FCC Keeps Using Bogus Data To Claim It's Closing The 'Digital Divide'

from the unserious-people dept

We've noted repeatedly that despite a lot of breathless pearl clutching from U.S. leaders and regulators about the "digital divide," the United States doesn't actually know where broadband is (or isn't) available. Historically the FCC has simply trusted major ISPs -- with a vested interest in downplaying coverage and competition gaps to maintain their domination -- to tell the truth.

That hasn't worked out particularly well. From AT&T to Barrierfree, ISPs routinely like to overstate broadband availability by millions of households. Despite repeated warnings this data is flawed, the FCC continues to use it anyway to claim the agency's industry-cozy policies (like gutting the lion's share of consumer protections) are paying huge dividends. They aren't. Like so many Trump agencies, the FCC is simply massaging data to justify predetermined industry-dictated policy positions. It's theater dressed up as serious adult policy.

The FCC's methodology has also long been flawed, considering entire census blocks to be connected if just one home in a block can potentially get service. The results are ugly: the FCC's $350 million broadband availability map all but hallucinates broadband availability and speed (try it yourself). It also excludes prices, in large part because ISPs don't want the cost of monopolization clearly outlined to American consumers, press, and lawmakers.

Despite repeated complaints (often by FCC Commissioners themselves), the FCC just keeps doubling down on shoddy data to justify its complete and total fealty to telecom giants. The agency's latest notice of inquiry (part of its Congressional duty to report on the state of broadband once a year) even acknowledges the agency's data is bad... then proceeds to use it anyway to claim kissing AT&T's, Verizon's, and Comcast's asses is justifiable policy:

"More Americans than ever before now have access to the benefits of broadband as the Commission’s policies have created a regulatory environment to stimulate broadband investment and deployment."

Except, again, that's simply not true. Despite repeated (almost weekly) lies by the Ajit Pai FCC that gutting oversight of telecom monopolies resulted in a massive investment boom, numerous studies (not to mention earnings reports, SEC filings, and public statements by executives) have made it clear that simply never happened. This being Trumpland, this sort of thing apparently no longer matters.

But with 42 million Americans out of reach of any broadband during a health crisis, and an estimated 83 million more stuck under a broadband monopoly, it does matter. And, as telecom industry watcher Doug Dawson notes, this bad data is still being used to determine which areas receive grants and taxpayer subsidies:

"The idea of levying fines against ISPs for blatant broadband overreporting is long overdue. There can be huge consequences when ISPs can freely claim broadband coverage that doesn’t exist. The biggest current consequence of such overreporting is that it can block eligibility for grants. The FCC used the faulty 477 data when determining the areas that are eligible for the $16.4 billion in RDOF grants that will be awarded in October. I know of counties where no RDOF grants are being offered due to the FCC data falsely showing counties to already have adequate broadband. There are many rural counties where at least some portion of the county has been incorrectly excluded from RDOF grant eligibility due to ISP overreporting of broadband speeds and coverage."

This stuff matters when work, health care, connectivity, and learning are all dependent on a reliable connection. It matters even more during an historic health crisis where broadband is now essential for survival. We can't fix a problem we refuse to accurately measure, and it's abundantly clear to any objective observer that the Trump FCC doesn't want an accurate read on the situation, lest the data clearly show that kissing monopoly ass isn't akin to policy magic.

Filed Under: ajit pai, digital divide, fcc

Pai FCC Ignored Falsely Inflated Broadband Numbers To Pat Itself On The Back

from the whoops-a-daisy dept

We've noted more than once that the Donald Trump, Ajit Pai FCC isn't much for this whole accurate data thing. This FCC can routinely be found parroting inaccurate lobbyist claims on a wide variety of subjects, whether that's the rate of recent broadband investment, or the number of people just out of reach of affordable broadband. As such, it's not uncommon to find the FCC basing policy decisions on junk data; most recently exemplified by its rubber stamping of the job and competition eroding Sprint/T-Mobile merger (which was approved before FCC staff had seen ANY data).

