Cohen Payment Kerfuffle Forces AT&T To Be Slightly More Transparent About Lobbying

from the sunlight-is-the-best-disinfectant dept

Though it kind of flew under the radar given countless other scandals, you might recall how Trump fixer and former lawyer Michael Cohen was also busted selling access to the President. One of the companies involved in this particular aspect of Cohen's grift was AT&T, which was found to have doled out $600,000 to Cohen, presumably under the belief that it would gain additional access and influence.

AT&T's received more than a few favors in the Trump administration since, including an FCC willing to self-immolate on lobbyist demand, and the death of both broadband privacy and net neutrality rules at the agency. Not to mention the Trump tax cuts, which netted AT&T more than $20 billion up front, and at least $3 billion in savings annually in perpetuity. And while the Trump DOJ did sue to thwart the AT&T Time Warner merger, that may have had more to do with Trump's close ties to Rupert Murdoch -- and Trump's disdain for CNN -- than any animosity toward AT&T.

Aside from AT&T throwing top policy man Bob Quinn under the bus for behavior AT&T has engaged in for years, AT&T saw little to nothing in the form of accountability. Amusingly, the little accountability they did witness came courtesy of AT&T's own investors. After the Cohen fiasco highlighted the secretive costs of AT&T's influence machine, some investors pushed AT&T for more transparency. The company recently responded by providing marginally more insight into the vast network of groups and organizations AT&T routinely pays to support its (usually anticompetitive and anti-consumer) policies:

"For the first time, AT&T is divulging some contributions to outside groups that keep their donors secret, providing a fuller, if still incomplete, picture of the Dallas-based telecom giant's vast spending on state and federal politics. A new report released by the company details payments totaling about $4.2 million to industry groups and think tanks that was used for lobbying during a portion of last year.

...The disclosure is the product of a years-long shareholder campaign and allows AT&T to avoid a proxy fight at its April 26 annual shareholder meeting. For the past five years, AT&T had advised investors to vote against nonbinding proposals asking for a report on lobby payments to outside groups.

Even with this slightly more transparent filing, AT&T's payment to Cohen (or the subsequent Barcelona meeting AT&T had with Ajit Pai pre-appointment) would still not have been voluntarily disclosed. That said, it's worth noting that AT&T's report on lobbying expenditures for the first half of 2018 reveal AT&T's funding of several of the telecom-industry-backed lobbying and policy organizations currently under law enforcement scrutiny for their role in those fake net neutrality comments that plagued the net neutrality repeal:

"In a recently released report covering the first six months of 2018, AT&T includes payments used for lobbying to more than 40 outside groups, including two — Broadband for America and the Taxpayer Protection Alliance — that have been subpoenaed by the New York attorney general as part of an ongoing investigation into millions of fake public comments on the FCC's net neutrality proposal."

Granted this is still just a drop in the bucket. As the attacks on net neutrality made pretty clear, AT&T has mastered the dark lobbying art of creating illusory support for what's usually unpopular policy using an ocean of co-opted groups and financially conflicted former and current politicians, happy to parrot AT&T missives in Tweets, editorials, and PR campaigns with nary a financial disclosure. AT&T's lobbyists routinely fail to register as lobbyists, and many telecom sector lobbyists skirt lobbying disclosure rules by simply... pretending they do something else.

That said, while American lobbying and disclosure guidelines are still the legal equivalent of damp cardboard, it's nice to see that the Cohen kerfuffle at least forced AT&T to be more transparent, however marginally.

Filed Under: lobbying, michael cohen, transparency
Companies: at&t

T-Mobile Still Pretending That Staying At Trump's DC Hotel Isn't An Obvious Ploy To Gain Merger Approval

from the nothing-to-see-here dept

In a letter responding to Congressional inquiry, T-Mobile has confirmed that the company dramatically ramped up its patronage of Trump's hotel in DC as it sought regulatory approval of its $26 billion merger with Sprint. A copy of the letter, obtained by the Washington Post, makes it clear that the company spent upwards of $195,000 at the property since it originally announced the telecom industry's latest megadeal last April. That was a dramatic shift from the period of time before the deal was announced:

"T-Mobile’s patronage of President Trump’s Washington hotel increased sharply after the announcement of its merger with its Sprint last April, with executives spending about $195,000 at the property since then, the company told congressional Democrats in a letter last month. Before news of the megadeal between rival companies broke on April 29, 2018, the company said, only two top officials from T-Mobile had ever stayed at Trump’s hotel, with one overnight stay each in August 2017.

