AT&T Says The Real Problem With The Internet Is We Pay Too Much Attention To Giant ISPs

from the ill-communication dept

As Silicon Valley giants like Google and Facebook face all manner of (justified) regulatory scrutiny, telecom has been able to somehow remove itself from the conversation, despite engaging in many of the same (if not worse) behaviors over the years. While Congress obsesses about new ways to regulate "big tech," the US government has oddly been busy neutering all oversight of "big telecom". That's at least partially by design; giants like AT&T and Comcast have spent years pushing for the hyper regulation of companies telecom increasingly competes with in the online ad space.

The result: as Silicon Valley faces an endless cavalcade of daily DC and press outrage, the telecom sector has suddenly little to no scrutiny whatsoever. Whether it's the speed at which the competition-eroding T-Mobile merger is being shoveled through the DOJ and FCC, or the blind eye being turned to major telecom privacy scandals (like location data), telecom lobbyists have been on a successful tear convincing well-heeled DC lawmakers to ignore the massive, obvious monopoly, privacy, and competition issues inherent in telecom to focus exclusively on the problems in "big tech."

AT&T's top lobbying and policy man, Jim Cicconi, was recently brought out of retirement to (in part) help tackle both the looming privacy minefield and an ongoing revolt among investors who have grown tired of AT&T's focus on growth for growth's sake. In a treatise nobody asked for, Cicconi this week shared his thoughts on recent missives at the NY Times exploring how the bloom of optimism has fallen from the internet rose in recent years.

The Times package focuses on everything from US broadband coverage woes to the rise of internet misinformation. But Cecconi's takeaway from the package, unsurprisingly, is somehow that broadband providers are yesterday's news and no longer worth talking about:

"Notably, nowhere does the series discuss internet service provider (ISP)-based open internet misconduct or concerns, and for good reason. As intervening events in the last few years have dramatically exposed how the internet is being used, misused and manipulated by a variety of internet players, ISP-centric arguments have quickly become yesterday’s policy story."

This idea that the hugely unpopular telecom sector is an innocent little angel and Silicon Valley is the only real problem has been a narrative telecom giants have been pushing for a while, and with pretty notable success if you've tracked DC policy conversations and the newswires. But because the Times didn't bother mentioning how telecom is nearly as terrible on privacy as Facebook, doesn't make it untrue. Of course Cicconi and AT&T's real goal is to ensure that whatever regulation and legislation comes from this era of reckoning, it won't include big telecom:

"Yet for the past decade plus, the internet policy debate has been focused almost solely on ISPs, to the exclusion of other online actors. That regulatory myopia has in turn produced the internet we didn’t expect. The true costs and challenges of an interconnected world, which are now only starting to be more fully understood, are the issues that today demand our time, energy and best ideas. As we look back on the debate, I hope that the signs and signals we missed previously will illuminate our path forward."

That's total fantasy. The telecom sector has spent billions of dollars to eliminate consumer protections and government oversight of its businesses over the last few decades. That recently culminated in the FCC's decision to effectively self-immolate at industry's behest, shoveling any remaining telecom oversight to an FTC that lacks the authority or resources to police the sector effectively. The end result: a total accountability vacuum that's letting the telecom sector rip off customers with relative impunity, provided they're moderately clever about it.

Our friend Jim is worried about one thing: that Congress and the states will ruin AT&T's string of good luck with new laws and regulation focused on subjects like privacy and an open internet. And he'd sure appreciate it if the most unpopular business sector in America, fresh on the heels of thirty years of anticompetitive behavior, is excluded entirely from the conversation.

Filed Under: internet, jim cicconi, privacy, regulations, telcos
Companies: at&t

Apathy Isn't A Business Model: Major US Telcos Teeter Toward Bankruptcy

from the dysfunction-junction dept

For more than a decade we've noted how the US broadband industry's biggest problem is a lack of healthy competition. In countless markets consumers either have the choice of a terrible phone company or a cable giant. The nation's phone companies have spent the last decade refusing to upgrade (or in some cases even repair) their aging DSL lines, because they don't see residential broadband as worth their while. That in turn is giving giants like Comcast and Spectrum an ever greater monopoly in many markets, reducing the already muted incentive to compete on price or shore up comically terrible customer service.

