Google Fiber's About-Face Provides Useful Lessons For A Broken Broadband Industry

from the don't-build-your-house-on-a-swamp dept

Last fall, Alphabet/Google announced that the company would be notably scaling back its Google Fiber ambitions. The company axed its CEO, laid off a small number of employees, and froze a number of anticipated fiber builds (in Portland and a few other locations). Numerous reports indicated that there were growing concerns among many executives about the high costs and slow pace of deploying fiber, so the company was considering an overall pivot to next-generation gigabit wireless while it continued building out most already-announced markets.

While it's hard to call this pivot a failure until we see a real wireless product, ISPs like AT&T were of course quick to suggest Google Fiber was little more than folly (ignoring that AT&T's anti-competitive behavior played a starring role in Google Fiber's struggles in many cities). This has contributed to an overall air of "we told you so" smugness emanating from numerous quadrants of the telecom status quo.

That take, however, is short-sighted. One, the launch of Google Fiber put an unrelenting spotlight on the lack of broadband competition in countless markets, driving many large ISPs (like AT&T) to deploy gigabit broadband service that had previously been unheard of. Google Fiber also managed to shine a bright spotlight on the way many large ISPs use our broken legislative and regulatory systems to keep things broken, whether that's by using utility pole beaurocracy to slow competitors' installs, or writing awful state protectionist law hamstringing what your local town and city can do about it.

Over at Backchannel, long-standing duopoly critic and Harvard Law Professor Susan Crawford notes that there are a lot of useful lessons from Google Fiber, most notably that the system Google Fiber is operating in is effectively rotten to the core:

"The fundamental lesson of Google Fiber is that, in the end, its business model was just like that of another cable actor. It was playing within the existing sandbox, using the right technology but the wrong business model.

That sandbox has been left to the vagaries of the marketplace, in which existing monopolies have built moats around their businesses in the form of rights to programming, rights of way, bundled products, relationships with credulous legislators, and a million other barriers to entry that make competing — even for Google — just too expensive for shareholders looking for immediate, media company-like returns, quarter after quarter."

The solution, Crawford insists, is a shift toward local, municipal, open access networks via which ISPs come in and compete:

"The only business model for fiber that will work to produce the competition, low prices, and world-class data transport we need — certainly in urban areas — is to get local governments involved in overseeing basic, street grid-like “dark” (passive, unlit with electronics) fiber available at a set, wholesale price to a zillion retail providers of access and services. There’s plenty of patient capital sloshing around the US that would be attracted to the steady, reliable returns this kind of investment will return. That investment could be made in the form of private lending or government bonds; the important element is that the resulting basic network be a wholesale facility that any retail actor can use at a reasonable, fair cost.

The result: Instead of different wires competing side by side with one another, there would be one great basic facility available neutrally to every form of business. Your ISP could use that fiber in competition with 10 others; your traffic lights could use it to govern congestion; your energy grid could use it to measure and regulate consumption and use of renewables. (Here comes the much-touted Internet of Things, which, without fiber everywhere, is being built on sand.) At the same time, the government would stay out of providing and inventing retail services itself."

Data, including data from the FCC (promptly ignored by the agency) does support the argument that such open access networks result in better broadband, better customer service, and lower prices thanks to real competition. In fact, Google Fiber initially insisted it would support the open access model -- before promptly backing away from it. And some areas, like Huntsville, Alabama, are following through on building an open network, then inviting multiple ISPs (including Google Fiber) to come in and compete.

More competition means organic punishment for high prices, bad service, and net neutrality violations -- which in turn means fewer attempts to fix this issue using often ham-fisted attempts at regulating a moving train.

The problem: incumbent ISPs effectively run massive chunks of our government, to the point where they quite-literally write telecom law (usually via ALEC or some other third-party, legislation ghostwriting apparatus). That includes the twenty-some odd state laws preventing towns and cities from making telecom infrastructure decisions for themselves, lest they might upset somebody at AT&T, Verizon, Charter or Comcast.

