Former Head Of Ajit Pai's Broadband Advisory Council Is Headed To Prison For Fraud

from the ill-communication dept

In 2017, FCC head Ajit Pai came under fire for filling a new "Broadband Deployment Advisory Council" (BDAC) task force with oodles of industry representatives, but few if any consumer representatives or local town or city officials. Not too surprisingly the panel saw a significant amount of controversy, several protest resignations, and the arrest of a one-time panel chair for fraud, but the panel itself never actually accomplished much of anything to address the problem it was created for.

This week more data emerged on the details behind the arrest of Pai's former council head Elizabeth Ann Pierce. Pierce, the former CEO of Alaskan telecom provider Quintillion, is headed to jail after a pretty elaborate fraud scheme that bilked numerous investors out of some significant cash. Pierce effectively conned numerous parties out of millions by forging sales contracts, used a significant chunk of the money for "personal expenses," then hid the scope of the fraud from her own colleagues and other Quintillion executives:

"Between May 2015 and July 2017, Pierce engaged in a scheme to induce two New York-based investment companies to provide more than $270 million to construct the Quintillion System by providing them with eight forged broadband capacity sales contracts and related order forms under which Quintillion would obtain guaranteed revenue once the Quintillion System was built (the "Fake Revenue Agreements").

Under the Fake Revenue Agreements, four telecommunications services companies appeared to have made binding commitments to purchase specific wholesale quantities of capacity from Quintillion at specified prices. The cumulative value of the Fake Revenue Agreements was approximately $1 billion over the life of the Fake Revenue Agreements. In reality, the Fake Revenue Agreements were completely worthless because Pierce had forged the counterparties' signatures."

Just the person you want leading a council on fixing the broken US telecom sector, right?

Again, the council Pierce headed was supposed to help fix the broken US broadband sector and extend service to less connected areas, but hasn't done much of anything. And the things the council has recommended teeter toward the absurd: like the time it suggested that companies like Google, Netflix, and Facebook pay a "tax" to ISPs to fund the broadband network investment telecom monopolies routinely refuse to do themselves (such a tax has been on AT&T's policy wishlist for years, and is effectively what really began the entire net neutrality debate more than a decade ago).

In some areas, Pai's FCC tenure has been ruthlessly efficient at neutering FCC oversight of natural telecom monopolies and giving those monopolies absolutely everything they want. In other instances it's been plagued with an almost preternatural ability for absurd controversy, incompetence, and bizarre missteps. A commission tasked with doing something it refuses to do, headed by somebody now going to prison for fraud, certainly falls into the latter camp.

Filed Under: ajit pai, broadband advisory council, elizabeth ann pierce, fcc, fraud
Companies: quintillion

Robocalls Swamp Hospitals As The Trump FCC Pretends To Fix The Problem

from the spammed-to-death dept

Despite endless government initiatives and countless promises from the telecom sector, our national robocall hell continues. Robocalls from telemarketers continue to be the subject the FCC receives the most complaints about (200,000 complaints annually, making up 60% of all FCC complaints), and recent data from the Robocall Index indicates that the problem is only getting worse.

As robocallers get bolder, they're increasingly targeting institutions like hospitals, often to a dangerous degree:

"At Tufts Medical Center, administrators registered more than 4,500 calls between about 9:30 and 11:30 a.m. on April 30, 2018, said Taylor Lehmann, the center’s chief information security officer. Many of the messages seemed to be the same: Speaking in Mandarin, an unknown voice threatened deportation unless the person who picked up the phone provided their personal information."

Tufts' phone provider, Windstream, informed the medical center there was nothing they could do. But the problem has spiked in recent months, and other medical professionals say legislators, corporations, and the FCC have been too slow in responding to the threat:

"Administrators at other hospitals, cancer centers and medical research organizations around the country share Tufts’s robocall concerns. They fret that such a seemingly obvious tech malady has worsened in recent months and that government regulators and phone companies have been too slow to help. And they fear that robocallers could eventually outmatch their best efforts to keep hospital phone lines free during emergencies, creating the conditions for a potential health crisis."

