Biden FCC Prepares To ‘Restore Net Neutrality,’ But The Details Will Matter

Broadband

from the here-we-go-again dept

Hey, remember when a bunch of unpopular broadband monopolies convinced a corrupt reality TV star to dismantle most oversight of their very broken industry? And remember how to accomplish this companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast spread endless lies about what was actually happening, going so far as to use fake and even dead people to try and pretend the idea was broadly popular?

Good times.

Anyway, now that the FCC finally has a fifth Commissioner and Democrats finally have a voting majority after almost seven years of lobbyist-fueled bullshit, reports are emerging that indicate the agency is preparing to finally restore net neutrality rules. The FCC clearly leaked word to Bloomberg that the FCC will vote to begin the process of restoring net neutrality rules at an October 19 agency meeting:

“Remarks by Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel will center on the FCC’s role in net neutrality, two people briefed on the topic said, pointing toward a possible renewed fight over US regulations of broadband providers. Rosenworcel is expected to announce plans to restore the rules, according to two of the people, who asked not to be identified because the details aren’t yet public.”

As noted previously, what those rules will look like matters. A lot. Given this FCC’s lack of backbone, I had concerns that the agency would propose something that very much looks like real net neutrality, but doesn’t fully include the Title II reclassification required to ensure the FCC can actually enforce it. Something designed with ample industry input to pre-empt tougher, state level rules.

But in comments made before the National Press Club, FCC boss Jessica Rosenworcel hinted that the restoration of net neutrality will involve a restoration of the agency’s Title II authority under the Communications Act. A separate fact sheet circulated by the FCC also states that restoring the agency’s Title II authority will be key:

“The proposed rules would return fixed and mobile broadband service to its status as an essential “telecommunications” service.”

Rosenworcel noted that restoring the agency’s authority under Title II won’t just aid in the enforcement of net neutrality, but will also help the agency’s quest to impose stricter cybersecurity requirements on network operators. Rosenworcel also stated the FCC’s actual order will be made publicly available on Thursday.

Why does any of this matter? The Trump-era net neutrality repeal not only killed net neutrality rules, it actively gutted the FCC’s consumer protection authority over broadband giants. The Trump repeal even tried to ban states from being able to protect broadband consumers. The courts have frowned upon that last point, noting the FCC can’t abdicate its consumer protection authority then tell states what to do.

I routinely see misinformed folks try to claim that net neutrality must not have mattered because the internet didn’t fall apart post repeal, but that’s ignorant gibberish. A growing roster of state net neutrality rules have helped keep ISPs from implementing truly stupid ideas. They don’t want to implement some anti-competitive idea that runs afoul of regulators across the entire west coast.

The actual rules aside, either you want predatory giants like AT&T and Comcast to see some type of real oversight, or you don’t. The attack on net neutrality was really part of a decades-long assault on the FCC and all meaningful telecom consumer protection authority. Not some of it, all of it.

That kind of mindless fealty to monopoly power doesn’t benefit innovation, competition, or consumers, and folks that claim otherwise are lying to you.

There’s a reason U.S. broadband is slow, patchy, and expensive: unchecked monopoly power and regulatory capture (and the corruption that enables it). The one-two punch of limited competition and little to no meaningful government oversight have proven utterly corrosive to quality, affordable broadband. Contrary to claims by the telecom industry, it’s not something that’s debatable.

The telecom lobby is already seeding the press with bullshit about net neutrality before consumer groups can even fire up their messaging machines. Mainstream news outlets are already giving sterile historical primers on net neutrality that weirdly exclude most of the telecom industry’s bad behavior, leading credence to long-debunked industry claims (like the false claim net neutrality hurt industry investment)

It’s all going to get very stupid. Again.

As we once again descend down this rabbit hole I think it’s important to remember that the real problem is unchecked telecom monopoly power. If you’re opposed to attacking monopoly power directly or less directly (net neutrality), what’s your solution? If it involves handcuffing government regulators in the belief that AT&T and Comcast will suddenly become magically innovative, or waiting for “free market competition” to magically fall from the sky without some kind of real reform, you’re part of the problem.

To be clear: neither party has a great track record of standing up to concentrated telecom monopoly power. These are companies now bone grafted to our intelligence gathering and first responder networks, and when genuine reformers attempt to stand up to them it’s usually politically painful. The current Rosenworcel FCC generally avoids making telecom giants mad; so hopefully there are no strange loopholes or caveats included in the final order to appease Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and friends.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, fcc, high speed internet, jessica rosenworcel, net neutrality, telecom, title ii

Net Neutrality’s Dead: Time To Focus On The Real Issue: Telecom Monopolization

Broadband

from the this-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept

Earlier this month a homophobic smear campaign seeded in the press by the likes of AT&T, Comcast, and News Corporation successfully killed the FCC nomination of popular reformer Gigi Sohn. The goal: to keep the FCC in perpetual partisan gridlock, preventing the agency from making any decisions deemed even remotely controversial by the media and telecom giants the agency is supposed to regulate.

