Contrary To Media Claims, There's No Evidence Russia Was Behind Fake Net Neutrality Comments

from the a-game-of-telephone dept

Earlier this week we noted how the Ajit Pai FCC again shot down journalist FOIA attempts to find out who was behind the millions of bogus comments that plagued the agency's net neutrality repeal. The move prompted one of the agency's commissioners, Jessica Rosenworcel, to accuse her own agency of a coverup--since Pai refuses to work with either journalists or law enforcement investigations trying to uncover the truth of who was behind the comment fraud.

In an uncharacteristically snarky statement (pdf) issued the same day, Pai attempted to dismiss the criticisms as purely partisan attacks. But he also acknowledged something we already knew...that 500,000 or so of the email addresses used in the FCC's comment form came from users purportedly on Russian ISPs. From his statement:

"...one finds the now-standard overheated rhetoric about “net neutrality” (omitting, as usual, the fact that the half-million comments submitted from Russian e-mail addresses and the nearly eight million comments filed by e-mail addresses from e-mail domains associated with FakeMailGenerator.com supported her position on the issue!)."

So this is nothing new. Media reports had noted previously how 444,938 of the millions of bogus comments happened to have Russian email addresses. The New York Times' FOIA-focused lawsuit against the FCC also specifically highlights these addresses (many of which actually supported retaining net neutrality), likely in the hopes this would lend a little extra gravitas to court consideration.

Yet in the modern news media cycle, which can often resemble a game of telephone, numerous media outlets somehow rushed to the conclusion that Pai had "confirmed" that Russia must have been behind the efforts to stuff the ballot box at the FCC. Just a smattering of examples from this week:

That's fairly remarkable, given that's not what Pai said, nor is there any proof that "Russia" itself interfered with the net neutrality public comment period.

While many of these stories were more nuanced than the headlines (which writers often don't get to pick), the reality is the headlines are all a pretty large majority of people read. The Daily Dot report in particular was a huge hit on Reddit, upvoted more than 66,000 times and circulated far and wide. Not too surprisingly, the media's collective headline errors quickly drove many on Twitter to accuse Pai of being a Russian agent himself in dire need of prosecution:

Even Tim Wu, the Columbia law professor who coined the term net neutrality, circulated one of the headlines claiming Russia itself had been "linked" to the comment fraud:

Here's the problem: while these 500,000 email addresses used in the FCC's form appear to be Russian, that may not mean all that much.

Whoever stuffed the FCC comment section with farmed support (and in some cases opposition) for the repeal used all kinds of tricks to generate the bogus identities, including a bot that pulled names alphabetically from a hacked database of some kind. Many of the names used were dead people. Anybody could have plugged Russian email addresses into some of these form-generated responses, without actually representing the Russian government or even Russian people, thanks largely to an FCC website that didn't even remotely try to ferret out spam or bullshit.

Putin's adoration of hacking and disinformation is a legitimate problem, even if many may disagree on the breadth of the impact the Russian leader's digital dick waving has had on the real world and elections. And while it's certainly possible that Russia's attempts to pour gasoline on our already napalm-esque levels of dysfunction extended to the net neutrality fight, there's simply no evidence actually supporting that claim right now. Nor did Pai state that there was.

In similar cases, the evidence that inevitably appears usually points to a more obvious culprit: industry. These kinds of fake comments have been plaguing multiple US government agencies and proceedings in the states over the last few years, from proceedings at the Labor Department trying to rein in financial fraud, to efforts at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau aimed at thwarting payday loan fraud.

More often than not it's the companies that benefit from the shenanigans that are found to be behind gamesmanship like this, since more than a few DC policy shops now offer this kind of greasy bullshit as an added value service for clients hoping to shape or influence public perception and government policy. The goal is usually to not just to create bogus support for bad policy, but to help undermine trust in the public comment process--often the only chance many Americans have to voice their thoughts on these decisions. Using Russian email addresses in bulk certainly would go a long way toward achieving that goal.