Many US telcos now exist solely to milk subsidies while doing the absolute bare minimum. This dynamic often results in some absurd dysfunction. Like in West Virginia, where incumbent telco Frontier has repeatedly been busted in a series of scandals involving substandard service and the misuse of taxpayer money. The graft and corruption in the state is so severe, state leaders have buried reports, and, until recently, a Frontier executive did double duty as a state representative without anybody in the state thinking that was a conflict of interest.

Frontier has also been facing investigations in states like Minnesota, where regulators have questioned why the company has received taxpayer subsidies for doing little to nothing. Unsurprisingly the company has been struggling with using apathy as a business model, and there's chatter that a long awaited bankruptcy may finally be imminent. Unlike AT&T and Verizon, telcos like Frontier, Windstream, and CenturyLink don't have wireless income to offset the losses:

"Some financial analysts have been predicting a Frontier bankruptcy for several years. According to these analysts, companies such as Frontier and Windstream continue to rely, in large part, on copper network infrastructure, which can’t support the speeds that cable infrastructure can support. As a result, these telcos will continue to have difficulty competing in both the residential and business market. And unlike companies such as AT&T and Verizon, the second-tier telcos don’t have a wireless business to fuel growth."

Much of Frontier's debt came courtesy of a massive 2015 deal to acquire Verizon's unwanted territories in states like Florida, Texas, and California for $10.5 billion. Frontier's focus at the time was growth for growth's sake, despite the obvious fact that many of these customers were on aging phone and DSL lines that needed to be upgraded lest they fall apart. Like many of its companions, Frontier chose the latter option, and now faces a bankruptcy protection proceeding that was already technically paid for by the American taxpayer.

Again, the inevitable outcome of these telco bankruptcies is a bigger, stronger cable broadband monopoly. Despite the predictions of many, wireless isn't going to be a magical panacea that fixes the problem. And while low-orbit satellites may help, that sector too has its own lengthy history of failed promises. With the government recently deciding that the sector needs neither competition nor meaningful regulatory oversight to function properly, there's not much in the way accountability or repercussion for the mass of US telecom giants that simply refuse to give a damn.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, finances, telcos
Companies: frontier

FCC Approved T-Mobile Sprint Merger Without Even Seeing The Full Details

from the ill-communication dept

Surprising nobody, the Ajit Pai FCC last week approved T-Mobile's $26 billion merger with Sprint. The approval comes despite that fact that antitrust experts, consumer advocates, and a long list of others have pointed out the deal will reduce wireless sector competition by 25%, inevitably driving up costs and reducing the quality of service (40 years of US telecom history suggests as much). And while T-Mobile and Sprint insists the deal will create jobs, both union reps and Wall Street predict the deal could kill anywhere between 10,000 and 30,000 jobs.

Granted last week's vote of approval was really just a formality. The FCC's majority commissioners had already made it clear they'd be signing off on the deal. Troubling but unsurprising is the repeated allegations that the Trump FCC majority signed off on the deals before seeing most of the actual details, something FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel was quick to point out in a statement:

"...the process that got us here is equally troubling. Three of my colleagues agreed to this transaction months ago without having any legal, engineering, or economic analysis from the agency before us. Consumers deserve better from the Washington authorities charged with reviewing this transaction."

Yeah, who needs to see the actual details on a transaction that will dramatically alter the US wireless landscape before voting?

Former FCC lawyer Gigi Sohn shared a similar observation in a statement circulated to the media:

"Today’s decision is the culmination of one of the most irregular and opaque processes in FCC history. The FCC majority prejudged the merits of this merger two months before the Justice Department found the combination of T-Mobile and Sprint to be anticompetitive and required the creation of a new fourth competitor to pass legal muster. Despite this radical change in the merger, Chairman Pai has refused to put the new arrangement out for public comment."

No willingness to look at hard data, an active disdain for public input; where have we seen that before? Worth noting the DOJ has followed a similar tack, ignoring advice from its own staffers to sign off on the deal.

