While the world over is dealing with the scourge that is copyright trolling, it is true to say that this virus has not spread everywhere equally. One of the hardest hit countries has been Denmark, where a few copyright trolling practices have caused an insane amount of headaches for the public, and chum within the court systems. It all got bad enough to turn rivals into bedfellows, with two major ISPs, Telenor and Telia, teaming up to push the legal fight to unmask their respective customers back on the copyright trolls. The duo's initial efforts at convincing the legal system that the privacy rights of its customers trumped the rights of copyright trolls to extract settlement cash from them went poorly, with the District Court finding for the copyright trolls.
But the fight for customer privacy didn't stop there and the companies appealed the case up to Denmark's higher courts, which decided for the ISPs and consumer privacy.
“In its order based on telecommunications legislation, the Court has weighed subscribers’ rights to confidentiality of information regarding their use of the Internet against the interests of rightsholders to obtain information for the purpose of prosecuting claims against the subscribers,” the Court said in a statement.
Noting that the case raised important questions of European Union law and the European Convention on Human Rights, the High Court said that after due consideration it would overrule the decision of the District Court. The rights of the copyright holders do not trump the individuals right to privacy, it said.
“The telecommunications companies are therefore not required to disclose the names and addresses of their subscribers,” the Court ruled.
It's a game-changing ruling for Denmark's public. Assuming this is the end of it, copyright trolling as any kind of massive business model in Denmark ought to suffer a quick death. If the trolls can't force ISPs to unmask customers with the faulty evidence of an IP address, the settlement letters will never go out, people will not be fooled into thinking they have to pay them, and the mass income off of these shady practices that make copyright trolling a viable enterprise goes away. We cannot stress enough how greatly this alleviates the public from a burden to defend itself against a flawed and pretend attempt at justice.
Telenor is not going to let anyone make light of it. Nor will they let the public gloss over its fight to protect them.
“This is an important victory for our right to protect our customers’ data,” said Telenor Denmark’s Legal Director, Mette Eistrøm Krüger.
“At Telenor we protect our customers’ data and trust – therefore it has been our conviction that we cannot be forced into almost automatically submitting personal data on our customers simply to support some private actors who are driven by commercial interests.”
A ruling like this should be equally welcome everywhere copyright trolling is a thing. Sadly, in far too many countries, ISPs and rightsholders are often the same people, which is what prevents this type of consumer-first activity from ever occurring.
If you missed it, large ISPs like Verizon, with the help of the Trump administration and GOP, worked to quickly kill FCC privacy protections before they could take effect last year. Those rules were arguably modest by any measure, simply requiring that ISPs transparently disclose what data is being collected and who it's being sold to, while providing users working opt out tools (or opt in tools if dealing with sensitive consumer financial data). Those rules, you'll recall, were only proposed after ISPs repeatedly made it clear they were utterly unwilling and unable to self-regulate on the privacy front.
ISPs like Verizon, AT&T and Comcast were given ample leeway on privacy for years. Our reward was covert efforts to track users around the internet without telling them, and repeated efforts to charge users more if they wanted to protect their own privacy. Large ISPs had every opportunity to avoid regulation and self-regulate. They showed us repeatedly this was beyond their capabilities. Limited broadband competition routinely protected them from any repercussions, and revolving-door regulators have now completed the circle of dysfunction.
Much like we're seeing on net neutrality, this hostility to real consumer privacy protections on the federal level resulted in multiple states devising their own consumer protections. Like in California, where lawmakers attempted to push a privacy law that largely mirrored the FCC's effort. And while Google, Facebook, Comcast, AT&T and Verizon will all breathlessly tell you they support meaningful privacy reform, the EFF documented in great detail how they worked together last year to quietly scuttle the initiative. Largely by lying about what it actually did:
"One of the most offensive aspects of the misinformation campaign was the claim that pretending to restore our privacy rights, which have been on the books for communications providers for years, would help extremism...In materials like this advertisement, the opposition lobby claimed that A.B. 375 would result in a deluge of pop-ups that consumers would have to click through, and that in turn this inundation would create a sort of privacy fatigue. Consumers would stop caring, and cybersecurity would suffer.