T-Mobile has also hired former Trump ally Corey Lewandowski and former FCC Commissioners Robert McDowell and Mignon Clyburn to "consult" on the deal and grease the wheels of approval. T-Mobile CEO John Legere has consistently tried to play this obvious attempt at pandering to Trump as just unrelated happenstance:

Amusingly, Legere built his entire brand on being a "no bullshit" alternative to AT&T and Verizon. Yet here we are.

As Legere has attempted to sell the press, public, and regulators on the deal, he's adopted many of his competitors' worst habits. It's been clearly documented in countries like Canada or Ireland that when you reduce the total number of major wireless competitors from four to three, it results in dramatically higher rates as the incentive to compete on price is proportionally reduced. Such telecom mergers almost always result in significant layoffs as redundant positions are eliminated. Wall Street predicts T-Mobile's merger will be no different, eliminating anywhere between 10,000 and 30,000 jobs.

This is not alien territory. In US telecom, these megadeals almost uniformly make the sector worse, as your wallet can attest. Yet both Sprint and T-Mobile execs have engaged in the same old game of Charlie Brown and Lucy football, breathlessly insisting that this deal will somehow be different. At the same time, execs continue to pretend that kissing Trump's ass by staying at his DC hotel isn't an obvious lobbying strategy for the company:

"While we understand that staying at Trump properties might be viewed positively by some and negatively by others, we are confident that the relevant agencies address the questions before them on the merits," (T-Mobile) wrote.

That makes one of you. The Trump FCC has been a glorified rubber stamp for absolutely every pipe dream telecom lobbyists can cook up, be it killing popular net neutrality rules (something Legere supported) or literally weakening the definition of the word "competitive" to make life easier on the sector's biggest players. While the DOJ is less certain (though still sounding likely from what I've heard), there's zero doubt that the FCC will rubber stamp this merger, likely piggybacking on T-Mobile's (false) tailor-made claims that the deal is essential if the United States doesn't want to "fall behind" in the "race to 5G."

Once Legere gets done bullshitting his way to merger approval, he'll have to quickly pivot back again to pretending he's the "no bullshit" alternative to the other major wireless carriers. But of course as just one of three remaining competitors, history has shown us time and time again how T-Mobile will have less incentive than ever to seriously compete on price, and will, sooner or later, come to resemble AT&T and Verizon in all the wrong ways.

Filed Under: donald trump, john legere, lobbying, merger, trump hotel, washington dc
Companies: sprint, t-mobile

Article 13 Supporters Find Smoking Gun That Isn't: Majority Of Tweets Criticizing Copyright Directive Are Not Coming From DC

from the flop dept

Volker Rieck runs a German anti-piracy operation, and over the last year or so has been an increasingly vocal -- if somewhat unhinged -- supporter of Article 13 and the EU Copyright Directive. I won't link, but a few quick Google searches will find some examples of Rieck trying to build out conspiracy theories of big giant American internet companies secretly running the entirety of the anti-Article 13 push in Europe. You could say that some of them dip into red yarn on a corkboard territory. Of course, as we've discussed before, the idea that any attacks on Article 13 are all really because of Google has been a key part of the pro-Article 13 lobbying strategy from the beginning. Of course, as we've highlighted, if you look at the actual lobbying, it's been almost entirely from legacy copyright organizations, with very little coming from the internet industry. This has created all sorts of conspiracy theories, including the crazy claim by a German MEP that he knew the emails he was getting against Article 13 were really astroturf from Google... because many of the senders had Gmail accounts.

Rieck's latest move, however, goes into really nutty territory. In a now deleted story, Rieck claimed to have found something of a smoking gun, proving that Article 13 criticism was really being driven by US corporate interests: in a "study" that he helped "conduct," and resulted in him sending an explosive "warning" letter to Members of the EU Parliament, he claimed to have uncovered that "more tweets (88,000) came from Washington (DC) alone than from the entire EU (71,000)." That would certainly be interesting if it were true.

