It’s over. It’s finally over. The battle to end the trademark registrations for “Taco Tuesday” began years and years ago, mostly after Taco John’s wielded the trademark haphazardly to occasionally threaten other taco joints with legal action. Less spotlighted was Gregory’s Bar & Restaurant, which held the trademark for the phrase in the one state that Taco John’s didn’t, New Jersey. But, and if you haven’t been following this story I swear to god this next collection of words forms a true sentence, LeBron James teamed up with Taco Bell to launch a public campaign to get both trademark registrations rescinded by the USPTO. As a result, Taco John’s finally agreed to just give up this fight it was doomed to lose. But the owner of Gregory’s Bar & Restaurant, who’s name is — sigh — Gregory Gregory (duplicate is not a typo), vowed to fight to keep his trademark in New Jersey.
After a months-long battle with a Jersey Shore bar and restaurant over the trademark for Taco Tuesday, fast food giant Taco Bell said in a press release Tuesday that the trademark to the name had been relinquished.
“When we set out to free Taco Tuesday, we did it for all who make, sell, eat and celebrate tacos,” said Taco Bell Chief Global Brand and Strategy Officer and incoming Chief Executive Officer, Sean Tresvant. “Taco Bell wants everyone to have the opportunity to celebrate Taco Tuesday.”
Well, that’s almost certainly bullshit, of course. Taco Bell wants to be able to use the phrase “Taco Tuesday”, that’s why it fought this fight. But here’s the thing: it should be able to. As we’ve talked about at length in previous posts, these trademarks never should have been granted in the first place, and certainly became totally generic after years and years of use by multiple other parties in a multitude of ways.
And here’s the really frustrating thing: Taco Bell’s fight to overturn these trademarks has probably generated more business for Gregory’s than the stupid trademark it had in the first place.
Despite his frustration with the recent battles over the name, Gregory also acknowledged the publicity his fight with Taco Bell has generated for his business.
“We have gotten a lot of customers that were new because they saw it,” he said.
I’m not typically in the business of cheering on big companies defeating small companies at, well, mostly anything, frankly. But this whole things was dumb from the jump. Taco Tuesday is free for all to use. It’s finally over.
The list of things law enforcement officers consider reasonably suspicious could fill a decent-sized book. Pretty much anything anyone does or says when being accosted by an officer is usually deemed to be indicative of illegal activity.
It’s not just cops. It’s the courts, too. A list of things considered to be “reasonably suspicious” enough to justify warrantless searches compiled by Radley Balko back in 2014 shows there’s no winning when it comes to law enforcement officers and their “training and expertise.”
Being the first person off a plane
Being the last person off a plane
Someone authorities believe has tried to blend in to the middle of exiting passengers
Booking a nonstop flight
Booking a flight with a layover
Traveling alone
Traveling with a companion
People who appear nervous
People who appear “too calm“
Merely flying to or from a city known to be a major thoroughfare in the drug pipeline
That’s on top of the list that opened that 2014 Techdirt post, which contained a list of things Amtrak security officers consider to be “suspicious” — a list that includes being too calm, being too nervous, being ahead of passengers when boarding, being behind passengers when boarding, buying tickets with cash, or carrying “too little” luggage.
Another list (one used by officers during traffic stops) claimed any of the following could be considered suspicious behavior: smoking cigarettes, carrying currency, eye contact, single keys, GPS use, “older car recently registered,” overly cooperative, and that all-time favorite, “Other.”
Also included on that “reasonable suspicion” checklist used by the Virginia State Police: “Fake smile/laughter.”
That brings us to this case, highlighted by FourthAmendment.com. Virginia state troopers think you’re suspicious if you laugh too much. Philadelphia police officers think you’re suspicious if you laugh too little.
The suppression order [PDF] begins with a traffic stop. Edward Holloway was pulled over by Philadelphia PD officers John Smart and Danielle Foreman while driving in a “high crime area” because his windows were allegedly “excessively tinted.”
While pulled over, the officers noticed Holloway kept making calls on his phone. Holloway testified he was calling his employer to inform them he would possibly be late. He was asked for his ID, registration, and proof of insurance. He provided all of this, but running a records check showed Holloway’s registration was expired and his insurance had been cancelled. The officers decided to impound the vehicle.
While waiting for the tow truck, Officer Smart decided to engage in some exploratory conversation, leading off with this:
While Defendant sat in the vehicle, Officer Smart asked Defendant a question to the effect of whether there were any “guns, drugs, cats, sharks, or weapons” in the vehicle.