In the case of net neutrality, whoever was behind the fake comments was obviously keen on trying to downplay and discredit the millions of bipartisan Americans pissed off by the FCC's blatant handout to giant ISPs like AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Charter (Spectrum). Numerous investigations (at the GAO and NY AG, for example) and next February's net neutrality court battle are likely to, sooner or later, shed light on who carried out this operation, who funded it, and why Pai's FCC is trying so hard to keep most of these investigations from getting to the truth.

Filed Under: ajit pai, bad reporting, comments, fake comments, fcc, net neutrality, russia

FCC Commissioner Accuses Her Own Agency Of A Net Neutrality Cover Up

from the ill-communication dept

We've long discussed how the Pai FCC's net neutrality repeal was plagued with millions of fraudulent comments, many of which were submitted by a bot pulling names from a hacked database of some kind. Millions of ordinary folks (like myself) had their identities used to support Pai's unpopular plan, as did several Senators. Numerous journalists have submitted FOIA requests for more data (server logs, IP addresses, API data, anything) that might indicate who was behind the fraudulent comments, who may have bankrolled them, and what the Pai FCC knew about it.

But the Pai FCC has repeatedly tried to tap dance around FOIA requests, leading to several journalists (including those at the New York Times and Buzzfeed) suing the FCC. Despite the Times' lawyers best efforts to work with the FCC to tailor the nature of their requests over a period of months, the agency continues to hide behind FOIA exemptions that don't really apply here: namely FOIA exemption 6 (related to protecting privacy) and 7E (related to protecting agency security and law enforcement activity).

And while the Times and Buzzfeed had appealed the FCC's ruling, the FCC this week released a memorandum and order formally denying those requests. In it, the FCC doubles down on the claims that it's simply blocking the release of this data because it's super worried about the privacy of FCC commenters (though again, if you actually read the Times lawsuit, you'll note the FCC was utterly inflexible in terms of narrowing down the scope of requests).

FCC lawyers also try to make the amusing claim that the press really doesn't need this data because there's other investigations (including one at the GAO) trying to get to the bottom of the scandal:

"Confessore proffers a putative public interest in understanding the integrity of the Commission’s comment process. This question, however, is being or has already been examined by other press outlets,51 Commission staff, and the Government Accountability Office, among others. Confessore has not provided us with any reason to believe that his review of this data would significantly advance any public interest beyond the investigations that are already underway."

Of course this is the same FCC that has also actively blocked law enforcement efforts to get to the bottom of the scandal, refusing nine inquiries from the NY AG over a period of five months for additional data. So while the Pai FCC breathlessly claims it's all about transparency and integrity, their actions on this subject (and that whole fake DDOS attack they concocted in a weird bid to downplay public backlash) tend to undermine these claims.

Meanwhile, Pai's fellow Commissioner, Jessica Rosenworcel, has certainly taken off the gloves in recent weeks. She hit Twitter and issued a statement that effectively accused her own agency of engaging in a cover up of fraudulent activity:

Her full statement (pdf) is also worth a read, and doesn't pull any punches:

"Instead of providing news organizations with the information requested, in this decision the FCC decides to hide behind Freedom of Information Act exemptions and thwart investigative journalism. In doing so, the agency asserts an overbroad claim about the security of its public commenting system that sounds no more credible than its earlier and disproven claim that the system was the subject of distributed denial of service attack. It appears this agency is trying to prevent anyone from looking too closely at the mess it made of net neutrality. It is hiding what it knows about the fraud in our record and it is preventing an honest account of its many problems from seeing the light of day.

Pai's justification for the FOIA blockade tries very heavily to insist this is all just unfair partisan gamesmanship. But at this juncture his FCC's record when it comes to transparency, blatant telecom sector cronyism, and bizarre scandals has pretty much been established. This is an agency that not only used bullshit telecom lobbyist data to undermine policies that had broad, bipartisan public support, it has been rocked by scandal after scandal, fought tooth and nail against real transparency on numerous fronts, and has refused to give any real weight to the will of the tech-savvy public.