Comcast, Facebook, Verizon and Google all donated $200,000 each to help hamstring the effort. And while successful, they're now facing another push for a new, very similar initiative that should show up on California voter ballots this November. Again, despite industry face-fanning and pearl clutching there's not much that's controversial about it (you can read more about the act here), with the primary goal being transparency and ensuring consumers have the ability to opt out.
But when the Cambridge Analytica story broke, and actually caring about privacy became en vogue for a brief moment, the public spotlight forced Facebook to quietly slink away away from its opposition to the effort in California. Now Verizon, who is trying to make inroads in marketing via its Oath subsidiary (the combination of AOL and Yahoo), has also been forced to quietly back off opposition in the wake of media attention. A Verizon spokesperson makes it clear that, much like the net neutrality fight, the company's goal is to lobby for weak federal protections that pre-empt tougher state ones:
"Verizon has decided not to continue with the coalition so that we can focus our efforts on creating a national framework for privacy and related issues -- and not a state-by-state approach," a spokesman says."
Again, all of these giant companies will breathlessly tell you they support meaningful privacy protections for consumers. But the reality is that any effort to empower and inform consumers erodes revenues, since it will increase the chance that users opt out of data collection and monetization efforts. That's why no matter how frequently you'll see companies like Verizon and Facebook insist they're interested in "solutions" to the wild west that is currently consumer privacy, it remains routinely difficult to take them seriously in any meaningful capacity.
The coalition attempting to reverse the Trump FCC's attack on net neutrality continues to grow. INCOMPAS, a trade group representing a number of smaller ISPs like Sonic and RCN, says it has filed a Petition (pdf) in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia challenging the FCC's misleadingly-titled "Restoring Internet Freedom" Order. INCOMPAS joins Mozilla, Vimeo, numerous consumer groups and 23 state attorneys general in claiming that the FCC violated agency policy when it ignored the public, ignored the experts, and decided to give a sloppy wet kiss to the nation's entrenched broadband monopolies.
While FCC boss Ajit Pai frequently tries to claim that the FCC's modest net neutrality protections were a terrible burden on small ISPs, his claims pretty routinely aren't supported by actual facts and hard data (remember those?). In a statement, INCOMPAS members make it clear that giving entrenched monopolies like AT&T and Comcast free rein to abuse a lack of broadband competition in creative new ways isn't going to end well for them:
"The American people do not want the internet to look more like cable, where prices rise, customer service falls, and gatekeepers control what you watch, read and pay...As we watch the AT&T-Time Warner antitrust trial unfolding, it’s clear large ISPs fear a competitive streaming marketplace. Their desire to gobble up content, rather than creating it from scratch, is a sign that anti-competitive interconnection practices and paid prioritization schemes are on the horizon unless strong net neutrality protections are preserved."
And while AT&T and friends like to pretend that the rules derailed their ability to be "innovative," you might recall Sonic CEO Dane Jasper told us how the rules are only really a "regulatory burden" if you're engaging in anti-competitive behavior. And in his own statement, Jasper reiterates the fact that if you're a small business owner that doesn't support net neutrality, you're doing it wrong:
"Net neutrality has always been critical for small businesses and start-ups to compete in the internet age. When the FCC eliminated those protections, it opened the door for large, incumbent ISPs to use their gatekeeper position to put a stranglehold on innovation and competition. As an ISP, Sonic believes every American should have access to fast and affordable internet. The repeal of net neutrality threatens this vision, and we’re proud to support INCOMPAS in challenging the FCC’s disastrous Order in Court."
We're in for a quiet stretch here before the legal fight begins (likely sometime this summer), but when the case begins we should get some interesting additional insight into the numerous, laughable efforts the industry and FCC engaged in to try and downplay massive public opposition to their policy ploy. In the interim, we've noted how ISPs are busy trying to pass fake net neutrality law in the hopes of pre-empting states laws and preventing the 2015 rules from being re-established should the FCC lose in court.
You will recall that we recently discussed the odd announcement by the Japanese government that it would seek to start a site-blocking policy to prevent copyright infringement. The announcement itself was odd for several reasons. First and foremost, this exact kind of government censorship is specifically forbidden in Japan's constitution except to "avert present danger", the context for which normally applies to real-life violence, the taking of liberty, or the destruction or taking of property. To be clear, the exception has never been used for anything remotely like this. But that's not all. The announcement was also strange because pretty much everyone agrees that the government is looking to subvert its own constitution to protect the anime and manga industries, which is both almost certainly the most Japan sentence ever written and completely unnecessary given the that the anime and manga industries are both massive and growing. None of that sounds like a "present danger."
