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:
Facebook ads have a problem. It's called digital redlining.
In 2021, a Facebook user filed a lawsuit because they didn't think they were getting a fair shot at viewing advertisements. Wanting to see ads might seem absurd — if you're anything like me, you want ads off your social media experience at all costs. Still, to a 55-year-old prospective tenant in the Washington, D.C. area, it was about more than a simple publicity blurb on Facebook. It, the plaintiff argued, had grave real-life consequences.
So Neuhtah Opiotennione filed a class-action lawsuit against nine companies that manage various apartment buildings in the D.C. area, alleging that they engaged in "digital housing discrimination" by excluding older people — like her — from viewing advertisements on Facebook. She alleges that because the defendants deliberately excluded people over the age of 50 from viewing their ads — something you could once do on Facebook — she was denied the opportunity to receive certain housing advertisements targeted to younger potential tenants.
"In creating a targeted Facebook advertisement, advertisers can determine who sees their advertisements based on such characteristics as age, gender, location, and preferences," the lawsuit reads. The plaintiff alleged that rental companies used Facebook's targeting function to exclude people like her because of her age, instead directing the ads to younger prospective tenants.
David Brody, counsel and senior fellow for privacy and technology at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which filed a brief in favor of the plaintiff, said in a press release that "Facebook is not giving the user what the user wants – Facebook is giving the user what it thinks a demographic stereotype wants. Redlining is discriminatory and unjust whether it takes place online or offline, and we must not allow corporations to blame technology for harmful decisions made by CEOs."
The case was ultimately dismissed because the judge felt that online targeting of advertisements causes no injury to consumers. However, Ballard Spahr LLP, a law firm that focuses on litigation, securities and regulatory enforcement, business and finance, intellectual property, public finance, and real estate matters, said that the ruling could have a significant impact on how we view discrimination online.
"It seems likely to make it more difficult for private parties to attempt to bring lawsuits related to online ad targeting on social media networks or through methods like paid search," the firm said. "But, secondarily, we wonder whether it will serve as a barrier to regulatory actions as well."
Opiotennione v. Bozzuto Mgmt. is just one of many lawsuits against Facebook alleging discrimination. We already know how nefarious these ads can be, from spying on us to collecting our data and creating a world with further devastating partisan divides. But there's something else harmful going on with ads online, particularly on one of the largest ad platforms ever, Facebook. According to Facebook's parent company, Meta, the platform has a total advertising audience of more than two billion people. Any one of them could be missing out on ads — for housing, credit opportunities, and other important issues that impact the wealth gap — due to digital redlining. Here's why that's important.
Wait, what is digital redlining?
Traditional redlining is when people and companies purposefully withhold loans and other resources from people who live in specific neighborhoods. This tends to land along racial and financial divides, and it works to deepen those divides. It can happen online, too.
Digital redlining refers to any use of technology to perpetuate discrimination. It's how The Greenlining Institute, a California-based organization that works to fix digital redlining, describes the practice of internet companies failing to provide infrastructures for service — such as broadband internet — to lower-income communities, as it's seen as less profitable to do so.
That kind of digital redlining results in lower-income people having to turn to prepaid plans and other more expensive options for internet while also having to deal with slower speeds than those in wealthier — and often whiter — communities, which have a digital infrastructure. The Greenlining Institute isn't the only organization working to fix this kind of digital redlining. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is also forming an agency task force focused on combating digital discrimination and promoting equal broadband access nationwide.
But digital redlining also refers to unfair ad-targeting practices. According to the ACLU, online ad-targeting can replicate existing disparities in society, which can exclude people who belong to historically marginalized groups from opportunities for housing, jobs, and credit.
"In today’s digital world, digital redlining has become the new frontier of discrimination, as social media platforms like Facebook and online advertisers have increasingly used personal data to target ads based on race, gender, and other protected traits," the ACLU said in a press release from January. "This type of online discrimination is harmful and disproportionately impacts people of color, women, and other marginalized groups, yet courts have held that platforms like Facebook and online advertisers can't be held accountable for withholding ads for jobs, housing, and credit from certain users. Despite agreements to make sweeping changes to its ad platform, digital redlining still persists on Facebook."
An investigation by The Markup found that AT&T, Verizon, EarthLink, and CenturyLink disproportionately offered lower-income and least-White neighborhoods slow internet service for the same price as speedy connections they offered in other parts of town
Listen to this episode from How to Fix the Internet on Spotify. One of the supposed promises of AI was that it would be able to take the bias out of human decisions, and maybe even lead to more equity in society. But the reality is that the errors of the past are embedded in the data of today, keeping prejudice and discrimination in. Pair that with surveillance capitalism, and what you get are algorithms that impact the way consumers are treated, from how much they pay for things, to what kinds of ads they are shown, to if a bank will even lend them money. But it doesn’t have to be that way, because the same techniques that prey on people can lift them up.
Episode Description:
“One of the supposed promises of AI was that it would be able to take the bias out of human decisions, and maybe even lead to more equity in society. But the reality is that the errors of the past are embedded in the data of today, keeping prejudice and discrimination in. Pair that with surveillance capitalism, and what you get are algorithms that impact the way consumers are treated, from how much they pay for things, to what kinds of ads they are shown, to if a bank will even lend them money. But it doesn’t have to be that way, because the same techniques that prey on people can lift them up.”
Companies Want Access To More & More Of Your Personal Data & From Where You Are To What's In Your {DNA}
Companies Want Access To More & More Of Your Personal Data & From Where You Are To What’s In Your {DNA}
How Far Can the Surveillance Economy Go?
By LESLIE K. JOHN
UNINFORMED CONSENT
Companies want access to more and more of your personal data — from where you are to what’s in your DNA. Can they unlock its value without triggering a privacy backlash?
Three years ago the satirical website The Onion ran an article with the headline “Woman Stalked Across 8 Websites by Obsessed Shoe Advertisement
