AT&T Settles Lawsuit Over 'Fake 5G,' Won't Change A Thing

from the ill-communication dept

Big wireless carriers haven't been exactly honest when it comes to the looming fifth-generation wireless standard (5G). Eager to use the improvements to charge higher rates and sell new gear, carriers and network vendors are dramatically over-hyping where the service is actually available, and what it can actually do. Some, like AT&T, have gone so far as to actively mislead customers by pretending that its existing 4G networks are actually 5G. AT&T took this to the next level recently by issuing phone updates that change the 4G icon to "5GE" on customer phones, despite the fact that actual 5G isn't really available.

This isn't just confusing consumers. Even Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was misled this week by AT&T's gambit:

When AT&T has been called out for the misleading practice, it has only doubled down, with executives like AT&T Communications CEO John Donovan going so far as to say they were pleased by the consternation the head fake was causing:

"Every company is guilty of building a narrative of how you want the world to work, and I love the fact that we broke our industry's narrative two days ago, and so they're frustrated and they're going to do what they do," Donovan said.

"I think the result of last month, beating the industry out [with the 5G hotspot], and this 5G E launch a couple of days ago, our competitors are frustrated," Donovan said. "if I have now occupied beachfront real estate in my competitors' heads, that makes me smile."

So far, consumers aren't really smiling. Not only is AT&T's 4G network being dressed up as 5G, its actual 5G is nothing to write home about. Critics have rightly noted that AT&T's actual 5G footprint is negligible at best, device support is largely nonexistent, and the costs are nothing to cheer about. By and large these early deployments are little more than highly-limited marketing demos, and even then they're not doing a very good job selling 5G as a meaningful connectivity revolution. At least not one worth the additional costs consumers are expected to pay.

Unsurprisingly, the FCC hasn't much cared that AT&T's misleading its customers by pretending 4G is 5G. Sprint, however, sued AT&T back in February, stating that by falsely claiming it was offering 5G, the company was using false advertising to leech away the company's customers.

This week, that lawsuit was quietly settled without the companies involved providing any details whatsoever:

"AT&T and Sprint have settled a lawsuit over AT&T’s “5G Evolution” branding, which Sprint claimed was fooling customers into believing its 4G LTE network was a full-fledged 5G network. “We have amicably settled this matter,” an AT&T spokesperson told the Dallas Business Journal — which cited anonymous sources saying that AT&T would keep using “5G E” in its marketing material. AT&T and Sprint also confirmed its statement to The Verge."

In other words AT&T either paid Sprint to shut them up, or Sprint just backed down for some unforeseen reason. Either way, insiders state that nothing will actually change at AT&T, and the company intends to continue pretending that its modestly-upgraded 4G network is actually 5G. Combined with a lot of the other availability misrepresentation these carriers are engaged in, they're inadvertently teaching customers to associate 5G with empty promises and hype. Not a particularly solid ethical or marketing start for a technology these carriers proclaim will revolutionize the planet as part of the "fourth industrial revolution."

Filed Under: 4g, 5g, fcc, truth in advertising
Companies: at&t, sprint

Trump's Chinese Telecom Protectionism Always Seems To Be Lacking Evidence

from the facts-matter dept

If you hadn't noticed by now, the Trump administration has made blacklisting Chinese telecom companies one of its top priorities. That's been most notably exemplified by the administration's attacks on Huawei, which is repeatedly cited as an asset of the Chinese government without much in the way of proof. From pressuring U.S. carriers to drop plans to sell Huawei phones to the FCC's decision to ban companies from using Huawei gear if they want to receive federal subsidies, this effort hasn't been subtle. A harder, broader ban is supposedly looming in the wings.

There's no doubt that Huawei, like AT&T here in the states, isn't a shining beacon of ethical behavior. At the same time, the dulcet undertones justifying much of the blacklisting is based on the premise that the company spies on Americans on a massive scale. Yet nobody has provided evidence of that. In the slightest. In fact, one 18-month investigation into Huawei in 2011 (the last time we had a similar epidemic of hand-wringing on this subject) found that there was no evidence supporting that claim. As in, at all:

"We knew certain parts of government really wanted” evidence of active spying, said one of the people, who requested anonymity. “We would have found it if it were there."

