The FCC Doesn't Actually Know How Many People Have Broadband

from the busted-data 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.

While these shaky maps have been the norm for several decades, recent bipartisan pressure by states (upset that they're not getting their share of taxpayer subsidies because we don't actually know where broadband is) has finally forced even the Ajit Pai FCC and the telecom industry to take some modest action.

US Telecom, a lobbying org largely backed by AT&T, has been conducting trials in Missouri and Virginia that utilize a new broadband mapping system that integrates hundreds of millions of data points, statistical scoring, and managed crowdsourcing to get a far more accurate assessment of broadband availability. The results? A huge chunk of the areas the FCC has long claimed have broadband, don't:

"In Missouri and Virginia, up to 38% of rural homes and businesses that the FCC counts as having broadband access actually do not, the new research found. That's more than 445,000 unconnected homes and businesses that the FCC would call "served" with its current system.

Given that the new research covered just two states with a combined population of 14.6 million (or 4.5% of the 327.2 million people nationwide), it's likely that millions of homes nationwide have been wrongly counted as served by broadband. A full accounting of how the current data exaggerates access could further undercut FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's claims that repealing net neutrality rules and other consumer protection measures have dramatically expanded broadband access."

Granted most of this is due to the flawed Form 477 data the FCC collects from ISPs. Historically, nobody has confirmed that the data ISPs provided is really accurate, letting ISPs spend years falsely overstating broadband availability. The FCC's methodology had long made the problem worse by determining an entire census blocked "served" with broadband if just one home in that zone had broadband.

The industry has long opposed more accurate mapping because it would only serve to highlight the industry's coverage and competitive shortcomings. That's a major reason why the FCC's $350 million broadband map omits pricing data and largely hallucinates both availability and speeds. And the industry is only finally buckling to pressure now because it knows better mapping efforts are inevitable, and they want to be the ones in control of the data. Some consumer advocates are understandably concerned that less transparency into the raw data may be the industry's broader goal.

Whether the FCC will adopt US Telecom's approach is unclear. But what is clear is that the agency tasked with improving broadband deployment in the US doesn't actually know who has broadband and hasn't for the better part of the last decade. What's also fairly clear is that the Pai FCC's claims that gutting consumer protections (like net neutrality) have dramatically boosted broadband availability, are routinely not supported by, you know, facts. It's kind of hard to claim your policies are having a profound impact on broadband availability when you don't actually know where broadband's available in the first place.

Filed Under: ajit pai, broadband, competition, fcc, mapping

FCC Does Something Right: Proposes Making Suicide Prevention Hotline A Three Digit Number

from the good-for-them dept

We give FCC chair Ajit Pai a lot of grief (to be fair: we've given basically every FCC chair a lot of grief over the years). However, when he does something right we should give him credit. And he's now embraced a plan to give the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline its own 3 digit number, likely to be 988. This is one of those simple plans that just makes sense. Thankfully, there's been a lot greater awareness over the past few years concerning the hotline and suicide prevention in general -- but you still need to remember the phone number. Most people don't (it's 1-800-273-8255 (TALK), in case you don't know). Moving it to a simple three digit number is a good idea that should save lives.

The FCC staff studied several options for the dialing code before going forward with proposing the 9-8-8 number, including repurposing of some of the existing three-digit codes that end with 1-1. The report also explains why directing suicide hotline calls through the existing 9-1-1 infrastructure could be unworkable.

“For example, calls to 911 average 2 minutes or less, and 911 call-takers focus on identifying the nature of the emergency and the caller’s location to enable prompt dispatch of appropriate emergency response. Thus, the 911 system is not well-suited to provide suicide prevention counseling or to respond to calls that can be handled through conversation with a trained mental health professional rather than dispatching first responders,” the report said.

Kudos to Pai and the FCC for moving forward on this.

Filed Under: 988, ajit pai, fcc, national suicide prevention lifeline, suicide prevention

EFF Hits AT&T With Lawsuit Over Sale Of User Location Data

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 a wave of massive scandals showing how your daily location data has long been collected by cellular data companies, then sold to a laundry list of dubious individuals and organizations. Outfits that have repeatedly failed to prevent this data from being abused by everyone from law enforcement to stalkers.

The Ajit Pai FCC has yet to lift a finger or so much as scold the companies for their cavalier treatment of private user data. And while cellular giants like AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile say they've stopped the practice in light of these scandals, nobody has actually bothered to confirm this fact. Given the billions to be made, it's certainly possible these companies may have just made a few modest changes to what's collected, who they sell this data to, and what they call this collection, but are still engaged in monetizing your daily location habits in some fashion.

