Big Telco’s fury over FCC plan to infuse telecoms policy with facts
I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library on Monday, November 13 at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!
Reality has a distinct anti-conservative bias, but conservatives have an answer: when the facts don't support your policies, just get different facts. Who needs evidence-based policy when you can have policy-based evidence?
Take gun violence. Conservatives tell us that "an armed society is a polite society," which means that the more guns you have, the less gun violence you'll experience. To prevent reality from unfairly staining this pristine ideological mind-palace with facts, conservatives passed the Dickey Amendment, which had the effect of banning the CDC from gathering stats on American gun-violence. No stats, no violence!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment
Policy-based evidence is at the core of so many cherished conservative beliefs, like the idea that queer people (and not youth pastors) are responsible for the sexual abuse of children, or the idea that minimum wages (and not monopolies) decrease jobs, or the idea that socialized medicine (and not private equity) leads to death panels:
Fortunately for conservatives, not every Biden agency is led by competent, honest brokers – the finance wing of the Dems got to foist some of their most ghoulish members upon the American people, including a no-fooling cheerleader for mass foreclosure:
And these same DINOs reached across the aisle to work with Republicans to keep some of the most competent, principled agency leaders from being seated, like the remarkable Gigi Sohn, targeted by a homophobic smear campaign funded by the telco industry, who feared her presence on the FCC:
The telcos are old hands at this stuff. Long before the gun control debates, Ma Bell had figured out that a monopoly over Americans' telecoms was a license to print money, and they set to corrupting agencies from the FCC to the DoJ:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/14/jam-to-day/
Reality has a vicious anti-telco bias. Think of Net Neutrality, the idea that if you pay an ISP for internet service, they should make a best effort to deliver the data you request, rather than deliberately slowing down your connection in the hopes that you'll seek out data from the company's preferred partners, who've paid a bribe for "premium delivery."
This shouldn't even be up for debate. The idea that your ISP should prioritize its preferred data over your preferred data is as absurd as the idea that a taxi-driver should slow down your rides to any pizzeria except Domino's, which has paid it for "premium service." If your cabbie circled the block twice every time you asked for a ride to Massimo's Pizza, you'd be rightly pissed – and the cab company would be fined.
Back when Ajit Pai was Trump's FCC chairman, he made killing Net Neutrality his top priority. But regulators aren't allowed to act without evidence, so Pai had to seek out as much policy-based evidence as he could. To that end, Pai allowed millions of obviously fake comments to be entered into the docket (comments from dead people, one million comments from @pornhub.com address, comments from sitting Senators who disavowed them, etc). Then Pai actively – and illegally – obstructed the NY Attorney General's investigation into the fraud:
The pursuit of policy-based evidence is greatly aided by the absence of real evidence. If you're gonna fill the docket with made-up nonsense, it helps if there's no truthful stuff in there to get in the way. To that end, the FCC has systematically avoided collecting data on American broadband delivery, collecting as little objective data as possible:
This willful ignorance was a huge boon to the telcos, who demanded billions in fed subsidies for "underserved areas" and then just blew it on anything they felt like – like the $45 billion of public money they wasted on obsolete copper wiring for rural "broadband" expansion under Trump:
Like other cherished conservative delusions, the unsupportable fantasy that private industry is better at rolling out broadband is hugely consequential. Before the pandemic, this meant that America – the birthplace of the internet – had the slowest, most expensive internet service of any G8 country. During the lockdown, broadband deserts meant that millions of poor and rural Americans were cut off from employment, education, health care and family:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/12/ajit-pai/#pai
Pai's response was to commit another $8 billion in public funds to broadband expansion, but without any idea of where the broadband deserts were – just handing more money over to monopoly telcos to spend as they see fit, with zero accountability:
All that changed after the 2020 election. Pai was removed from office (and immediately blocked me on Twitter) (oh, diddums), and his successor, Biden FCC chair Jessic Rosenworcel, started gathering evidence, soliciting your broadband complaints:
All that evidence spurred Congress to act. In 2021, Congress ordered the FCC to investigate and punish discrimination in internet service provision, "based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin":
In other words, Congress ordered the FCC to crack down on "digital redlining." That's when historic patterns of underinvestment in majority Black neighborhoods and other underserved communities create broadband deserts, where internet service is slower and more expensive than service literally across the street:
FCC Chair Rosenworcel has published the agency's plan for fulfilling this obligation. It's pretty straightforward: they're going to collect data on pricing, speed and other key service factors, and punish companies that practice discrimination:
This has provoked howls of protests from the ISP cartel, their lobbying org, and their Republican pals on the FCC. Writing for Ars Technica, Jon Brodkin rounds up a selection of these objections:
There's GOP FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, with a Steve Bannon-seque condemnation of "the administrative state [taking] effective control of all Internet services and infrastructure in the US. He's especially pissed that the FCC is going to regulate big landlords who force all their tenants to get slow, expensive from ISPs who offer kickbacks to landlords:
The response from telco lobbyists NCTA is particularly, nakedly absurd: they demand that the FCC exempt price from consideration of whether an ISP is practicing discrimination, calling prices a "non-technical aspect of broadband service":
https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/110897268295/1
I mean, sure – it's easy to prove that an ISP doesn't discriminate against customers if you don't ask how much they charge! "Sure, you live in a historically underserved neighborhood, but technically we'll give you a 100mb fiber connection, provided you give us $20m to install it."