With Sohn’s nomination killed, it could take the better part of the rest of the year to appoint and confirm a third Democratic FCC Commissioner, assuming one gets appointed at all. If and when that candidate does get seated, they’ll have very little time before the next presidential election to implement any major policies. As such, the FCC will very likely focus on politically safer fare.

That means meaningful reforms that are popular among consumers, like the restoration of net neutrality, or the restoration of media consolidation limits, are all but doomed (for now):

Now, the White House has been forced to start over, prolonging a vacancy that continues to obstruct the administration’s broadband agenda. The White House hasn’t announced a new nominee or when they’re hoping to confirm someone, but it’s unlikely that Biden would pick someone as critical of cable companies as Sohn. Republicans and “dark money” groups have already proved that they’re willing to spend millions to block progressive nominees. With so little time left in Biden’s first term, stakeholders may even try to thwart a more moderate nominee, especially if there’s an opportunity to continue the stalemate past the 2024 election.

Even if Sohn was appointed, I wasn’t entirely sure that FCC boss Jessica Rosenworcel actually had the backbone to revisit the net neutrality fight. If you’re a career politician with an eye on a lucrative post-FCC career, there’s not a lot of political upside in upsetting top telecom donors. Former FCC boss Tom Wheeler embraced net neutrality only in part because he was retiring and had nobody left to impress.

With the FCC effectively lobotomized, states and municipalities have effectively given up on coherent federal leadership on issues like telecom policy. Instead they’re redirecting the conversation back to where it probably should have been all along: the perils of unchecked telecom monopolization, and the need to build cohesive, locally-owned and operated alternatives to monopoly power.

As we’ve long noted, net neutrality rules were just imperfect, stopgap protections to try and protect consumers (and competitors) from monopoly power. If you bring real competition to bear on entrenched monopolies like AT&T and Comcast, net neutrality rules become less important as unethical ISPs would be punished by customer defections to competitors.

(That’s not to say federal consumer protection isn’t important, but it’s hard to watch the agency over the last twenty years and not come away with the sense that the activist battle against entrenched telecom giants has been a profound failure, and is in dramatic need of new, creative tactics.)

The problem: with state and federal policymakers under the sway of entrenched monopolies, it’s very difficult to implement cohesive federal policies that bring competition to bear against monopolies.

Enter a huge boom in community-owned and operated broadband networks, whether they’re cooperatives, municipalities, city-owned utilities, or public/private partnerships. These projects are an organic, grass roots response to federal regulatory capture and monopolization, which is why monopolies have tried so hard to outlaw them with shitty, protectionist state laws.

Again, net neutrality was important. Title II classification of ISPs (which provides the FCC the authority to hold Comcast accountable) remains important. Having competent federal regulators step in to address widespread market harms in the wake of market failure is important.

But in the absence of that, and given the public’s weariness in retreading the complicated, wonky world of net neutrality policy, it’s probably time to shift the policy focus back to the roots of the real problem: mindless consolidation and unchecked telecom monopoly power.

83 million Americans live under a broadband monopoly. It’s clear the federal government is too corrupt and captured to do much about it. As a rightward-lurching court system seeks to lobotomize the federal regulatory state entirely, the onus will increasingly be thrown at the feet of state and local leaders to build meaningful alternatives to monopoly power on a block by block basis.

Filed Under: broadband, community broadband, fcc, high speed internet, municipal broadband, net neutrality, telecom

Ready Or Not, Here Comes Net Neutrality War 2.0

Broadband

from the trolls-under-the-bridge dept

I’ve got some bad news for those of you who were frustrated or bored by decades of net neutrality bickering: it’s about to kick off all over again. And this time it’s even more global.

In the UK, US, EU, and South Korea, telecom lobbyists have been making successful inroads on plans that would force “Big Tech” to pay “Big Telecom” companies billions of dollars for no coherent reason. They’ve convinced gullible lawmakers that tech companies get a “free ride” on the Internet, and should therefore be forced to pay telecom giants even more money to shore up essential infrastructure.

Of course there are numerous problems here. One, the common claim that a tech company like Netflix or Google gets a “free ride” on the Internet is a lie pushed by telecom companies that we’ve debunked countless times. It’s a several decade old attempt by telecom giants with a rich history of subsidy fraud and skimping on fiber upgrades to “double dip” — effectively getting paid extra for no reason.