As we just got done explaining, the Pai FCC has been getting a lot of press for what it claims is a bold, new plan to help rein in the robocall menace by "suggesting" that carriers offer free robocalling tools by default, and recommending that they quickly adopt call authentication technology to thwart spoofing (faking the originating call number). But the Pai FCC proposal isn't actually new, and offers absolutely no penalty for carriers that fail to comply.

And while Ajit Pai has promised to hold carriers accountable if they don't, there's absolutely nothing in Pai's tenure so far that suggests he's actually capable of standing up to carriers. The press likes to beat around the bush on this front, but there are two major reasons this FCC hasn't done more to thwart robocalls. One, carriers don't want to have to pay for it, and the Pai FCC has proven to be a mindless rubber stamp to carrier interests. Two, a lot of "legitimate" telemarketing and debt collecting agencies utilize these exact same tactics, and the FCC doesn't want to upset them either.

What we get as a result is a government that pays a lot of lip service to the problem, but doesn't actually do much of anything for fear of upsetting campaign contributors in the telecom and marketing industries. They're quick to go after smaller robocall players that are easy to prosecute, but they're terrified of holding larger, legitimate companies accountable for their own role in failing to implement technologies that could have put the problem to bed years ago. Again because while a lot of "robocalls" are perpetuated by illegal scam operations, a lot of them are perpetuated by industries using the exact same tactics (this 2018 testimony by Margot Saunders (pdf) explains this in great detail) to harass and spam consumers.

As a result, the problem will only get worse until somebody in government grows a spine and mandates that all carriers must implement anti-spoofing tech and provide completely free robocall-blocking tools to consumers by default, giving consumers full control over who can call them and when. The problem is getting bad enough that even Ajit Pai may be forced to take a tougher stance against his BFFs in the marketing and telecom sectors, but that's not a bet most would be willing to make anytime soon.

Filed Under: ajit pai, fcc, hospitals, robocalls, spam

Dish To Buy Parts of T-Mobile To Save Sprint Merger, But It's Not Likely To Help

from the ill-communication dept

We recently noted that the DOJ seemed to have shifted its thinking and is now likely to approve T-Mobile's highly problematic $25 billion merger with Sprint. Why? As it stands, the merger would eliminate one of just four major US wireless competitors, dramatically reducing any incentive to compete on price and inevitably resulting in layoffs. So T-Mobile lobbyists have launched a hail Mary pass: they're proposing spinning off a part of the company and potentially selling it to a competitor like Dish Network. This would create a new fourth carrier to (theoretically) help offset any potential competitive harm.

That theory gained traction again with yet more reports stating that Dish would buy about $6 billion in T-Mobile and Sprint assets in an attempt to force this new fourth carrier into existence:

"Dish could announce a deal as soon as this week for assets including wireless spectrum and Sprint’s Boost Mobile brand, said the people, who asked to not be identified because the matter isn’t public. The deal hasn’t been finalized and talks could still fall through, said the people.

The potential divestitures are aimed at appeasing the Justice Department, which wants T-Mobile and Sprint to sell enough assets to ensure that the U.S. maintains at least four viable wireless players.

While this is likely going to be played up by the press and loyal T-Mobile politicians as the perfect "solution" to the reduced competition issue the deal creates, that's not true. The assets Dish is buying (Sprint's prepaid brand Boost Mobile) are largely incongruent with actually building a viable fourth carrier, so while this deal might be great for Dish (which has been hoovering up and squatting on spectrum for years with zero penalty) it's not going to accomplish what T-Mobile and the government are going to claim when DOJ approval is announced this week or next.

Wall Street analyst Craig Moffett put it this way in a research note to investors:

"We’re not sure why that deal is sensible for anyone involved. Dish, remember, already has more spectrum than they know what to do with; what they lack is money and ground facilities, and the deal described on Friday wouldn’t deliver either one. Instead, it would make both problems worse. And while Boost would help provide a baseline revenue stream in return for an upfront purchase price, the fit between Boost and Dish is, at best, superficial.