Enter the EFF, who this week filed a new class action lawsuit against AT&T (pdf). The suit seeks an injunction to ensure that AT&T can no longer collect and sell this data. The class action represents several California AT&T users who say they were never informed, nor gave consent, for their location data to be used in this fashion:

"Defendants’ practices allow Plaintiffs and other AT&T customers to be tracked and targeted by unknown third parties without their knowledge. AT&T leverages the technology embedded within a customer’s phone and its own network infrastructure to locate its customers without any indication that AT&T is tracking them in order to sell their precise location to third parties for non-911 purposes. Indeed, AT&T’s practices were only publicly exposed after an FBI investigation revealed that a sheriff in Missouri had used carrier location data to stalk a Circuit Court Judge and fellow law enforcement officers without their knowledge or consent and without any legal authority to do so. This highly sensitive data has also been used to harass AT&T customers and bypass the rights afforded by the Fourth Amendment."

The lawsuit also demands that AT&T delete the oceans of data that the carrier has collected and sold over the last decade (a bit tricky given the number of companies this data has long been shared with). It also alleges that AT&T violated the Federal Communications Act by not protecting location data, and California's Unfair Competition Law and the Consumers Legal Remedies Act by misleading consumers as to the sale of this data. The EFF also states that both the cellular carriers and proxy aggregator companies violated the California Constitutional Right to Privacy.

In a statement to Motherboard, AT&T unsurprisingly promised to fight the lawsuit, and again insisted it had already ceased selling location data to third-party aggregators:

"While we haven’t seen this complaint, based on our understanding of what it alleges we will fight it. Location-based services like roadside assistance, fraud protection, and medical device alerts have clear and even life-saving benefits. We only share location data with customer consent. We stopped sharing location data with aggregators after reports of misuse."

Having covered AT&T for the better part of several decades, I can promise you that AT&T's not going to give up this multi-billion dollar market without some form of shenanigans, and that an objective third-party audit confirming AT&T's claims will be essential in putting these scandals to rest.

Filed Under: ajit pai, bounty hunters, fcc, location data, oversight, privacy
Companies: at&t, eff

Pai's FCC Crushes Rules That Brought More Broadband Competition To San Francisco

from the look-mom-I'm-helping dept

While many appointments of the Trump administration lack even marginal competence to complete the duties for which they're assigned, the same can't be said of FCC boss Ajit Pai. While Pai's industry-cozy policies may be historically unpopular, the efficiency with which Pai has dismantled telecom consumer protections (and FCC authority in general) can't be denied. Having been a vanilla commissioner for years before being appointed agency head, Pai knows precisely which rules to demolish--and how to obtain the maximum benefit for his core constituents: AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Charter Spectrum.

Gutting net neutrality, killing efforts to bring competition to the cable box, even weakening the definition of competition to aid industry incumbents are but a taste of what Pai has been up to the last few years. Many of these efforts are subtle enough to fall under the radar, even if the impact of the decisions are profoundly negative. Case in point: last week, the FCC announced that the agency would soon vote on whether to preempt a San Francisco city ordinance designed to promote broadband competition in apartments, condos, and other multi-unit buildings.

Article 52, first passed in December of 2016, allows ISPs to use existing building wiring to serve customers, even if it's being used by another ISP. The ruling effectively created an "open access" model inside of San Francisco buildings to help drive a bit more broadband competition. Part of the provision prevents landlords from signing exclusivity deals with incumbent ISPs, something that's been a problem (one the FCC refused to seriously address) for decades (there's a great primer on this here by Susan Crawford).

Enter Ajit Pai, whose new proposal would pre-empt San Francisco's ordinance as a favor to industry incumbents who don't like the added competition. And, like so many things Pai does (the "restoring internet freedom" net neutrality repeal comes quickly to mind), his office tried to claim the proposal does the exact opposite of what it actually does:

"Despite its primary goal of eliminating a rule that gives ISPs access to multi-unit buildings, Pai's proposal is titled, "Improving Competitive Broadband Access to Multi-Tenant Environments." In addition to immediately preempting the San Francisco ordinance, the proposal seeks public comment on other "actions the Commission could take to accelerate the deployment of next-generation networks and services within" multi-tenant complexes. Any further rule changes coming from this proceeding likely wouldn't involve sharing of infrastructure, as the Pai plan argues that ISPs "are less likely to invest in deployment" if they know they have to share network components with other providers."

Of course after Pai loves to trot out claims that something will "boost sector investment," even if we've already seen how those promises are just hot air designed to obfuscate the real agenda: protecting incumbent ISP revenues from absolutely any competitive challenge. This shtick where ISPs lobby for "pre-emptive" federal guidelines is also fairly common. The broader rules they lobby for almost always wind up having so many loopholes as to be useless, because the entire point was to pre-empt tougher local or state ordinances lobbyists didn't want. It lets you kill policies off you don't like--without making it obvious that's what you're doing.

Consumer groups, like the EFF, were unsurprisingly unimpressed:

While efforts like this see little to no press coverage (in part because Pai's good at disguising policies as the opposite of what they actually are), the cumulative impact of Pai's tenure will, ultimately, be profound and severe. But because it's going to be felt most by lower income folks already struggling to get and pay for broadband, it will net a fraction of the attention reserved for numerous other tech policy conversations.

Filed Under: ajit pai, competition, fcc, open access, pre-emption, san francisco

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

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