Pai comes off as an unwavering ideologue who truly seems to believe he's doing an incredible job of "unleashing innovation" despite every shred of evidence to the contrary (not unlike the man who appointed him to the position). Unfortunately for Pai, whose post-FCC political ambitions couldn't be any more obvious, his legacy will likely be the giant middle finger he's given to tech-savvy Millennials. As for the fake comments specifically, they're likely to play a starring role in next February's net neutrality lawsuits, which will look to prove the agency violated the Administrative Procedure Act by ignoring the will of the public as it rushed to give AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast a sloppy kiss for the ages.

Filed Under: ajit pai, comments, fake comments, fcc, foia, jessica rosenworcel, net neutrality, public records, transparency

Activists Make One Last Push To Restore Net Neutrality Via Congressional Review Act

from the one-more-time-around dept

Efforts to reverse the FCC's historically unpopular attack on net neutrality using the Congressional Review Act (CRA) have been stuck in neutral for several months, but activists are backing one last push in a bid to get the uphill effort over the hump.

The CRA lets Congress reverse a regulatory action with a simple majority vote in the Senate and the House (which is how the GOP successfully killed broadband consumer privacy protections last year). And while the Senate voted 52 to 47 back in May to reverse the FCC's attack on net neutrality, companion efforts to set up a similar vote in the House haven't gained much traction as the clock continues to tick. A discharge petition needs 218 votes to even see floor time, and another 218 votes to pass the measure.

But the needed votes have lingered at around 172 for months, split (quite stupidly, given broad public support) along strict partisan lines.

Hoping to push the effort over the line and drum up the needed votes ahead of the December 10 CRA deadline, net neutrality activist groups like Fight for the Future are holding one last online protest on Thursday, November 29. This time around they've drummed up the support of numerous musicians and celebrities in the hope of getting the attention of a public that's clearly weary of the entire debate:

"The effort is backed by musicians and celebrities like Hollywood star Evangeline Lilly (Ant-Man and the Wasp, The Hobbit, Lost), Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, and EDM star Bassnectar, along with startups and major web companies like online selling platform Etsy, delivery service Postmates, publishing platform Tumblr, Private Internet Access VPN, popular blog BoingBoing, domain registrar Namecheap, search engine StartPage, and speaker company Sonos."

The problem, of course, is that all the public screaming in the world has yet to shift the thinking of well-lobbied net neutrality opponents in Congress, and adding Tom Morello or Sonos to the proceedings, while appreciated and notable, isn't likely to move the needle much. Even if the vote succeeds, it still would have to avoid a veto by Trump. And while activists I've spoken to have argued that a House vote could appeal to Trump's "populist" side and pressure him to let the restoration ride through, that's simply not very likely.

That said, it was worth trying as a hail Mary pass anyway, and there's absolute value in both naming and shaming corrupt lawmakers, something Fight For the Future has toyed with via crowdfunded billboards. There's also value in keeping the issue in the public headspace ahead of next year's Congressional battles. Still, users looking to this effort to actually restore the FCC's rules should probably temper their enthusiasm. Our existing Congress has made its disdain for the public interest abundantly clear, and the real fight for net neutrality is next year.

The best chance at saving net neutrality rests with next year's net neutrality court battle, the opening arguments for which begin next February. It's there that a handful of companies like Mozilla, and 23 state attorneys general, will make their case that the FCC ignored the public and violated the Administrative Procedure Act in aggressively dismantling popular consumer protections, while basing their entire justification for the repeal on telecom industry lobbying bullshit.