The problem with that claim? It's not even close to true. It is based on Rieck not fully understanding the software they used to do this analysis, called Talkwalker. Luca Hammer initially called into question the use of Talkwalker (while our own Glyn Moody had called out another big problem with the data used in the study months ago). But the biggest issue was this: Talkwalker itself admits that if users haven't turned on location tracking on Twitter, then it just "guesses" their location based on a few factors -- with a fallback being language. And, if there are no other indicators of location, Talkwalker will associate all English tweets with being in Washington DC, i.e., the capital of the largest country where English is the primary language.

In other words, what looks like a grand conspiracy of a bot sending tweets about EU copyright policy out of the lobbying den of Washington DC, actually appears to be some pro-copyright maximalists completely misunderstanding the tool they were using to do an analysis. Not a good look.

Of course, some of the supporters of Article 13, like IMPALA Music have continued tweeting this "study" despite it being totally debunked, but I guess that's to be expected.

In the meantime, as law professor Annemarie Bridy correctly points out, even if this is about legislation for the EU, it's crazy to think that people in the US have no stake in the outcome. First off, EU legislation can reach well beyond the borders of the EU and into the US: witness GDPR and the Right to be Forgotten (remember, in France, they've been arguing that the RTBF, as applied in the EU, must be global in nature). Second, as we've seen for decades, copyright maximalists push ever more crazy copyright policies in one region of the world, and then demand "harmonization" elsewhere, pushing that the same rules be applied in other places. Going to Europe to get a crazy copyright law put in place, and then rushing back to the US to demand matching laws is not a new idea. It's literally how we got the DMCA in the first place.

So, no, the criticism of Article 13 is not being driven by some sneaky campaign out of Washington DC, but that also doesn't mean that American voices shouldn't be able to participate in a debate that will undoubtedly impact us and the internet we use.

Filed Under: article 13, eu, eu copyright directive, germany, lobbying, talkwalker, tweets, volker rieck

AT&T Throwing FundRaiser For Senate Chair Ahead Of Privacy Hearings

from the nothing-to-see-here dept

Scandal after scandal after scandal has resulted in many finally realizing that the United States is likely going to have to craft at least some basic privacy guidelines moving forward. The problem: with so many justly wary of Congressional Luddites screwing it up, and so many wealthy industries lobbying jointly to try and weaken the potential guidelines, this isn't going to be a pretty process. If we come out of it with anything even closely resembling a decent privacy law for the digital age (one that doesn't make things worse) we'll be very fortunate.

But it's hard to craft much of any meaningful privacy rules when Congress is so grotesquely beholden to the industries they're supposed to be holding accountable. That was made pretty obvious when the telecom sector lobbied to kill some basic FCC privacy guidelines the FCC had approved before they could even take effect back in 2017. Those rules simply required that ISPs be transparent about what data is being collected and who it would be sold to, something that could have proven extremely useful in the wake of these revelations of carriers selling your location data to any and every nitwit in America.

And as Congress begins holding public hearings to contemplate what privacy rules should look like, telecom giants like AT&T are again likely to have an outsized influence on what those laws will likely look like. For example, AT&T and other telecom giants will be holding a fundraiser for Senator Roger Wicker, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, the night before a major hearing on privacy regulations:

"According to the invitation for Tuesday’s fundraiser, which will be supporting a group backing Wicker’s reelection called RFW PAC, it costs $1,500 to attend the event as a guest, $2,500 to attend as a sponsor and $5,000 to co-host. The next day Wicker’s committee will hold its first hearing of the new Congress on crafting comprehensive data privacy legislation — a key issue for the telecom industry."

The fact that a huge swath of folks don't see a problem here speaks to how Sisyphean the effort for meaningful privacy rules is going to be. Like so many problems (like health care or broadband availability), you can't actually fix the problem until you address government corruption. And you can't fix government corruption until you address lobbying reform. And you can't fix lobbying reform thanks to... lobbying. It would be funny in a Keystone-cops-esque way if the end result wasn't so repeatedly and painfully tragic.

AT&T is, you'll recall, a company busted charging broadband users $500 more per year just to opt-out of snoopvertising, effectively making privacy a luxury option available only to those who can afford it. It's the same company busted selling user location data to shady middlemen, covertly modifying user packets to track users around the internet, and with a long, deep history of not only sucking up to the NSA and spying on Americans, but also advising the government on how best to tap dance around existing wiretap and privacy laws.

Again, AT&T is the very last company you want having any additional leverage when it comes to crafting meaningful privacy law. Especially given that this Wednesday's hearing is already missing any objective experts or consumer groups in the testimony lineup. And yet they're likely to have more of an impact on what our looming new privacy law looks like than probably any other companies short of Apple, Facebook, and Google.