Both the DOJ and FCC continue to push a remedy for the problems the deal creates that few think will actually work. They're hoping to have T-Mobile shovel off some additional spectrum and its prepaid wireless brand to Dish Network, who'll then attempt to build a functional fourth competitor to replace Sprint over the next half decade. But Dish has a long, long history of spectrum squatting and empty promises when it comes to wireless (just ask T-Mobile). And this FCC has exactly zero credibility when it comes to holding telecom giants accountable for, well, anything.

To make that deal work, the government will have to helicopter mom the hell out of the deal; ensuring T-Mobile lives up to its obligations and Dish meets its goals. It will also have to hold AT&T and Verizon accountable when they inevitably try to scuttle the deal in a bid to prevent a fourth viable competitor from truly emerging, something that, even under optimal conditions, isn't supposed to happen for years. Imagine thinking that's a more sensible route than just blocking the same deal that's already been blocked several times because it's clearly harmful to workers, consumers, and the market?

Filed Under: ajit pai, competition, details, fcc, merger, telcos
Companies: sprint, t-mobile

After Jack Hack, Government Starts Taking Wireless 'SIM Hijacking' Seriously

from the yeah-maybe-get-on-that dept

Wireless carriers have been under fire for failing to protect their users from the practice of SIM hijacking. The practice involves posing as a wireless customer, then fooling a wireless carrier to port the victim's cell phone number right out from underneath them, letting the attacker then pose as the customer to potentially devastating effect. Back in February, a man sued T-Mobile for failing to protect his account after a hacker, pretending to be him, ported out his phone number, then managed to use his identity to steal thousands of dollars worth of cryptocoins.

Like the ongoing wireless industry's location data scandals, the FCC has so far refused to utter so much as modest condemnation of carriers that have failed to protect users.

But with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey having his Twitter account recently hijacked thanks to SIM hijacking, the government appears to have finally gotten the message that we have a bit of a problem.

For example, the FBI issued a warning last month to its private industry partners, noting that two-factor authentication can be bypassed thanks to the hacks:

"The FBI has observed cyber actors circumventing multi-factor authentication through common social engineering and technical attacks," the FBI wrote in a Private Industry Notification (PIN) sent out on September 17. The FBI made it very clear that its alert should be taken only as a precaution, and not an attack on the efficiency of MFA, which the agency still recommends. The FBI still recommends that companies use MFA.

Carriers, for their part, don't much like to publicly talk about the problem. In part because it's frequently their employees who are helping to facilitate the scams for a little money on the side. Identity thieves use SIM hijacking to do everything from cleaning out bank accounts, to stealing valuable Instagram usernames and selling them for Bitcoin. The process isn't particularly complicated, and more often than not involves the social engineering of a cellular carrier's support employees. Until the Dorsey hack, their refrain has been this is a small problem that's very unique. It's not.

There are some steps users can take, including changing passwords frequently. T-Mobile users can also, for example, call 611 from your cellphone (or 1-800-937-8997), then tell a support staffer that you want to create a “port validation” passcode (here's a guide for other carriers). Still, like the SS7 wireless exploit that has been in the wild for years, it's clear wireless carriers might want to spend a little less time on mindless mergers and consolidation, killing net neutrality, and jacking up prices, and a little more time training their employees and protecting their customers from security threats.

Filed Under: fbi, fcc, identity fraud, jack dorsey, sim hijacking, telcos

Telcos And Rupert Murdoch Pushing Nonsense Story That Google Helping Keep Your Internet Activity More Private Is An Antitrust Violation

from the oh-really-now? dept

There are all sorts of reasons and ways to hate on big internet companies these days, but as we've warned, some of them are in conflict with one another -- though that doesn't seem to stop those who keep pushing the narrative forward from blindly repeating them anyway. The latest is a positively bonkers article in the Wall Street Journal arguing that Google's (somewhat middle of the road) support for DNS over HTTPS (DoH) is potentially an antitrust violation worthy of Congressional action.

This is (1) utter nonsense and (2) driven by telcos looking to undermine consumer privacy. So if you're a pro-privacy Google hater, you might want to at least reconsider supporting this particular line of attack. If you are unaware, under the current DNS system, you still leak some key metadata every time you visit a site to your DNS provider (which is usually, but not always, your broadband/internet access provider). It used to be that those providers could collect even more, page-level, information, but that is less and less true as more and more of the web itself is encrypted with HTTPS. DoH is an attempt to encrypt the last bit of info that leaks when you surf -- the metadata about the top level domains you are visiting. Mozilla has been strongly pushing support for DoH, and will plan to move most public Firefox users to DoH in the relatively near future. Google, on the other hand, is supportive of the standard, but has shown no inclination to adopt it nearly as widely as Mozilla.