Should the FCC lose that lawsuit, the agency's 2015 rules would be restored -- though Ajit Pai's FCC isn't likely to enforce them during his tenure (however long it lasts). Should the FCC and its ISP BFFs win that case, they still need to find a way to prevent a future FCC or Congress from passing net neutrality rules (or laws) with real teeth. That's why companies like AT&T have been pushing loyal foot soldiers like Marsha Blackburn to table loophole-filled, fake net neutrality legislation with only one real purpose: preempting tougher state or federal rules.

But with a shifting Congressional makeup, and net neutrality supporters in Congress not eager to anger activists by signing garbage legislation, that gambit isn't likely to succeed. The net result: like privacy, we're going to need to have a real conversation about what a realnet neutrality law might look like. And it's going to require a Sisyphean effort to prevent countless industries and their loyal political foot soldiers (with a vested interest in uneven playing fields and turf protection) from polluting the entire process.

While many are fatigued by the entire net neutrality fight, it's worth remembering that net neutrality doesn't just live or die based on the passage or restoration of rules or laws. It's a never-ending fight that will continue for however long the broadband industry maintains a stranglehold on meaningful competition. Given telco upgrade apathy, 5G's overhype as a competitive panacea, a growing cable monopoly over next-gen speeds, and Pai-era regulatory apathy, that's a problem that's not going away anytime soon.

Filed Under: activists, ajit pai, congress, cra, fcc, net neutrality, protest

Senators Press Wireless Carriers On Streaming Video Throttling

from the ill-communication dept

Three U.S. Senators are pressuring wireless carriers for answers after recent studies showed they routinely throttle video services -- not to protect the network from congestion -- but to simply make an extra buck.

One of the core goals of net neutrality was to prevent ISPs from imposing arbitrary restrictions on the network just to harm competitors or boost revenues. Of course lax enforcement and now dismantled rules have made that hard to stop. As a result, ISPs like Comcast routinely impose completely arbitrary and unnecessary usage caps, then exempt their own content from those limits, but punishing users if they step outside the Comcast walled garden. Wireless carriers have similarly throttled music, games and videos, then begun charging users more money if they want those services to operate as the creators intended.

Even with net neutrality rules intact, the FCC didn't really do a good job understanding how these arbitrary restrictions (like usage caps and zero rating) could prove anti-competitive. And in the year or two since things have only gotten worse, with wireless carriers like Verizon throttling all video on its network unless you pay the company for an even more expensive plan. The perils of this should be obvious--especially for Americans who already pay some of the highest prices for mobile data in the developed world.

Historically, ISPs have tried to claim they only throttle video when it causes network congestion, with net neutrality generally allowing such network management. But recent studies out of Northeastern have shown that this throttling has nothing to do with managing network congestion, and everything to do with erecting artificial barriers consumers then have to pay more to overcome. David Choffnes, whose data for these studies is being collected via his WeHe app, also recently found that Sprint has been throttling Skype (a potential competitor to Sprint's own services).

Last week, Senators Edward Markey, Richard Blumenthal, and Ron Wyden sent joint letters to AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, demanding answers as to why they throttle, which services they throttle, and whether they clearly inform users of the throttling (in Sprint's Skype instance, they didn't).

"We write to express our concern that mobile carriers may be inappropriately throttling and prioritizing internet traffic from common mobile apps without the knowledge of their customers. All online traffic should be treated equally, and internet service providers should not discriminate against particular content or applications for competitive advantage purposes or otherwise."

So far the FCC and major carriers haven't wanted to much talk about Choffnes or Northeastern's findings. Choffnes recently informed me in an interview that his goal is to bring some crowd-sourced transparency to network performance in the wake of the repeal of net neutrality. He was quick to highlight the inherent problem with letting ISPs non-transparently hamstring companies they're actively trying to compete with (Netflix vs. AT&T, for example):

"In a neutral network, all of these services can compete on a level playing field to offer a product that attracts the most users,” he said. “When an Internet provider targets a service for throttling, the playing field can tilt in favor of one service over another.”