Filed Under: fundraiser, lobbying, privacy, roger wicker, soft corruption
Companies: at&t

German Politician Thinks Gmail Constituent Messages Are All Faked By Google

from the not-how-it-works dept

Christopher Clay alerts us to the latest Google Derangement Syndrome from an EU Bureaucrat. Last year, we noted that various EU politicians kept insisting that all of the complaints about their awful plan were due to Google lobbying and astroturfing -- when the reality showed that nearly all of the lobbying came from legacy copyright players.

However, German MEP Sven Schulze must have thought he was really on to something in claiming he had real proof of Google astroturfing. In a tweet (in German) he claimed that because all of the complaints he's getting seem to come from people with Gmail addresses, it's proof of fakery. No, really. Here's a translation (courtesy of Google, of course) of his tweet:

Now coming back every second of messages about # upload filter & # Article 13 pure. Apart from the fact that these contents are not correct, ALL come from # Gmail accounts. 🤔Man # google , I know that you are angry, but ye have this # fake really necessary action?

Really now? Perhaps Schultze is unaware that (as of the most recent public stats), Gmail is used by 1.5 billion people. These days, it's pretty typical for lots and lots of people to use Gmail as their personal (and often professional) email address. To claim that seeing Gmail emails proves Google is astroturfing is... nutty. And, it would appear that Schulze's followers recognize just how idiotic this looks.

How do you say ratioed in German?

And many of those 4.5 thousand replies are ruthlessly mocking him for being completely clueless.

I'm guessing he'll blame Google for all those replies as well?

Filed Under: article 13, bots, copyright, email, eu, eu copyright directive, gmail, lobbying, sven schulze

The Revolving Door Spins Hard: FCC's Clyburn Now Lobbying For T-Mobile

from the pivot-on-a-dime dept

If you hadn't noticed by now, U.S. lobbying restrictions are the legislative and police equivalent of damp, musty cardboard. While there are some basic guidelines in place, they're so filled with loopholes as to be largely useless. One of the bigger problems is the far-too-generous definition of lobbyist we currently employ, which lets lobbyists tap dance around disclosure rules if they just... pretend they're doing something else.

One case in point is Comcast's top lobbyist David Cohen, who routinely lobbies the government, but tap dances around the rules by calling himself the company's Chief Diversity Officer. Lobbying rules updated in 2007 require that if an employee spends more than 20% of their time lobbying in DC, they have to register with the government as a lobbyist. As such, folks like Cohen just call what they're doing something else, usually obfuscating their lobbying under what superficially appear to be more altruistic endeavors that often involve lobbying state and more local officials outside of DC.

Since US rules prevent regulators and Senators from immediately jumping into direct lobbying for the first year or two post-government, they'll often just call themselves "consultants" or "advisors" as they help their new clients lobby the government. Case in point: recently departed FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn this week announced that she'd be "advising" T-Mobile as the company tries to gain regulatory approval for its job and competition-eroding megamerger with Sprint:

"I’m advising T-Mobile and Sprint as it seeks to accelerate the creation of an inclusive nationwide 5G network on how to best build a bridge across the digital divide,” Clyburn told Politico.

Clyburn left her post last year, telling media outlets at the time she would “be a better public servant not serving on the FCC."

The move caught the consumer advocacy and activist community by surprise, given Clyburn's support of net neutrality (which T-Mobile opposed), and the solid work she did at the FCC trying to rein in an utterly broken prison telco monopoly. While T-Mobile and Sprint have tried to claim that the merger will somehow speed up America's quest for faster 5G networks (a claim Clyburn's clearly piggybacking on), they themselves have even acknowledged that's not really true.

Let's be real: Clyburn's there to help T-Mobile seal the deal via concessions. Concessions that aren't likely to actually thwart the most harmful impacts of the deal, particularly the 10,000 to 30,000 jobs that are expected to be cut as the combined company streamlines operations and inevitably eliminates redundant retail, support, and middle management positions. And concessions that the FCC probably won't enforce anyway, especially in the wake of the telecom lobby and T-Mobile having successfully convinced the Pai FCC to effectively neuter its oversight authority over the broken telecom sector.