Somehow telecom lobbyists and the the politicians paid to love them have tried to dress this up as a serious adult policy proposal. Here in the states, Trump appointed FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, who has never seen an AT&T policy proposal he hasn’t fawned over, has been beating this drum for several years. The effort has seen greater traction in the EU and South Korea, where one ISP went so far as to sue Netflix, claiming Squid Game’s popularity strained their networks unfairly.

Just like in the older net neutrality wars, when the press covers this stuff they utterly fail to illustrate to readers how much of it is bullshit. This CNBC article, for example, frames the issue this way:

Telecom groups are pushing European regulators to consider implementing a framework where the companies that send traffic along their networks are charged a fee to help fund mammoth upgrades to their infrastructure, something known as the “sender pays” principle.

Their logic is that certain platforms, like Amazon Prime and Netflix, chew through gargantuan amounts of data and should therefore foot part of the bill for adding new capacity to cope with the increased strain.

“The simple argument is that telcos want to be duly compensated for providing this access and growth in traffic,” media and telecoms analyst Paolo Pescatore, from PP Foresight, told CNBC.

But none of this framing is remotely true. It’s Netflix customers who are demanding this content over broadband subscriptions they already pay an arm and a leg for due to limited broadband competition. It’s being delivered by content companies that have spent countless billions on their own transit routes, undersea cables, bandwidth, cloud infrastructure, and content delivery networks.

If an ISP network can’t handle this demand, the reason is uniformly because the ISP in question didn’t scale its network upgrades to meet demand. This isn’t your fault. This isn’t “Big Tech’s” fault. It’s the fault of telecom monopolies that routinely hoover up billions in subsidies and tax breaks in exchange for networks they always, routinely, half-deliver.

CNBC goes on, claiming this is all a big problem with “no clear solution,” with the closest it gets to skepticism being some questions about the logistics about it all:

But the solution is clear and simple: don’t listen to telecom monopolies when they make up problems, then demand billions in new taxes and subsidies for no reason. Telecom experts in the EU and US have been trying to tell policymakers this with very mixed results.

This whole mess is basically just Ma Bell looking for a hand out and dressing it up as serious adult policymaking, with the help of a gullible press. Meanwhile companies like Netflix, whose dedication to net neutrality grew strained as they grew big and powerful, now find themselves trying to, once again, fend off calls that they should subsidize big telecom, suggesting that such maybe their original principles shouldn’t have been so easily discarded.

One “tell” if you’re struggling to detect who’s engaging this policy conversation in good faith: the captured policymakers pushing the idea never discuss the real reason broadband is so spotty and expensive: monopoly power, mindless consolidation, corruption, and decades of subsidy fraud by the biggest players (see our recent report on just this subject).

Captured politicians frame this tax on big tech as some kind of miracle cure for the “digital divide.” A super easy way to nab some easy political brownie points. In reality, it’s just another way to distract you from the real problem: telecom monopolization and the corruption that protects it.

Filed Under: bandwidth, broadband, cable, eu, fiber, high speed internet, net neutrality, sender pays, telecom, telecom subsidies, uk, us

UK Eyes Scaling Back Net Neutrality Rules For No Coherent Reason

Broadband

from the policy-purgatory dept

Tell me if any of this sounds familiar: UK telecom regulator Ofcom is proposing that the country scale back popular net neutrality rules under the claim that the rules are harming innovation.

The UK had adopted net neutrality as part of its membership in the EU. With that membership discarded, Ofcom is now claiming the rules should be rolled back. But the reasons they provide, that the basic rules were somehow preventing ISPs from innovating and providing price cuts, are bullshit.

You wouldn’t know that from reading this Bloomberg report on the proposal, which stenographs the following industry claim completely without context or skepticism:

Internet service providers should be allowed to offer a broader range of premium packages on a wider variety of parameters such as latency, and could include discounted tariffs during off-peak hours, according to proposals from the watchdog published Friday.

“The net neutrality rules constrain the activities of broadband providers, and could be restricting their ability to develop new services and manage their networks,” Ofcom said in the report. 

As we’ve covered extensively, net neutrality rules are stopgap measures designed to stop telecom companies from abusing their uncompetitive market power to harm competitors or rip off captive subscribers. You wouldn’t need such rules if these markets had healthy broadband competition, but we don’t have competition thanks to rampant regulatory and political corruption.

There’s absolutely nothing about the EU and UK net neutrality rules preventing ISPs from innovating or offering price cuts. They don’t innovate or offer price cuts because of a lack of competition. It’s all a big dumb corrupt purgatorial policy loop, and a lovely example of regulatory capture, all framed by outlets like Bloomberg as serious adult policymaking, despite being brutally unpopular with the public.