“This is particularly problematic if the Internet provider's service is favored, because they can use this advantage to drive users away from competing products and to ones belong to the Internet provider,” Choffnes added. “And because the competition is limited by the Internet service they are given, in some cases there may nothing they can do to regain equal footing."

While the major carriers have until December 6 to answer, it's unlikely carriers will face much in the way of repercussions during FCC boss Ajit Pai's watch. Pai was not only happy to kill net neutrality and gut FCC authority at telecom lobbyist request, the net neutrality repeal replaced hard rules on transparency with entirely voluntary guidelines that ISPs can ignore at their leisure with absolutely no meaningful repercussions.

Keep in mind, that ISPs are currently trying their best to behave ahead of next February's court showdown over net neutrality (which could restore the 2015 rules). Should they win that fight, the kind of nickel-and-diming they engage in will progressively be less and less subtle.

Filed Under: broadband, fcc, net neutrality, senate, streaming, wireless
Companies: at&t, comcast, t-mobile, verizon

AT&T CEO Continues His Fake Calls For Real Privacy, Net Neutrality Laws

from the ill-communication dept

You'd be hard pressed to find a bigger enemy of consumer safeguards than the fine folks at AT&T. The company has a history of all manner of anti-competitive behavior, from making its bills harder to understand to help scammers rip off its customers, to routinely ripping off programs designed to help everyone from the hearing imparied to the poor. AT&T also of course played a starring role in killing both the FCC's 2010 and 2015 net neutrality rules, and pretty much all meaningful state and federal efforts to protect broadband and wireless user privacy.

Yet like clockwork, company executives like to pretend that despite this, they really love net neutrality, privacy, and healthy regulatory oversight. Case in point: AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson attended a conference this week where he once again proclaimed that AT&T really wants Congress to pass meaningful new net neutrality and privacy laws — something the press, as it loves to do, was quick to repeat entirely unskeptically without any necessary context:

"AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson joked Monday that Washington may not agree “on the freezing temperature of water,” but he called on a divided Congress to come together pass net neutrality and privacy legislation. The executive called for legislative clarity around the issue of broadband Internet access, saying certain basic principles should be codified into law."

Notice for a moment that the linked outlet in question doesn't bother to clarify to readers that we had meaningful net neutrality and broadband privacy rules at the FCC (passed after years of painstaking debate), and AT&T lobbyists worked tirelessly to kill both of them. AT&T also routinely battles any efforts to mandate more competition or broadband availability, to the point where they prevent efforts to even improve broadband availability maps. These are not problems AT&T wants fixed; rather important context when judging the merits of Stephenson's statements.

To be clear, AT&T doesn't want meaningful privacy or net neutrality legislation. It wants loophole filled placeholder laws on these subjects in name only; laws that pretend to address the problems on both of these fronts, but serve one key purpose: pre-empt tougher state or federal laws that might actually accomplish something. AT&T wants laws its lawyers write that don't actually fix the problems we all largely agree need fixing, especially the lack of broadband competition that helped create privacy and net neutrality violations in the first place.

That tech and policy reporters don't understand this (or understand it but for whatever reason don't share this fact with readers) is consistently frustrating.

Stephenson's schtick is always exhausting. But he outdid himself with some additional commentary at the conference, most notably this bit:

"I get fatigued every time the President changes, the head of the FCC changes, and regulations swing from left to right,” Stephenson said in remarks tonight at the Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech D. Live conference in Laguna Beach."

Again, Stephenson's lobbyists are directly responsible for this hard shift "right" away from giving a damn about consumer protection. AT&T backed Trump and Ajit Pai to the point where it thought it was a good idea to pay a shady dudebro "fixer" $600,000 to covertly gain access to the President. And since the "swing" shifted in AT&T's favor it has received absolutely everything it asked for, from a full out assault on federal and state consumer protections, to an FCC that's often literally indistinguishable from AT&T's lobbying apparatus.