Also ignored is that U.S. hardware vendors like Cisco have a very long history of trying to gin up hysteria on Capital Hill on this front among lawmakers who aren't too keen on, well, facts:

"What happens is you get competitors who are able to gin up lawmakers who are already wound up about China,” said one Hill staffer who was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter. “What they do is pull the string and see where the top spins."

Again, it's certainly possible that Huawei has spied on Americans, but shouldn't somebody actually provide the smallest bit of public evidence of that fact before we blacklist a company from the better part of a continent? Wouldn't we demand the same if the shoe was on the other foot? The UK and Germany have been skeptical of the US claims, noting they've also yet to see hard evidence proving the scope of the claims. As such, they've taken steps to tighten up security in general, instead of stumbling down the facts-optional protectionism rabbit hole.

Fast forward to last week when the FCC announced it would be banning China Mobile from doing business in the US:

"After a lengthy review of the application and consultation with the U.S. intelligence community, in 2018, the Executive Branch agencies recommended that the FCC deny China Mobile USA’s application due to substantial national security and law enforcement concerns that cannot be resolved through an agreement with the company (called “voluntary mitigation”). Notably, this is the first time the Executive Branch has ever recommended that the FCC deny an application due to national security concerns. Based on this recommendation and the full public record in this proceeding, I have determined that approving this application would not serve the public interest. At our May meeting, the Commission therefore will vote on an Order that would deny China Mobile USA’s application."

Given the Trump administration's relationship to factual reality, that it was the "first" to deny a telecom application on national security grounds doesn't actually mean anything. What was the nature of the identified threat? How severe was it? Where was it discovered? Can you provide the slightest shred of data supporting this claim? Even in redacted form? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Again, it's entirely possible China Mobile is a surveillance threat. But again, why not make at least some of that information public? The problem with the all-too-patriotic and unquestioning press and analyst repetition of these claims (and that is the general tone of US coverage) is that it opens the door to letting government and US industry disguise protectionism as national security. And when you press for evidence, those pushing the agenda hide behind government secrecy. Hopefully it's not too hard to see how this is a problem, or to understand that demanding a bit more (any?) actual evidence isn't really a steep ask.

But the press, oblivious to its own patriotism, tends to parrot these claims without much in the way of hard questions. Or without providing much meaningful context.

For example, you'd be hard pressed to find many stories on Huawei that mention that Americans are so happy to install poorly secured internet of things devices on their home and business networks, foreign intelligence organizations probably don't even need to own the core infrastructure. Or that there's an absolute universe of other Chinese-made hardware embedded in everything from your home router to your not-so-smart refrigerator we apparently don't seem nearly as perplexed by. Or that the United States engages in most of the dubious behavior we have routinely accused China of.

That the "US engages in much of this same behavior and probably shouldn't be giving lectures on surveillance ethics" isn't intended as whataboutism. There's a genuine problem at the heart of this issue: if the US press doesn't demand a factual, transparent public accounting of the Chinese surveillance threat, the door is opened wide to lobbyists eager to disguise protectionism as national security. Companies like Cisco, who simply don't want to compete with cheaper Chinese hardware, have been exploiting this dysfunction for years. And the press, with a few occasional exceptions, has been happy to lend a hand.

Filed Under: china, evidence, fcc, protectionism, telecom
Companies: china mobile

FCC Under Fire For Putting ALEC Rep On 'Consumer' Advisory Board

from the foxes-and-the-hen-house 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.

Fast forward to last week, and the FCC has once again found itself under fire for appointing a member of the The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to the agency's "consumer advisory" panel:

"A committee that advises the Federal Communications Commission on consumer-related matters now includes a representative of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which lobbies against municipal broadband, net neutrality, and other consumer protection measures. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced his Consumer Advisory Committee's new makeup on Wednesday. One new member is Jonathon Hauenschild, director of ALEC's Task Force on Communications and Technology. He and other Consumer Advisory Committee will serve two-year terms.

The most obvious problem is that ALEC is directly employed by the telecom sector to undermine and eliminate consumer protections.