Here in reality, T-Mobile's quest for regulatory approval for its merger hasn't been going particularly well. Every single consumer group has warned that the deal will consolidate an already troubled wireless sector, reducing the number of major wireless carriers from four to three -- dramatically reducing an already muted incentive to actually compete on price. Americans already pay some of the highest prices for wireless and fixed broadband among all developed nations, and the idea that more consolidation and fewer competitors will somehow fix this is simply not supported by factual data or reality:

"“This is not that complicated,” Fight For the Future Executive Director Evan Greer told Motherboard.

“More centralization and less competition isn't good for anyone except wealthy CEOs of telecom companies,” Greer said. “Telecom lobbyists have a long history of pretending that their policy goals are somehow magically aligned with helping the downtrodden, but it's a lie. This merger will mean more expensive, crappier cell phone plans, and hit the people who can least afford it the hardest."

Clyburn may have done some important work while at the FCC, but that doesn't mitigate the fact that revolving door regulation is highly corrosive.

FCC Commissioners have a long proud history of claiming to represent the public (once in a great while even actually doing so!), then shuffling off to lobby for telecom operators who'll actively make the problem (limited competition, high prices, terrible customer service) worse. Former FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell was already on T-Mobile's payroll, telling anybody who'll listen this merger will be "great for America." Former FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker quickly hopped from the FCC to lobbyist spots in both the wireless sector and at Comcast. Former FCC boss Mike Powell is now the chief of the cable industry's biggest lobbying operation, the NCTA.

Efforts to actually fix the very broken US broadband sector are routinely derailed by revolving door lobbyists. And any efforts to shore up our flimsy lobbying guidelines are quickly derailed by those same dollar per holler influence peddlers. Across countless sectors we're stuck in a catch 22 where meaningful progress is routinely thwarted until public anger finally boils over, and the United States finally acknowledges it has a very real problem that will require more than just routine grumbling to resolve.

Filed Under: fcc, lobbying, mergers, mignon clyburn, revolving door, soft corruption
Companies: sprint, t-mobile

Revolving Doors And Regulatory Capture Are Ensuring E-Voting Remains An Insecure Mess

from the we're-from-the-government-and-we're-here-to-secure-corporate-boardroom-p dept

Despite the long list of bad news generated by electronic voting machines, their market share only continues to grow. Rather than consider them the attack vectors they are, state and county legislators have decided to toss caution and paper ballots to the wind. The future is now. And it's riddled with vulnerabilities.

Maybe there shouldn't be a rush to digitize the democratic process, at least not while manufacturers are still shipping machines pre-loaded with security flaws and inadequate software. The push for e-voting machine deployment isn't organic, of course. It's an organized push that starts with the machines' manufacturers and ends in regulatory capture.

Sue Halpern has exposed the paper trail connect voting machine manufacturers to ill-advised rollouts in her article for the New Yorker. The heaviest pushes target legislatures that make purchasing calls for the entire state. Most states allow the decision to be made at the county level, which decreases the chance the entire state will be affected by voting machine hacking or malfunctions. But in states like Georgia and Delaware, a successful pitch to the state legislature can mean hundreds of millions of dollars in sales.

The pay-for-play begins in the usual way: paid junkets that take state advisory boards to major cities for the usual wine/dine/schmooze-fests with all expenses paid. An investigation by McClatchy showed the Governor Brian Kemp's chief of staff, David Dove, attended an event held by voting machine manufacturer ES&S (Election Systems & Software) -- timed impeccably to capture the state's $100 million voting machine market. To the surprise of no one, the state's election commission decided to award ES&S this contract. But it had to do so over the voices of non-purchased stakeholders who saw nothing good in replacing one faulty e-voting machine with a similarly faulty product.

In doing so, the panel rejected the advice of computer scientists and election-integrity advocates, who consider hand-marked ballots to be the “most reliable record of voter intent,” and also the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, which recommended that all states adopt paper ballots and conduct post-election audits.

This continued the proud Georgia tradition of voting machine vendor cross-pollination in the state legislature, which kicked off almost a two decades ago. In 2002, Diebold secured a $54 million contract to provide the state with voting machines. Diebold's lobbyist was a former Georgia state official. When problems developed, ES&S stepped in, killing off legislation addressing election integrity issues and capturing a very key demographic.

In 2006, a bill requiring a verifiable paper record of each ballot, introduced in the Georgia legislature at the urging of election-integrity advocates, failed after the state’s elections director, Kathy Rogers, opposed it. Rogers, of course, later went to work for E.S. & S.