Again, the pretense being pushed by Stephenson here is that we can't rely on the partisan whims of the FCC and we should encode tough consumer protection into law via Congress. And in an ideal world, that's a sound argument. But this isn't an ideal world, and AT&T's arguments aren't made in good faith. It's a world in which AT&T throws money at politicians to ensure any real protections will never get passed. You can't pass meaningful privacy or net neutrality laws via Congress because companies like AT&T spend billions of dollars and countless man hours to prevent that from happening.

You can, however, throw campaign contributions at lawmakers eager to table "compromise legislation" that's usually nowhere near an actual compromise. Countless politicians (most notably Marsha Blackburn) love to table AT&T-crafted legislation and pretend it's a sincere attempt to solve complex technical problems, ignoring that said bills almost always have fewer teeth than a dottering grandpa and more holes than a ratty, knitted afghan.

AT&T's ideal net neutrality law would ban things ISPs never intended to do anyway (like the outright blocking of websites), while ignoring all the areas ISPs engage in creative anti-competitive behavior (like usage caps and zero rating or interconnection shenanigans). The same applies to privacy. AT&T wants a law that mandates ISPs do things they already do (like "clearly informing" users how they're being spied on via mouse print), but doesn't ban any of the bad things AT&T has been busted doing (like modifying packets to covertly track users, or charging users more money if they want to protect their own private data).

Meanwhile, at the same conference, Stephenson whined incessantly about how numerous state efforts to pass their own privacy and net neutrality laws were a "total disaster," hoping nobody is bright enough to realize that wouldn't be happening if Stephenson's lobbyists hadn't dismantled pretty modest federal guidelines.

There's nothing about Stephenson's arguments that are grounded in good faith, yet you'd have a hard time understanding that if you're a reader of news reports that are often more blind stenography than actual insight fueled by historical context.

Filed Under: net neutrality, privacy, randall stephenson
Companies: at&t

Sprint Throttled Skype Without Telling Anyone... And Nobody Seems To Care Much

from the slippery-slope dept

Last month we pointed to research out of Northeastern University that showed U.S. wireless video performance was thoroughly mediocre thanks in large part to arbitrary carrier throttling. The study, spearheaded by researcher David Choffnes, found that this carrier throttling usually had absolutely nothing to do with congestion. Instead, much of it was driven by carriers trying to impose arbitrary limits on your connection, then charge you more money to avoid it. For example, Verizon now throttles all video on its "unlimited" wireless data connections to 480p (around 1.5 Mbps), unless you pay Verizon for a more expensive plan.

Choffnes is tracking ISP network management by using crowdsourced data from his Wehe app. More recently Choffnes released an updated report that continues to show that carriers arbitrarily throttle video and select apps. But his report and data also found that Sprint (and its prepaid subsidiary Boost Mobile) routinely throttles Skype performance on its networks... without telling consumers about it. The throttling was discovered in 34 percent of 1,968 full tests run between January 18 and October 15 of this year, note the researchers:

"We found a significant number of instances of Sprint throttling our Skype tests. This is interesting because Skype’s telephony service can be construed as directly competing with the telephony service provided by Sprint...We asked Sprint to comment on our findings. Their reply was: "Sprint does not single out Skype or any individual content provider in this way." Our test results indicate otherwise, particularly for video content providers where we were able to confirm targeted throttling of Wehe tests."

On its surface, Sprint throttling Skype a third of a the time isn't the end of the world. But as is often the case with net neutrality, it's the precedent that matters. Sprint has already tinkered with throttling video, music, and games unless users were willing to pay more money, something nobody in the Obama administration so much as blinked at -- even with net neutrality rules intact.

Now, post-repeal, Sprint is throttling a service that could be directly construed as competing with Sprint's own offerings, something Choffnes told me should be raising alarm bells for anybody interested in keeping the internet competitive and relatively neutral:

"In a neutral network, all of these services can compete on a level playing field to offer a product that attracts the most users,” he said. “When an Internet provider targets a service for throttling, the playing field can tilt in favor of one service over another."