Either way, done correctly, DoH protects your privacy and stops the fairly large metadata loophole that has allowed DNS providers (generally your telco/broadband provider) from being able to snoop on everywhere you surf. There are some reasonable concerns that if browsers automatically force users to use specific DNS resolvers for DoH that it could, potentially, lead to more control/centralization of both those servers, but as EFF points out in the link above, that's mitigated by more ISPs simply adopting DoH themselves.

The problem, of course, is that the biggest telcos, such as AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast don't want to stop spying on you and all of your internet habits. And, so, rather than adopting DoH, they're trying to undermine DoH entirely by pretending that Google's lukewarm interest in supporting DoH is, itself, an antitrust violation. What's kind of incredible, however, is just how open they are about this plan, and that's it's entirely about preventing the big broadband providers from spying on your traffic:

“Because the majority of world-wide internet traffic…runs through the Chrome browser or the Android operating system, Google could become the overwhelmingly predominant DNS lookup provider,” a coalition of internet service providers said in a Sept. 19 letter to lawmakers. “Google would acquire greater control over user data across networks and devices around the world. This could inhibit competitors and possibly foreclose competition in advertising and other industries.”

They urged lawmakers to call on Google not to impose the new standard as a default standard in Chrome and Android.

Google, for it's part, reiterated (as it has in the past) that it has no plans to force users into using its own DNS offerings. While the Wall Street Journal report at least quotes some pushback on this claim, it still seems to present this mostly as a credible antitrust concern, when the reality is that it's clearly an attempt by big broadband players to play an antitrust card to (1) attack Google and (2) to prevent Google from helping consumers better protect their own internet privacy.

There are, of course, plenty of legitimate concerns that people have about Google's own privacy practices. But pushing people towards DoH is a good thing. A few months back we saw UK ISPs laughably attack Mozilla's plans to support DoH by calling the company an "internet villain" claiming that better protecting your privacy would undermine "internet safety standards." To be clear: this is nonsense. What they mean is, like with other forms of encryption, it might make a very tiny number of criminals marginally harder to track down. But, on the flip side, it will massively protect everyone else's privacy from overly snoop happy broadband providers.

We've noted for a while how hypocritical it is for people to focus on "antitrust" and "privacy" claims about the big internet companies, while ignoring the much larger problems on both fronts regarding broadband companies. Similarly, we've talked about how many of the attacks on "big tech" are quietly driven by the big broadband players quietly fanning the flames. But this story combines all of that. It's the big broadband players/telcos pushing a totally bogus monopoly story against Google (which makes no sense at all if you understand the details, and which wouldn't even be a potential monopoly concern at all if those very same broadband companies adopted DoH themselves), in order to stop Google from better protecting your privacy -- so that the broadband providers can better snoop on you.

And, a side note: Rupert Mudoch's Wall Street Journal has been one of the worst in pushing these misleading anti-Google/Facebook stories over the last few months, which is, again, no surprise at all, as it's been revealed before that Murdoch has been eager to attack Google and Facebook and has no problem using the Wall Street Journal to do so. While this story at least includes some balance, the entire narrative arc of it seems to follow the telcos talking points -- and it's notable that while it briefly quotes a section of the telcos letter to Congress, it fails to post the entire letter. I wonder why...

Either way, this kind of thing undermines any serious discussion of either privacy or competition online, by mixing up and conflating an attempt to better protect privacy, and pretending it's an antitrust violation.

Filed Under: antitrust, competition, dns over https, doh, privacy, rupert murdoch, snooping, telcos
Companies: google, mozilla

Telecom Union Got Hoodwinked Into Supporting AT&T's Shitty Merger

from the ill-communication dept

You may be shocked to learn this, but nearly all of the promises AT&T made in the lead up to its $86 billion merger with Time Warner wound up not being true.