This is a profoundly stupid demand, but that didn't stop the wireless lobbying org CTIA from chiming in with the same talking points, demanding that the FCC drop plans to collect data on "pricing, deposits, discounts, and data caps," evaluation of price is unnecessary in the competitive wireless marketplace":
https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/1107735021925/1
Individual cartel members weighed in as well, with AT&T and Verizon threatening to sue over the rules, joined by yet another lobbying group, USTelecom:
https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/1103655327582/1
The next step in this playbook is whipping up the low-information base by calling this "socialism" and mobilizing some of the worst-served, most-gouged people in America to shoot themselves in the face (again), to own the libs:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Republicans say the Dickey Amendment has never prohibited gun research in the first place.
Once upon a time, Congress allocated $2.6 million per year to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention specifically to research gun violence. In 1992, the CDC converted its violence prevention division into a center that would lead federal efforts to reduce deaths and injuries resulting from violence. In 1993, the CDC released a study finding that keeping firearms in the home increased the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.
The gun lobby immediately accused the CDC of being anti-gun. In 1995, Republicans took control of both houses of Congress for the first time since the 1950s. In 1996, at the urging of the NRA, Congress stripped the CDC of the $2.6 million spent annually on gun violence research, shifting the money to a fund for studying traumatic brain injuries. Congress also attached the “Dickey Amendment” (named for its author, Republican Jay Dickey) to a 1996 spending bill, expressly providing that “None of the funds made available in this title may be used, in whole or in part, to advocate or promote gun control.” Congress has renewed the Dickey Amendment in its spending bills every year.
In 2009, the National Institutes of Health published a study finding a link between gun possession and gun assault. The NRA was once again displeased, and accused the NIH of being anti-gun. In 2011--again at the behest of the NRA--Congress extended the Dickey Amendment to cover all Department of Health and Human Services agencies, including the NIH.
As a result of the Dickey Amendment, gun violence is now the least-funded and least-researched cause of death in the United States. President Obama tried to reverse this trend, but was unsuccessful:
“In fiscal 2014 through 2017, former President Obama requested $10 million each year for CDC to use to study gun violence and prevention. The GOP-controlled House denied the request each time.”
In 2018, a horrific mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida left 17 dead. In its wake, Republican leaders agreed for the first time to include language in Congress’s funding package that the Dickey Amendment does not bar the CDC from conducting gun violence research:
“While appropriations language prohibits the CDC and other agencies from using appropriated funding to advocate or promote gun control, the Secretary of Health and Human Services has stated the CDC has the authority to conduct research on the causes of gun violence.”
Republicans also declared that the Dickey Amendment “never prohibited gun research in the first place.”
A spending bill passed earlier this year reaffirmed the CDC's authority to study gun violence, but that's unlikely to happen without additional funding.
It’s still allowed but unfunded now. Hope the CDC does it anyways.
Just in case you wonder why the US has so many gun crimes, you can thank the NRA for trying to suppress any and all research into gun crime. You may note that the amendment does not ban CDC research into deaths from gun crime directly, but it was accompanied by a cut to the CDC budget of exactly as much money as they spent researching gun deaths in the previous year. It was not a subtle message...