Last year, Pai's FCC tried to claim that the number of U.S. residents without access to fixed broadband (25Mbps downstream, 3Mbps upstream as per the FCC) dropped from 26.1 million people at the end of 2016 to 19.4 million at the end of 2017. Pai's agency attributed this improvement to the agency "removing barriers to infrastructure investment," which is code for gutting most meaningful consumer protections at lobbyist behest. But last year we noted that a good chunk of that improvement was not only thanks to policies Pai historically opposed (community fiber broadband networks and fiber build out conditions affixed to the 2015 AT&T DirecTV merger), but to administrative error.

Consumer groups also pointed out that a big reason for that shift was a major false claim on the part of a smaller ISP named BarrierFree. BarrierFree had dramatically overstated its coverage areas in Form 477 data submitted to the FCC, resulting in broadband improvement numbers overstated by millions of Americans. In a follow up report this week, the FCC quietly acknowledged that the FCC was long aware of the "mistake" but published the falsely inflated numbers anyway:

"This week, the FCC released more details on BarrierFree's apparent history of violating rules requiring ISPs to submit "Form 477" broadband-deployment data every six months, and it shows that numerous warning signs were spotted by FCC staff long before Pai touted the inaccurate data. The FCC on Tuesday issued a Notice of Apparent Liability that proposed a $163,912 fine for BarrierFree, kicking off a process that gives BarrierFree a chance to respond to the allegations and fight the proposed penalty.

The problem, of course, is that this isn't some one off. The form 477 data submitted by ISPs has long been taken at face value by the FCC; an obvious problem since ISPs have a vested interest in obscuring any broadband coverage or competition shortcomings (lest somebody try to do something about it). In addition to not really verifying submitted numbers, the FCC compounds the problem with methodology that declares an entire census block "served" with broadband if just one home in that block has service. As a result, the FCC is in no position to claim with any accuracy that it even knows where broadband is truly available, much less that unpopular efforts like the attack on net neutrality contributed to meaningful improvements.

Consumer groups say in this case, the Pai FCC once again failed to make accurate data a genuine priority, or take any real accountability for its own failure to adequately police the data reported by ISPs:

"Although the FCC is trying to fine BarrierFree for submitting inaccurate data, the commission is not penalizing the ISP for failing to submit over 10 years' worth of required Form 477 reports. "The Pai FCC slept on BarrierFree's repeated violation of FCC rules," Free Press Research Director Derek Turner told Ars, calling the FCC's attempt to downplay its own role in spreading inaccurate data "shameful."

This bunk data and willful incompetence is most easily reflected by the FCC's $300 million broadband availability map. Spend just a few minutes perusing your neighborhood and it quickly becomes apparent the FCC is not only all but hallucinating available providers and speeds, but it also refuses to even collect and share data on another telling metric: broadband prices. The end result is a broadband affordability problem we genuinely haven't yet measured, and rose-colored glasses proclamations by the Pai FCC that are based more on magical thinking than anything resembling hard data.

Filed Under: ajit pai, broadband, broadband availability, digital divide, fcc, internet access
Companies: barrierfree

AT&T Is Astroturfing The FCC In Support Of Trump's Dumb Attack On Social Media

from the fake-support-for-dumb-ideas dept

We've noted for a long time that telecom giants like Comcast and AT&T have been pushing (quite successfully) for massive deregulation of their own monopolies, while pushing for significant new regulation of the Silicon Valley giants whose ad revenues they've coveted for decades. As such, it wasn't surprising to see AT&T come out with a incredibly dumb blog post this week supporting Trump's legally dubious and hugely problematic executive order targeting social media giants. You know, the plan that not only isn't enforceable by the agencies supposedly tasked with enforcing it (the FCC), but that also risks creating a massive new censorship paradigm across the entire internet.