Like so many sectors, you can't really fix what ails the broadband industry until you fix the underlying legislative rot that lets companies use campaign contributions and disinformation to dictate garbage technology policy in the first place. So sure, open access networks should absolutely be pursued where possible, but voting out politicians whose entire function appears to be to protect broken mono/duopoly markets (looking at you, Marsha Blackburn) would need to be the very first step in what's an achievable but Sisyphean climb toward better broadband.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, google fiber, muni broadband, susan crawford
Companies: google

Tom Wheeler: Trump, GOP Plan To 'Modernize' The FCC A 'Fraud'

from the in-Comcast-we-trust dept

So we've noted a few times how former FCC boss Tom Wheeler surprised many of us (myself included) simply for basing his telecom policy decisions on actual facts. That doesn't sound like much, but for more than fifteen years, both parties had stocked the agency with a rotating crop of either sector apologists like Michael Powell (now the cable industry's top lobbyist) -- utterly incapable of even admitting the broadband industry had competition problems -- or wishy-washy folks like Julius Genachowski, who basically just told everybody what they wanted to hear, and just hoped things worked out for the best.

Wheeler wound up being a notably different animal for the FCC. He based many of his policy decisions on real-world data collected from actual customers (shocking!), repeatedly highlighted the lack of real broadband competition in many markets (blasphemy!), and, as evident on his shift toward Title II reclassification and net neutrality, actually changed his mind when confronted with evidence that challenged his world view (what insolence!).

Now that Wheeler's back in the private sector, he's unshackled himself somewhat, last week providing an interesting interview with Harvard Law Professor Susan Crawford. In it, Wheeler takes particular aim at Trump's new FCC pick Ajit Pai, noting the new FCC boss (who repeatedly complained that Wheeler left him out of key policy decisions) refused to even meet with him during the last year. Wheeler also chimes in on the subject of net neutrality, municipal broadband, and how ISPs like Comcast and AT&T have an almost nauseating amount of influence over state legislatures.

But the most important part has to do with Wheeler's take on the Trump administration's increasingly obvious plan to defund and defang the FCC as broadband watchdog. Because the industry and our new FCC boss lack the courage to just come out and say this, telecom sector lobbyists (and the various PR flacks, consultants, think tankers, and politicians paid to love them) have concocted a new narrative in which they claim they're simply "streamlining" or "modernizing" government by eliminating the FCC from the equation, and dumping all oversight of megacarriers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon into the lap of the FTC.

Wheeler, however, was quick to point out the real goal of such a shift:

In the Trump administration, people are talking about stripping regulatory power from the FCC, and essentially taking the agency apart (including moving jurisdiction over internet access to the Federal Trade Commission [FTC]). “Modernizing” the FCC is the lingo being used. What’s your thought about that?

It’s a fraud. The FTC doesn’t have rule-making authority. They’ve got enforcement authority and their enforcement authority is whether or not something is unfair or deceptive. And the FTC has to worry about everything from computer chips to bleach labeling. Of course, carriers want [telecom issues] to get lost in that morass. This was the strategy all along.

So it doesn’t surprise me that the Trump transition team — who were with the American Enterprise Institute and basically longtime supporters of this concept — comes in and says, “Oh, we oughta do away with this.” It makes no sense to get rid of an expert agency and to throw these issues to an agency with no rule-making power that has to compete with everything else that’s going on in the economy, and can only deal with unfair or deceptive practices.

Again, so it's clear, broadband ISPs want all oversight shifted to the FTC because they know the underfunded and overworked agency won't have the ability to actually enforce the rules currently on the books, much less craft new ones should they become necessary. With companies like Comcast facing less organic broadband market pressure than ever, less federal regulatory oversight than ever, and the ability to literally write state protectionist laws keeping your town and city from having any say over this dysfunction, you've got a disaster brewing for consumers and numerous business sectors alike.