When any group spends so much money on lobbying government to suppress research and discussion, you had better believe there is something there worth researching and discussing.
The Tiahrt Amendment doesn’t help either, as it makes it impossible to use certain types of data in research. Oddly, the NRA is quite fond of this one too...
I am calling for the repeal of the Dickey Amendment, which restricts the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from researching gun violence and its effects on public health.
After every mass shooting, we are cautioned to wait for the facts before we act. Because of the Dickey Amendment, we don't have the facts. Repealing the Dickey Amendment should be a no-brainer.
This is about using scientific information as our guiding light to combat the gun violence epidemic. Lifting this ban will finally allow scientists to research solutions and give lawmakers the tools to make fact-based decisions on how to prevent the next tragedy.
The new Spending Bill, passed March 21, 2018, is clarifying the Dickey Amendment and added funding for the CDC to research gun violence more freely. It also includes the “Fix NICS Act, bipartisan legislation aimed at improving the National Instant Criminal Background Check System that is used to screen U.S. gun buyers.” This is a step in the right direction for preventing gun violence, hang in there guys.
I'm going to start by saying that wherever you stand in the matter of gun control, it is important that we have the tools and information needed to make the best decision for the safety of the people.
That being said, I personally think we need to stop playing sides in this and come together to stop these unnecessary deaths. I’m in awe that we are fighting over something that we should all be rallying together to stop.
The above gifs are from a segment on Last Week Tonight from 10/04/17 and it’s still relevant today. The following information is about studying gun violence, and having the information to keep everyone as safe as possible. I know this is all over the place right now and I know a lot of it is being written off as someone trying to take the guns away. But there is a serious problem and we should be aware of it. There is very little research about gun violence that can be performed and disclosed because of some Bills that are in place. That’s not to say that there has been no research at all, but the lack of funding has deterred much of the investigation and if there were more studies about gun violence, there might be more measures put into place to prevent the crimes.
There is more below that goes into the bills that are in place and how they effect the education on gun safety. There is also some insight from Jay Dickey (the man who introduced the Dickey Amendment). The Dickey Amendment It’s not a list of reasons as to why we should or shouldn’t have access to firearms. It’s about the lack of funding to the CDC on research to end gun violence. Below is the research I've done on the lack of information and what can be done about it.
PSA - The Dickey Amendment has been called for repeal this year (02/20/18 ) by Senator Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.). If this is something you feel strongly about and want to be able to change, please contact your representatives. This may seem like a baby step, but it needs to start somewhere.
I would like to apologize for a long post, but if you can muscle through it then it’s much appreciated.
The Dickey Amendment (1996) was put into place to prevent the advocacy of gun control, but it's turned into a way to keep the CDC from collecting information and conducting research about gun violence and even Mr. Dickey came to regret this. The man that introduced this bill, Jay Dickey (passed away 04/20/17), wrote in an essay that ran in The Washington Post a week after 2012 Aurora theater shooting. One of his quotes from this essay:
“ We were on opposite sides of the heated battle 16 years ago, but we are in strong agreement now that scientific research should be conducted into preventing firearm injuries and that ways to prevent firearm deaths can be found without encroaching on the rights of legitimate gun owners. The same evidence-based approach that is saving millions of lives from motor-vehicle crashes, as well as from smoking, cancer and HIV/AIDS, can help reduce the toll of deaths and injuries from gun violence. ”
He was also quoted in an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep,
JAY DICKEY: Don't let any of those dollars go to gun control advocacy.
INSKEEP: So that's what the intent was. Did you intend to cut off all research on the effects of guns or gun ownership in society?
DICKEY: We didn't think about that. It turned out that that's what happened, but it wasn't aimed at that. And it wasn't necessary that all research stop. It just couldn't be the collection of data so that they can advocate gun control. That's all we were talking about. But for some reason, it just stopped altogether.
And later in that same interview,
INSKEEP: It has created a strange situation, hasn't it? If you want to learn details about mass shootings, you can't really find good information.