Another legislator took an extended trip through the lawmaker/lobbyist revolving door. Charles Harper went from sod farmer to state rep to lobbyist for ES&S before ending up as the deputy chief of staff in Governor Brian Kemp's office. Brian Kemp, of course, spent the last election hastily patching voting machine vulnerabilities following the exposure of flaws, blaming the Democratic Party for the alleged hack, doxxing absentee voters, and, finally, overseeing voting integrity operations of an election he participated in.

Congress has tried to fix this problem… multiple times. It opened this year's session with a 571-page bill full of reforms and paper ballot mandates. The problem is previous attempts to install these reforms have failed after receiving pushback from state officials. Voting machine vendors are focusing on states and counties, where the decisions (and purchases) are made. And it's working.

Last year, the Democratic congressman Bennie Thompson, of Mississippi, proposed the Election Security Act; a year before, the Republican Mark Meadows, the chair of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, introduced the Paper Act, which was endorsed by the former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and by Grover Norquist, the president of the conservative organization Americans for Tax Reform. The Senate’s attempt to reform election practices, last year’s Secure Elections Act, had bipartisan support, too, but was killed by the White House before it got out of committee.

You can't remove money from politics and you can't banish lobbyists from petitioning on the behalf of the causes and corporations they represent. But you can oust politicians who prefer corporations to constituents. Changes can be made and it all starts with those who serve their own interests rather than the public's. Shining a light on regulatory capture is the first step.

Filed Under: brian kemp, e-voting, georgia, lobbying, regulatory capture

There Was Heavy Tech Lobbying On Article 13... From The Company Hoping To Sell Everyone The Filters

from the lobbyist-influence dept

One of the key themes we've been hearing for years now concerning the EU's awful Article 13 section of the EU Copyright Directive, was that no one should pay any attention at all to the critics of Article 13, because it's all just "big tech lobbying" behind any of the criticism. In the past, we highlighted a few of these claims:

Here's Geoff Taylor from BPI:

The US tech lobby has been using its enormous reach and resources to try to whip up an alarmist campaign...

And here's Richard Ashcroft from PRS for Music:

the Internet giants... have whipped up a social media storm of misinformation about the proposed changes in order to preserve their current advantage.

And how about UK Music's Michael Dugher who really wants to blame Google for everything:

Some absolute rubbish has been written about the EU’s proposed changes on copyright rules.

Amongst the ludicrous suggestions from the likes of Google is the claim that the shake-up will mean the end of memes, remixes and other user-generated content. Some have said that it will mean ‘censorship’ and even wildly predicted it will result in the ‘death of the internet’.

This is desperate and dishonest. Whilst some of the myths are repeated by people who remain blissfully untroubled by the technical but crucially important details of the proposed EU changes, in the worst cases this propaganda is being cynically pedalled by big tech like Google’s YouTube with a huge vested and multi-million-pound interest in this battle.

However, as we wrote about back in December, an analysis that looked at the actual lobbying efforts around copyright in the EU found that it was done overwhelmingly by the legacy copyright industries, and only sparingly by the tech companies. In that post, I went through a spreadsheet looking at the lobbying of the EU Commission, and found that over 80% of the meetings were from the entertainment industry.

However, as is coming out now, there was definitely one "tech" company that was one of the most aggressive lobbyists on Article 13. However, it was lobbying in favor of it, and that's because it knew that Article 13 would lead to an artificial, but highly inflated demand for internet filters. And that's the company known for building the filtering technology behind nearly all of the non-ContentID copyright filters: Audible Magic.

Law professor Annemarie Bridy recently posted a detailed Twitter thread of Audible Magic's lobbying activities regarding Article 13. It's easy to see why the company did so, because the law, if put into effect, would be a huge, huge benefit for Audible Magic, more or less forcing nearly every internet platform of a decent size to have to purchase Audible Magic's technology. Indeed, in the run-up to Article 13, we heard directly from policymakers in the EU who would point to Audible Magic as "proof" that filtering technology was readily available for not much money and that it worked. Neither of these claims are accurate.