Yes, Boost serves a budget-conscious consumer, as does Dish Network’s satellite business, but Boost is a mostly urban brand and Dish’s satellite business is an increasingly rural one. And, more urgently, Boost’s distribution poses a huge problem. Historically, Boost was heavily dependent on Walmart for retail gross additions, but they’ve since lost that distribution channel. They would also, presumably, lose distribution through Sprint-branded stores (and even if, as a condition of the deal, they didn’t, does anyone think that Sprint/T-Mobile store employees would direct any volume to a spun-off Boost brand?) That would leave Dish with a brand that has a churn rate as high as 5% per month to be spun off with an inadequate distribution front end, and with no realistic path to replace that front end before the subscriber base was, well, gone."

That's a lengthy way of saying the spin off and sale of assets to Dish isn't going to work, and the end product is not going to be an adequate replacement for technically killing off Sprint. The effort is theatrical, and likely to end with just three major competitors anyway.

The other major problem is regulatory accountability and follow through. Creating and maintaining an entirely new viable fourth carrier while ensuring Dish doesn't just squat on spectrum for later sale is going to require some significant regulatory guard rails and FCC oversight. Who exactly is going to shepard this process, Ajit Pai? The same Ajit Pai that has yet to stand up to any major company on any issue of substance? The same Ajit Pai who didn't think any meaningful conditions were required to protect jobs and consumers from the deal's inevitable impact? The same guy who thinks oversight of predatory natural monopolies isn't necessary? Good luck with that.

At the end of the day Dish's involvement will be sold as an amazing solution to the deal's biggest issues. But in reality the simpler, safer, and saner option remains to just block the deal outright. Just like regulators did when they blocked AT&T from buying T-Mobile in 2011, and when Sprint tried the same thing in 2014. A turd is still a turd, even when you put an adorable little hat on it.

Filed Under: antitrust, competition, doj, fcc, mergers, spectrum, wireless
Companies: dish, sprint, t-mobile

FCC Pats Itself On The Back For 'New' Robocall Plan That Isn't New, Has No Real Teeth

from the consumer-protection-theater dept

The Ajit Pai FCC has been making the rounds the last few weeks patting itself on the back for its new anti-robocall initiative. But while the tech press has kind of tripped over itself to suggest the plan is a dramatic departure from FCC robocall policies of the past, the reality is there's little to nothing in the plan that's actually new. The biggest change is a new FCC rule adjustment that would let wireless carriers install robocalling blocking tools on consumer devices by default, in contrast to the current paradigm where consumers have to opt in (assuming the tools are offered at all).

To hear Ajit Pai tell it in an editorial over at USAToday, this slight policy language shift is a major revolution in robocall enforcement:

"Stopping the deluge of unwanted calls is the FCC’s top consumer protection priority. That’s why I recently proposed to allow such calls to be blocked by default, before they even get to your phone. Call-blocking services are available now, but only if a consumer proactively asks for it or downloads an app.

But under my proposal, which the FCC will vote on Thursday, phone companies won’t have to wait before offering these protections. This should greatly increase consumer adoption of these services and help stem the flow of scam robocalls. And, of course, consumers can opt out if they don’t want these calls blocked."

Here's the thing though. While the plan urges wireless carriers to offer robocall blocking technology by default, and encourages them to deploy anti-spoofing tech to help prevent robocallers from hiding their real numbers, there's absolutely nothing in the plan that actually requires they do so. And while Pai has suggested he'll take "regulatory action" if carriers don't, there's little to nothing in Pai's history that suggests he's capable of standing up to carriers should they lag on such adoption. In the two years since being appointed by Trump, Pai has yet to stand up to carriers on a single policy proposal of any real measure. As in: ever.

While Pai suggests that FCC policy (not letting carriers offer tools that block calls by default) was a major reason why carriers were lagging on implementing robocall-blocking technology, the real reason is arguably much simpler: they didn't want to pay for it. As a result, wireless carriers have spent several years blaming everyone but themselves for failing to do more to thwart robocalls, suggesting it was FCC policy -- not carrier penny pinching -- that was to blame. And while Pai subtly perpetuates that myth here, former FCC lawyer Gigi Sohn recently told me the previous FCC had already gone out of its way to make it clear carriers would not face penalties for being more aggressive:

"We said in 2015 that the carriers incurred no legal liability for allowing consumers to use robocall blocking technology,” Sohn says. “Here, Pai is saying that the carriers won’t incur liability for blocking robocalls by default. So I suppose it’s a bit stronger, but not by much."