To be clear, deregulation does help some industries -- especially those that naturally enjoy healthy competition. But with the amount of control large ISPs have over state legislatures, and the lack of competition in the last mile, the telecom sector is far from a free market. Undaunted by historical evidence of the folly of blind telecom deregulation, ISPs have long argued that if you just leave the industry completely alone, gigabit connections will miraculously sprout from sidewalk cracks and we'll all be living in a telecom utopia in no time. History has proven repeatedly this antiquated belief system is pure folly.

Just when it seemed like we were finally putting this dated fantasy in the rear-view mirror, in comes a brand new plan to effectively neuter the only regulatory agency to stand up to AT&T and Comcast in the last decade. Again, it will go something like this: first Pai and the new FCC will simply refuse to enforce the rules already on the books (net neutrality). From there, you can expect Comcast, AT&T and Verizon's Congressional allies to push for a new Communications Act rewrite that rolls back all of Wheeler's policy proposals and fits the FCC with a shiny new collar and chain.

Said Act will breathlessly profess to create jobs, increase broadband deployment, close the digital divide and finally solve net neutrality, but will do nothing of the sort. What it will actually do is contain ample loopholes ensuring that the FCC can never again actually hold massive broadband and media empires accountable to the public by cutting the agency off at the knees, in part by rolling back Wheeler's Title II classification, but also by shoveling consumer protection off to an FTC whose purview will be similarly constrained over the coming months and years.

The end result of this "modernization"? Less oversight than ever for industry giants AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and Charter. Given these companies' growing size, long and undeniable track record of anti-competitive behavior and outright fraud, what could possibly go wrong?

Filed Under: ajit pai, fcc, net neutrality, susan crawford, tom wheeler

New Mockumentary Highlights Why An Open Internet With Real Competition Is Important

from the though-a-bit-over-the-top dept

A new "mockumentary" called The Internet Must Go launched today, in conjunction with the latest court hearing in the Verizon case against the FCC over the FCC's net neutrality rules. I got to see a "preview" showing of the film last week with the filmmaker. You can see the whole thing below, or at the link above, which includes a number of extras. The premise of the mockumentary is that the major ISPs have hired a clueless market researcher to figure out how to convince Americans that we don't need an open internet with basic non-discriminatory end-to-end connectivity. That researcher then goes out and talks to a bunch of net neutrality supporters who school him on the importance of an open internet. There are a bunch of appearances in the film from folks you may know and recognize, like Larry Lessig, John Hodgman and Alexis Ohanian. As the filmmaker explained to us last week, the goal of the film is to try to make more people in the general public aware of the issue of "net neutrality," so it's more generally targeted at folks who don't spend a lot of time on these issues and who aren't generally aware of what's going on. On that front, perhaps the video will be successful, though I have to admit that, on the whole, the presentation is a bit disappointing. As I've said repeatedly, I'm a huge supporter of the concept of end-to-end neutrality and an open internet, but the movie badly caricaturizes the nature of the argument, and what's actually at stake, at times. The issues are a bit more complex than they're laid out, and it feels like that takes away from what could be a more informative film.

Frankly, where the film shines best is the part where it gets a bit away from the loaded term of net neutrality, and gets to the real problem: the lack of competition in broadband. For almost a decade, we've been pointing out that the so-called "fight" over net neutrality is really just a symptom of the lack of true competition in the broadband space. Get real competition at the service level and the issue of net neutrality fades away. What the ISPs claim is an attempt to get rid of "net neutrality" is really just an attempt to leverage a dominant position to get people to pay twice for the same bandwidth. So the part in the middle of the film where they start to look at the lack of competition, and how certain areas are completely underserved by the major ISPs because of this, the film gets more interesting.

Overall, the message that an open internet is worth protecting, and that we need a competitive and innovative broadband infrastructure, is absolutely true. I'm just not sure the film really presents that message in the best way possible. It's way over the top in how it paints the goals of the ISPs, and that takes away from what could have been a stronger message about how to actually tackle the lack of competition.