As Mike already noted, AT&T's post was a pile of bad faith nonsense, weirdly conflating net neutrality with the ham-fisted attack on Section 230. AT&T just got done deriding the FCC's relatively modest net neutrality rules as "government interference in the internet run amok." Yet here it is, advocating for a terrible plan that attempts to shovel the FCC into the role of regulating speech on social media, authority it simply doesn't have. For those that tracked the net neutrality fight, the intellectual calisthenics required here by folks like AT&T and its favorite FCC officials have been stunning, even for Trumpland:

By "momentum," Carr clearly means "intellectually-flimsy support by lobbyists employed by a telecom monopoly."

Folks like FCC boss Ajit Pai know damn well Trump's order is laughable and legally dubious, going against nearly every principle they spent the last decade claiming to stand for. But they're going through the motions anyway to avoid upsetting dear leader and derailing any future political prospects. As a result, the FCC is burning resources holding a public comment period on Trump's EO and the (equally laughable) petition from the NTIA.

Numerous folks have submitted their comments on the record (you can read Mike's here). That includes AT&T, which is apparently not only busy making intellectually inconsistent arguments, but is providing form letters to other organizations to try and get them to support Trump's crappy EO. Some folks digging through the comments noticed that a lot of these groups are submitting AT&T's form letters to the FCC... without bothering to proof read them first:

It is surely only a coincidence that several groups with links to AT&T all submitted the same exact letter:

This is a greasy lobbying tactic companies like AT&T have employed for years. In fact, we wrote a piece just about a decade ago busting AT&T for the exact same behavior. AT&T can routinely be found giving money to groups in exchange for support for problematic to downright terrible policies, be it be support for AT&T's latest merger, or the culling of any meaningful oversight of telecom monopolies. Often this includes the "co-opting" of even civil rights or consumer groups. Other times, it involves the creation of entirely bogus "consumer rights" or advocacy groups.

The goal is always the same: to create the illusion of broad support for what's almost always terrible tech policy that aids AT&T in some way.

This sort of "astroturfing" (fake grass roots) has been a problem nobody wants to fix. This being the Trump FCC, you shouldn't expect them to police this kind of gamesmanship with any sort of integrity. You'll recall that the FCC not only turned a blind eye as the telecom sector used dead, fake, or hijacked personalities to spam the FCC during the net neutrality repeal, it actively blocked law enforcement inquiries into who was behind them.

This corporate co-opting of what's often the only chance the public has to express their thought on the record plagues numerous agencies, not just the FCC. And given AT&T's still busy doing this sort of thing nearly a decade after being busted for the exact same thing, you can clearly see how important protecting the integrity of public policy discourse is for U.S. leaders. Granted if your arguments are sound on their merits (which the Trump EO most certainly isn't), you wouldn't need to generate fake support from dead people or co-opted organizations in the first place.

Filed Under: ajit pai, astroturf, brendan carr, comment, fake comments, fcc, ntia, section 230
Companies: at&t

My Comment To The FCC Regarding The Ridiculous NTIA Petition To Reinterpret Section 230

from the what-nonsense dept

Today is the due date for the first round of submissions to the FCC's comment period on the NTIA's laughable petition, which asks the agency to reinterpret Section 230 in response to the President's temper tantrum about Twitter fact checking him. This is clearly outside of its regulatory authority, but it has caved and pandered to the President by calling for comments anyway.

There are a ton of individuals and organizations commenting on why nearly everything around this is unconstitutional and/or outside the FCC's legal authority. The Copia Institute is filing a comment along those lines written by Cathy Gellis, and she'll have a post about that later. However, I wanted to file a separate comment from my own personal perspective about Section 230 and the nature of running a small media website that relies heavily on its protections. Because beyond the various filings from lawyers about this or that specific aspect of the law or Constitutional authority, it appeared that there was little discussion of just how illiterate the NTIA petition is concerning how content moderation works. And, tragically, many of the early filers on the docket were people who were screaming that because some content of theirs had been moderated by a social media company, the FCC must neuter Section 230.

