit of commentary:
Our colleagues who expressed an opinion that Jack Daniel’s tastes like anything but the nectar of the gods are, of course, wrong, but this is America and they may express their opinion. Under the likelihood of confusion test, however, it is unclear how far they can go to share that opinion. Could they print their opinion on a pamphlet? What if the opinion is printed on clothing? Could they use Jack Daniel’s filigree to surround their opinion stated on a t-shirt? What if they print that expression on a t-shirt using Jack Daniel’s stylized font? Could they print the expression on a black t-shirt using Jack Daniel’s stylized font and a replica of a Jack Daniel’s bottle? Does it depend on where you live?
There’s so much in the filing, including a fun usage of my favorite XKCD, which I’ll leave you to find.
But then we get to the Appendix, which is what drew so much attention to this filing in the first place. It is a contest, in which they ask each Justice and each of the Justice’s clerks to complete a simple connect-the-dots drawing and send it back to MSCHF to be used in an exhibition.
The show will be composed of 45 works on paper, each taking the form of a Connect-the-Dots drawing, a classic childhood puzzle-drawing format.
Enclosed in this brief are 45 pages, each specifically addressed to one of the people reading this brief. Each page has on its front fact a connect-the-dots drawing waiting for an artist’s hand to make them into completed artworks. On the reverse is a pre-addressed, pre-paid mailing label allowing the completed drawing to be returned to MSCHF for exhibition at no cost to the artist.
In describing the nature of the end result, the filing notes that the Justices and clerks will be part of what “determines what these artworks are” and highlights that each person reading the brief is “the executor of an artwork that makes use of cultural iconography.” But also, to make the point:
Each of these drawings will be displayed as part of a gallery show. Will they be rendered illegal prior to that exhibition?
As you’ve probably guessed by now, the connect-the-dots drawings make use of… some well known trademarks. Here’s the first one, for Chief Justice John Roberts, parodying the Arm & Hammer logo by adding a sickle to it as well:
Robert Flatow, a clerk for Justice Alito, is given a mashup between Mickey Mouse and Shrek:
I do wonder how Clarence Thomas’ clerk, Daniel Shapiro feels about the connect-the-dots he was given:
Spencer Smith, clerk to Justice Sotomayor, was given one that makes reference to Section 230, and appears to be creating a tombstone guillotine with the monopoly man’s decapitated head in front of it (I’m not going to comment on that any more…)
Justice Amy Coney Barrett gets a mix of McDonalds and the cross, creating “McMass.”
There are 45 in total, and many of them are fairly amusing, but all basically make the point about the intersection of trademark and artistic expression. I am assuming that none of the recipients, and almost certainly none of the Justices, will actually participate, though MSCHF also filed a separate motion asking for leave to send a pack of colored pencils (importantly, a pack of Crayola® Colored pencils) for the Justices and clerks to use.
The Justices are not exactly well known for their senses of humor, especially around something that may feel like it is mocking the court, but I think the brief does a good job making its point. And I look forward to the MSCHF exhibit.
In September, it suddenly decided the First Amendment doesn’t have anything to do with online speech. It refused to block a Texas law targeting social media services — a law that would force private companies to host speech they (or a majority of their users) didn’t care for. Compelled speech is always unconstitutional, but Fifth Circuit judge Andy Oldham said otherwise in an incomprehensible ruling that ran contrary to more than a century of Supreme Court precedent.
Then, in December, it clawed back a very solid First Amendment ruling, announcing it would be rehearing the case en banc after an (unnamed) judge asked that the case be reheard by the entire court. This was a clear First Amendment retaliation case. Officers arrested a local journalist for asking another cop some questions. The independent journalist had done nothing more than ask a Laredo police employee for confirmation of facts about a Border Patrol officer’s suicide. For this, she was arrested for allegedly “misusing official information.”
As the court noted in the decision it later pulled, there was no question this arrest violated the First Amendment.
Put simply: If the government cannot punish someone for publishing the Pentagon Papers, how can it punish someone for simply asking for them? See New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971) (per curiam).