Uh huh. That was the lead off. Then this happened:
Officer Smart testified that he asks such a question at vehicle stops to “read people’s body language and their demeanor.” Officer Smart further testified that after he asked this question, Defendant “was breathing heavily,” “would not make eye contact,” “was reaching toward the passenger’s seat multiple times,” “was reaching towards the center console multiple times,” “looked at the center console two or three different times,” and “placed his right hand resting on top of the plastic panel by the shifter column center console.” Based on Defendant’s “nervous behavior and movements” alone, Officer Smart ordered Defendant to get out of the car.
Holloway was frisked, resulting in the discovery of Percoset, which Holloway claimed was legally prescribed. Then Officer Smart began his “inventory” of the vehicle prior to its towing — something that apparently involved pulling the top off the center console gear shift area, which led to the discovery of illegal drugs and a handgun.
Holloway moved to suppress this evidence, saying this search of his car and the frisk of his body weren’t supported by reasonable suspicion or probable cause. The government begged to differ. Lawyers paid for with tax dollars actually made this argument in court:
The Government argues that reasonable suspicion arose because Defendant did not laugh in response to Officer Smart’s question of whether there were any “guns, drugs, cats, sharks, or weapons” in the car, and instead “immediately started breathing heavily, looked toward the shifter column, and avoided eye contact.”
Well, frisk the court, I guess, because it’s not laughing either.
The Court finds that Officer Smart did not have reasonable suspicion to frisk Defendant or Defendant’s vehicle. “Nervous, evasive behavior” is just one factor considered in a “reasonable suspicion determination [which] must be based on commonsense judgments and inferences about human behavior.”Officer Smart testified that he regularly asks individuals the question concerning “firearms, drugs, cats, dogs, alligators, and weapons” at vehicle stops because it “helps [him] read people’s body language and their demeanor.” He further testified that he was trained by other officers to infer that an individual who does not laugh at such a question is nervous about either firearms or narcotics and that he typically receives a “laughing response” to that question. […]
The Court does not find that laughing at a law enforcement officer while being questioned about drugs and weapons would be an appropriate response. Moreover, failing to laugh at a bizarre question while being questioned about drugs and weapons does not create reasonable suspicion to remove an individual from a car after a traffic violation.
And there it is: the deafening silence that drowns out the desperation rimshot. And while it wasn’t the government’s only argument, it was its worst argument. But the rest weren’t much better. It argued the defendant was not actually on his way to work so he couldn’t have been nervous about being late for work. It argued that he shouldn’t have been nervous when officers patted him down if he did, as he asserted, have a prescription for the pills the officers found on his person.
And the court says the stuff found in the car (following the prying open of the center console gear shift casing by Officer Smart) would not have been “inevitably discovered” during an pre-tow inventory search. Inventory searches detail everything that isn’t in a locked or closed area. A shift stick encasement is generally not the sort of thing cops open up when performing a perfunctory inventory search.
But it bears repeating that the initial assertion by the government was that failing to laugh at something most people would only very charitably describe as a joke is suspicious behavior. And that argument is so terrible and so incredibly convenient one wonders if the government would have made the same argument if Holloway had laughed and told the court laughing at such a stupid question was just as suspicious as not laughing at it. Given the “reasonable suspicion” assertions we’ve already discussed here at Techdirt, it would be completely in law enforcement character to claim opposite reactions to the same stimulus equally suspicious.
When Twitter first launched what it called “Birdwatch,” I was hopeful that it would turn into a useful alternative approach to helping with trust & safety/content moderation questions, but I noted that there were many open questions, in particular with how it would deal with malicious actors seeking to game the system. When Elon took over Twitter, he really seemed to embrace Birdwatch, though he changed the name to the pointlessly boring “Community Notes.”
I still think the concept is a good one, and think it’s one of Elon’s few good moves. I think other social media sites should experiment with some similar ideas as well.
The problem, though, is that Elon seems to think that Community Notes is an effective replacement for a comprehensive trust & safety program. At the heart of so many of Elon’s decisions in firing the vast majority of the company’s trust & safety staff was that “Community Notes can handle it.”