The key part of my comment is to reinforce the idea that content moderation is impossible to do well and you will always have some people who disagree with the results, and there will also be many "mistakes" because that's the nature of content moderation. It is not evidence of bias or censorship. And, indeed, as my comment highlights, changing Section 230 to try to deal with these fake problems is only likely to lead to the suppression of more speech and the shrinking of the open internet.

Also, I talk about the time I wasn't kicked out of a lunch where I sat next to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai.

You can read my entire comment below.

If you would like to file a comment on the proceedings and have not yet done so, while the initial round of comments is due today, there is a second round for "responding" to comments made in the first round, which runs through September 17th.

Filed Under: ajit pai, cda 230, content moderation, fcc, impossibility, ntia, section 230
Companies: techdirt

FCC Boss Ajit Pai Pretends To Care About A Prison Telco Monopoly Problem He Helped Protect

from the you're-not-helping dept

Over the last few decades, companies like Securus have managed to obtain a cozy, government-supported monopoly over prison phone and teleconferencing services. Like any monopoly, this has pretty traditionally resulted in not only sky high rates -- upwards of $14 per minute for phone calls -- but comically poor service as well. Because these folks are in prison, and as we all know everybody in prison is always guilty, drumming up enough sympathy to convert into political momentum has long proven difficult, so regulatory fecklessness has proven easy to come by.

Recent efforts to do something about it were scuttled by FCC boss Ajit Pai, whose former clients included Securus. Pai not only routinely opposed efforts by ex-FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn to drive change in the prison telco sector, one of his very first acts as FCC boss was to pull the rugs out from underneath his own lawyers as they tried to support those reforms in court. The suddenly rudderless FCC ultimately and unsurprisingly lost due to a challenge by Global Tel*Link, which obviously wanted the status quo to remain intact. So now, while the FCC has the authority to cap interstate calling rates, the courts have declared it lacks the authority to regulate intrastate prison calling rates.

So it was odd to see Pai take to Twitter this week to first profess his breathless support for prison telco monopoly price gouging reform (clearly not true), and then state the fact his hands are tied in terms of actually doing something about it (something he's largely responsible for):

Lawyers who actually followed this saga from gestation were.... not impressed:

Responding to complaints, Pai yesterday sent a letter to the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC), proclaiming that this is "unfortunately a problem the FCC is powerless to address," and "calling for states to take action." The same states he's ironically been trying to argue lack the authority to protect consumers from telecom monopoly harm in other areas of telecom, like residential monopolies, net neutrality, and consumer privacy.

But however bad residential telecom is, prison telecom is worse. Securus and other such companies are part of a dangerously cozy and captive market, where prisons get paid upwards of $460 million annually in "concession fees" (read: kickbacks) to score exclusive, lucrative prison contracts. In this comically absurd environment, the service pricing and quality are just about what you'd expect. Government oversight of these businesses has been virtually non-existent, despite accusations that these companies have allowed some law enforcement to monitor what should be privileged attorney client communications and that they have been embroiled in location data scandals.

Filed Under: ajit pai, fcc, legal authority, monopoly, prison calls
Companies: securus

FCC's Assault On Low-Income Broadband Program Is Making The COVID-19 Crisis Worse

from the pretending-to-care dept

While FCC boss Ajit Pai is best known for ignoring the public and making shit up to dismantle FCC authority over telecom monopolies, his other policies have proven to be less sexy but just as terrible. From neutering plans to improve cable box competition to a wide variety of what are often senseless handouts to the industry's biggest players, most of the administration's policies are driving up costs for the rural Americans and small entrepreneurs he so breathlessly pledges fealty to.