ALEC played a starring role in helping the broadband industry pass blatantly-protectionist bills in more than 21 states that hamstrung or simply banned towns or cities from building their own networks, even in instances when private industry refuses to. It has also bandied about cease and desist warnings against critics who've pointed this out. Both ALEC and Hauenschild have lobbied against net neutrality protections that continue to have the overwhelming bipartisan support of the public. You'd be hard pressed to find a single actual consumer advocate who'd agree with ALEC's positions on these issues.

While Hauenschild likely holds some personally divergent opinions from his employer, there's very little in his background or time at ALEC that would qualify him as expert on consumer telecom issues. Certainly nothing that would somehow position him above a universe of objective experts or academics who've actually worked to protect consumer welfare. And while Pai appointing a like-minded ally to an FCC panel isn't surprising, involving ALEC also raised a few eyebrows given that even AT&T and Verizon have recently backed away from the organization due to its recent hosting of a bigoted, far-right extremist:

"ALEC has long received financial support from the telecom industry. But Verizon left ALEC in September 2018 after it hosted a speech by right-wing activist David Horowitz, in which Horowitz argued against the legalization of abortion and gay marriage, compared the left wing's support of "redistribution of income" to slavery, and said that "at the K-12 level, school curricula have been turned over to racist organizations like Black Lives Matter, and terrorist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood."

Verizon explained to The Intercept that it "has no tolerance for racist, white supremacist, or sexist comment[s] or ideals." AT&T subsequently ended its membership in ALEC, also citing the Horowitz speech."

While ALEC certainly has expertise in consumer protection, it comes in the form of trying to prevent it from happening. Again, Pai surrounding himself with like-minded allies isn't surprising. But appointing an ALEC rep to a consumer issue advisory panel is kind of like inviting a hungry shark to your swimming safety seminar: there's certainly experience there, just not of a variety you're going to find useful. And certainly not helpful when it comes to fixing the universe of problems consumers face in a telecom sector dominated by wealthy and well-connected natural monopolies.

Filed Under: ajit pai, consumer advisory board, fcc
Companies: alec

Very Little In Trump's 'Bold' New Rural Broadband Plan Is Actually New

from the head-fake dept

Last week the Trump administration and the Ajit Pai FCC held a major press conference announcing a "bold" new three-pronged program they claimed would address the nation's longstanding rural broadband issues. During the conference, the President and Pai were flanked by a chorus line of cellular industry employees and ranchers adorned in both tower climbing gear and cowboy hats, apparently in a bid to add a little authenticity to the Village People-esque proceedings:

In his speech, Trump offered his insights on how the "race to 5G" (fifth generation wireless) was an administration priority and a cornerstone of the purportedly new plan:

"We were at 4G, and everybody was saying, “We have to get 4G.” And then they said, before that, “We have to get 3G.” And now we have to get 5G, and 5G is a big deal. And that’s going to be there for a while. And I guess, at some point, we’ll be talking to you about number 6. What do you think? (Laughter.) Do you think that’s true, Ajit?"

According to the administration, part one of the plan involves a new spectrum auction to help drive the deployment of 5G to rural areas. Part two involves clearing away a lot of the "regulatory underbrush" (read: net neutrality, privacy protections, FCC authority over ISPs) the industry has falsely claimed stifled its ability to adequately deploy broadband. And part three is the creation of a "new" $20.4 billion Rural Digital Opportunity Fund it promised would help connect up to four million rural homes and small businesses to high-speed broadband networks over the next decade.

On the surface that all sounds lovely, and the larger technology press was quick to parrot the claims without much skepticism:

"The two proposals reflect the most intensive effort of the Trump era to close the so-called “digital divide” and gain an edge in the global race to build a fully functioning, nationwide 5G network. Proponents say the advances that 5G offers over 4G LTE will enable mobile download speeds of up to 1,000 megabits per second — roughly 100 times faster than the standard — and pave the way for new technologies such as self-driving cars and virtual reality."

You may, however, be shocked to learn the government's real plan is a far cry from what it was portrayed as.

For one, telecom policy experts told me the "new" $20 billion fund isn't actually new. It appears that the FCC is just renaming an existing fund (the Connect America Fund, slated to expire in 2021) and making a few tweaks to it. Of course the FCC hasn't actually announced the specifics behind the changes, though given its fealty to the likes of AT&T and Verizon, you can probably be fairly certain that it involves ensuring that the biggest telecom companies wind up getting a larger chunk of subsidies to help fund their fiber backhaul and 5G deployments.