DICKEY: Well, I think you're right. And the thing that really brought this to my mind was watching as the little barricades were set up between the interstate to stop head-on collisions. The highway industry spent money in their scientific research to figure out what could be done, assuming that they were going to allow cars to continue to be on our highways. Enormous reduction of head-on collisions has been caused just by that little 2-and-a-half, 3-foot fence. We could do the same in the gun industry.
INSKEEP: You're saying there might be some way to not interfere with anybody's right to own a gun but regulate it in such a way that fewer people are killed by guns?
DICKEY: That's correct. I can't tell you what that might be, but I know this. All this time that we have had, we would've found a solution, in my opinion. And I think it's a shame that we haven't.
The Dickey Amendment has been put up for repeal multiple times within the last few years, with no success. Now on 02/20/18 it has been called for repeal again by, U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.). As I said earlier, please contact your representatives if this is something that you feel strongly about.
While some are opposed to the idea of funding this research:
“It’s just not helpful to turn a funding bill into a debate over gun control — particularly when it’ll be part of a bill that funds the entire government,” said House Labor-HHS-Education Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole.
There are others, both democrat and republican alike, that think something needs to change:
House Labor-HHS-Education subcommittee, Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro. “I’m going to fight like hell to get it out of the Labor-H bill,” she said. “We’re talking about research the CDC has been able to do on automobile safety and other areas. Why shouldn’t we do research here?”
“I’m for letting a thousand flowers bloom. I think anybody who wants to study it — if you’ve got something to say on it — we should take that into account,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn said. “I’m not familiar enough with it to be able to give you a definitive answer, but I don’t see why anybody should be worried about studying problems and potentially coming up with ideas for a solution.”
On another note, H.R.4573 - Gun Violence Research Act of 2017 was introduced to the House of Representative on 12/06/17 as a way to grant the CDC the ability to perform and disclose research about gun violence (other than suicides) that could aid in preventing such violence. At this point it has been introduced to the House and referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and the Subcommittee on Health, but nothing has been voted on yet.
The Bill goes on to list the number of gun related deaths in the US in 2017 alone as well as defining what constitutes a mass shooting and how many there have been since the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012.
I hope that all of this has shed some light on what the government could be doing to prevent these violent crimes from happening. Thank you for taking the time to read and if anything looks incorrect, or you find updates that I have not, please feel free to comment. I really don’t want this to turn into a post to perpetuate hate, this is to spread information that not many people are aware of. But, if this post makes you angry, that’s good, it should. If it makes you want to make change, please contact your representatives.
The Dickey Amendment has been put up for repeal multiple times within the last few years, with no success. Now on 02/20/18 it has been called for repeal again by, U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.). As I said earlier, please contact your representatives if this is something that you feel strongly about.
Reference (In order of appearance. All of the urls are links):
"Dickey Amendment (1996)." Wikipedia. March 03, 2018. Accessed March 06, 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment_(1996).
Dickey, Jay, and Mark Rosenberg. “We won't know the cause of gun violence until we look for it.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 27 July 2012, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-wont-know-the-cause-of-gun-violence-until-we-look-for-it/2012/07/27/gJQAPfenEX_story.html?utm_term=.637f438f0763.
Inskeep, Steve , and Jay Dickey. “Ex-Rep. Dickey Regrets Restrictive Law On Gun Violence Research.” NPR, NPR, 9 Oct. 2015, www.npr.org/2015/10/09/447098666/ex-rep-dickey-regrets-restrictive-law-on-gun-violence-research.
Shutt, Jennifer. "GOP Unlikely to Revisit Spending Ban on Gun Violence Research." Roll Call. February 16, 2018. Accessed March 20, 2018. https://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/gop-unlikely-to-revisit-spending-ban-on-gun-violence-research.
Kelly, Robin. “Text - H.R.4573 - 115th Congress (2017-2018): Gun Violence Research Act of 2017.” Congress.gov, 8 Dec. 2017, www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/4573/text.
Don’t assume the o.p. created the meme, I did not. I did create this update after reading this particular meme was inaccurate and wanted clarification for my followers. The number actually goes higher with suicides and people who die at a later date after the incident is not being tracked, the NRA tries to dismiss things like that to keep the number artificially lower. Ask yourself why a society would allow close to 40,000 preventable deaths per year.