The government didn’t have to wait long for a response. The Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (NTT) announced yesterday that it will begin blocking access to sites that provide unauthorized access to copyrighted content.
“We have taken short-term emergency measures until legal systems on site-blocking are implemented,” NTT in a statement.
NTT Communications Corp., NTT Docomo Inc. and NTT Plala Inc., will block access to three sites previously identified by the government – Mangamura, AniTube! and MioMio which have a particularly large following in Japan. NTT said that it will also restrict access to other sites if requested to do so by the government. The company added that at least in the short-term, it will prevent access to the sites using DNS blocking.
If nothing else did, this sudden move by NTT ought to demonstrate to everyone in Japan just how dangerous these sorts of ham-fisted government attempts at policy are. This sort of bowing to government pressure, especially when that pressure is of an unconstitutional nature, doesn't typically find a home in democratic nations. That's all the more true when we're discussing a form of censorship. It's also more than a little jarring to watch a private sector industry carry out government aims as an "emergency" with the excuse essentially of "legislating democratically takes too long."
And, while we made this point in our original post on this topic, let's reiterate that cracking this censorious door open an inch will lead to the government barging straight through it.
To date, just three sites have been named by the government as particularly problematic but it’s now promising to set up a consultation on a further response. A bill will also be submitted to parliament to target sites that promote links to content hosted elsewhere, an activity which is not illegal under current law.
Read that last bit again and understand what it means: the Japanese government will target websites for censorship that are not breaking Japanese law. If that doesn't terrify Japan's public, then it damn well should.
Meanwhile, other ISPs in the country have taken a slightly more measured approach, stating that they will consult with experts on what to do. That's certainly better than NTT's approach, except that it still falls short of what every ISP ought to be saying: "No, this is against the law."
Earlier this year, the entertainment and telecom industries' "six strikes" anti-piracy initiative died a quiet death after years of hype from the RIAA and MPAA about how it would revolutionize copyright enforcement (it didn't). The program involved ISPs using a rotating crop of "escalation measures" to temporarily block, throttle or otherwise harass accused pirates until they acknowledged receipt of laughably one-sided copyright educational materials. Offenders, accused entirely based on IP address as proof of guilt, were allowed to try and contest these accusations -- if they paid a $35 fee.
Needless to say, data suggests the Copyright Alert System didn't do much if anything to stop piracy, since most would-be pirates simply obscured their internet behavior using proxies and VPNs. Meanwhile, the supposed "education" the program provided American consumers accomplished little more than driving up broadband costs as ISPs passed on the cost of participation in the farce to the end user.
But while six strikes is technically dead, that's not apparently stopping participating ISPs like Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner Cable (now Charter Spectrum) from continuing to threaten to disconnect users from the internet based on often-flimsy IP address evidence. Users of these ISPs say they continue to receive threats from their ISP that they'll be kicked off of the internet if they don't stop being naughty:
"So, over the weekend my internet got interrupted by my ISP (internet service provider) stating that someone on my network has violated some copyright laws. I had to complete a survey and they brought back the internet to me,” one subscriber wrote a few weeks ago. He added that his (unnamed) ISP advised him that seven warnings would get his account disconnected.
Another user, who named his ISP as Comcast, reported receiving a notice after downloading a game using BitTorrent. He was warned that the alleged infringement “may result in the suspension or termination of your Service account” but what remains unclear is how many warnings people can receive before this happens.
To be clear ISPs don't actually kick people off of the internet, as nearly everybody (outside of the RIAA and MPAA) has acknowledged that severing access to a necessary utility is a draconian over-reaction to downloading the Led Zeppelin discography. Under the six strikes initiative, nothing actually happened to users after reaching the sixth strike, the hope being you could scare people into compliance (it doesn't work). The only way to ensure compliance would be to craft an organization tasked with tracking individual users as they float between ISPs, an approach France found to be an untenable disaster.
Nothing still happens to users who give a middle finger to these warnings, but that apparently doesn't stop ISPs like Verizon from temporarily suspending user accounts, requiring they call up the droll old telcosexy new Millennial-focused advertising powerhouse to get reconnected to the internet:
"So lately I’ve been getting more and more annoyed with pirating because I get blasted with a webpage telling me my internet is disconnected and that I need to delete the file to reconnect, with the latest one having me actually call Verizon to reconnect,” a subscriber to the service reported earlier this month."