Consumer advocates were even more pointed, noting that much of the Pai proposal had basically taken the previous FCC's robocall efforts (which Pai repeatedly voted against), slapped a new coat of paint on it, and tried to claim it was new:

"This follows a familiar pattern of Pai taking the initiatives of the Obama FCC, filing the serial numbers off, and then claiming these ideas as his own,” Feld says. “It takes truly world class chutzpah for Pai to do this after he dissented from virtually everything Wheeler tried."

Feld told me the FCC's proposal opens the door for carriers to charge US consumers (who already pay some of the highest rates in the developed world for service) an additional line item fee for blocking robocalls, something consumer groups believe should simply be included as a standard part of your service.

The Pai proposal is also quick to focus almost exclusively on illegal scam operations, ignoring the "legitimate" debt collectors and telemarketers that utilize the exact same tactics. In fact, the same week the new FCC proposal was being circulated, Pai's fellow Commissioner Michael O'Rielly was busy kissing up to the telemarketing and debt collection industry at an industry event:

"Repeat after me,” O’Rielly said on Thursday. “‘Robocall’ is not a bad word.”

That's a bit of a mixed message there, hoss.

So in short, while the Pai proposal makes one modest clarification to FCC rules, most of the proposal is simply a rehash of previous efforts, and offers zero penalties for carriers that choose to do nothing. It also opens the door to consumers paying more to block these annoying calls, and doesn't really address that much of the robocalling menace is coming from large above-board companies. Ultimately Pai now finds himself in a precarious position. His longstanding policy of refusing to hold carriers accountable for misdeeds will run face first into the ocean of pissed off Americans tired of receiving annoying robocalls.

Filed Under: ajit pai, fcc, robocalls

Comcast Gets $9 Million Fine For Tricking Customers With 'Worthless' Protection Plans

from the relative-wrist-slap dept

In August of 2016, Washington State sued Comcast, claiming the cable giant had long been offering consumers a "service protection plan" that was barely worth the paper it was printed on. According to the Washington State AG, the plan promised consumers "comprehensive" protection for all repairs, service calls, maintenance of inside wiring and customer-owned equipment, and "on-site education about Comcast products" for $5 more per month.

But the AG investigation found Comcast repeatedly misled consumers about the scope of the plan, and routinely charging consumers for repairs and service that should have been included under the plan's umbrella. Comcast misled more than 500,000 Washington state consumers in this fashion, and the AG's original lawsuit (pdf) noted that Comcast had even created a clear "service code" for techs to use when they wanted to incur charges for service that should have been covered under the plan.

Fast forward to last week, when a ruling in King County, Washington court (pdf) found that Comcast also technically violated the law more than 445,000 times when it charged tens of thousands of Washingtonians for this worthless Service Protection Plan -- without first obtaining their consent. From the full AG announcement:

"The court found that Comcast added the SPP to the accounts of 30,946 Washingtonians without their knowledge, and did not tell an additional 18,660 Washingtonians the true cost of the plan. The court ordered Comcast to refund affected consumers, and pay 12 percent interest on the restitution. The amount of restitution is unknown at this time, but is expected to be significant. The court ordered Comcast to issue the refunds within 60 days and report to the state on the specific details and amounts."

Comcast's little gambit was certainly profitable: the court ruling declared that Comcast netted more than $73 million in errant fees over a five-year period by signing up customers for the worthless service plan they never asked for. Court recordings even documented how Comcast would sign up customers for the plan even when they clearly rejected Comcast representatives' pitches.

Comcast, whose historically terrible customer service is already the stuff of legend, will be required to refund nearly 50,000 customers and pay a $9.1 million fine to make up for years of misleading behavior. And while that sets a Washington State record, that still likely falls well short of the total net profit Comcast made from scamming Washington State consumers. And that's of course just Washington State; if Comcast was doing this in Washington, it was likely doing it in other states, yet no other states have pursued investigations into the behavior.