“This is particularly problematic if the Internet provider's service is favored, because they can use this advantage to drive users away from competing products and to ones belong to the Internet provider,” Choffnes added. “And because the competition is limited by the Internet service they are given, in some cases there may nothing they can do to regain equal footing."

Sprint, for its part, justly flatly denied to me and other reporters that this was even happening, though Choffnes stands by his data. Here's the point where an objective regulator would come in, investigate the issue, and then punish companies if necessary. Of course in the Ajit Pai era that's simply not going to happen. Under the FCC's 2015 rules, ISPs had to be transparent about what they were doing so users knew what kind of connection they were buying. With those rules now dead, the FCC has effectively made transparency a largely voluntary affair that ISPs can ignore at their leisure.

That's where Choffnes comes in. He's trying to at least hold ISPs accountable by using crowdsourced data to clarify what ISPs are up to. But with the news of Sprint throttling Skype coming and going without a single comment from anybody in a position to actually do anything about it, it's not clear if knowing alone is going to be enough.

Again, Sprint throttling Skype for a third of its users certainly isn't the end of the world. But it remains a precedent you should be worried about. ISPs are desperately trying to be on their best behavior right now ahead of next February's net neutrality lawsuits against the FCC. They don't want to add any fuel to the fire (well, aside from that Verizon throttling California firefighters for no reason thing). But should the FCC and ISPs win their court battle, you're going to see a lot more "creative" efforts to impose costly new barriers to access, and less and less transparency with the end user about what's happening.

Filed Under: competition, fcc, net neutrality, throttling, voice
Companies: skype, sprint

Marsha Blackburn Continues To Be Rewarded For Screwing Up The Internet

from the rooting-against-your-self-interests dept

You'd be hard pressed to find a bigger telecom sector crony than Tennessee Representative Marsha Blackburn. Blackburn has long made headlines for her support of SOPA, attacks on consumer protections like net neutrality and the FCC's broadband privacy rules. She's also come out in favor of turning ISPs into censors, and has been first in line to support giant ISP-backed protectionist state laws hampering competition. AT&T is routinely one of Blackburn's top donors, and her home state of Tennessee remains one of the least connected states in the nation as a direct result.

Even in our current hyper-tribalistic, post-truth reality, you'd have a hard time arguing that Blackburn has been anything but terrible for the health of the internet and consumer rights. Yet somehow, Blackburn just keeps getting rewarded for giving consumers the tech policy equivalent of a giant middle finger.

Shortly after her attacks on net neutrality (Blackburn absolutely adores the idea of letting the biggest companies buy an unfair market advantage from ISPs) Blackburn was promoted to head the Communications and Technology subcommittee. And this week, Blackburn successfully jumped from the House to the Senate, beating challenger and former Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen to nab the Senate seat vacated by departing Tennessee Senator Bob Corker. Her win was, unsurprisingly, heralded as a big win for the public welfare by the state's political apparatus:

"Marsha Blackburn demonstrated the type of conservative leadership Tennessee voters want in Washington,” National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Cory Gardner said in a statement Tuesday evening. “We want to congratulate Senator-elect Blackburn on a hard-fought victory and look forward to her working in the U.S. Senate to confirm conservative judges, push pro-growth reforms and advocate for policies that improve the lives of all Tennesseans."

It's another example where blind partisan fealty tends to trump common sense, resulting in people who can only see in red or blue cheerfully voting against their own best self interests in what winds up being little more than a self-immolating, facts-optional game of team sports. As we've noted constantly, issues like net neutrality really aren't partisan, since an overwhelming bipartisan majority of Americans support this and other basic checks on monopoly power. ISPs and lawmakers just like to frame such tech issues as partisan, as sowing division hinders consensus and helps stall meaningful change and reform.