Of course many of these ISPs are just going through the motions because of the Cox versus BMG case, in which a notably-distorted interpretation of the DMCA by Judge Liam O'Grady now puts ISP safe harbor protections at risk -- if they don't participate in this useless and costly game of make believe. Most ISP executives I've spoken to make it clear that the broadband industry is cooperating begrudgingly to protect themselves from liability, and are all well aware of the futility and ineffectiveness of these systems, the cost of which are now rolled into your already bloated broadband bill.
So while six strikes may formally be dead, the animated corpse of the misguided concept lives on, with ISPs that don't even believe in what they're doing pretending that this costly and annoying system of threats and scolding actually has any substantive purpose. That, apparently, will have to make do until the MPAA and RIAA (and the myriad of lawmakers and dollar per holler consultants paid to love them) can concoct an even worse idea.
We've long talked about the problems that come along with government mandating ISPs to act as copyright police by blocking so-called "pirate" websites. The issues with these attempts are many, ranging from their muted impact on piracy to concerns over just how a website is deemed to be a "pirate" website to the inevitable collateral damage sustained by non-infringing sites. With the last of those, you can pretty much set your watch to the stories of innocent sites being caught up in this sort of censorship. Still, the breadth of this particular problem likely escapes many people.
To get a handle on the sort of scope we're talking about, we can take a look at Russia. In response to international accusations of the government being lax on matters of copyright infringement, Russia enacted legislation in 2013 that tasked ISPs and hosting providers with blocking pirate websites. It's been nearly half a decade, so let's check in and see what sort of impact that legislation has had.
More than four years on, Russia is still grappling with a huge piracy problem that refuses to go away. It has been blocking thousands of sites at a steady rate, including RuTracker, the country's largest torrent platform, but still the problem persists.
Now, a new report produced by Roskomsvoboda, the Center for the Protection of Digital Rights, and the Pirate Party of Russia, reveals a system that has not only failed to reach its stated aims but is also having a negative effect on the broader Internet.
According to that study, the numbers come out to roughly 4,000 sites blocked that are the actual sort of website the Russian government meant to target and 41,000 sites that are essentially purely collateral damage. The reason for this is that the nature of the legal proceedings in these sorts of cases is such that the actual site operators basically never show up in court. Instead, the ISPs and hosting providers do, and are then ordered to block these pirate sites by IP addresses, among other methods. These IP addresses can be shared, however, meaning that any third party sharing an IP address with the target of a block order from the courts are caught up and likewise censored.
Due to the legal requirement to block sites by both IP address and other means, third-party sites with shared IP addresses get caught up as collateral damage. The report states that more than 41,000 innocent sites have been blocked as the result of supposedly targeted court orders.
But with collateral damage mounting, the main issue as far as copyright holders are concerned is whether piracy is decreasing as a result. The report draws few conclusions on that front but notes that blocks are a blunt instrument. While they may succeed in stopping some people from accessing ‘pirate’ domains, the underlying infringement carries on regardless.
“Blocks create restrictions only for Internet users who are denied access to sites, but do not lead to the removal of illegal information or prevent intellectual property violations,” the researchers add.
So, the blunt instrument of censorship has been fairly bad at stopping copyright infringement, it's stated goal, but quite good at censoring innocent sites at a factor of ten to one compared with the actual targets of the censoring. That's the kind of failure that's so bad it's impressive. One would think the Russian government would be looking to overhaul the legislation and censorship program to start driving these numbers back into the realm of reason. But this is Russia we're talking about, so instead the country is ramping up its censorship efforts, with requirements for search results to omit "pirate" sites and by criminalizing VPNs.
It's enough that you start to wonder just how many websites the average Russian citizen will be able to access at all before long.
For decades now, broadband ISPs have abused the lack of meaningful competition in the telecom market by not only refusing to shore up historically awful customer service, but by raising rates hand over fist. This usually involves leaving the advertised price largely the same, but pummeling customers with all manner of misleading fees and surcharges that drive up the actual price paid post sale. And by and large regulators from both major political parties have been perfectly ok with this practice, despite it effectively being false advertising.