As we’ve been covering, UK and EU ISPs alike have also desperately glommed on to the telecom industry talking point (started here in the US) that Big Tech should give Big Telecom billions in additional dollars for no coherent reason. That’s also parroted again here by Bloomberg un-skeptically and with absolutely no context:

UK internet service provider TalkTalk Telecom Group Ltd welcomed the guidance.

“We think the rules can and should support innovation and network efficiency,” a spokeswoman said. “In addition, content providers should in some cases be able to support network capacity growth while also ensuring consumers continue to have unrestricted access to content.”

This claim that “Big Tech” gets a free ride on the internet and should throw billions of dollars at the telecom industry is very hot right now. Telecom lobbyists have exploited legitimate animosity against tech giants to convince captured lawmakers that a Big Tech tax is a great idea. Despite the fact that corruption means telecom subsidies very often wind up being thrown in the toilet without subsidy reform.

Again, western governments aren’t willing to stand up to telecom monopolies due to corruption. The best we got were some very basic, imperfect stopgap measures to try and rein in telecom monopoly power. But corruption and regulatory capture ensured those rules were short lived in the US. And now, apparently, a scaling back is planned for the UK that’s not based on any coherent logic.

Of course the public and press are generally bored by net neutrality, so nobody much cares. I’d doubt that more than a small handful of readers ever made it to this point in this story, their eyes having glazed over in the first paragraph. I might as well write gibberish like stinky pony lollipop farts in this sentence, since telecom policy has become too boring for anybody to care much about in the Big Tech era.

So we continue to get what we get in the US, Canada, and UK. Monopoly telecom domination, poor service, high prices, spotty availability, slow speeds, with atrocious customer service, all overseen by captured regulators that genuinely could not give any less of a shit about consumer welfare or the litany of obvious harms caused by concentrated telecom monopoly power.

Filed Under: fcc, high speed internet, monopoly power, net neutrality, ofcom, telecom, uk

Telecom Lobbyists At WISPA, NCTA Throw Hissy Fit Over Doomed Net Neutrality Bill

Broadband

from the the-house-always-wins dept

This week we noted how the Democratic party had introduced a new two-page bill that would simply give the FCC even clearer authority to restore net neutrality. Of course the bill won’t pass this corrupt Congress, was barely noticed in the summer heat, and couldn’t be implemented anyway because the telecom industry and GOP have successfully blocked the appointment of Gigi Sohn, gridlocking the agency.

Still, the faintest idea we might revisit net neutrality still sent a shiver up the spine of telecom companies, who got right to work pretending that base levels of competent oversight of their industry would be utterly apocalyptic for broadband investment:

“Net Neutrality may be a mixed bag, but common carrier regulation would inhibit competition, private investment and innovation, and further confound the complex task of eradicating of the digital divide,” said Eric Slee, VP of government affairs for WISPA, the wireless internet service providers association.

Slee says “the specter of open access, service and rate regulation, among other Title II mandates, would result in fewer solutions and deployment growth in the very areas most in need of it.”

I’ve probably spilled more ink on this subject than anybody alive, and have pointed out this claim is provable bullshit countless times. It never seems to matter. The telecom lobby has spent decades slowly lobotomizing U.S. telecom regulators. Any time there’s the faintest conversation about reversing direction (having marginally competent regulatory oversight), they all run screaming to the fainting couches.

Top cable industry lobbyist Michael Powell, formerly head of the FCC, got much of the current Title II debate rolling back in 2002 when he reclassified cable broadband as an “information service.” This opened the door to a massive era of broadband deregulation Powell and friends insisted would usher forth an immense new wave of broadband competition.

If you’ve checked your broadband bill or, oh, spent thirty seconds in reality, you may have noticed that this utopian broadband landscape never materialized. And with Congress making the faintest hint that it wants to revisit the discussion, Powell’s back again predicting regulatory doomsday:

“The case is particularly thin to justify the famed ‘nuclear option’ to reclassify carriers under Title II utility regulation which empowers the FCC with the authority to go big on new regulation.”

It’s all so comical, boring, and stupid at this point I struggle to put any of it into words. The FCC doesn’t “go big” on anything, much less telecom regulation. The idea that this FCC would ever radically improve consumer protection, seriously challenge monopoly power, or impose broadband rate regulation is an absolute joke. Even if it wanted to it can’t because telecom lobbyists are gridlocking appointments with the full throated support of the GOP.

The U.S. FCC is a feckless pile of damp cardboard on consumer protection. You couldn’t even find me an instance where a current Democratic FCC official has clearly acknowledged telecom monopolies exist (83 million Americans live under one) and are bad, much less proposed any serious solutions to the problem. And even if they did, the telecom industry, fused at the hip with the GOP, would kill those proposals immediately.