In the wake of the federal government abdicating most of its authority to protect consumers from giant telecom monopolies that face little organic competition, states have tried to step up their game when it comes to consumer protection. But it hasn't been easy; with the Ajit Pai FCC's help, the telecom lobby has tried its damnedest to ban states from being able to hold giant ISPs responsible. That gambit hasn't been working out all that well -- at least in states that can be bothered to actually still care about consumer protection.

Filed Under: fcc, scams, service protection plan, washington, wireless protection plan
Companies: comcast

Microsoft Again Slams America's Shaky Broadband Maps

from the you-can't-fix-a-problem-you-don't-understand dept

We've long noted how US telecom policy never really accomplishes much because the underlying data we use to make decisions is hot garbage. The FCC doesn't really spend much time fact checking industry availability and speed claims, resulting in coverage maps that hugely overstate broadband speed, availability, and overall competition. When efforts to improve US broadband mapping pop up, the telecom sector routinely lobbies to kill them, lest somebody actually get a good idea of the broken state of US telecom.

Outside of consumers and consumer groups, nobody much cares about this perpetual dance of dysfunction. One lone exception has been Microsoft, which has been increasingly highlighting the shaky quality of US broadband mapping data. Microsoft has been a major backer of White Space broadband, which utilizes the spectrum freed by the migration to digital television as a new emerging broadband option.

In a recent blog post the company argued that the FCC is potentially overstating US broadband (defined by the FCC as 25 Mbps downstream) availability on a fairly epic scale. In part because the agency isn't verifying ISP claims, but also because when an ISP serves just one home in a census block, the FCC takes that to mean the entire census block is connected to broadband. Microsoft's data shows that 162 million Americans don't technically use "broadband" (25 Mbps), often because they can't get it or it's not affordable.

That's why when the Pai FCC recently released yet another survey claiming that American broadband was wonderful (falsely claiming things like killing net neutrality was the reason why), Microsoft issued a statement attempting to correct the record:

"We share the FCC’s commitment to closing the digital divide in rural America, but we have concerns that this report continues to rely on inaccurate coverage data. There is strong evidence, including the FCC’s own subscription data and Microsoft data, that broadband is not available to millions of people in America even though the FCC’s data says it is. We hope that, moving forward, the FCC adopts appropriate solutions as we’ve previously outlined to improve the accuracy of broadband mapping so the country can more quickly close the digital divide."

With Ajit Pai's FCC widely now seen as a mindless rubber stamp for the interests of AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast, there's not much chance it's going to lead the charge on better mapping. Sensing the levees of frustration about to break on this subject, the telecom lobby (US Telecom) has been pushing for its own mapping proposal experts tell me has one real function: to try and keep real, accurate data out of the hands of American consumers:

“I think we should be extremely skeptical of taking ideas from an industry that has chosen to avoid competing with cable companies as the arbiter of accurate mapping that will measure the state of competition and access,” Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer Ernesto Falcon told Motherboard via email. “They have every interest in hiding the ball of how badly the United States is behind on fiber to the home deployment as they are generally seen as the companies that should be leading that effort."

"We are concerned about the true motivations of this industry-led effort, and fear that the end result will be only marginal improvements in accuracy but a major loss in transparency and public access to the underlying data,” [Free Press' Derek] Turner said.

Accurate, transparently available data would highlight how US telcos have all but refused to upgrade their aging DSL networks as they fixate on wireless video, giving cable giants like Comcast and Spectrum a growing monopoly over next generation speeds (and no, 5G isn't magically going to fix it). But if you fix the mapping data and provide America an accurate picture on how it's getting screwed (especially on price), somebody might just get the crazy idea to actually fix it -- and we sure as hell wouldn't want that.

Filed Under: accuracy, broadband, broadband maps, competition, data, fcc
Companies: microsoft

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

FCC Broadband Report: What Broadband Competition Problem?

from the nothing-to-see-here dept

By law, the FCC is required once a year to issue a report indicating whether quality broadband is being deployed on a "reasonable and timely basis." If not, the agency is supposed to, you know, actually do something about it. Unsurprisingly, the Pai FCC last year issued a glowing report declaring that everything was going swimmingly, despite some glaring evidence to the contrary. After all, the nation's phone companies have effectively stopped upgrading their DSL lines, leaving cable giants like Comcast with a quietly growing monopoly over faster broadband speeds (no, 5G won't magically fix this).

