Big Telecom Continues Its Global Quest To Tax Big Tech For No Good Reason

from the troll-tolls dept

A few months back we noted how FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr had taken to Newsweek to dust off a fifteen year old AT&T talking point. Namely that "big tech" companies get a "free ride" on telecom networks, and, as a result, should throw billions of dollars at "big telecom" for no real reason. You'll recall it was this exact argument that launched the net neutrality debate, when former AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre proclaimed that Google wouldn't be allowed to "ride his pipes for free." Basically, telecom giants have long wanted somebody else to fund network builds they routinely leave half finished despite billions in subsidies.

While this dumb argument originated with AT&T, it has been adopted by countless international telecoms over the years. Like this week, when a coalition of 13 large European telecom companies signed a joint letter demanding that U.S. tech giants pay them more money for no coherent reason:

"Large and increasing part of network traffic is generated and monetized by big tech platforms, but it requires continuous, intensive network investment and planning by the telecommunications sector. This model—which enables EU citizens to enjoy the fruits of the digital transformation—can only be sustainable if such big tech platforms also contribute fairly to network costs."

Again, this is the idiotic argument that just never dies. We had an entire fifteen year net neutrality debate over this that nobody appears to have learned much from.

Tech giants like Google already pay for not only bandwidth, but they own billions of dollars worth of transit routes, undersea cables, and other infrastructure (Google even runs its own residential ISP). Consumers also pay an arm and a leg for bandwidth thanks to heavily monopolized telecom markets. This idea that anybody in this chain gets a free ride is absolutely ridiculous. Telecom giants regularly enjoy fat profits thanks to limited competition and largely feckless government oversight. They're also endlessly subsidized to finish networks routinely left mysteriously undercooked.

Telecom is basically just trying to exploit its market power in a bid to nab an unnecessary troll toll. Yet despite being in bad faith with little merit, it doesn't take much for telecom giants to dust off the dumb argument and re-inject it into the discourse every few years. That's thanks in large part to unskeptical news outlets like Reuters that parrot the claims in good faith, without including any important context. For example, Reuters frames the entire debate like this:

"The call by the CEOs comes as the telecoms industry faces massive investments for 5G, fibre and cable networks to cope with data and cloud services provided by Netflix and Google's YouTube and Facebook.

Reuters doesn't deem it worth mentioning that it's consumers demanding access to those services. Consumers that already pay their regional telecom monopoly an arm and a leg for broadband. This demand isn't somehow "big tech's" fault. Nor is it somehow big tech's responsibility to pay an extra troll toll if an ISP fails to meet consumer bandwidth demand despite bloated revenues. Reuters (much like telecom allies like the FCC's Brendan Carr) also somehow omits how global telecom giants routinely underinvest in network upgrades despite billions of dollars in tax breaks, subsidies, and regulatory favors over a period of decades.

It's just uncanny how telecom just keeps trotting out the same dumb argument that it deserves to be paid extra for no coherent reason, and the majority of news outlets parrot the request as if it's actually being made in good faith.

Filed Under: brendand carr, fcc, free ride, internet services, internet taxes, net neutrality, telcos

Yahoo Reminds Everyone It Still Exists By Formally Announcing Its Exit From China

from the dozens-of-users-forced-to-choose-from-hundreds-of-alternatives dept

The bell continues to toll for American tech companies willing to do business with China. Increasing censorship demands have made even the most obliging of platforms reconsider their obligations to the authoritarian regime, resulting in the most difficult tradeoff: a company's reputation versus access to a market containing more than a billion users.

LinkedIn was one of the last to pull up its anchor and exit the country under a not-so-full head of steam. LinkedIn survives in China, albeit in a severely limited form that will make it less likely to receive content deletion requests from the Chinese government. That doesn't mean it won't receive more requests. It just means it won't have as much to delete or block when it's asked to.

Most social media platforms operated by US companies are already blocked by the Chinese government, mostly due to their refusal to set up local data centers as is required by law in the country. Those that can still be accessed by Chinese citizens are subject to the censorial wishes of the government.

But nothing says American tech companies are done with China like the announcement that a long-forgotten search engine and email provider is finally calling it quits. Last chopper out of Saigon this ain't. But it's still notable, even if it only affects a small customer base.

Yahoo Inc. is shutting down operations in China due to an "increasingly challenging business and legal environment," The Wall Street Journal reports.

As of Nov. 1, Yahoo’s suite of services are "no longer...accessible from mainland China," a Yahoo spokesman tells the Journal, which notes that on the same day, China’s Personal Information Protection Law went into effect. The new privacy law from Beijing is meant to “curb data collection by technology companies,” the Journal says.

LOL. First of all, any Chinese law that claims to protect users from internet services just means the government is trying to oust companies that won't retain shitloads of data for the Chinese government to rifle through at will. The Chinese government does not care about the privacy of its citizens and it never will.

Second of all, any American tech company that willingly continues to do business does so at the government's pleasure. Cooperation with the Chinese government means being implicated in everything from jailing journalists to vanishing the country's Muslim population into political prisons. No company should want to be a part of that, no matter how really cool a billion users might sound.