The telecom lobby has engaged in decades of grotesque behavior to keep this broken ass status quo intact, from using fake and dead people to generate bogus support for bad policy, to ghost running sleazy smear campaigns on the FCC appointment of popular, qualified reformers, ensuring the agency lacks the voting majority to implement even basic policies with broad public support.

Any time anybody makes the slightest suggestion that slightly stronger FCC oversight might be a nice contrast to three straight decades of kissing monopoly ass, the telecom sector has an absolute hissy fit. And, nine times out of ten, they get absolutely everything they ask for. Which is why U.S. consumers pay some of the highest prices in the world for slow, spotty service and atrocious customer service.

There’s no mystery to any of this. It’s not a debate. The U.S. is comically corrupt, and policy leaders refuse to meaningfully address a broken market dominated by regional telecom monopolies (you can read all about it in my new report for Techdirt and the Copia Institute). The best we get are these sad little proxy stage plays over things like net neutrality, and even then… the house always wins.

Filed Under: broadband, consumer protection, fcc, high speed internet, lobbying, net neutrality, telecom
Companies: ncta, wispa

Democrats “Strategically” Push Net Neutrality Bill That Won’t Pass And Won’t Be Noticed In The Summer Heat

Broadband

from the performative,-not-practical dept

Democrats have a “strategy” they really love to employ that involves pushing bills they know will never pass. The idea is that while the bill may not pass, it will bring extra attention to whatever issue they’re pushing, and force the GOP to put their opposition to (policy X) on the record, shaming them publicly.

Of course, neither usually happens. The press can barely be bothered to cover new laws, especially if they deal with complicated policy. And the modern Trump GOP doesn’t really feel shame for corrupt, dumb, or otherwise terrible policy choices. Being shameless and ignorant has kind of become the entire brand.

But the Democrats persist, often using decades old strategies (hey, want to sign this petition?) to push doomed legislation in a futile bid to shame the shameless. This strategy was again on stark display with Senators Markey and Wyden’s release of a new net neutrality bill this week.

The Net Neutrality and Broadband Justice Act is a simple, two-page bill that would once again reclassify broadband as an essential service under Title II of the Communications Act, restoring the FCC consumer protection authority removed during the controversial 2017 Trump FCC repeal. The bill doesn’t itself restore net neutrality; it punts that obligation to the FCC which is under no obligation to follow through.

The bill itself is a great idea. It codifies FCC Title II authority into clear law, putting to rest the regulatory tug of war that occurs on telecom policy every time the parties change power. We’ve noted repeatedly how the repeal was a corruption-fueled mess, utilizing all manner of complete bullshit and fraud, to do something Comcast wanted but a vast, bipartisan majority of the public opposed.

The bill not only killed popular net neutrality rules, it gutted much of the FCC’s consumer protection authority, punting most remaining authority to an over-extended, less telecom savvy FTC that lacks the authority to police the sector (the whole reason Comcast and AT&T wanted it). It even tried to ban states from protecting broadband consumers, though the courts haven’t looked kindly on that part.

The repeal was a giant gift to telecom monopolies, who prefer their regulators slack jawed and lobotomized as they price gouge American consumers stuck in highly uncompetitive markets. And despite a contingent of ignorant pundits who claim the repeal didn’t matter because the Internet didn’t immediately explode, this kind of blatant corruption matters.

Look At Us, We’re Doin’ Stuff

The problem, there’s no indication any political dynamics have changed since Senator Kyrsten Sinema and numerous key senators scuttled the last attempt to restore the rules in 2019 using the Congressional Review Act. It’s unlikely to pass. It may not even come to a vote. Markey’s office wouldn’t comment when asked about their strategy to actually obtain the needed votes.

It’s also the middle of summer, so the bill announcement dropped with a bit of a thud, undermining the whole “raising awareness” objective. Net neutrality, while important, has bored the public and press to tears. They signed their petitions, they called their lawmakers, they even protested for 15 years, and the net result was jack shit. It’s been five years since the repeal, and nothing meaningful has really changed in terms of actually fixing the problem.

The other problem: even if the bill passes, the FCC can’t really implement and enforce the new law. It currently sits gridlocked at 2-2 commissioners thanks to the GOP’s and telecom industry’s protracted attack on belated Biden nominee Gigi Sohn, whose confirmation vote has been all but scuttled. This is all thanks to a coordinated propaganda campaign accusing her of hating cops, rural America, and puppies.

I’m told by some folks in activist circles that the Biden administration’s belated, nine-month late nomination of Sohn has screwed up a lot of policy timing. The nomination was purportedly belated because they (absurdly) thought the appointment of a popular, competent reformer would create controversy as they tried to float the infrastructure bill.

But the delay then gave the telecom sector and GOP time to galvanize opposition to Sohn, which includes Joe Manchin. And it punted numerous other proposals from the net neutrality bill to the equally performative ban on broadband caps into the summer, where folks would be less likely to notice them.