This week, the FCC once again issued a report stating that broadband was being deployed in a reasonable and timely basis. As with the earlier, leaked versions of this report, the FCC has been quick to proclaim that some modest improvement in overall broadband availability was thanks to Pai FCC policies like killing net neutrality:

"According to the FCC’s latest study, the number of Americans lacking access to a broadband (defined by the FCC as 25 Mbps downstream, 3 Mbps upstream) has dropped from 26.1 million Americans at the end of 2016 to 21.3 million Americans at the end of 2017. The FCC said availability of 250 Mbps connections grew 36 percent in 2017.

“This report shows that our approach is working,” Pai said of the report before it was formally released to the public. “But we won’t rest until all Americans can have access to broadband and the 21st century opportunities it provides to communities everywhere."

But there are several problems with this claim. One, this growth is well in line with past years. Two, much of the growth in the report is thanks to things Pai had nothing to do with. For example, while Pai's FCC takes credit for "record" fiber growth last year, at least half of the lines deployed were thanks to conditions affixed by the previous FCC to AT&T's 2015 merger with DirecTV. Similarly, a not insubstantial portion of the broadband speed and availability improvements are courtesy of community broadband networks Pai's FCC actively opposes. And while Pai has also tried to claim some of the growth is thanks to killing net neutrality, the report's data is only current up to the end of 2017. Net neutrality wasn't officially repealed until June of 2018.

This is all before you get to the fact that none of this data is reliable because US broadband mapping and availability data is hot garbage, something all five Commissioners (after years of complaints) have finally started to acknowledge:

"“We need to stop relying on data we know is wrong,” Rosenworcel said. “Putting aside the embarrassing fumble of the FCC blindly accepting incorrect data for the original version of this report, there are serious problems with its basic methodology. Time and again this agency has acknowledged the grave limitations of the data we collect to assess broadband deployment.”

Gigi Sohn, a lawyer for the previous FCC, told Motherboard in a statement that you can’t fix a problem you don’t really understand.

“The FCC's 2019 Broadband Deployment Report is hopelessly flawed and cannot be the basis for future policymaking,” Sohn said. “Nor does it validate Chairman Pai’s unsubstantiated claims that his policies have helped to close the digital divide."

You'll also note that this report, much like the FCC's $250 million broadband map, fails utterly to even mention the high cost of broadband in the United States. While the FCC obtains pricing data from ISPs, it has long shirked away from sharing this data with the public, lest somebody get a better sense of the hugely negative impact limited competition has on the US market.

Another notable bit of amusement: an earlier draft of Pai's report was found to have been based on an ISP clerical error that resulted in the FCC overstating broadband availability by some 62 million households. When Pai released the initial synopsis of the report, he proclaimed that the near-mystical growth was a direct reflection of his policies. After consumer groups pointed out the errors in the data the FCC quietly fixed the error, but left its conclusions the same. The FCC's newest Commissioner, Geoffrey Starks, found that a little bit odd:

"The fact that a 2019 Broadband Deployment Report with an error of over 62 million connections was circulated to the full Commission raises serious questions. Was the Chairman’s office aware of the errors when it circulated the draft report? If not, why didn’t an “outlier” detection function raise alarms with regard to Barrier Free? Also, once the report was corrected, the fact that such a large number of connections came out of the report’s underlying data without changing the report’s conclusion, and without resulting in a substantial charge to the report, calls into question the extent to which the report and its conclusions depend on and flow from data."

Again, none of this is really new. While the FCC has always had a tenuous relationship with factual data under both parties, Pai's FCC has taken this to an entirely new level. It's clear to pretty much everybody that US broadband is an incredibly broken market dominated by some of the least-liked natural monopolies in America. But Pai has yet to stand up to telecom giants on a single issue of substance, and his FCC has been caught repeatedly just blindly using massaged telecom lobbyist data to justify policies that have been widely criticized, on a bipartisan basis, for making existing problems (particularly high prices) worse.

Filed Under: ajit pai, competition, fcc, net neutrality