Filed Under: alexis ohanian, broadband, competition, fcc, internet must go, isps, john hodgman, larry lessig, mockumentary, net neutrality, open internet, susan crawford

Telco Astroturfing Or Elaborate Double-Reverse Sabotage Fakeout? You Decide

from the point-counterpoint dept

You may recall that we recently wrote about the likelihood of telco astroturfing on professor Susan Crawford's book, Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age. If you don't remember, Crawford's book is highly critical of the telco industry and the fact that serious broadband competition is lacking in the US and that we've fallen way behind many other countries.

The book came out in January, and around March, there was suddenly a bunch of one star reviews that started appearing that all had tell-tale signs of being fake. I spent an evening comparing the then 31 one-star reviews to the then 41 5-star reviews, noting some oddities in the one-star reviews. For example, almost none of the one-star reviewers had ever reviewed another product on Amazon, while nearly all of the 5-star reviewers had a bunch of other reviews. Most of the 1-star reviews felt the need to mention their profession and that they lived in a "rural" area for no clear reason at all. Almost none were "verified purchases" or used Amazon's Real Names program. I concluded that there was fairly strong and compelling evidence that these were astroturf reviews -- fake reviews put forth by the telco industry, their friends or lobbyists to try to drag down the star ratings of the book.

I never thought that defenders of the telcos would respond to the claims. After all, there are times when it really is best to shut up. However, it would seem that some cannot resist. Richard Bennett -- a long time apologist for the telcos' position on nearly everything -- has decided to step to the plate with an alternative theory for those obviously fake one-star reviews, and followed it up with a series of mocking tweets directed at me, claiming that I am a "poor journalist" for never even considering his alternate theory and suggesting that I would never "dare" to discuss it.

So, in the interest of "fairness," I thought I'd present the two competing theories side by side, and let the readers decide which one makes more sense. For some background, Bennett has been a long time denier of any problems with US broadband, insisting that it's been highly competitive and super fast and innovative for years and years. He works for ITIF, which was among those who fought hardest against net neutrality rules and was the "think tank" behind the original plan that turned into SOPA. When the MPAA was desperately seeking tech experts who would support SOPA, the only ones they turned up all had connections to ITIF (and weren't particularly experts on technology anyway). That gives you a hint of ITIF's standard operating procedures. More recently, Bennett co-authored a report claiming that US broadband was highly competitive and working wonderfully -- a report that was discredited thoroughly and repeatedly by a variety of experts, making it a bit of a laughing stock.

But... he's sure he knows where those one-star reviews came from. You see, as we mentioned in our original post, Bennett was among the short list of "named" reviewers of the book. As I noted, nearly all of the named reviewers were well known in DC telco policy circles, working for think tanks, like ITIF, that had a long history of repeating AT&T's talking points. I have no problem with that, because he was clearly named there, and didn't try to hide anything, and his one-star review was well written and gave a full explanation of his position. That's fine. So, here's his alternative theory, followed by my theory:

• All of those obviously faked one-star reviews -- which he admits are clearly faked -- weren't actually done by telco lobbyist/astroturfers, but rather they were done by Free Press or their supporters, an organization that has been a big supporter of Crawford's book and the view that the telcos are abusing their power and providing us substandard broadband. But, you ask (and I did!), why would an organization like Free Press who supports Crawford's work litter her Amazon book page with one-star reviews? According to Bennett, the answer is obvious to someone of his great intellect (a rarefied club to which I do not belong): it was to do two things (1) bury his own absolutely brilliant critique of Crawford's work so that potential buyers would not read it and (2) so that six months later, a complete stooge like me would come along, find the fake reviews that were really written by Free Press (again, supporters of the book) and write an article blaming those reviews on telco lobbyists.
  
  Because this is a slightly complex strategy, let me repeat it, just to be clear: Bennett is claiming that Free Press -- an organization that supports Crawford's book -- purposely sabotaged the reviews on the book's page, piling up about 25 obviously bogus one-star reviews solely to demote his own one-star review, and at the same time lead "gullible" people such as myself to pin the blame on telco shills.
  