I’ve heard repeatedly that Sohn has received virtually no strategic or messaging support from the Biden administration as she faces down a parade of criticism concocted by AT&T and Rupert Murdoch, who don’t want her implementing media and telecom reform of any kind. She’s also received virtually no support from her potential future colleagues at the FCC.

She’s received some support from consumer groups and lawmakers in the form of an occasional op-ed nobody actually will read, petition campaign nobody signed, or throwaway comment during an interview, but nothing you’d call particularly revolutionary or effective in the modern, controversy-obsessed media environment. Most left wing tech and telecom activism remains stuck somewhere in 2004.

Getting Sohn appointed to the FCC before the summer recess should have taken messaging priority over absolutely everything. Including press events for doomed bills unveiled when everybody was at the beach. Like the GOP, there should have been an absolutely relentless drumbeat of creative criticism about the corruption currently blocking Sohn’s nomination across the entirety of social media.

There were certainly some unavoidable obstacles to Sohn’s nomination vote (one key lawmaker had a stroke, for example), but should Sohn’s nomination be scuttled (and it’s looking likely), the failure to message effectively and whip up the votes is an historic strategic failure that won’t soon be forgotten.

Not A Complete Waste Of Calories

So is the bill totally pointless? No. Activists tell me that there’s been a lot of turnover at many Senate offices, so pushing the bill can be a learning experience for new staff. The fight over net neutrality is really a fight against monopolization and consolidation, and for competent, adult oversight of a very broken business sector. As such, it’s a fight that’s not going away anytime soon.

It’s also arguable that some, muted awareness is better than no awareness at all. Keeping net neutrality in the headlines (though at this writing, only a handful of outlets could even be bothered to cover the bill’s unveiling) still serves a function. Especially in the “big tech” era, where telecom policy conversations have been deemed decidedly unsexy by the policy discourse gods.

And finally, the bill advertises that some lawmakers still care about issues like telecom consumer protection ahead of the midterms, even if they’re too powerless or strategically incompetent to do anything meaningful about it. That’s not exactly impressive, but it’s also not nothing.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, fcc, net neutrality

Democrats Hope To Gotcha The GOP With Doomed New Net Neutrality Bill

Broadband

from the performative-gibberish dept

As we’ve long noted, the Trump era attack on net neutrality was one of the more grotesque examples of regulatory capture and corruption in Internet policy history.

The rules, which imposed some very modest restrictions on giant telecom monopolies to prevent them from abusing market power, were very popular among consumers of all political stripes. And the Trump FCC’s repeal involved using a lot of outright lies and even fake and dead people to reduce the oversight of extremely unpopular telecom monopolies.

Despite the Democrats controlling the FCC for more than a year and a half, they still haven’t done anything about it.

It inexplicably took the Biden administration nine months to even nominate a third Democratic Commissioner (Gigi Sohn). The telecom lobby then successfully crippled Sohn’s nomination (and therefore the agency) with the help of the GOP and key Democrats, intentionally leaving it gridlocked and incapable of passing anything of controversial note.

Hoping to break this logjam, Senators Edward Markey and Ron Wyden are poised to introduce a new net neutrality bill according to the Washington Post. The two-page bill would reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service and open companies like AT&T and Verizon up to stricter oversight by the FCC. From what I hear, the bill could drop before the August recess.

To be clear, putting FCC authority and net neutrality into law is a good idea. The repeal was hugely unpopular corruption-fueled gamesmanship, and having a functioning telecom regulator in a country dominated by monopolies is a good idea, despite what the cult of the telecom industry linked free market Libertarian think tank would like you to believe.

Unfortunately, the bill has little real chance of passing in a corrupt Congress. A Congress in which the entirety of the GOP and several key Democratic Senators (Manchin, Sinema) routinely and dutifully prioritize telecom monopoly revenues over market health or consumer welfare. So why try this now? Somebody told the Post the hope is to shame Republicans into owning their policy inconsistencies:

Some net neutrality advocates also think Republican calls to designate social media companies as common carriers could make their positions more untenable, the person said.

You’ll recall that numerous Republicans claimed that the FCC lacked the authority to tell telecom monopolies what to do on net neutrality (it did). Those very same Republicans then pivoted on a dime several years later to try and claim the FCC had the authority to regulate social media (it didn’t).

The pivot was motivated by the GOP’s desire to dismantle Section 230 and force “big tech” to carry GOP political propaganda, cornerstones of modern GOP influence in the face of a sagging electorate. This was always about protecting their ability to soak the public in propaganda, at times hidden under performances like a phony, uncharacteristic interest in “antitrust reform.”