As we’re in the midst of a series of major crises around the globe, where the flow of information has proven incredibly important, one thing we’re clearly learning is that Community Notes is not up to the task. Just to drive this point home, over the weekend Elon himself posted some fucking nonsense (as he’s prone to do) and many hours later Community Notes pointed out it was hogwash. Elon, as he’s done in the past when he’s been “Noted,” claimed he was happy it happened to himself… before claiming that his post was “obviously a joke meme” and that “there is more than a grain of truth to it.”
So, first of all, there isn’t “more than a grain of truth to it.” The whole thing is simply false. But, more importantly, if you look at the top replies to his “obviously a joke meme,” suggests that Elon’s biggest fans did not, even remotely, think that this was “obviously a joke meme,” but rather took it entirely seriously, cheering him on for “telling the truth.” Here’s just one of the top replies to his original tweet:
Also, it took quite some time for the note to appear on Elon’s account. And, look, content moderation at scale is impossible to do well and all that, but Community Notes seems like the exact wrong approach in situations like this one. Especially at a time when the accounts pushing out the most viewed news these days seem to be made up by a combination of grifters and idiots:
Online we have seen many users of X describe their experience of this crisis as different. Some of that may result from the more ambiguous nature of the larger conflict, especially as the news cycle moves from the unambiguous horror of the initial attack to concerns about Israel’s response. However, our investigation here suggests an additional factor: in Musk’s short tenure as owner of the platform, a new set of news elites has emerged. These elites post frequently, many sharing unvetted content and emotionally charged media. While sharing no single political ideology, many embrace a similar culture of rapid production of unlinked or ambiguously sourced content, embracing a “firehose of media” ethos that places the onus of verification on the end-user. This occurs in an environment that has been shorn of many of the “credibility signals” that served to ground users in the past — checkmarks that indicated notability, fact-checks distributed through Twitter Trends, and Twitter/X-based labeling of deceptive content. Even fundamental affordances of the web — such as simple sourcing through links — have been devalued by the platform, and, perhaps as a result, by the new elites that now direct its users’ attention.
Leaving aside the significant concern of taking away professional, trained trust & safety employees, and replacing them with random (often hand-picked) untrained volunteers, there are serious concerns coming to light about how Community Notes actually works in practice.
Multiple reports have come out lately highlighting the limitations of Community Notes on important breaking news in the midst of various conflicts around the world, where you have malicious actors seeking to deliberately spread misinformation. A report at Wired found that Community Notes is actually making some of the problems worse, rather than better.
On Saturday, the company wrote on its own platform that “notes across the platform are now being seen tens of millions of times per day, generating north of 85 million impressions in the last week.” It added that thousands of new contributors had been enrolled in the system. However, a WIRED investigation found that Community Notes appears to be not functioning as designed, may be vulnerable to coordinated manipulation by outside groups, and lacks transparency about how notes are approved. Sources also claim that it is filled with in-fighting and disinformation, and there appears to be no real oversight from the company itself.
“I understand why they do it, but it doesn’t do anything like what they say it does,” one Community Notes contributor tells WIRED. “It is prone to manipulation, and it is far too slow and cumbersome. It serves no purpose as far as I can see. I think it’s probably making the disinformation worse, to be honest.”
The report isn’t just based on random Community Notes users, but looking more closely at how the program works, and the ability for it to be gamed. Wired found that it wasn’t difficult to set up multiple accounts controlled by one person which all had access to Community Notes, meaning that you could manipulate support for a position with just a small group of users controlling multiple accounts.
It also points to earlier (pre-Elon) research that showed that (then) Birdwatch wasn’t used nearly as much for standard fact checking, but was used in political debates by users who disagreed politically with someone who had tweeted.
Back during the summer, the Poynter Institute had a good analysis of the limitations of Community Notes for dealing with real-time misinformation campaigns during crises. Specifically, the design of the current Community Notes has some, well, questionable assumptions built in. Apparently, it looks over your tweeting history and assigns you to a camp as being either “left” or “right” and then only allows a Community Note to go public if enough of the “left” people and the “right” people agree on a note.
“It has to have ideological consensus,” he said. “That means people on the left and people on the right have to agree that that note must be appended to that tweet.”
Essentially, it requires a “cross-ideological agreement on truth,” and in an increasingly partisan environment, achieving that consensus is almost impossible, he said.
Another complicating factor is the fact that a Twitter algorithm is looking at a user’s past behavior to determine their political leanings, Mahadevan said. Twitter waits until a similar number of people on the political right and left have agreed to attach a public Community Note to a tweet.
