Consumer Groups Get Punchy As Biden Team Lags On Staffing FCC, Restoring Net Neutrality

from the taking-your-sweet-time dept

Last December the Trump administration rushed the appointment of Nathan Simington to the FCC, despite Simington having absolutely no real experience or qualifications for the role. That's because Simington was appointed for two other reasons. One being the silly (and utterly hypocritical if you tracked the net neutrality fights) effort by the Trump administration to try and have the FCC target Section 230, which was derailed by Trump's election loss.

But the other purpose of Simington's rush appointment was to ensure the FCC would be gridlocked at 2-2 commissioners. Like the FTC, the FCC is comprised of a 3-2 partisan makeup depending on who controls the White House. And while Biden could have easily appointed a new FCC Commissioner to break that gridlock, we're now nearing six months into his tenure with no movement on this front.

Granted there are a lot of fires the Biden administration is tasked with putting out. But having a gridlocked FCC during a health and economic crisis where broadband is playing a starring role still isn't a great look. As a result, a coalition of more than 50 consumer groups and unions wrote the Biden camp last week asking for something vaguely resembling urgency on the FCC front:

"As we move toward the second half of 2021 with no nomination for the fifth and final commissioner, the Federal Communications Commission remains below full capacity, which is incompatible with the goal of delivering open, affordable and reliable high-speed broadband to every home. This is all the more urgent given the fact poor families and people of color are disproportionately disconnected from high-speed internet access, compounding grave inequalities that were made worse during the pandemic.

Given the legislative calendar and the diminishing number of days for hearings and confirmation votes, we have reached a critical point to guarantee the agency charged with ensuring affordable communications access can do its work during your administration. Failing to nominate a fifth commissioner leaves the FCC less than fully operational and limits its capacity to most effectively.

Consumer groups are being overly polite here because they tactically need to be, but there's no reason for this to be taking this long, even with everything on the Biden team's plate.

I bring this up a lot, but that's because I still see a lot of folks who seem to think the net neutrality repeal didn't really matter much because the internet didn't immediately implode in a rainbow of color.

But it mattered because the repeal didn't just kill net neutrality rules, it effectively gutted the FCC's consumer protection authority, leaving it ill-equipped to police basic things like rampant telecom industry billing fraud. It shoveled any remaining consumer protection oversight to an FTC with limited authority over telecom, and that's too understaffed and underfunded to tack "hold telecom monopolies meaningfully accountable" on top of its existing, massive workload. It's precisely why the telecom lobby pushed for this. And the Biden team's lack in doing anything on this front for five+ months reflects a failure to understand any of this.

This regulatory lobotomization also occurred right before a crisis showcasing the essential nature of broadband for stuff like education, healthcare, and overall opportunity. The ridiculously named Trump/Pai "restoring internet freedom" repeal even tried to ban states from protecting broadband consumers (though the courts haven't looked too kindly on this last part). Needles to say, the combination of limited competition and regulatory capture isn't a good thing, and if you think it is, you've not spent much time on the phone with Comcast support, or trying to use an aging, expensive DSL line.

All of this also still matters because all of the justifications for the repeal, including claims of amazing job growth and ramped up broadband network investment, wound up being a lie. We effectively gutted oversight of a broken and heavily monopolized US business sector -- entirely because a handful of monopolies and their various policy tendrils promised all manner of amazing outcomes. When a long parade of experts pointed out the repeal was based on bullshit and would be harmful, we... ignored them. And when the amazing promised outcomes never materialized... we ignored that too.

And while many insist that Congress should just pass a net neutrality law and end this "regulatory ping pong," that (usually intentionally) ignores the fact that this telecom campaign-cash slathered Congress is never going to hit the 60 votes necessary to pass a law of any worth. That leaves us with a choice: either an FCC that's too feckless and pathetic to be able to stand up to AT&T and Comcast, or an FCC that at least has the authority and voting majority to occasionally hold these giants accountable.