The underlying justification for this pivot was absolute gibberish. While there was ample pretense to the contrary, there was never any legal or logical coherent consistency to any of it. It was self-serving, incoherent hypocrisy. It was basically a fake Hollywood western town, but in policy form.

The GOP opposed FCC oversight of telecom because they wanted to protect AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon revenues. They supported FCC oversight of social media because they wanted to punish “big tech” for belatedly, sloppily, reining in hate speech and GOP party propaganda online. There was layer upon layer of bullshit used to obfuscate these two, basic self-serving truths.

I don’t know what the response to this kind of corrupt bullshit is, beyond organizing block-by-block to unseat lawmakers that routinely show they don’t actually care about consumers or healthy markets. I guess proposing a bill you know won’t pass might help highlight the hypocrisy? But the press and public are so tuned out on the net neutrality debate in the “big tech” era — I’m not sure it will even register in the summer news cycle.

So it likely won’t get much attention. It doesn’t have the votes. And “Let’s propose a bill that has zero chance of passing a grotesquely corrupt Congress, because this will somehow shame the shameless GOP into owning their hypocrisy” is a weird gambit Democrats really enjoy spending calories on, despite minimal returns.

Filed Under: antitrust reform, broadband, ed markey, gop, high speed internet, monopolies, net neutrality, propaganda, ron wyden, section 230

Survey Shows Majority Of GOP Voters Support Restoring Net Neutrality

Broadband

from the it-ain't-a-democracy dept

We’ve noted more than a few times how net neutrality rules were just some stopgap rules to prevent telecom monopolies from being assholes in the absence of real competition. They were modest protections (by international standards) attempting to protect consumers and competitors from giant unchecked monopolies we’ve let run amok for the better part of a generation.

Telecom and GOP joint propaganda turned this on its head, convincing some voters that net neutrality was “government run amok,” a radical policy position, or a dire threat to broadband investment (none of these arguments were true, but were relentlessly repeated for years).

Despite those efforts, a new poll indicates that a majority of GOP voters actually understand the difference and support restoring net neutrality rules:

Nearly two-thirds of Republican voters support reinstating net neutrality regulations when presented with detailed arguments for and against the move, according to a new survey from the University of Maryland shared exclusively with The Technology 202. 

Of course (waves tiny American flag democratically) that’s in stark contrast to the GOP’s behavior, which involved working hand in hand with telecom monopolies to gut federal and state telecom oversight (using fake and dead people to pretend the plan had public support), and has extended to blocking popular reformer Gigi Sohn from being seated at the FCC so the agency remains in partisan gridlock.

The GOP talks endlessly about their newfound support for “antitrust reform” as it pertains to “big tech,” but only because they want Twitter to stop moderating political propaganda and hate speech. Said “antitrust reformers” simply adore monopolization and consolidation in countless other sectors, whether it’s energy, telecom, banking, insurance, air travel, or food production.

This is far from the first poll that makes it clear a majority of Americans support net neutrality rules and want them restored. The majority of Americans also despise their cable and phone monopolies, and support both implementing meaningful consumer protections and taking steps to drive more competition to market.

Instead of doing either of those things the entirety of the GOP (and a substantial portion of the DNC) not only don’t hold telecom monopolies accountable, they’re literally incapable of even acknowledging they exist, or that they cause numerous harms to innovation, markets, and consumers.

Filed Under: antitrust reform, broadband, competition, digital divide, gop, high speed internet, monopolies, net neutrality

Big Telecom Finally Ends Quest To Stop States From Protecting Broadband Consumers

Broadband

from the it's-the-corruption,-stupid dept

The Trump FCC spent four years being a giant rubber stamp for giant U.S. telecom monopolies. That included rubber stamping mergers before even reading the details, gutting FCC consumer protection authority, and demolishing decades-old media consolidation rules crafted with broad bipartisan consensus, and stripping away your town and city’s ability to stand up to giant carriers.

The Trump GOP and Congress killed efforts to impose basic and helpful broadband privacy rules (kind of important given the repeated location data scandals since). They scuttled net neutrality. And they convinced the Ajit Pai FCC to lobotomize its authority to police bad behavior by unpopular companies like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon. If you recall, this unpopular policy paradigm was all propped up by the illusion of public support via the use of dead and fake people.

There was only really one telecom industry gambit that didn’t work out during the Trump era, and not because they didn’t try.

The telecom lobby convinced the Trump/Ajit Pai FCC to include language in the “restoring Internet freedom” net neutrality repeal that tried to effectively ban states from being able to protect broadband consumers from fraudulent behavior. The goal was fairly obvious: weaken federal consumer protection authority, then proclaim that states couldn’t step in and fill the void. Basically: no oversight at all.