Granted throwing more money at AT&T and Verizon never really actually fixes much of anything, as the countless billions taxpayers have doled out for half-completed fiber connections pretty routinely shows. These are the same companies that just received billions in Trump tax breaks and countless regulatory favors. They don't need more taxpayer money, but having watched this industry for years I'd wager these two companies' lawyers are the ones driving whatever changes to the program Pai has in store.

Two, the spectrum auctions that Trump and Pai heralded as helping rural America not only weren't new (they'd been planned since the previous FCC), the spectrum being auctioned doesn't actually help rural America in the slightest. Wall Street telecom analyst Craig Moffett noted last week how the millimeter spectrum being auctioned has numerous line-of-sight, range, and wall penetration issues, and will only likely be used in urban markets:

"Aside from unresolved phone battery issues, Moffett told Motherboard that 5G requires “incredibly wide” blocks of spectrum ideally up to 800 MHz wide. The only place blocks of that size reside is in the upper reaches of millimeter wave spectrum. But that spectrum comes with its own issues, Moffett said—namely difficulties with long range signal penetration of building walls, something journalists quickly discovered when testing Verizon’s Chicago 5G launch.

As a result, the technology will be useful for many urban environments, but only via the use of numerous “small cells,” frequently placed on city light poles or building roofs. In more rural and suburban markets carriers will rely on “sub-6” (below 6 GHz) spectrum for cost reasons, providing connectivity that’s going to be a far cry from the speeds promised by carrier marketing.

“Yes, it will be better than 4G eventually, and it will be great for supporting huge numbers of low bandwidth IoT connections,” Moffett said. “But broad-based availability of the kinds of insane speeds people have gotten so excited reading about won’t be available for many, many years, if at all.”

In short, the major "new" funding wasn't new, and the major "new" spectrum auction not only wasn't new, it had nothing to do at all with rural users. Granted Pai also tried to hand off policy moves like killing net neutrality and neutering FCC authority over ISPs as solving the industry's problems, when that's not really true either. Giving entrenched natural monopolies a free pass to behave anti-competitively and jack up captive customer bills doesn't aid rural broadband users, it just doubles down on all the problems that brought us to this point in the first place.

The wireless industry has tried hard to obscure a basic fact: that the same coverage and high prices that plague 4G will plague 5G.

There's still little real incentive to cover rural America because the return on investment isn't there. Subsidies don't work because state and federal lawmakers have become corrupted. And there's still regional geographical monopolies over things like cell tower backhaul that will keep prices high. Meanwhile, as our obsession with merger mania escalates (Sprint, T-Mobile), the incentive to genuinely compete on price drops proportionally. Add in some regulatory capture and the Pai FCC's assault on consumer protections, and it shouldn't take a genius to see that American consumers, especially rural ones, aren't a top priority.

Last week's press conference appears to be entirely focused on trying to trick rural voters into thinking the Pai FCC has their best interests at heart. There's little real evidence to suggest that's actually true, though the majority of the press was happy to dutifully carry forth the claim to those voters all the same.

Filed Under: 5g, ajit pai, donald trump, fcc, rural broadband, spectrum

New FCC Commissioner: Hey, Maybe Somebody In Government Could Address These Wireless Location Data Scandals?

from the ill-communication dept

We've noted a few times now that while Facebook gets a lot of justified heat for its privacy scandals, the stuff going on in the cellular data and app market in regards to location data makes many of Facebook's privacy issues seem like a grade-school picnic. That's something that was pretty well highlighted by the recent Securus and LocationSmart scandals, which showcased perfectly how cellular carriers and location data brokers routinely buy and sell your daily travel habits with only a fleeting effort to ensure all of the subsequent buyers and sellers of that data adhere to basic privacy and security standards.

That was again exemplified by reports on how this data often winds up in the hands of bounty hunters, and can often include 911 location data that's supposed to be protected by law.