While that may work on issues where there isn’t any kind of culture war, it’s completely useless for culture war issues, where plenty of disinformation flows. Indeed, the Poynter report notes that a huge percentage of the highest rated Community Notes inside the Community Notes system are never seen by the public because they don’t have “cross-ideological agreement.”
The problem is that regular Twitter users might never see that note. Sixty percent of the most-rated notes are not public, meaning the Community Notes on “the tweets that most need a Community Note” aren’t public, Mahadevan said.
The setup with “cross-ideological” consensus basically seems almost perfectly designed to make sure that the absolute worst nonsense will never have Community Notes shown publicly.
Meanwhile, a report from NBC News also highlights how even when Community Notes is able to help debunk false information, it often comes way too late.
NBC News focused on two prominent pieces of Israel-Hamas misinformation that have already been debunked: a fake White House news release that was posted to X claiming the Biden administration had granted Israel $8 billion in emergency aid and false reports that St. Porphyrius Orthodox Church in Gaza was destroyed.
Only 8% of 120 posts related to those stories had published community notes, while 26% had unpublished notes from volunteers that had yet to be approved. About two-thirds of the top posts NBC News reviewed had no proposed or published Community Notes on them.
The findings echo what a Community Notes volunteer said was X’s lack of response to efforts to debunk misleading posts.
“All weekend we were furiously vetting, writing, and approving Community Notes on hundreds of posts which were demonstrably fake news,” Kim Picazio, a Community Notes volunteer, wrote on Instagram’s Threads. “It took 2+ days for the backroom to press whatever button to finally make all our warnings publicly viewable. By that time… You know the rest of that sentence.”
And when the Community Notes don’t show up until much later, a ton of nonsense can spread:
A post about the debunked White House news release published by a verified account had nearly 500,000 views and no proposed or appended note Tuesday afternoon.The Community Notes system also showed that a user tried to submit a fact-check Sunday on another post including the same known misinformation but that it had yet to be approved, saying, “Needs more ratings.” The post had accrued 80,000 views since Sunday.
In a search for St. Porphyrius Orthodox Church in Gaza, only five Community Notes had been applied to the top 42 posts echoing the debunked misinformation. Several posts from verified users with no notes repeated the claim and got over 100,000 views, while 13 Community Notes had been proposed on posts of the debunked claims but had not yet been approved for publishing.
During the first 5 days of the conflict, just 438 Community Notes (attached to 309 posts from 223 unique accounts) earned a “HELPFUL” rating and ended up being displayed publicly to users. Although it’s impossible to know what percentage of content about the war this represents, the fact that trending topics related to the conflict have routinely involved hundreds of thousands or even millions of posts suggests that a few hundred posts is just a drop in the bucket. The visible notes were generally attached to popular posts — the 309 posts in question earned a combined total of 2147081 likes, an average of 6948 likes per post. The majority of the posts that earned Community Notes (222 of 309 posts, 71.8%) came from paid X Premium/Twitter Blue subscribers, and the majority of the accounts posting them (147 of 223, 65.9%) are X Premium subscribers, who are potentially earning a share of X’s ad revenue based on the number of times their posts are seen and who therefore have a financial motive to never delete misleading content. (Overall, roughly 7% of posts that received Community Notes were deleted during the period studied, but there’s no reliable way of knowing how many of these posts were related to the Israel/Hamas war.)
Again, I really like the concept of Community Notes. I think it’s a very useful tool — and one example (of many) of trust & safety tools beyond simply “taking down” content. But it needs to be part of a wider strategy, not the only strategy. And, the program can’t be setup with such a huge blindspot for culture war issues.
But, that’s exactly how things currently work, and it’s a shame, in part because I fear it’s going to discourage others from creating their own versions of Community Notes.
For months, it has seemed as though retailers are under siege, raided on a daily basis by organized groups of thugs who walk off with hundreds, if not thousands of dollars of merchandise.
This has been amplified by all forms of media. Clips from security cameras circulate social media with viral spread outpacing reality. This is further amplified by news media operations, which lead reporting with the same clips, offering up the same conclusory takes on isolated instances.
This has been a boon for law enforcement. Officials have used these incidents to ask for bigger budgets, despite being unable to offer any solutions to the problem other than throwing more money at it. That they’ve failed to deter this supposed wave of retail crime fails to register with local politicians who are just as likely as everyone else to assume whatever’s gone viral must be representative of the larger whole.