  His evidence for this is that his own brilliant review has many "unhelpful" votes and just a few "helpful" votes, and that could only have happened because Free Press set up this complex string of dominoes, knowing that one day I would tip them over, getting the story on Reddit and having lots of people on Reddit vote down his unimpeachable critique of Crawford's duplicitous book. Or, he believes, Free Press is so frightened by the intellectual might and persuasive power of his review, that it unleashed an unruly and uninformed mob of its followers armed with blatant misinformation, to click that his review was "unhelpful."



• Or, you know, my theory: most of those one-star reviews were from telco astroturfing groups designed to pull down the star rating on the book.

I will in admit that, as Bennett suggests, I had not considered his alternative scenario, in part because I am simply not as smart as Bennett, but also (perhaps in larger part) because it sounds like the most ridiculous and convoluted strategy I've ever heard of, involving both a massive overvalued view of the important persuasive power of his own review, as well as a truly epic confusion about Amazon reviews and the process under which they work and how potential buyers view them. But, I will concede, his version is not impossible. Just completely nutty.

For what it's worth, since my original post did end up on the front page of Reddit, and got a ton of traffic, a bunch of folks added their own 5-star reviews (and one absolutely hilarious one-star parody review), which have since shifted the numbers so that there are many, many more five-star reviews on the book, many of which admit that they haven't read the book but are trying to counter the astroturf reviews. As I noted in my original story, I don't think this is particularly helpful, and Bennett now uses those reviews to argue that there is some sort of equivalence between the clearly faked astroturf reviews and the "faked" 5-star reviews.

So, there we go. Since Bennett claims that I am too gullible and stupid to see the truth, I will leave it up to the readers here to suss out which of the two theories is more plausible. Theory one, in which supporters of the book purposely sabotaged the ratings, driving down the overall star rating, just to bury Bennett's own brilliant review and get it buried with "unhelpful" votes, or the apparently facile explanation that the bogus one-star reviews came from telco astroturfers. And, of course, for Bennett's theory to be accurate, it would mean that people don't really care so much about the overall star ratings on a product as they do about how many "helpful/unhelpful" votes there are on each review -- and therefore loading up the book page with one-star reviews, just to drive people to vote Bennett's single review as "unhelpful" was the strategy. But, perhaps I'm wrong in my assumption that most people focus mainly on the star ratings, and Bennett in his vast store of knowledge has ferreted out the real plot from those nefarious consumer advocates at Free Press.

I'll leave it open for you to decide.

Filed Under: amazon reviews, astroturfing, broadband, richard bennett, susan crawford, telcos

Telco Astroturfing Tries To Bring Down Reviews Of Susan Crawford's Book

from the lame dept

Astroturfing -- the process of a faux "grassroots" effort, often set up by cynical and soulless DC lobbyists pretending to create a "grassroots" campaign around some subject -- is certainly nothing new. It's been around for quite some time, and it's rarely successful. Most people can sniff out an astroturfing campaign a mile away because it lacks all the hallmarks of authenticity. A separate nefarious practice is fake Amazon reviews -- which have also been around for ages -- amusingly revealed when Amazon once accidentally reassociated real names with reviewers' names to show authors giving themselves great reviews. Over time, Amazon has tried to crack down on the practice, but it's not easy.

So what happens when you combine incompetent astroturfing and fake Amazon reviews? Check out the reviews on Susan Crawford's book, Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age. Now, I should be clear: while I respect Crawford quite a bit, and often find her arguments compelling and interesting, I found Captive Audience to go a bit too far at points, and felt that the book lost a lot of its persuasive power in really overstating the case. We agree that the broadband market is not even remotely competitive, but we disagree on the solution to that. Still, I think the book is very much worth reading, and an important contribution to the discussion on broadband/telco policy.

But, boy, the telco lobbyists and shills really have been going overboard trying to smear the book every which way. Front groups set up by the big broadband players going by names like NetCompetition, Broadband For America, and Media Freedom have wasted little time attacking the book as if it has no redeeming merits at all.