The company's promise that the deal wouldn't result in price hikes for consumers? False. The company's promise the deal wouldn't result in higher prices for competitors needing access to essential AT&T content like HBO? False. AT&T's promise they wouldn't hide Time Warner content behind exclusivity paywalls? False. The idea that the merger would somehow create more jobs at the company? False.

Of course the press and public aren't the only folks AT&T misled. To glean the support of the telecom sector's biggest union, the Communications Workers of America, AT&T apparently promised that newly acquired Time Warner (and subsidiary) workers would be able to join the union. But when the time came to actually allow those employees in, guess what? AT&T suddenly declared that wouldn't be happening for the vast majority of them:

"Of about 22,000 U.S. employees who previously worked at Time Warner, AT&T claimed the agreement applies to at most 82, a union official wrote in a letter attached to a June court filing. CWA, which already represents about 90,000 AT&T employees, has asked a judge to order arbitration. In May, the company asked that the case be dismissed, saying the company has “the right to determine” which employees are covered by unionization provisions."

Granted if you spend five seconds looking at the history of major mergers in the telecom and media space, none of this should be surprising.

Merger after merger, a universe of amazing promises are revealed that post deal, never actually materialize. Any conditions that are affixed are usually theatrically hollow, and adherence to them is rarely enforced. In AT&T's case, not a single merger condition was affixed to the deal, thanks in large part to a comically-myopic ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon, who was oblivious to AT&T's plan to use the death of net neutrality, regulatory capture at the FCC, and ownership of essential content as a competitive bludgeon in the streaming wars to come.

At some point, you'd think that major telecom unions would stop supporting megadeals that almost uniformly result in higher prices, less competition, and fewer jobs (given redundant positions are pretty uniformly eliminated a year or two after the ink is dry). But the CWA pretty routinely can't help itself; it also breathlessly supported AT&T's 2011 merger with T-Mobile, which was ultimately blocked for being exceptionally terrible. Fortunately the CWA seems to recognize the latest megamerger proposal, T-Mobile's planned $26 billion merger with Sprint, is going to be bad for the sector as well.

At some point you'd think that everybody in the chain, from unions and consumers to the press and antitrust enforcers, would realize these industry megadeals are almost always uniformly harmful. Pre-merger promises never materialize, prices routinely go up, and job losses abound; yet each and every time there's a new megadeal proposed we appear to have learned nothing, just like some purgatorial version of Charlie Brown and Lucy football.

Filed Under: mergers, promises, telcos, unions
Companies: at&t, communications workers of america, cwa

Trump Whines About AT&T, Ignores His FCC Has Spent Two Years Kissing The Company's Ass

from the ill-communication dept

While there are countless news outlets that justifiably criticize the President, Trump has long been particularly fixated on CNN. So fixated, in fact, that it's believed this disdain for the network (in addition to Rupert Murdoch's competitive desires) played a starring role in his DOJ's bungled effort to try and block AT&T's $86 billion merger with CNN parent company Time Warner.

This week, Trump doubled down once again, proclaiming that the public should stop using AT&T services as punishment for CNN's criticism of the President:

The tirade resulted in a fairly feeble effort to get the #DumpATT hashtag trending on Twitter, and some consternation and furrowed brows among journalists who took the rambling Tweet a bit too seriously.

The irony here, at least if you're an adult who has actually paid attention to this administration's policies, is that AT&T has received a near-endless list of favors from Trump's administration, many of which it's not entirely clear that Trump is even aware of. In fact, AT&T has probably received more regulatory handouts from this administration than any other administration in American history. Which, if you tracked the favors doled out by Bush-era FCC boss Michael Powell (now the top lobbyist for the cable industry), that's saying something.

AT&T was a massive beneficiary of the Trump tax cuts, now saving $3 billion annually in perpetuity. According to AT&T, that money was supposed to go back into the company's network and employees, but instead resulted widespread layoffs. Trump's FCC also gave AT&T a massive regulatory handout when it helped kill broadband privacy protections, killed net neutrality rules with popular bipartisan support, and voluntarily eroded its own authority over ISPs like AT&T at lobbyist behest. Trump's FCC has also routinely turned a blind eye to AT&T scandals like its failure to police location data sales.