CenturyLink (combined by the merger of Qwest, CenturyTel and Embarq) has been exceptionally talented when it comes to misleading fees. A few years ago the company began charging its broadband customers an "Internet Cost Recovery Fee," which the company's website explains as such:
"This fee helps defray costs associated with building and maintaining CenturyLink's High-Speed Internet broadband network, as well as the costs of expanding network capacity to support the continued increase in customers' average broadband consumption."
Of course that's what the rest of your bill is supposed to be for, but by breaking out a cost of doing business below the line, CenturyLink can advertise a lower (completely false) rate. That not only helps the company mislead consumers, but makes it harder to compare existing plans -- should you actually have something vaguely resembling broadband competition in your town. In addition to misleading fees like this, CenturyLink has also taken advantage of a lack of competition by imposing arbitrary and unnecessary usage caps and overage fees as well.
But the company has been forced to retreat from both misleading fees and overage fees as it faces a steady stream of lawsuits for its pricing practices. The company was sued back in June after a whistleblower revealed the company was ripping off its customers in yet another way: signing them up for pricey services they never wanted, and never ordered. CenturyLink's problems have only ballooned since, with a growing list of states filing their own suits for what they say is a documented pattern of fraudulent billing:
"I want [CenturyLink] to knock it off,” Swanson said. “It is not OK for a company to quote one price and then charge another for something as basic as cable television and internet service. We want an injunction so the company stops doing this to other people, and hopefully fixes the problem for these people as well.”
The lawsuit, filed in Anoka County District Court, accuses Louisiana-based CenturyLink of committing consumer fraud and engaging in deceptive trade practices. It cites 37 specific cases in which people were overbilled by the company and denied the opportunity to reduce those charges — even when they had the original offer in writing."
Again, this has been going on for decades as a direct result of an overall lack of competition in the market. Usually said lawmakers defend their apathy to this problem by insisting the "free market" will somehow magically bring competition to bear on ISPs, culling any bad behavior. The problem, however, is these same lawmakers often simultaneously support ISP-written state level protectionist laws designed specifically to ensure this competition never actually arrives. It's a cycle of dysfunction that we won't be rushing to fix anytime soon, as the current Trump FCC is making fairly clear.
Opponents of net neutrality often claim the rules placed "onerous burdens" on small and large ISPs alike. But when push comes to shove, you'll rarely see any of these folks provide hard evidence of such "burdens." Usually, opposition is driven by a fundamental misunderstanding of what the rules do, and by a conflation of the rules with nebulous partisan worries that net neutrality somehow represents "government run amok." That confusion is, quite often, courtesy of "insight" on the subject from the likes of Ted Cruz, who has repeatedly tried to insist that killing the popular consumer protections somehow "restores freedom" (citation needed).
But in yet another example of net neutrality's broad support out here in the real world, the EFF this week accumulated a list of 40 or so ISPs, VPN and VoIP providers that would very much like it if the rules remained intact. Noting how the last FCC's decision to reclassify ISPs as common carriers under the Communications Act actually helps them compete with their larger counterparts, the companies note that net neutrality hasn't hurt their ability to develop and expand their networks in the slightest:
"We have encountered no new additional barriers to investment or deployment as a result of the 2015 decision to reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service and have long supported network neutrality as a core principle for the deployment of networks for the American public to access the Internet."
Among these companies is California ISP Sonic, one of the few independent ISPs from the early aughts that managed to survive the incumbent ISP gauntlet, and the slow but steady attack on competition that started under former FCC boss turned top cable lobbyist Michael Powell (we talked with Sonic CEO Dane Jasper about this a podcast last April). Sonic and the rest of the companies proceed to note that eliminating the rules doesn't "restore freedom" for them; in fact most of them worry that the elimination of the rules will have a dramatically negative impact on competition in the market:
"Without a legal foundation to address the anticompetitive practices of the largest players in the market, the FCC’s current course threatens the viability of competitive entry and competitive viability. As direct competitors to the biggest cable and telephone companies, we have reservations about any plan at the FCC that seeks to enhance their market power without any meaningful restraints on their ability to monopolize large swaths of the Internet."