One of Pai's biggest targets has been the FCC's Lifeline program, an effort started by Reagan and expanded by Bush that long enjoyed bipartisan support until Trumpism rolled into town. Lifeline doles out a measly $9.25 per month subsidy that low-income homes can use to help pay a tiny fraction of their wireless, phone, or broadband bills (enrolled participants have to chose one). The FCC, under former FCC boss Tom Wheeler, had voted to expand the service to cover broadband connections, something Pai (ever a champion to the poor) voted down.

Despite endless lip service to the "digital divide," Pai's tenure as boss has included a notable number of efforts to scuttle the Lifeline program that weren't paid much attention to -- until a pandemic came to town. COVID-19 has shone a bright spotlight on the fact that 42 million Americans still can't access broadband (double official FCC estimates), and millions more can't afford service because regulatory capture has helped protect natural monopolies and the resulting lack of competition.

The FCC Lifeline is literally the bare minimum we could be doing to help make broadband more affordable for the poor. Yet despite a pandemic, new data indicates the program has shrunk (by design) notably, and now serves around one fifth of the people it could be helping thanks in part to Pai's cuts:

"Less than a fifth of the 38 million households that qualify for the program are actually enrolled. And despite a recent uptick, enrollment remains down sharply from the Obama era. Starks and other critics lay the low participation rate at the feet of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, a Republican appointed by President Trump in 2017 to lead the commission."

Pai is, as you might have noticed, a big fan of the idea that if you pull back government oversight of telecom, magic happens (investment spikes, product improves, coverage expands, dogs and cats snuggle up). Except that kind of magical thinking has always been nonsensical in US telecom, given that when you scale back on regulatory oversight, giants like AT&T and Comcast, natural monopolies that they are, simply continue to double down on problematic behavior. That's best exemplified by Pai's promise that killing net neutrality would result in amazing investment, only for us to see investment cuts and mass layoffs.

This kind of ideology is a little harder to push when you're talking about gutting programs intended to help the poor (usually such efforts have to be disguised as "efficiency" and "reform"). Still, Under Chairman Ajit Pai's "leadership," the FCC voted 3-2 in late 2017 to eliminate a $25 additional Lifeline subsidy for low-income native populations on tribal land. As part of Pai's effort he also banned smaller mobile carriers from participating in the Lifeline program, a move opposed by even the larger companies (Verizon, AT&T) that stood to benefit.

Pai's attempt to neuter Lifeline in Tribal areas didn't go so well. The courts ultimately rejected the plan, politely implying in a ruling (pdf) that Pai and his staff not only pulled their justifications completely out of their asses, but failed to do any meaningful research whatsoever into how the cuts would impact poor and tribal communities:

"The Commission's adoption of these two limitations was arbitrary and capricious by not providing a reasoned explanation for its change of policy that is supported by record evidence. In adopting the Tribal Facilities Requirement, the Commission's decision evinces no consideration of the exodus of facilities-based providers from the Tribal Lifeline program. Neither does it point to evidence that banning resellers from the Tribal Lifeline program would promote network buildout.

Nor does it analyze the impact of the facilities requirement on Tribal residents who currently rely on wireless resellers. Further, the Commission ignored that its decision is a fundamental change that adversely affects the access and affordability of service for residents of Tribal lands. Similarly, in adopting the Tribal Rural Limitation, the Commission's decision evinces no consideration of the impact on service access and affordability. Its decision does not examine wireless deployment data related to services to which most Tribal Lifeline recipients subscribe."

Pai's rigid ideology doesn't leave much room for compromise or real-world data. And keep in mind: we're simply talking about a $9.25 subsidy that was created by Ronald Reagan that barely covers even the bullshit fees tacked on to your broadband bill. That should make it abundantly clear why more serious low-income aid programs (or efforts to simply improve broadband competition) are never seriously considered. To folks like Pai, turning the FCC into an AT&T ass kissing bobblehead doll is guaranteed to result in near miraculous outcomes, and any evidence to the contrary is simply ignored.

Filed Under: ajit pai, broadband, covid-19, fcc, lifeline, pandemic