So, this case — where the person suing was so firmly in the right local prosecutors were unwilling immediately dropped the charges — gets a rehearing. But a blown call on the First Amendment — one issued by the Appeals Court last July — won’t get a second chance.
The request for an en banc hearing of this case has been denied. Fortunately, this denial [PDF] comes with a lengthy dissent from Judge James Ho attached — one that points out everything that’s wrong with the original decision.
Here’s the background. Sylvia Gonzalez, a retiree residing in Castle Hills, Texas, was unhappy with her local government. So, she chose to do something about it. She ran for office, securing a spot on the city council after winning her election run against a well-connected incumbent.
But her efforts didn’t end there. She organized a petition to unseat the current city manager and reinstate the previous city manager who she and petition signers felt would do a better job making sure the town’s streets were repaired in a timely manner. She presented this petition containing 300 signatures to the mayor during her first city council meeting. This resulted in a “contentious debate,” one that extended past the evening’s meeting and into the next day.
At the end of the second meeting, she was summoned to the mayor’s office by the police captain. The mayor asked where the petition was. Gonzalez responded by saying she turned it in to the mayor the day before. The mayor prompted her to look for it. Gonzalez did, finding it in her binder. The mayor said “You probably picked it up by mistake.” She gave him the petition.
So far, so banal.
BUT WAIT. This is from Judge Ho’s dissent:
The mayor, the police chief, and a special detective then hatched a plan to charge Sylvia with a crime in order to remove her from office. The police chief deputized his close friend, a private attorney, as a special detective to investigate Gonzalez. Following the investigation, the special detective filed an arrest affidavit alleging that Gonzalez had committed the crime of “intentionally destroy[ing], conceal[ing], remov[ing], or otherwise impair[ing] the verity, legibility, or availability of a governmental record.” Tex. Pen. Code Ann. § 37.10(a)(3).
Basically, the three conspired to criminally charge Gonzalez (who apparently wasn’t liked by the mayor) for mistakenly putting her own petition in her own folder, rather than turning it over to the mayor like she had thought she did. This would be the criminal “concealing or removing” of a government record. This happened after the first police officer Mayor Edward Trevino approached investigated and said no criminal activity had taken place.
Normally, this violation would be handled with a criminal citation and a summons to appear before a judge. It does not (normally!) result in an arrest. But nothing about this was normal. The intent was to intimidate and humiliate the feisty newcomer. Here’s what happened:
First, the special detective got a warrant rather than a summons. […]Second, the special detective circumvented the district attorney by using a procedure normally reserved for emergencies or violent felonies: He walked the warrant directly to a magistrate. Third, the special detective prevented Gonzalez from using the satellite booking function, which facilitates booking, processing, and releasing nonviolent offenders without jailtime. Gonzalez’s warrant did not go through any of the traditional channels, so it wasn’t in the satellite booking system.
Thanks to these machinations, Gonzalez spent a day in jail handcuffed to a bench and forced to forgo the use of a restroom. Jailers also refused to let her stand up to stretch her legs. The district attorney finally managed to step in and drop the charges, but not before Gonzalez’s name and criminal charges made headlines for several days.
Gonzalez sued. Somehow, the Fifth Circuit granted immunity to everyone involved in these clearly retaliatory actions — retaliation provoked by Gonzalez’s speech, her words to the council and the mayor, and the petition she had organized. Since no one else in the circuit had been quite so brazenly retaliatory in a similar situation, the Appeals Court decided there was no way these city officials would have known their abject fuckery was unconstitutional.
And that’s how it’s going to stand, now that a majority of Fifth Circuit judges have voted not to reexamine this blight on their records. At least Judge James Ho isn’t going to let this travesty pass unremarked:
The First Amendment is supposed to stop public officials from punishing citizens for expressing unpopular views. In America, we don’t allow the police to arrest and jail our citizens for having the temerity to criticize or question the government.
But it falls on the judiciary to ensure that the First Amendment is not reduced to a parchment promise. Few officials will admit that they abuse the coercive powers of government to punish and silence their critics. They’re often able to invent some reason to justify their actions. So courts must be vigilant in preventing officers from concocting legal theories to arrest citizens for stating unpopular viewpoints.