The companies also express concern about Congress' recent decision to kill broadband privacy protections at the behest of giant ISPs like Comcast, Verizon and AT&T -- most of which are not coincidentally conducting massive pivots into media and advertising:
"Lastly, we implore the FCC to examine the ramifications of the Congressional Review Act repeal of broadband privacy and provide guidance. We have long championed our customer’s privacy and believe Congress was in error to erode their legal right to privacy. However, the repeal’s detrimental impact on the reach and scope of Section 222’s ISP privacy provisions has resulted in great uncertainty in the market that the FCC could help provide clarity."
The companies' support comes on the heels of similar support for the rules from over 900 startups (you know, the people actually building the networks and technologies of tomorrow). In both instances (privacy and net neutrality), these "onerous regulations" had broad support among consumers and many smaller companies alike, highlighting again how the myopic opinion that "all regulation is automatically bad" is lazy thinking, a violent over-simplification, and incredibly detrimental when it comes to bringing competition to bear on one of the most anti-competitive and complicated segments of American industry.
You might recall that Tennessee Representative Marsha Blackburn recently played a starring role in gutting FCC consumer broadband privacy protections using the Congressional Review Act. It was one of the more bare-knuckled examples of pay to play government in recent memory, and many of the straight GOP-line voters have been getting an earful from their constituents back home. Utterly unmoved, most of those lawmakers have quickly shifted on their heels and are now busy trying to gut net neutrality with the same blatent disregard for public opinion they showed while killing privacy protections.
In what appears to be largely a PR move to try and deflect significant criticism for her large ISP-friendly policies, Blackburn has subsequently introduced the BROWSER Act -- aka the Balancing the Rights of Web Surfers Equally and Responsibly Act. The act, as the FCC's now-discarded rules would have done, requires that consumers must opt in before a broadband provider is allowed to collect and sell subscriber information.
According to a Blackburn press statement on the legislation, killing the FCC's popular privacy protections, then introducing this new bill (which has little more than zero chance of passing for reasons we'll get into) was necessary to eliminate "confusion":
"As a Member of the House Homeland Security Committee's Cybersecurity Subcommittee, internet privacy and security must be a top priority. Step one in that process was to override any regulation that creates more confusion by giving jurisdiction to multiple agencies, only to have them regulate only one-half of the digital world.
Step two in that process is to introduce comprehensive internet privacy legislation that will more fully protect online users in their use of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), search engines and social media,” said Fitzpatrick. “The BROWSER Act does just that. We must offer American citizens real internet privacy protection, not mere lip service which gives internet users false expectations about their level of online security. I encourage all House members who are serious about protecting our constituents' online privacy to join me in advancing this bill."
So, as we already noted in great detail, this appears to be part of a script that was hashed out months ago by the GOP. Step one is to gut FCC oversight authority over one of the least-competitive sectors in American industry by killing the privacy protections, walking back net neutrality, and dismantling the FCC's 2015 decision to classify ISPs as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. From there, the plan is to shovel any remaining oversight of giant broadband duopolies to an FTC Blackburn (and the ISPs that adore her) know is ill suited to provide meaningful, real oversight.
It’s a fraud. The FTC doesn’t have rule-making authority. They’ve got enforcement authority and their enforcement authority is whether or not something is unfair or deceptive. And the FTC has to worry about everything from computer chips to bleach labeling. Of course, carriers want [telecom issues] to get lost in that morass. This was the strategy all along.
With the attacks on net neutrality and privacy becoming politically toxic, it's highly unlikely that Blackburn's proposal sees any serious support among Democrats. And because it actually would wind up expanding regulatory authority over "edge providers" (Netflix, Google, other content companies), it's not likely to see support among many Republicans, either. According to a joint statement made under the umbrella of the Internet Association, internet companies like Google, Netflix, and Twitter also oppose the new law:
We, along with a broad swath of the American economy, are aware of the BROWSER Act and are tracking the proposal. This bill has the potential to upend the consumer experience online and stifle innovation. Policymakers must recognize that websites and apps continue to be under strict FTC privacy enforcement and are not in an enforcement gap, unlike other stakeholders in the ecosystem.
This is all an arguably bizarre move for a politician that has shown, time and time again, that her very top priority is always the interest of giant ISPs like Comcast and AT&T -- coincidentally her top campaign contributors. Blackburn, who supported SOPA, has pushed legislation repeatedly trying to kill net neutrality under the banner of "restoring freedom." She's also gone out of her way to defend AT&T and Comcast's efforts to pass state-level protectionist laws hindering competition, which is a major reason her home state of Tennesee is one of the least connected states in the nation.