While it’s true there have some particularly daring robberies at retail outlets, those instances remain outliers. For the most part, the amount of retail theft hasn’t changed much. Most increases in “shrink” (the retail term for lost property via internal or external theft) can likely be chalked up to the off-loading of checkout duties to shoppers. Self-checkouts lend themselves to theft, something that is only now being addressed by retailers now that those losses have exceeded the labor savings that come from having customers ring up and bag their own purchases.
But the amount of shrink that can be attributed to self-checkout lanes (or, rather, the lack of best practices when deploying self-checkout options) isn’t enough to explain larger retail losses. So, the narrative has shifted to portraying the nation’s retailers as being victimized on a regular basis by organized smash-and-grab operations where thousands of dollars of merchandise is stolen in a single incident.
Meanwhile, cop shops get richer and politicians are once again talking about being tough on crime. But what’s being represented as a bold new wave of criminal activity is likely nothing more than retailers hoping to hide their losses behind the public’s skewed perception of the theft problem.
The analysts noted that overall shrink — merchandise losses due to external and internal theft, damaged products, inventory mismanagement and other errors — makes up just 1.5% to 2% of retailers’ sales. That percentage has remained steady for years, despite retailers sounding the alarm more than ever about theft.
The National Retail Federation said that retailers’ losses, known as shrink, increased 19% last year to $112 billion, based on a survey of 177 retailers. But shrink as a percentage of sales fell during the height of the pandemic as stores temporarily closed and grew in 2022 as stores re-opened.
This hit to profits is relatively small and fleeting — not reason enough alone to close stores according to the analysts. At nine major retailers that have increasingly cited the rising impact of theft, shrink as a percentage of sales increased just 0.4% in 2022, they found.
“We believe there is a disconnect…between the expected increase in shrink and the attention it has drawn,” the analysts said.
While the report does acknowledge there are areas of the country where organized theft is causing serious retail problems, it does go on to note that retailers affected by other issues are using these instances to hide preexisting problems, as well as to lobby lawmakers for favorable legislation.
While theft is likely elevated, companies a are also likely using the opportunity to draw attention away from margin headwinds in the form of higher promotions and weaker inventory management in recent quarters. We also believe some more recent permanent store closures enacted under the cover of shink relate to underperformance of these locations.
That’s just part of it. The analysts also suggest that retailers aren’t wise to jump on the hysteria train if they don’t need to. What’s being seen now is indicative of how things are going to go for the foreseeable future, given the relative ease of moving stolen property combined with the increase in the market for stolen products, given the pressure placed on the average American household by supply chain issues and increased inflation.
Combined with this bleaker macro outlook, the capacity to steal and move stolen goods has reached an inflection point. We do not see any of these trends reversing, in fact, we believe they will likely grow stronger in the coming years, particularly given online demand for secondhand goods amid an uncertain economic backdrop.
The upshot is most closed retail stores weren’t closed because they suffered too much theft. They were on their way out well before this due to their inability to maintain profitability even without increases in shrink.
So, when company spokespeople speak to journalists or issue widely reprinted press releases, it would serve viewers well to question what exactly is prompting the actions being taken. The analysts detail Target’s recent store closures as evidence of more widespread retail misdirection that attempts to blame (perhaps nonexistent) increases in theft for store closures, rather than mismanagement by either local management or Target Corporation as a whole.
Target has not quantified the dollar or basis-point impact of theft in the stores it is closing. And it would seem a relatively small and likely fleeting hit to profits could not be telling the whole story. Indeed, there is a more cynical theory as to why some retailers are choosing to close a store to address theft. One analysis by Popular Information found that the stores Target is closing in both New York and San Francisco actually had lower reported theft rates when compared to other nearby locations (though total dollar amounts were not reported and instances of violence are harder to parse out through reports alone).
More pointedly, we would note that after making a big push into smaller format, Target has not discussed the initiative since 2020. As such, we allow that Target could be using shrink to mask other issues, including poor inventory management, which came to a head in 2022 following supply chain disruption, and is now exiting underperforming stores to boost overall margins. Meanwhile, stores in downtown locations could also be seeing as much if not more of an impact from lower overall traffic patterns.
The rest of the report details statements from several retailers, most of which either say that shrink remains a manageable problem or that it has increased year-over-year, but only to meet the percentages seen pre-pandemic (2019). While there may be more cases of organized retail theft, retail theft overall simply isn’t what it seems to be when the most “reporting” is simply regurgitation of the last social media post to go viral.