Filed Under: biden administration, fcc, gridlock

With Simington Vote, The GOP And Big Telecom Maneuver To Cripple The Biden FCC

from the nice-democracy-you've-got-there dept

We've noted at length how the GOP is rushing this week to appoint Trump ally Nathan Simington to the FCC. Simington, you'll recall, wrote Trump's ridiculous executive order targeting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the essential law that protects freedom of expression and innovation on the internet. The bumbling attack is necessary, you're told, to "fix" the social media "censorship" of Conservatives that doesn't actually exist. In other words, an unqualified appointment pushing an idiotic solution to a nonexistent problem that actually creates new, unnecessary headaches.

Simington you'll recall is slated to replace Mike O'Rielly, the Republican FCC Commissioner fired last August by Trump for some timid statements suggesting that Trump's plan wasn't a great idea (an argument supported by a massive bipartisan coalition of experts) and the FCC lacks the proper authority to enforce. O'Rielly's term is up at the end of the year, so the GOP is rushing to gain a quick Simington approval in both committee and the broader Senate. The committee vote sped through process this morning along party lines, with the GOP making nary a peep about Simington's lack of any real qualifications for the post.

Attention now shifts to a full Senate vote on Simington.

It gets lost in analysis, but the GOP is threatening Section 230 to bully social media giants into not policing disinformation and race-baiting bullshit, a cornerstone of modern party power. But given the gambit's unlikely success at the FCC in the wake of a Trump loss and Ajit Pai exit, the 230 stuff has almost become a distraction now, at least as it pertains to the FCC.

The goal for McConnell has shifted toward miring the Biden FCC in partisan gridlock to prevent it from being able to reverse unpopular Trump-era policies. Should Simington be approved, the agency would sit at two Republican and two Democratic Commissioners heading into the new year. I've spoken to several consumer groups and insiders familiar with the process who say this is the likely GOP strategy. But it was further highlighted in a letter by Grover Norquist (yes, he's still around) to Mitch McConnell.

Norquist's right wing 501(c)(4) organization, Americans for Taxpayer Reform (ATR), is a telecom-industry favorite, frequently used in policy debates to target things AT&T and Comcast don't like, from functional, adult oversight of the broadband sector, to diabolical plan by many communities to build better, faster broadband networks. Norquist's letter spells out to McConnell (who of course already knew this) that the Simington appointment would be a great way to thwart the Biden FCC from doing much of anything. Of course it's phrased in such a way to suggest Norquist and friends are only interested in genuine, good faith bipartisanship:

"Americans for Tax Reform urges you to confirm Nathan Simington to the FCC before the end of this year,” Americans for Taxpayer Reform president and conservative operative Grover Norquist wrote to McConnell. “Simington’s confirmation now would ensure a 2-2 FCC at the outset of a Biden Presidency. The FCC could continue to pursue important initiatives on a bipartisan basis, but it would be blocked from jamming through partisan initiatives—whether those involve profligate spending or an anti-growth agenda."

Of course if you've tracked the modern "own the libs" GOP for any more than thirty seconds, you already know bipartisan solutions aren't what they're interested in. Most tech policy subjects, like net neutrality or community broadband aren't partisan and have broad, bipartisan support among U.S. consumers. But the GOP, and countless industries like telecom, figured out years ago if you frame them as partisan anyway via disinformation and rightwing news outlets, you can easily drum up animosity among the misinformed, stall consensus, and thereby, derail meaningful reform or constraints on corporate power.

For telecom, Simington's appointment has several advantages. One, it appoints an unqualified sycophant to the FCC who'll spend much of his time fixated on "reining in big tech," while ignoring a parade of bad behavior by "big telecom." That's well in line for a telecom industry that has spent several years exploiting legitimate grievances about tech giants to its own tactical and regulatory advantage without most folks really understanding or noticing.