There's countless other favors AT&T has gleaned from the Trump administration as well, whether it's the FCC decision to weaken the very definition of broadband competition or the killing of plans to bring more competition to the cable box. The Trump administration fealty to AT&T is so severe, we're at the point that when reporters contact Trump's FCC for information, they've occasionally been directed to US Telecom, a lobbyist organization spearheaded by... AT&T.

People tend to look at the Trump DOJ's decision to sue to thwart the Time Warner merger (which again had more to do with helping Rupert Murdoch and hurting CNN than any disdain for AT&T) as a sign of Trump's "opposition" to AT&T, but you'd be pretty hard pressed to find a company that's done as well under Trump as CNN's new parent company. That quickly forgotten $600,000 AT&T's lobbyists paid now-imprisoned Trump lawyer Michael Cohen for broader access to the administration seems to have been money well spent.

The entire fracas once again highlights how Trump's Twitter tirades are only tangentially related to reality, and very rarely tethered to his administration's actual policies. In fact, based on his comments on net neutrality, it's not really clear the President of the United States has the foggiest understanding of what his own FCC is doing. If Trump really wanted to hurt AT&T and CNN, a good first step would probably be to stop kissing the Dallas-based telecom giant's massive, monopolized ass.

Filed Under: antitrust, doj, donald trump, fcc, oversight, regulations, subsidies, telcos
Companies: at&t

If 'Big Tech' Is a Huge Antitrust Problem, Why Are We Ignoring Telecom?

from the ill-communication dept

Over the last week or so, Google, Amazon, and Apple have all taken a significant beating on Wall Street amidst rumblings of looming antitrust investigations by the DOJ and FTC. Google, we're told, is subject of a looming antitrust probe by the DOJ. Amazon, we've learned, is facing growing scrutiny from the FTC. Apple stock also did a nose dive on the news that it too may soon be subject to a significant new antitrust probe.

On its surface, many of these actions aren't all that surprising. After all, experts have noted for a decade than US antitrust enforcement has grown toothless and frail, and our definitions of monopoly power need updating in the Amazon era. Facebook's repeated face plants on privacy (and basic transparency and integrity) have only added fuel to the fire amidst calls to regulate "big tech."

Oddly missing from coverage from these probes is the fact that much of this behavior by the Trump administration may (*gasp*) not be driven by a genuine interest in protecting markets and consumer welfare. For one, it's hard to believe that an administration that has shown it's little more than a rubber stamp for sectors like telecom is seriously worried about monopoly power. Two, it's hard to believe an administration obsessed with nonexistent censorship is going to come at these inquiries with integrity, and not, say, as a vessel to pursue a pointed partisan persecution complex.

I've been arguing for a while that while many of the calls to regulate big tech are driven by genuine worries about monopoly power, a lot of it is being driven by the telecom sector. For years now, telecom lobbyists and policy folks have been using the anger over Facebook to covertly call for heavier regulation of Silicon Valley. You see, these telecom lobbyists, who just got done convincing the Trump administration to neuter FCC oversight of their own natural monopolies, are looking for any advantage they can get as they try to compete with companies like Google in the online ad space.

This is how former FCC boss turned cable lobbyist Michael Powell put it at a recent conference:

"Our governmental authorities need to get a handle on what kind of market power and harm flow from companies that have an unassailable hold on large pools of big data, which serve as barriers to entry, allowing them to dominate industries throughout the economy. For years, big tech companies have been extinguishing competitive threats by buying or crushing promising new technologies just as they were emerging. They dominate their core business, and rarely have to foreclose competition by buying their peers. Competition policy must scrutinize more rigorously deals that allow dominant platforms to kill competitive technologies in the cradle."

If you've watched as telecom giants have crushed every and any competitive threat by buying state and federal government, this entire paragraph should be fairly amusing to you. Powell's clients couldn't care less about anti-competitive behavior. What they do want is, again, for government to erect regulatory barriers that hamper the Silicon Valley companies whose ad revenues giants like AT&T and Comcast have drooled over for the better part of the last fifteen years. In the Trump administration they've finally found a vessel for this agenda.