That… hasn’t gone well with the courts. A series of federal rulings in California kept making it clear that the FCC can’t abdicate its consumer protection authority, then turn around and tell states what they can or can’t do. And after a court recently ruled this direction for a third time, big ISPs have finally given up on this particular fight:

While states being allowed to protect broadband consumers is a good thing, it’s hard to spend too much time drinking bubbly. For every California, Maine, or Washington (states with AGs that are fairly competent on the subject of broadband consumer protection) there’s a laundry list of states that are quite literally little more than rubber stamps to the interests of AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Charter.

The Trump FCC gambit to effectively lobotomize federal telecom consumer protection was massively effective, leaving the FCC without the authority or staff to meaningfully police bad telecom actors during a pandemic. Little of it has been fixed, and even among Democrats any incentive to do much about it feels muted and pathetic (it took the Biden team nine months to nominate a third FCC Commissioner).

With the entirety of DC policy fixated on the problems with “big tech,” there’s little real incentive to do much of anything about it. Folks are bored of net neutrality, largely because they didn’t understand what the fight was actually about: telecom monopolization, media consolidation, and whether you want federal regulators on these fronts that are anything more than marionettes for Comcast and AT&T.

“Net neutrality must not have mattered because the internet didn’t explode after repeal” is an incorrect but common and effective right wing trope. The resulting apathy has allowed the GOP and telecom sector to work hand in hand to potentially scuttle the nomination of popular and qualified FCC nominee Gigi Sohn using manufactured smears — all to keep the FCC stuck in feckless partisan gridlock.

Again, having competent and functional media and telecom regulators matters. Affordable internet in the climate change and COVID era matters. Competent broadband privacy policies matter (especially in the facing of surging authoritarianism). Cutting the head off of the FCC and shoveling the entire onus of consumer protection off to the states won’t work well in a country where a long line of states are little more than sniveling servants of giants like AT&T.

But we seem intent on pandering to telecom monopolies all the same. Which is particularly “entertaining” given all of the lip service being paid to “bipartisan antitrust reform” over the last few years. This interest in antitrust reform very clearly does not apply to some of the most obvious examples of natural monopolies the U.S. has on offer.

Filed Under: antitrust reform, broadband, california, competition, consumers, fcc, internet access, media consolidation, monopolies, net neutrality, privacy

Big Telecom’s Quest To Ban States From Protecting Broadband Consumers Continues To Go… Poorly

Broadband

from the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too dept

We’ve noted several times how the Trump FCC spent four years being little more than a giant rubber stamp for the nation’s biggest telecom monopolies. That included rubber stamping mergers before even reading the details, gutting FCC consumer protection authority, and demolishing decades-old media consolidation rules crafted with broad bipartisan consensus.

The Trump GOP and Congress killed efforts to impose basic privacy rules. They scuttled net neutrality. And they basically convinced the FCC to lobotomize itself so it lacked the authority to police bad behavior by unpopular companies like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon. If you recall, this unpopular policy paradigm was all propped up by the illusion of public support via the use of dead and fake people.

There was only really one telecom industry gambit that didn’t work out during the Trump era, and not because they didn’t try.

The telecom lobby convinced the Trump/Ajit Pai FCC to include language in the “restoring Internet freedom” net neutrality repeal that tried to effectively ban states from being able to protect broadband consumers from fraudulent behavior. The goal was fairly obvious: weaken FCC consumer protection authority, then proclaim that states couldn’t step in and fill the void. Basically: no oversight at all.

Fortunately the courts stepped in to point out that the FCC can’t abdicate its authority over broadband consumer protection, then try to tell states what they can or can’t do. Court rulings have also repeatedly pointed out that the Trump FCC’s attempt to do this wasn’t rooted in, you know, factual reality (which was kind of a theme during a lot of Trump era FCC proceedings favorable to the telecom sector).

This week the courts stepped in once again to tell the telecom lobby that it’s plan to ban states from protecting consumers isn’t going to happen. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals this week denied the telecom industry’s petition to have the full court rehear the court’s January ruling (pdf) in the lawsuit over California’s net neutrality law:

Again, when the federal government advertised loud and clear that it no longer cared about telecom consumer protection or monopolization, several states (namely Maine, Washington, and California) stepped in to fill the void with their own privacy and/or net neutrality rules. Comcast, AT&T and friends then tried to sue to stop them (with the help of Bill Barr’s DOJ), but it simply didn’t work out.

The story tends to get lost in the media weeds because it falls under the auspices of “net neutrality,” which has bored the public and press to death. But it’s really something quite larger. It’s the court system actively working (for once), preventing a heavily monopolized sector from effectively gutting most federal and state consumer protection authority based on little more than some wishful thinking and a few winks.

Filed Under: 9th circuit, big telecom, california, consumer protection, fcc, monopolies, net neutrality, privacy, telecom