Judge Ho says the court utterly failed to do that here. Not only is it failing the First Amendment, it’s fucking up qualified immunity as well.
Even worse, we’re not just getting the First Amendment backwards. We’re also getting qualified immunity backwards. Just compare the denial of en banc rehearing here with some of our other recent en banc decisions.
We grant qualified immunity to officials who trample on basic First Amendment rights—but deny qualified immunity to officers who act in good faith to stop mass shooters and other violent criminals. Compare, e.g., Gonzalez, 42 F.4th 487; Morgan, 659 F.3d 359 (granting qualified immunity to principal who prohibited students from expressing their faith while at school), with Cole v. Carson, 935 F.3d 444 (5th Cir. 2019) (en banc) (denying qualified immunity to police officers who took lethal action against a student who was about to shoot up his high school); Winzer v. Kaufman County, 940 F.3d 900 (5th Cir. 2019) (denying rehearing en banc in case against police department for lethal actions taken during active shooting incident).
Accordingly, officers who punish innocent citizens are immune—but officers who protect innocent citizens are forced to stand trial. Officers who deliberately target citizens who hold disfavored political views face no accountability—but officers who make split-second, life-and-death decisions to stop violent criminals must put their careers on the line for their heroism.
When even the Fifth Circuit is under-delivering on immunity, something is clearly wrong. And the original decision here — which says government officials can retaliate against speech they don’t like as long as they’re creative about it — is undeniably wrong. But it will remain in place, thanks to the inaction of a majority of the judges that call this appellate court home. And that doesn’t exactly bode well for the First Amendment retaliation cases they have chosen to re-hear.
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I know, I know, there are no room for facts in the modern GOP, just feelings. But, still, it’s kind of remarkable just how much they seem committed to the bit that Twitter was actively trying to suppress Republicans to help Joe Biden. There remains zero proof of this. Zero. Over the course of the various “Twitter Files” all we’ve seen is Twitter literally pushing back on anything that suggests political bias, and instead trying to review things based on whether or not they legitimately broke the rules.
But, still, Republicans are insisting that Twitter unfairly benefited Democrats, and they already held a ridiculous hearing on it (with more on the way!) that highlighted (repeatedly) that Twitter did not, in fact, try to help Democrats, but rather that they bent over backwards to give Republicans extra chances after they broke the rules, even when the Trump White House demanded Twitter block his critics.
During that hearing, Rep. Jamie Raskin highlighted something I’ve been saying for a while: that if Democrats had held the same kind of hearing regarding Fox News and its editorial choices, many people (and not just Republicans) would rightly be up in arms about the 1st Amendment implications of demanding a media company explain its editorial choices.
Separately (and this will become important in a moment), in 2021, the Federal Election Commission conducted an investigation to see if Twitter’s handling of the Hunter Biden laptop story represented an illegal “in-kind contribution” to the Biden campaign. The FEC concluded that here was no evidence, and specifically that there was no evidence of Twitter working with the Biden campaign:
As discussed below, Twitter has credibly explained that it acted with a commercial motivation in response to the New York Post articles rather than with an electoral purpose. With respect to its actions concerning Trump’s tweets, there is no evidence that Twitter coordinated its actions with the Biden Committee, and as such, the actions did not constitute contributions. Finally, the remaining allegations that Twitter limited the visibility of Republican users, suppressed distribution of an interview, and limited coverage of election lawsuits are vague, speculative, and unsupported by the available information. Therefore, the Commission finds no reason to believe that Twitter violated 52 U.S.C. § 30118(a) and 11 C.F.R. § 114.2(b) by making prohibited in-kind corporate contributions; finds no reason to believe that Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, and Brandon Borrman, Twitter’s Vice President, Global Communications, violated 52 U.S.C. § 30118(a) and 11 C.F.R. § 114.2(e) by consenting to prohibited corporate contributions; and finds no reason to believe that the Biden Committee knowingly accepted or received and failed to report such contributions in violation of 52 U.S.C. §§ 30104(b)(3)(A), 30118(a) and 11 C.F.R. §§ 104.3(a), 114.2(d).