The problem, of course, is there's enough legitimate bipartisan worry about the power of big tech that this little telecom sector lobbying gambit has been able to fly under the radar as the real driver of this new Trump administration push. Even with former Verizon lawyers now at the head of the DOJ (Bill Barr) and the Trump FCC (Ajit Pai). But there's a reason the Trump administration ignores telecom's monopoly and privacy issues while amplifying Silicon Valley's, and I'd argue it has a lot more to do with protectionism than a genuine worry about healthy markets.

If you were remotely serious about addressing the US' monopoly and antitrust problems, there's no way you'd simply ignore telecom. Giants like AT&T and Comcast already enjoy natural monopolies over the on ramp to the internet. They've then increasingly hoovered up countless media companies as they also position themselves to dominate the media flowing over those connections. This conflict and the potential for anticompetitive behavior sits at the heart of the net neutrality debate. Now, giants like AT&T want to become the next Google, with data harvesting plans every bit as problematic if not more so.

Yet again, notice how telecom gets a free pass by the Trump administration? Notice how Silicon Valley is demonized, but telecom's surveillance and anti-competitive gambits see zero backlash? I don't think it's happenstance that this new Trump "big tech" antitrust push comes as big telecom has asked for just such a push to aid its own competitive agenda. A lot of folks on both sides of the political aisle who'd like to see more done to rein in "big tech" seem a touch oblivious to the possibility that this new antitrust push may not be entirely in good faith.

There's a good chance these antitrust inquiries into Google, Facebook, and Apple are little more than partisan fever dreams co-driven by telecom lobbyists, yet a lot of outlets and experts are acting as if market health and consumer welfare are genuine motivators. It's entirely unclear what the Trump administration did to suddenly earn this blanket trust, but as the net neutrality fracas and trade wars have made pretty clear, it sure as hell isn't its several year track record on coherent tech policy.

Filed Under: antitrust, broadband, competition, doj, ftc, monopoly, telcos
Companies: amazon, apple, facebook, google

If Facebook's Privacy Practices Anger You, AT&T Shouldn't Get A Free Pass

from the ill-communication dept

Recent privacy conversations have tended to fixate almost exclusively on Facebook and its seemingly-bottomless pit of privacy scandals. But we've noted more than a few times how telecom has somehow been excluded from these conversations, despite behavior that's historically been as bad...or worse. From hoovering up and selling your location data to every Tom, Dick, and Harry on the internet, to trying to charge consumers even more money just to protect their own private data, telecom has a long, thirty-year history just packed with playing fast and loose with your private browsing, location, and other data.

And yet while the newswires are routinely now flooded with stories about how we need to break up Facebook, telecom has oddly gotten a pass. Telecom lobbyists just convinced the US government to effectively neuter FCC oversight authority over ISPs, all while these same ISPs call for heavier regulation of Silicon Valley giants they want to compete with in the online video ad space. That this might just be all one connected problem appears to be a concept that has escaped the thinking of far too many purported experts in the antitrust and tech policy worlds.

Telecom giants are particularly problematic because they not only own the conduit to the home, they increasingly own the services and content flowing over those connections, providing endless anti-competitive opportunities. As companies like AT&T and Comcast keep making very clear, they not only want to dominate wireless and fixed broadband, they want to be the next Google or Facebook. Fortune recently did a deep dive into AT&T's ambitions, highlighting how the company's data collection and tracking ambitions are every bit as problematic as Facebook:

"Say you and your neighbor are both DirecTV customers and you’re watching the same live program at the same time,” says Brian Lesser, who oversees the vast data-crunching operation that supports this kind of advertising at AT&T. “We can now dynamically change the advertising. Maybe your neighbor’s in the market for a vacation, so they get a vacation ad. You’re in the market for a car, you get a car ad. If you’re watching on your phone, and you’re not at home, we can customize that and maybe you get an ad specific to a car retailer in that location.”

Such targeting has caused privacy headaches for Yahoo, Google, and Facebook, of course. That’s why AT&T requires that customers give permission for use of their data; like those other companies, it anonymizes that data and groups it into audiences—for example, consumers likely to be shopping for a pickup truck—rather than targeting specific individuals. Regardless of how you see a directed car ad, say, AT&T can then use geolocation data from your phone to see if you went to a dealership and possibly use data from the automaker to see if you signed up for a test-drive—and then tell the automaker, “Here’s the specific ROI on that advertising,” says Lesser. AT&T claims marketers are paying four times the usual rate for that kind of advertising."