Yahoo's announcement is a bit too belated to have much of an impact, however. It hasn't been relevant for years, which means most of the gasps in its direction are from people surprised the company still exists. And this exit strategy has been in the works for most of a decade at this point. Yahoo Mail was ejected from China in 2013 and Yahoo's holding company has been winding down its Chinese-based operations since then, obviously expecting the day would come when it would be no longer possible (or wise) to continue as subservient to the Chinese censorship apparatus.

But once you've lost Yahoo… as the saying goes. There's not much left for Chinese citizens to work with that isn't at least indirectly controlled by the Chinese government. Pulling out may leave Chinese residents with precious few options for uncensored communications, but staying put means allying with a government that's shown an alarming willingness to be all the bad things people have attributed to it over the years. It loves capitalism, but only when it can control it. And it abhors anything it can't.

American companies have either found the exit or been shown it by the Chinese government several times over the past decade. Those who have found the exit on their own can at least say they did it voluntarily, even if this statement comes years after it has any meaningful impact.

Filed Under: china, internet services, personal information protection law
Companies: yahoo

US Courts Rep Ignores Everything About The Internet, Says PACER Access Can Never Be Free Because It Costs Money To Operate

from the LOGICAL-FALLACY-BONANZA dept

Open access to court documents is something we still don't have, thanks to PACER. The creation of PACER was supposed to increase public access, but the government erected a paywall between the public and the documents. To make things worse, the PACER's front end is an antiquated nightmare. The system isn't consolidated, so people seeking documents need to know exactly where it was filed before they can even start paying $0.10/page for unhelpful search results.

No one who uses PACER likes it. But it's the government's monopoly, so everyone who uses PACER has to use PACER because there is no alternative. The US Court system rakes in $150-200 million a year in fees, but hardly any of that money is being put towards fixing a system that only barely works and does so in the most begrudging way possible. Lawsuits have been filed and legislation proposed that would give the public free access to court documents, but so far, nothing has changed. PACER is still expensive. And it still sucks.

The sad state of PACER was discussed during a recent Congressional hearing. And it was defended in the worst way possible by the Judicial Conference's speaker.

Judge Audrey Fleissig of the U.S. District court for the Eastern District of Missouri also said in testimony for the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, IP, and the internet that shifting costs away from users without another funding plan would burden courts with new costs.

“Our case management and public access systems can never be free because they require over $100 million per year just to operate,” Fleissig said. “That money must come from somewhere.”

Everything about Fleissig's statement is ridiculous.

First and foremost, just because something costs money to operate doesn't mean it can't be free. To use a government example, interstate highways are free to use, yet they cost billions to construct and maintain. ($96 billion in 2014 alone.) The money does come from "somewhere," as Fleissig correctly notes. It's called taxes. The thing about PACER is its funded by both tax dollars and fees. The documents people pay to access are created with tax dollars that pay judges, clerks, and every other government employee involved in creating, processing, and posting documents citizens are then expected to pay $0.10/page to download.

Stepping outside the government, there are countless examples of free services that cost money to run, like Google's search engine… or the numerous browser options people use to run Google searches. Every search engine (and I'm including Bing here) runs better than PACER's internal search engine. And none of those charge users $0.10/page for search results. And then there's email, cloud storage, social media platforms, web-based apps, job-hunting services, classified ad sites, blogging platforms, mobile games, YouTube... a whole internet full of free services that cost money to create and support -- all at no cost to the user.

But that's only part of the ridiculousness. Insisting that it takes $100 million to run PACER is bogus. The US Courts system may spend $100 million doing it but that doesn't mean it couldn't be done more efficiently for less money. A bureaucracy claiming it spends every cent of its budget doing something shouldn't be taken as evidence said thing actually requires that much funding to accomplish. Government budgets are things to be spent, not areas of concern where less-costly options might be explored. The process does not lend itself to efficiency since the only thing that accomplishes is less money being appropriated in the next fiscal year.

While there are the salaries of support staff to consider, the bulk of the claimed expense is processing and hosting of PDFs and digital court dockets. The internet is built for this kind of thing and there are any number of options that would reduce costs and increase user-friendliness… all while giving away PDFs and docket listings for free. The system doesn't necessarily need to be privatized, but perhaps it should be outsourced to vendors that specialize in all the problems PACER has failed to solve for nearly two decades.

And here's another partial solution -- one inadvertently stumbled upon by the US Courts itself:

Approximately “87 percent of all PACER revenue is attributable to just 2 percent of users—large financial institutions and major commercial enterprises that aggregate massive amounts of data for analysis and resale,” the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts said.

Well, if that's the case, the largest users can subsidize everyone else. Set a monthly cap of 5,000 pages and let those who need more pay for unlimited access. It seems like the top 5% of users could easily guarantee free access for everyone. And if anyone else wants "value-added" access to the court document system (maybe with some sort of fire hose feed), they can pay for it. Those that just want to find relevant case documents can still muddle their way through PACER's broken system to find them, all without having to pay the government for documents they still haven't managed to find yet.

Filed Under: courts, fees, internet services, pacer, public access, transparency, us courts