And this new privacy legislation -- which again expands regulation of internet content companies -- is also strange for a lawmaker that has consistently insisted over the years that "regulating the internet" kills innovation:
Which brings us to the multi-million-dollar question: if Blackburn is such an obvious servant to the interests of telecom duopolies, why is she pushing a law that would add regulatory burdens on both ISPs and content companies alike?
As the ACLU was quick to note in their review of the bill, the biggest goal appears to be to preempt a lot of the state and city regulations that have been popping up all over the country in response to the killing of the FCC's rules. More than 17 states have introduced privacy broadband rules in the wake of the death of the FCC rules, and whatever loophole-filled final draft Blackburn submits would be certain to preempt these already tougher protections:
In some cases, state legislation being considered is stronger than what would have been required under the FCC rules. For example, in New Hampshire, a bipartisan bill would prohibit providers from offering discounts to individuals who waive their privacy rights – something the ACLU urged but the FCC declined to do in its rules. Many states have also pressed for limits on not just the use but also the collection of information.
...Skepticism of Rep. Blackburn’s motives is also warranted given her voting history. Rep. Blackburn introduced the legislation to gut the FCC rules. If she had truly been interested in creating parity between the privacy standards applied to edge and internet providers, she could and should have worked to strengthen and replace the rules. Instead, she irresponsibly pushed for reversal of the rules, leaving an enormous privacy gap. Introduction of this legislation, which thus far shows no indication that it will become law and could easily be watered-down, does not remedy this reckless act."
Indeed, killing these state-level privacy protections does appear to be a top GOP priority after the March vote to kill the FCC rules. FCC majority Commissioners Ajit Pai and Mike O'Rielly have already said they plan to somehow prevent states from imposing such protections. You're to ignore that Pai and Blackburn have argued that anti-competitive protectionist laws written by the likes of AT&T are a "states' rights" issue, but now when states are looking to actually protect consumers it's a bridge too far.
But the primary reason Blackburn is pushing this proposal is that she knows it has absolutely no chance of passing, but may provide PR cover for her increasingly-obvious, duopoly-favoring telecom policy proposals ahead of the 2018 elections. Blackburn has been hammered in recent months via giant billboard ads purchased by activists criticizing her privacy sell out in her home state of Tennessee. There's nothing particularly subtle about the campaign:
Either way it's a win/win for Blackburn. If it passes, Blackburn's friends at AT&T and Comcast will ensure it's crafted to be aggressively weaker than state-level laws, overseen by an FTC they know won't have the authority, funding or time to actually police the subject. If it doesn't pass, it still functions as a marketing message designed to try and convince the voters that Blackburn isn't the anti-consumer Comcast coddler her voting record and campaign contributions clearly show she is.
We've been talking about Australian politicians' odd obsession with passing ever more draconian data retention rules for years now. As you may recall, the politicians pushing for this appeared to have absolutely no clue what it actually entailed. Just a few months ago, we wrote about reports about how Australia's data retention laws had been abused to spy on journalists and their sources. While some parts of the law went into effect a year and a half ago, it appears some parts just went into effect a few weeks ago. These new rules require every ISP to retain metadata on all online communications for at least two years. And... it took just about two weeks before the Australian Federal Police (AFP) were forced to admit that it had used the info to spy on journalists (again). They insist this was a mistake, of course.
"Earlier this week, the AFP self-reported to the Commonwealth Ombudsman that we had breached the Telecommunications Interception Act. The breach ... related to an investigator who sought and was provided access to the call records of a journalist without the prior authority of a journalist information warrant," AFP Commissioner Andrew Colvin said on Friday afternoon.
"No investigational activity has occurred as a result of us being provided with that material. Put simply, this was human error. It should not have occurred, the AFP take this very seriously, and we take full responsibility for a breach in the Act. I also want to say there was no ill will, malice, or bad intent by the officers involved who breached the Act. Quite simply, it was a mistake that should not have happened."
Even if this truly was an accident, it highlights why mandatory data retention is so dangerous. That information will be accessed, and not always for good reasons. There's a reason why we don't allow law enforcement to search our stuff willy nilly without a warrant, and mandatory data retention completely flips this whole concept on its head for no good reason. Such information will almost always be abused -- and sometimes pretty damn quickly after it's available.