To make this work, AT&T needs to collect your TV viewing data, your daily location data, a significant database on your interests, data from third parties (car dealers), and your daily internet clickstream habits, a fusion of previously siloed datasets that even Verizon executives worried would be a bridge too far.

The problem, of course, is that AT&T has an absolutely terrible track record on privacy, and that's before you factor in that the company is effectively bone-grafted to the NSA. And yet you probably haven't seen many articles recently arguing for the breakup of AT&T. Only a few journalists seem to be even remotely keyed into the idea that myopically focusing on Facebook is a problem when AT&T's planning an even broader fusion of video, location, clickstream, and other data to track you on an unprecedented scale:

"If this was a story about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, this scheme would cause a week-long outrage cycle. It is outrageous, especially when you consider that AT&T also routinely hands over customer information to the government, is under investigation for illegally selling customer location data to shady third parties, and is generally about as protective of your data as a hotel front desk guarding a bowl of mints."

Again, telecom lobbyists and hired policy guns have convinced the government there should be no meaningful oversight of telecom despite it being rife with natural monopolies. At the same time, they're repeatedly (often somewhat covertly) driving much of the call to heavily regulate Silicon Valley. Yet somehow, folks angry with Facebook's privacy practices are often oddly oblivious to telecom's equally-problematic ambitions. Casual treatment of your private data isn't something exclusive to Facebook, and if we're going to solve modern privacy problems, a broader view that includes telecom is going to be essential.

Filed Under: privacy, surveillance, telcos, tracking
Companies: at&t

All Four Major Wireless Carriers Hit With Lawsuits Over Sharing, Selling Location Data

from the somebody's-watching-you dept

We've noted repeatedly that if you're upset about Facebook's privacy scandals, you should be equally concerned about the wireless industry's ongoing location data scandals. Not only were the major carriers caught selling your location data to any nitwit with a checkbook, they were even found to be selling your E-911 location data, which provides even more granular detail about your data than GPS provides. This data was then found to have been widely abused from everybody from law enforcement to randos pretending to be law enforcement.

Throughout all this, the Ajit Pai FCC has done absolutely nothing to seriously police the problem. Meaning that while carriers have promised to stop collecting and selling this data, nobody has bothered to force carriers to actually confirm this. Given telecom's history when it comes to consumer privacy, somebody might just want to double check their math (and ask what happened to all that data already collected and sold over the last decade).

Compounding carrier problems, all four major wireless carriers last week were hit with a class action lawsuit (correctly) noting the carriers had violated Section 222 of the Federal Communications Act by selling consumer proprietary network information (CPNI) data:

"Through its negligent and deliberate acts, including inexplicable failures to follow its own Privacy Policy, T-Mobile permitted access to Plaintiffs and Class Members’ CPI and CPNI,” the complaint against T-Mobile reads, referring to “confidential proprietary information” and “customer proprietary network information,” the latter of which includes location data."

It's likely that the sale of 911 data is where carriers are in the most hot water, since that's their most obvious infraction of the law. It's of course worth pointing out that wireless carriers (and fixed-line ISPs, frankly) have been hoovering up and selling location, clickstream, and a vast ocean of other user data for decades with very few (any?) Congressional lawmakers much caring about it. It's another example of how Facebook's cavalier treatment of user data (and government apathy toward meaningful solutions) isn't just some errant exception -- it's the norm.

Back in 2016, the previous FCC uncharacteristically tried to impose some pretty basic rules that would have gone a long way in preventing these location data scandals by requiring that carriers be more transparent about what data is collected and who it's sold to. It also required consumers opt in to more sensitive (read: financial, location) data. But telecom lobbyists quickly convinced Congress to obliterate those rules in 2017 using the Congressional Review Act before they could even take effect.

Two years later finds the sector swimming in scandal, and everybody has a dumb look on their faces utterly perplexed as to how we got to this point.

Filed Under: class action, fcc, lawsuit, privacy, section 222, telcos
Companies: at&t, sprint, t-mobile, verizon