Throughout all of this, the Ajit Pai FCC has largely been mute and feckless. In large part because taking action would require actually standing up to the industry's biggest wireless carriers, something that's indisputably not in Pai's wheelhouse. New FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks apparently has no such reservations, and in an editorial in the New York Times doesn't tread gently, noting the scale at which this data can be (and is) abused for a wide variety of reasons:

"The misuse of this data is downright dangerous. The harms fall disproportionately upon people of color. According to the Pew Research Center, people of color rely more heavily on smartphones for internet access, so they create more of this data, which makes them more vulnerable to tracking. Researchers also know that location data can be used to target them with misinformation or voter suppression tactics. It can also lead to assumptions about a person’s race or income level, assumptions that can feed into discriminatory automated decision making."

Starks also suggests that, perhaps, somebody at the FCC and government might actually want to do something about it:

"The F.C.C. says it is investigating. But nearly a year after the news first broke, the commission has yet to issue an enforcement action or fine those responsible. This passage of time is significant, as the agency usually has only one year to bring action to hold any wrongdoers accountable before the statute of limitations runs out. Some may argue that the F.C.C.’s authority to take action against wireless carriers for this activity has gotten weaker in recent years, with the repeal of consumer-focused privacy and net neutrality rules during the current administration. But I believe that the commission still has ample authority to address these egregious pay-to-track practices."

As it stands now, when you sign your lengthy, unread privacy and acceptable use policy with your wireless carrier, that agreement is interpreted by a long line of companies (as many as 70!) to mean you've agreed to have your daily location habits collected, monitored and sold. And while many of these carriers now say they've stopped the practice in the wake of press coverage of these scandals, history suggests that perhaps you shouldn't trust the statements of giant wireless carriers at face value.

Filed Under: data, fcc, geoffrey sparks, privacy

Just $6,790 Of $208 Million In Robocall Fines Have Been Collected By The FCC

from the this-isn't-working 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. Consumers continue to be hammered by mortgage interest rate scams, credit card scams, student loan scams, business loan scams, and IRS scams. 4.9 billion such calls were placed in February alone.

And while the FCC does routinely fine companies and scammers for robocalling, these aren't the kind of outfits that tend to leave a forwarding address. In fact of the $208 million in fines doled out by the FCC for robocall related fraud, the FCC has only been able to collect around $6,790 in actual penalties. That includes the recent, headline-grabbing record $120 million fine the FCC levied against a robocaller who had made up to 98 million robocalls during one three-month period. The FTC has similarly collected $121 million out of $1.5 billion penalties doled out to stop the annoying spam calls.

Often, it's hard to collect because the robocallers in question are just scam organizations that quickly disappear or can't pay. In other instances, it's just a lack of follow through at the FCC or Justice Department, something that's also plagued some of the agency's rulings against companies like AT&T. Many have been quick to point out that the collection failure highlights how fines alone aren't really doing much to thwart the problem, especially if authorities can't or won't collect them:

"The dearth of financial penalties collected by the US government for violations of telemarketing and auto-dialing rules shows the limits the sister regulators [FCC and FTC] face in putting a stop to illegal robocalls," the Journal wrote. "It also shows why the threat of large fines can fail to deter bad actors." Fines can be "a deterrent on legitimate companies that have real assets in the US," but they aren't as effective against scammers and overseas operators, an attorney quoted by the Journal said."

Most technology experts say the real solution to robocalling is finding improved ways to block the calls from reaching consumers in the first place. After years of companies like AT&T blaming everybody but themselves for the industry's apathy to the problem, carriers have finally promised to begin embracing authentication technologies like SHAKEN/STIR that should make it much harder to spoof numbers and complete these calls in the first place.

FCC boss Ajit Pai recently declared that if carriers don't deploy such technology this year (something they already planned), he might be forced to actually do his job and hold them more fully accountable for their failures on this front, be it glacial adoption of authentication tech, or providing free robocall tools to existing subscribers, who pay far too much for service to tolerate this scale of apocalyptic annoyance.