Two, the 2-2 split gives telecom and the GOP leverage to either block the appointment of a Biden FCC boss with any spine, or block the appointment of anybody whatsoever, effectively crippling the agency for at least two years. That means no reversal of the net neutrality repeal, no restoration of media consolidation rules, and probably not even any meaningful Covid policies (like barring usage caps or preventing ISPs from kicking struggling Americans offline) if they upset AT&T, Comcast, or Verizon in any meaningful way. That will create voter anger at Biden for "not doing more," a tactic you'll see played out across most regulatory agencies as the GOP shifts from mindless Trump sycophancy back to corporatist obstructionism.

Of course the GOP (and telecom) will argue that this most certainly isn't what's happening, as if the party that used dead and fake people to support shitty, unpopular FCC policies is above such tactics. But it's happening all the same. Like Americans for Tax Reform, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr is pushing the talking point (likely provided them in a .pdf by AT&T and USTelecom) that they're doing this to save the economy from harm (which is complete and total nonsense):

"FCC Republican Brendan Carr this week appeared on Fox Business and said, "It would be very valuable to get Simington across the finish line to help forestall what really would be billions of dollars worth of economic damage that I think a Democrat FCC would look to jam through from day one in January or February." (Despite Carr's claims, the Obama-era Title II regulation and net neutrality rules did not slow down investments in broadband networks, but major ISPs have cut back on network spending since the Pai-led FCC deregulated the industry and repealed the rules.)"

Whether it succeeds depends on GOP lawmakers suddenly growing a spine and voting against a terrible and unqualified Trump-chosen FCC Commissioner in the full Senate, or the Democrats finding creative and tactically-clever ways to kill or stall the vote, both of which would challenge recent historical precedent. "Crippling the nation's top telecom regulator with partisan gridlock during a public health crisis is bad" is messaging that pretty much writes itself, but most Democrats, seemingly often incapable of any creative and aggressive tactical responses to threats like this, have (with a few minor exceptions) been silent about the threat, assuming they see it coming at all.

But the ploy also hinges on the GOP being able to hold the Senate via the Georgia run off races, which is no sure bet. Either way, the modern GOP continues to show its primary party platform is to repeatedly proclaim that government can never, ever work, then set about immediately sabotaging any effort that might just test that theory. Given his very first fundraiser was held by a Comcast lobbyist, there's certainly no guarantee a Biden administration will be tough on telecom. But it's also pretty clear "big telecom" doesn't want to risk his administration appointing anybody that might just disrupt the broken status quo and reverse four straight years of anti-consumer Trump policy.

Filed Under: fcc, gridlock, joe biden, nathan simington, net neutrality, regulations, section 230

Patent Gridlock Harming The Ability To Create Lifesaving Cures

from the patents-costing-lives dept

I've gotten way behind on my series of posts on intellectual property. I plan to pick it up again shortly. There's a big post I've been working on that I just haven't had the time to complete. However, one of the upcoming posts in the series is going to focus in on the question of pharmaceutical patents. While some claim that the pharma industry is an example where patents actually work effectively, there's plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise. I'll try to highlight much of that evidence, but it looks like Michael Heller is doing some of that already. Heller, the author of The Gridlock Economy, which we recently mentioned has penned a piece for Forbes, where he points out how the rise of patents in the pharma and biotech world is not leading to new cures. In fact, it's actively stifling them, by making it nearly impossible for certain types of research to be done. This is a point Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has also been making for years.

Of course, some will point to some recent medical breakthroughs as evidence to the contrary, but as a New Yorker review of Heller's book points out, it's often much harder to see "foregone opportunities." But, the more you understand the economics of innovation and growth, the more you see how clearly pharma and biotech patents are stifling lifesaving advancements -- and that's not just a huge shame, it's incredibly destructive to human health, dignity and the wider economy.

Filed Under: economics, gridlock, michael heller, patents, pharmaceuticals