On the fees, Audible Magic has a public pricing page that has been frequently pointed out by supporters of Article 13, often with the claim "fees start as low as $1,000 per month." But... that's not accurate. The $1,000 only applies to "on device" databases. Hosted databases start at $2,000 per month, which is already double that... and the $2,000 per month only covers very low levels of usage. Indeed, the usage rates are so low that it's unlikely to think that any company that used Audible Magic at that rate would be making very much (if any) money at all -- meaning that relatively speaking, Audible Magic would be a huge margin killer. And the rates quickly go up from there. Indeed, on Audible Magic's pricing page, as soon as you get to a level that one might consider "sustainable" for a business, the prices become "contact us."

A few years back I spoke with one mid-sized streaming company, who told me Audible Magic was quoting them fees that were between $30,000 to $60,000 per month. An academic paper from 2017 found pricing to be slightly lower than what I had heard, but still quite expensive:

Commercial fingerprinting and filtering services, such as Audible Magic and Vobile, do not publicly release pricing. But we can guess at the ballpark: one medium-sized file hosting service reported that its license for Audible Magic filtering cost $10,000-12,000 per month in 2011 (though this provider was later able to negotiate a reduced rate based on the amount of content flagged through the system). Another estimated that Audible Magic cost its service roughly $25,000 per month. OSPs noted that the licensing fees are just the beginning. Filtering systems, several OSPs noted, are not turnkey services. They require integration with existing systems and upkeep as the OSP takes on new mediation roles between rightsholder and user (such as tracking and managing user appeals).

In other words, those things get really pricey quickly -- such that it becomes untenable for all but the largest of service providers.

And that leads us to the second part, about whether or not they work. As we've been detailing for years, the answer is clearly no. These fingerprinting technologies make both false positive and false negative errors all the time. We probably have a few examples sent our way every single day. Incredibly, the very lobbying video that Bridy points out Audible Magic created as part of its lobbying effort says that Audible Magic's technology is accurate to about 99%.

Last summer, we highlighted that Alec Muffett created a "simulator" that would look at the the error rates on such filtering technology -- and it noted that if you went with an accuracy level of 99.5% (higher than even Audible Magic claims) and ran it across 10 million pieces of content, you'd end up censoring approximately 50,000 pieces of content that were non-infringing. 50,000. And that's assuming the technology is even more accurate than even Audible Magic will claim.

And, of course, that's solely discussing the matching accuracy. It says absolutely nothing about understanding user rights -- like fair use, fair dealing, parody, etc -- none of which Audible Magic takes into account (meaning even more non-infringing works would get censored).

And, yet, as Bridy shows, Audible Magic has been lobbying hard for this:

It's not surprising that they'd lobby for such a thing. I mean, which company wouldn't lobby for a new law that would effectively require thousands of internet companies to buy your product for which there is little to no real competition (oh yeah, which almost certainly means Audible Magic would likely raise prices once the government required everyone to buy its filters).

Bridy highlights that their lobbying claims are complete bullshit as well:

Quite incredible that they highlight the "voluntary" nature of the filters while lobbying for making their technology required under law. And equally ridiculous that they claim that intermediary liability protections some how create "barriers" for online services. That, as Bridy points out, is exactly the opposite of reality. Safe harbors create clear rules that platforms understand so they know what they need to do to set up a legit platform. Removing those rules, as Article 13 does, and requiring expensive (and terrible) technology is a huge barrier, as the cost is prohibitive for most.

There's more in that thread, but as Bridy shows, Audible Magic's own presentation shows that it knows who the "winner" of Article 13 will be: Audible Magic inserting itself to become the de facto "copyright filter" layer of the internet:

So, yeah, there was some "tech" lobbying for Article 13 and its mandatory filters. It was just coming from the biggest supplier of those filters.

Filed Under: article 13, censorship, copyright, eu, eu copyright directive, filters, lobbying, mistakes
Companies: audible magic

Trump Hotel Fracas Highlights How T-Mobile's Consumer-Friendly Brand Schtick Is Wearing A Little Thin

from the ill-communication dept

To be clear, T-Mobile initially had an indisputably-positive impact on the wireless sector. The company's decision to eliminate consumer pain points like long-term contracts and early termination fees was quickly mirrored by other carriers thanks to a strange concept known as "competition." And CEO John Legere's relentless attacks on giants like AT&T and Verizon have proven to be immensely entertaining over the years. All told, T-Mobile has built its entire brand on the back of the idea that it was a polar opposite of the type of ethically-dubious giants that have dominated telecom for a generation.