Filed Under: fcc, ftc, robocalls

Pai FCC Tours The Country Promising Better Rural Broadband, But His Policies Routinely Undermine That Goal

from the watch-what-I-do,-not-what-I-say dept

You may have noticed that FCC boss Ajit Pai likes to breathlessly and repeatedly proclaim that one of his top priorities while chair of the FCC is to "close the digital divide." Pai, who clearly harbors post-FCC political aspirations, can usually be found touring the nation's least-connected states declaring that he's working tirelessly to shore up broadband connectivity and competition nationwide. On trip after taxpayer funded trip, both Pai and his fellow commissioners tell audiences his policies are expanding high-speed internet access and closing the digital divide to create jobs and increase digital opportunity.

Several times a month, some small local paper can be found unquestioningly hyping Pai and his fellow commissioners' "digital opportunity tour." Like this recent piece on FCC Commissioner Branden Carr's trip to Alaska, or this piece on Pai's recent visit to Vermont, where Pai once again repeated his (false) claim that gutting sector oversight (and net neutrality) will somehow magically result in better broadband in these historically neglected areas:

"A little rain did not stop Federal Communications Commission Chair Ajit Pai from climbing into a bucket loader and being hoisted to the top of a wireless hotspot in Springfield, Vermont, Wednesday...Pai says a free and open internet is in everyone's best interests. He says if the little guys are successful, competition goes up and costs go down. "So our hope going forward is that consumers would continue to be protected and the FCC and the Federal Trade Commission, we are going to have much more infrastructure improvements than we have had in the past few years," Pai said.

Usually, the Commissioner is portrayed as folksy, relatable, and genuinely interested in making things better:

"I come from a very rural part of Kansas where there isn't a lot of connectivity. Some of the people who move there do move there just to get away from it all, as it were. Our goal is to get you wifi whether you want it or not," Pai joked. "No, I'm just kidding, our [goal] is to make sure every American who wants internet access is able to get it. So if you don't want it, great, but, at least when I travel around, I've met many, many people who are desperate for it. We want to make sure that kind of connectivity that we often take for granted in some of the bigger cities extends to those off-the-beaten-path places."

And that would be great...if the Pai FCC's policies actually reflected those statements. Perhaps Pai truly does believe that he's single-handedly curing the digital divide by giving industry giants like Comcast and AT&T every policy win they've ever dreamed of. But in reality Pai's policies continue to run in stark contrast to his stated goal of more competition, lower prices, and broader broadband availability.

For example last week the FCC quietly voted to cap spending on programs actually designed to bring broadband connectivity to the parts of the country that private ISPs don't deem profitable enough:

"Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has proposed a new spending cap on the FCC's Universal Service programs that deploy broadband to poor people and to rural and other underserved areas.

Pai reportedly circulated the proposal to fellow commissioners on Tuesday, meaning it will be voted upon behind closed doors instead of in an open meeting. Pai has not released the proposal publicly, but it was described in a Politico report Wednesday, and an FCC official confirmed the proposal's details to Ars."

And a relentless Pai target has been the FCC's Lifeline program, an effort started by Reagan and expanded by Bush that long enjoyed bipartisan support until the post-truth era 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. He's been attacking the program ever since.

There are endless other examples of Pai policies doing the exact opposite of what he promises during his town-to-town PR tours, yet none of these are reflected in any of the local coverage of these taxpayer-funded junkets.

The repeal of net neutrality and FCC privacy rules, for example, opens the door to the nickel-and-diming of consumers that already pay some of the highest prices in the developed world for broadband. Pai's attacks on efforts to improve cable box competition ensure your cable box remains both closed and expensive to rent. Pai's FCC also recently gutted a program designed to make rural broadband more affordable in tribal areas, though the courts recently killed that effort after showcasing Pai's arguments weren't factually supportable.

Elsewhere, Pai's FCC has literally tried to weaken the definition of "competition," in a bid to obfuscate broadband deployment and competition shortcomings at behest of industry. And his agency can often be found demonizing community broadband efforts, which are an organic, local response to the private sector's obvious failure to uniformly deploy broadband across the country. This is all when Pai's FCC isn't busy protecting prison phone monopolies or gutting decades old media consolidation rules intended to protect diverse, local reporting.