I bet you can guess where this is going, right?
Last week in the ongoing lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News, among many other things that were in Dominion’s latest filing was this fascinating tidbit.
During Trump’s campaign, Rupert provided Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor, Jared Kushner, with Fox confidential information about Biden’s ads, along with debate strategy. Ex.600, R.Murdoch 210:6-9; 213:17-20; Ex.603 (providing Kushner a preview of Biden’s ads before they were public)
In other words, for all the talk of Twitter supposedly helping the Biden campaign, Fox News, via the chairman of its parent company, Rupert Murdoch, was literally taking proprietary information regarding the Biden campaign, which it only obtained because of its position as a news channel on which the campaign was advertising, and feeding it directly to Trump’s campaign via one of Trump’s most trusted advisors.
It sure looks like Fox actually was potentially engaged in providing an illegal in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign. I’m assuming, though, that the House Judiciary Committee won’t be hosting a long series of day-long hearings about this?
This pattern is getting frustrating. Each and every time we see Republicans making nonsense, unsubstantiated claims about what companies are doing, it turns out it’s because it’s exactly what the GOP itself is doing. Each accusation is more of a confession, both about what levels they’ll stoop to, but also the inability to comprehend that the other side isn’t so lacking in ethics, and wouldn’t stoop to the same level.
To sell captured lawmakers on the idea, telecom giants have falsely claimed that Big Tech companies get a “free ride” on the Internet (just as they did during the U.S. net neutrality wars). To fix this problem they completely made up, Big Telecom argues Big Tech should be forced to help pay for the kind of broadband infrastructure upgrades the telecoms have routinely neglected for years.
It’s a big, dumb con. But yet again, telecom lobbyists have somehow convinced regulators that this blind cash grab is somehow sensible, adult policy. Dutifully, European Commission’s industry chief Thierry Breton (himself a former telecom exec) said last September he would launch a consultation on this “fair share” payment scheme in early 2023, ahead of any proposed legislation.
Hoping to steer Breton away from the idea, The European Internet Exchange Association, a coalition of key transit companies, recently warned that trying to sock tech giants with arbitrary polls would result in a less stable internet overall, as companies try to route their traffic around ISPs looking for an extra buck.
Similarly, Dutch Economic Affairs Minister Micky Adriaansens is warning Breton that tech giants will simply offload the higher costs of internet access to consumers (something we’re already seeing in South Korea where such a proposal has already been implemented at telecom lobbyist demand):
“It will penalise the consumers,” she told Reuters in an interview, saying that consumers who pay subscription fees to telecoms providers and also subscribe to streaming and video services may see the latter fees go up with Big Tech likely to pass on the internet tax.
Regulators worldwide are increasingly looking for ways to bridge the “digital divide” and shore up subsidy funding for broadband expansion.
But they’re often not looking at the real problem. Both in the EU and North America, regulators routinely and mindlessly let telecom giants consolidate and monopolize an essential utility. Those monopolies then work tirelessly to drive up rates and crush competition. And, utilizing their lobbying power, they’ve also routinely gleaned billions in subsidies for networks they routinely half-complete.
Serious reform would involve embracing policies that challenge monopolization, and engage in meaningful subsidy reform — ensuring that the billions we give telecom giants first actually go toward meaningful network improvements. Once you’ve done that, you can focus on additional funding mechanisms if they actually make sense.
Instead, EU regulators have decided to embrace a plan that involves Big Tech giving Big Telecom billions of additional dollars for no coherent reason. All while EU providers like Telefonica pretend that erecting these new troll tolls will result in “top-notch digital infrastructure” and are “key to our future quality of life, prosperity, and competitiveness.”
If the EU successfully implements such a scheme, you can be absolutely sure the next step will be the U.S., with captured regulators like Brendan Carr (who has been beating this idiotic drum for a few years now) at the front of the parade at Comcast’s and AT&T’s behest.