Last minute efforts by Taylor Swift apparently didn't help convince Tennessee voters that Blackburn's not their ally. Neither did Consumer groups efforts to educate Tennessee voters about Blackburn's continued tendency to screw them; an effort that at one point involved crowdfunding billboards posted in Blackburn's home district:

With Blackburn how holding a more powerful position in the Senate, Tennessee voters (and the rest of us) can look forward to more of the same. Blackburn is always AT&T's first stop when the company wants to shovel some law its lobbyists wrote into the legislative bloodstream. That was made clear when Blackburn pushed both a fake net neutrality bill and a fake privacy bill, both with only one real goal: to prevent tougher state or federal laws from being passed. As giant ISPs continue their relentless assault on both competition and federal and state oversight, expect Blackburn to play an essential, starring role.

On the plus side, a freshly-reconstituted House filled with more net neutrality supporters should slow any telecom-industry efforts to pass wishlist legislation, while providing something vaguely resembling oversight for the Ajit Pai FCC. Still, it's incredible to watch politicians like Blackburn routinely sell out the majority of her constituents on tech policy, then watch those same constituents happily root against their own best self interests by giving her an endless series of promotions.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, marsha blackburn, net neutrality, privacy, tennessee
Companies: at&t

After Being Sued To Block Sci-Hub; Swedish ISP Blocks Court's And Elsevier's Website In Protest

from the but-is-that-a-good-thing dept

Late last week, Torrentfreak had a fascinating story about Bahnhof's response to a court case demanding it block the site Sci-Hub due to demands from Elsevier that Sci-Hub was inducing infringement of academic papers. We've written in the past about Sci-Hub. Rather than an evil piracy site as Elsevier likes to imply, it is a very clever system to allow academics to share and access other academic works. Of course, Elsevier prefers to lock up academic research that it did not pay for, which is a travesty. And it has gone after Sci-Hub in multiple jurisdictions, and is constantly playing a form of Whac-a-Mole as Sci-Hub keeps on moving around (not to mention each attempt at taking it down only seems to add to Sci-Hub's popularity). In this case, Elsevier sought a blocking order in Sweden. The Swedish ISP, Bahnhof, which has spent years pushing back against copyright maximalist extremism, but without much luck.

In giving in to the block demand, however, Bahnhof went a step further. It also put up a "block" for any subscriber visiting Elsevier's sites or the court's sites:

These are not full "blocks" per se. After reading Bahnhof's protest message, you can then apparently click through to the original site.

I posted this on Twitter on Friday and it got a huge response, with many people cheering it on. I think many of them had an initial gut reaction that this was a clever (and somewhat amusing) way to protest what many people feel is an unjust blocking order by turning the tables on those who requested and approved the blocking order. Indeed, that was my instinctual reaction as well. But, I don't think we should be that celebratory about this.

For one thing, this is exactly the kind of thing that many of us warn about concerning a lack of net neutrality laws. In this case, many people support this because they all agree that Elsevier is being ridiculous and censorial here. But... it's not hard to imagine a different situation. How would people feel if an ISP were, say, putting up a similar block page for anyone trying to visit a union webpage of striking telco workers? Because that happened once in Canada. Then... it feels a bit more like a giant company using its market position to silence critics in its workforce. We shouldn't change our views on what is and what is not okay for an ISP to do based solely on whether or not we like who is put out by the decision.

Sweden doesn't currently have net neutrality rules as far as I can tell, though ironically it appears that Bahnhof sells a pro-net neutrality hoodie. But blocking sites -- even to make a good point in the ridiculousness of the site blocking order -- still goes against net neutrality and raises serious questions about whether anyone should want an ISP inspecting the sites that we go to and interjecting its own man in the middle attack to make a political message.

Suddenly... it doesn't look quite as clever in that light. I understand the value of protesting an unjust court ruling, and this certainly feels like just desserts for Elsevier and the court, but we should always see it as problematic when an ISP is getting between us and the sites we want to visit, even if it's for a good cause.

Filed Under: copyright, net neutrality, protest, site blocking, sweden
Companies: bahnhof, elsevier, sci-hub