The lion's share of Pai's policies support one real agenda: protecting the nation's biggest companies from disruption, competition, or accountability. It's not really debatable. Yet thanks to the slow and steady erosion of quality local reporting, not a week goes by where Pai isn't featured by some fluffy local PR piece that ignores all of this and portrays Pai as a "folksy" champion for a digital divide. Even though the lion's share of the FCC boss' policies are making many of these problems notably worse.

Filed Under: ajit pai, broadband, fcc

The FTC Says It's Totally Cool With Anti-Competitive Internet Fast Lanes

from the with-friends-like-these dept

As we've noted for a while, the FCC's attack on net neutrality did much more than just kill net neutrality. It also gutted much of the FCC's authority over broadband providers entirely, making it harder than ever for the agency to police the behavior of historically anti-competitive giants like Comcast NBC Universal and AT&T Time Warner. What authority the government now has to oversee one of the more broken sectors in American industry got shoveled instead to the FTC, an agency critics say lacks the authority or resources to police broadband. That's the entire reason ISP lobbyists pushed for the plan.

Yet throughout the repeal, broadband providers and FCC head Ajit Pai stated that people didn't need to worry because if ISPs did anything wrong, the FTC and antitrust enforcement would stand as a last line of defense. But any expectations that modern, eroded antitrust authority would protect consumers and competitors were quickly ruined by the recent AT&T and Time Warner legal face plant, widely mocked as one of the more clueless rulings in tech policy history.

And last week, Trump FTC boss Joseph Simons made it abundantly clear that the FTC isn't likely going to be helping much either. Again throughout the repeal efforts, folks like FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr penned editorials like this one, insisting that post net neutrality, agencies like the FTC would be quick to crack down on anti-competitive ISP actions like "paid prioritization," which lets a company buy an competitive advantage from an ISP:

"Reversing the FCC’s Title II decision will return the FTC to its role as a steady cop on the beat and empower it to take enforcement action against any ISP that engages in unfair or deceptive practices,” Carr wrote. “Federal antitrust laws will apply.” Carr added that if ISPs “reached agreements to act in a non-neutral manner by unfairly blocking, throttling, or discriminating against traffic, those agreements would be per se unlawful."

Again, the argument being made is that you didn't need net neutrality or strong FCC oversight of ISPs, because antitrust and the FTC would thwart any anti-competitive shenanigans. But in a speech at the National Press Club last week, FTC boss Simons clearly stated that blocking, throttling, or paid prioritization would not be per se antitrust violations. He also said he sees such anticompetitive arrangements the same way as he sees... happy hour:

"Paid prioritization is a type of price discrimination, which is ubiquitous in the economy. For example, think about when you walk into grocery store. Some customers get lower prices because they cut out coupons. Others might get a seniors discount. Others might get 2% off with their credit card. Yet others get discounts because they have a loyalty card with that supermarket. Those of us who go to the afternoon movie matinees will generally pay less, and those of us willing to show up at a restaurant before 6 pm might get the benefit of a lower priced menu. And of course, let’s not forget Happy Hour discounts."

Except none of these examples are remotely the same thing as paid prioritization. Under paid prioritization, ESPN could buy a network latency and speed advantage over an up and coming streaming sports outfit, ensuring that ESPN traffic reached users more quickly and more efficiently. Given the lack of competition in broadband, neither users or impacted companies have a way (choice) to route around that behavior. Nobody has ever argued against discounts, in broadband, they've argued against incumbent ISPs erecting arbitrary tolls and tilting the playing field, something a truly objective FTC would actually care about.

Of course I've been noting how this is the telecom industry's plan all along, something that has been overlooked during the myopic focus on net neutrality alone. The telecom lobby convinced the FCC to effectively self-immolate, driving any remaining authority to an FTC that lacks either the willpower or authority to actually do the job. As a result, oversight and accountability is going to fall into the cracks, which was the industry's entire goal all along.

For now ISPs are trying (though occasionally failing) to avoid anti-competitive behavior so they don't add any ammunition to the giant lawsuit against the FTC, a ruling for which should arrive any day now. But if that lawsuit goes the industry's way, you can expect significantly more anti-competitive behavior moving forward, given they know (by design) that the government has been effectively defanged. And while that's great news if you're an AT&T or Comcast executive, that's not going to be good news if you're a consumer or one of countless small and mid-sized businesses that rely on some degree of internet neutrality to compete.