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We’ve spent plenty of time over the last year or so on Missouri and Louisiana’s lawsuit against the Biden administration for apparently suggesting how sites like Meta should moderate content on their platforms. That case has had its twists and turns and is now going before the Supreme Court. I’m sure we’ll have plenty more to say on that case shortly, but last week we also saw the lawsuit where 33 states sued Meta for (what the lawsuit claims) is Meta’s failures to keep kids from using the platform.
Two of the states that signed on were… Missouri and Louisiana.
So… I’m curious if there’s any way to square these two lawsuits. Because as far as I can tell, the argument is that the government should never, ever even say anything that will pressure a website to change how it handles content on its website.
But also…
It’s perfectly fine for the government to use the judicial system to… force a website to handle content in the manner that the state feels is best.
Of course, the reality is that it doesn’t matter one bit that the two lawsuits are wholly inconsistent. This has always been about culture wars and headlines, and the earlier case is about the Attorneys General in Louisiana and Missouri scoring culture war points with the dumber segments of their voting bases, while the Meta lawsuit is about scoring techlash culture points among angry parents and teachers for failing in their jobs as parents and teachers.
But, really, it seems like reporters who are covering those two AGs might want to ask them directly how they can have both of these lawsuits going on at the same time. Can the government tell websites that host 3rd party speech how to operate or not?
Groups like the National Digital Inclusion Alliance have consistently released studies showing that telecom giants like AT&T, despite billions in subsidies and tax breaks, routinely avoid upgrading minority and low income neighborhoods to fiber. Not only that, the group has documented how users in those neighborhoods even struggle to have their existing (older and slower) DSL lines repaired.
The nation’s top regulator, the FCC, has been completely asleep on the issue for decades. That changed (potentially) last year, when Congress pushed the FCC to investigate the problem as part of the infrastructure bill. And while the FCC has created a “digital discrimination task force” and is circulating a proposal to address the problem behind closed doors, early reports aren’t promising.
New Street Research, for example, issued a paywalled report with their analysis of the FCC’s planned proposal, and they come away decidedly underwhelmed:
“Upon reading the actual item, it is even more benign than we had anticipated. It refrains from making any accusations against any company and declines to consider any historic acts by ISPs as in violation of the digital discrimination rules.”
Another complaint made by the report is the fact that the FCC has opted for an informal complaint process instead of a formal one. That means complaints are shared with providers but not the public, reducing transparency and making it politically easier for the FCC to ignore them.
Even though the FCC’s proposal to address digital discrimination in broadband deployment sounds like it’s going to be toothless and performative, industry will of course portray it as some kind of “severe government overreach” as part of a longstanding quest to portray any and all regulatory oversight of telecom as unhinged extremism. Something New Street says will be unwarranted:
“We don’t doubt that the item will be criticized by some who allege that the item will result in setting up new barriers for deployments and create new rights for the FCC to micromanage broadband services, but considering what the item actually does, we think such predictions are wrong.”
We’ll see what the final plan looks like. The FCC’s outline of its proposal on digital discrimination is available here, though the agency isn’t expected to actually vote on the rules until November 15. Crafting useful rules is one thing, and actually enforcing them will be another. Even expecting the FCC to single out AT&T by name is probably asking a lot for an agency that often engages in regulatory theater.
For example, the Biden FCC wants to ensure broadband subscriptions have “nutrition labels” making it transparent how badly you’re getting ripped off by your ISP, but they generally have little interest in actually stopping regional mono/duopolies from ripping you off. And even these incomplete efforts are routinely portrayed as draconian “overreach” by industry giants.
Consumer groups, keen to be on commissioners’ good sides and just happy that the FCC is no longer being lobotomized by industry-blessed Trump appointed sycophants, are generally quiet about the performative nature of these efforts for fear of undermining them. Even many civil rights groups, similarly thrilled that the Biden FCC can even acknowledge this problem exists, aren’t keen to criticize it.
But the problem remains a very real one all the same. It’s hard to reform an industry dominated by predatory giants when your careerist regulators lack the backbone to even call companies out by name, much less candidly acknowledge that concentrated mono/duopoly power (and the corruption that coddles them) is the primary reason U.S. broadband remains patchy, sluggish, and expensive — a problem notably worse in marginalized and minority neighborhoods.