In more recent years the company's "uncarrier" branding schtick has started to look a little worn around the edges. From supporting efforts to kill net neutrality to weirdly attacking the EFF, the company occasionally lets its mask slip, showing it's not all that different from the companies it professes to be better than. This shift has been particularly obvious as the company has tried to sell the press, public, and Trump administration on the company's job and competition killing merger with Sprint (like that time it hired Corey Lewandowski to "consult" despite his comments mocking a kid with Down Syndrome).

As it rushes to consolidate the wireless sector from four to three carriers, T-Mobile's increasingly engaging in behavior it used to mock AT&T and Verizon for. Not least of which being the company's empty promises to police the sale of user location data to dubious third brokers and aggregators, something T-Mobile was perfectly happy to do in lock-step with other carriers.

That brings us to this week's revelations that T-Mobile executives booked 9 rooms at Trump's DC hotel the day after it first announced its Sprint merger ambitions. T-Mobile execs have been regular patrons ever since as they try to sell the government on the latest telecom sector megadeal nobody asked for:

"T-Mobile executives have returned to President Trump’s hotel repeatedly since then, according to eyewitnesses and hotel documents obtained by The Washington Post.

By mid-June, seven weeks after the announcement of the merger, hotel records indicated that one T-Mobile executive was making his 10th visit to the hotel. Legere appears to have made at least four visits to the Trump hotel, walking the lobby in his T-Mobile gear."

The Post had been digging into this story for months. When they recently confronted Legere in the lobby of Trump's hotel he tried to claim his patronage was thanks to the "convenience" and "security" Trump's hotel offered:

"Last week, a Post reporter spotted Legere in the Trump hotel’s lobby. In an impromptu interview, the T-Mobile chief executive said he was not seeking special treatment. He chose the Trump hotel, he said, for its fine service and good security.

"It’s become a place I feel very comfortable,” Legere said. He also praised the hotel’s location, next to one of the departments that must approve the company’s merger. "At the moment I am in town for some meetings at the Department of Justice,” Legere said. “And it’s very convenient for that."

Legere has historically built his brand on the idea that he's part of a straight shooting, no bullshit alternative to traditionally sketchy telecom operators. Yet here he is pretty clearly assuming a major media outlet and his Twitter followers are stupid. Legere took to Twitter to similarly proclaim there's just no way that his heavy sudden patronage of a Trump business could possibly influence the Trump administration's policy making decisions:

Right. There's just no way that giving additional money and attention to a raging narcissist's brand could possibly shape the thinking of such an influence-immune administration, right? Again, the assumption here appears to be that we're collectively fairly dim, especially given the ample coverage of the emoluments battle currently being waged. T-Mobile went from insisting it didn't engage in the same "bullshit" as AT&T and T-Mobile, to quickly becoming arguably indistinguishable when it comes to pandering for governmental favors.

To be fair, this was a situation Legere was likely forced into. T-Mobile's owner Deutsche Telekom has been eager to exit the U.S. wireless market for years, putting Legere in the unenviable position of having to shift from playing an edgy Millennial caricature to selling a mammoth turd. Still, the amount of bullshit Legere's been pushing to sell the merger is pretty comical, ranging from claims that eliminating one of just four major competitors will magically increase competition, to claims the deal will create thousands of jobs (despite the fact that Wall Street, and history, predict the exact opposite).

There are, of course, fifty years of history documenting how these kinds of mergers generally raise rates, erode jobs, and reduce service quality as consolidation reduces the incentive to compete. It's the exact cause of the problem Legere has spent the last ten years ranting about. Despite this, opposition to this deal has been slow to materialize, though New York and California regulators are just starting to have some doubts as to whether this deal will even remotely deliver a fraction of its promised "synergies."

All told, T-Mobile in its earlier incarnations applied some very useful pressure on a stale, historically anti-consumer wireless sector, even if its impact on price competition has probably been overstated by the press. But as T-Mobile stumbles further and further down the rabbit hole in its bid to kiss Trump's ass and get its merger approved, it's starting to look more and more like the companies' T-Mobile has spent years making fun of. Should the deal be approved and competitive pressure proportionally reduced, you can expect this metamorphosis away from T-Mobile's consumer-friendly roots to rapidly accelerate.

Filed Under: corruption, donald trump, emoluments, john legere, lobbying, merger, trump hotel, uncarrier
Companies: t-mobile