Filed Under: broadband, fcc, ftc, net neutrality, title ii, zero rating

Telecom Lobby Suddenly Pretends To Care About Accurate Broadband Maps

from the ill-communication dept

For a country that likes to talk about "being number one" a lot, that's sure not reflected in the United States' broadband networks, or the broadband maps we use to determine which areas lack adequate broadband or competition (resulting in high prices and poor service). Our terrible broadband maps are, of course, a feature not a bug; ISPs have routinely lobbied to kill any efforts to improve data collection and analysis, lest somebody actually realize the telecom market is a broken mono/duopoly whose dysfunction reaches into every aspect of tech.

If you want to see our terrible broadband maps at work, you need only go visit the FCC's $350+ million broadband availability map, which is based on the Form 477 data collected from ISPs. If you plug in your address, you'll find that not only does the FCC not include prices (at industry behest), the map hallucinates speed and ISP availability at most U.S. addresses. Part of the problem is that the FCC declares an entire region "served" with broadband if just one home in a census block has service. Again, ISPs fight efforts to reform this in a bid to protect the status quo.

Curiously, USTelecom (which is a policy and lobbying vessel for AT&T and Verizon) last week launched a new PR campaign in which they now profess to be immensely troubled by the country's terrible broadband maps. As such, in an editorial over at CNET, the group stated it's now "leading the charge" in better broadband mapping via several new trials it's conducting in Missouri and Virginia:

"USTelecom is leading the charge on a new, more precise, approach to broadband reporting and mapping. We have proposed to Congress and regulatory agencies a method to create a public-private partnership to map America's broadband infrastructure so policymakers and providers can better target scarce funding to communities with limited or no service options."

Again, one would be inclined to actually believe that if they hadn't watched this same organization routinely try to scuttle better broadband mapping efforts or deny the industry's competition and availability issues for the better part of the last two decades.

The plan itself is rather vague. In it, USTelecom proclaims that it will use "multiple sources of address, building, and parcel data" to create "a broadband serviceable location fabric" to better identify where broadband is available, and where it isn’t. But consumer group analysts who've fought for years for better mapping told me they believe the real goal of USTelecom's latest gambit isn't really better data, it's preventing outside researchers and journalists from confirming the accuracy of said data:

"The voluntary, AT&T and Verizon-led USTelecom idea has the potential to improve the accuracy of the FCC’s data, but it appears this methodology will produce far less transparent data that cannot be systematically verified and utilized by researchers,” (Derek) Turner said. “We are suspicious of the motivations of USTelecom, because their approach of using ISP-supplied address-level data is an idea its members have vigorously opposed since the FCC began collecting data."

The telecom lobby (and many industry lobbyists) enjoy this tactic where as soon as the groundswell of support reaches a certain fevered pitch, they'll push their own solution. Not because they really want to fix the problem, but because they want to pre-empt better, more transparent solutions they won't like. It's a tactic that many telecom-loyal politicians have been attempting with fake net neutrality laws designed to do one thing: pre-empt tougher, better state or federal proposals.

With $4.5 billion in new broadband subsidies on the line, politicians have ramped up the pressure on the FCC to fix the problem before doling out yet more taxpayer money. The Telecom industry, concerned about data that can further showcase telecom sector market failure, clearly hope to beat these efforts to the punch, with numerous caveats and restrictions. When I pressed USTelecom as to whether they'd support making this new data transparent to journalists, researchers, and the public, the group wouldn't answer, and would only punt to the Ajit Pai FCC:

"This is an industry-funded pilot program that the consortium will share first with the FCC when complete,” a USTelecom spokesperson said. “If the FCC adopts this new approach on a national basis, they will determine data availability."

Granted if you've been paying attention at home, you'd know by now that the industry-friendly FCC's reputation for data transparency is not what you'd call stellar. So if the telecom lobby genuinely wants better broadband mapping data, that's great. But if the entire purpose of the plan is to make it harder than ever to independently confirm the industry's speed and availability claims -- or two pre-empt better plans crafted via a coalition of objective experts -- it could actually just making the country's broadband mapping problem worse.

Filed Under: broadband, fcc, isp
Companies: at&t, ustelecom, verizon