But, at least people can look at who's behind those various organizations, or where their "founders" last plied their trade. When it comes to Amazon reviews, it's a somewhat different story. Karl Bode recently noted the large number of one star reviews on Crawford's book that exhibit a pretty clear pattern: a "folksy" tone from someone in an "ordinary" job, living in a "rural" location (they all mention a rural location) absolutely trashing Crawford's book, all using talking points that the big telco lobbyists have been handing out. Here are a few examples.

This is wrong

By lavell martin (hazelwood, mo United States)

Des Moines, Iowa
I am professional truck driver who uses the Internet in job training.I have just read the book "Captive Audience" by Susan Crawford. I am very disappointed in her negative attitude toward our national telecommunications system. As a professional truck driver, I have been using technology since the days when CB radio was the next big thing. Then came cell phones that were barely useful for an over-the-road trucker who was almost always "roaming" from his home system.

But times have changed and now every trucker has the ability to communicate, not with a trucker a quarter of a mile ahead or behind, but a quarter (or all the way) around the world. Wireless technology allows us to track where trucks and their cargo are in real time. They allow us to contact our customers to alert them to our arrival time, meaning I can unload as soon as I get to the customer rather than waiting for someone to arrive.

To read Ms. Crawford's book you would be led to believe that the companies who have investested hundreds of billions of dollars in these systems haven't accomplished anything. She is wrong. The "breaker-breaker" days are long gone and it is private industry that has left it far in our rear-view mirrors.

Unimpressed - Facts Don't Add Up

By nhunter

I do much of my schoolwork online and do not believe that Susan Crawford's points in "Captive Audience" are valid. I am from a rural area, yet my broadband connection is good enough for me to stream online lecture and perform research. Only 3-5% of homes in the US do not have access to wired broadband services, and generally in these cases there are multiple wireless options. I simply do not know anyone who is not able to purchase a wired broadband connection - even in remote areas.

Our system of private investment is sustainable and has provided affordable service to hundreds of millions of people. Looking at the state of broadband in the US I do not see the problems in our system that Ms. Crawford points out. The last thing we need is a complete overhaul that trades our tried and true system for one of uncertainty, reliant on government spending. In order to provide better, cheaper broadband we need to move regulation out of the 1990's and into the 21st century.

Captive Audience lacks in believability

By MAntkow

I am not sure I agree with the central premise of this book. While Susan Crawford certainly has credibility, given her tenure as President Obama's technology advisor, I am just not buying her take on the supposed monopoly within the telecom industry. If the United States is truly lagging behind other countries in its access to high-speed broadband Internet, how is it our Internet network infrastructure investments have risen by almost 25 percent? Moreover, if access were really a problem in the U.S., I would almost certainly have first hand knowledge of it. I am from a remote part of Kentucky that is as far a cry from big city living as one can get. I have yet to find my access to the Internet lacking.

Terrible Book
By Lee

I do not live in a metropolitan area, but I have had access to an affordable high-speed connection for over a decade. Ms. Crawford is not telling the whole story. The FCC has reported on multiple occasions that over 99% of the population has access to satellite, wired or wireless broadband connection. Not so long ago there were people who thought laptops would never be an equal to desktops, and tablets could never be a substitute for a laptop. It seems those that doubt technology usually end up wrong, and if there is any industry that will provide world changing innovation over the next few years, my bet is it will be in broadband here in the US.

Because I'm a curious sort, I decided to look a little more deeply at the 31 one-star reviews, and see if I might glean any patterns. I read through them all and noticed some very noticeable patterns. First of all, there are a few named reviewers who are listed as "verified buyers" of the book or are in Amazon's "Real Name" program. Those are people who are clearly legit. Of course, nearly all of those reviewers are rather well-known in technology/telco policy circles, often closely associated with various think tanks known for supporting the position of the telcos: you have Scott Cleland of NetCompetition, Richard Bennett of ITIF, Ryan Young of CEI, Andrew Langer of the Institute for Liberty and Geoffrey A. Manne of the International Center for Law and Economics. I don't have any problems with these reviews. While the view of these individuals are well-known and were probably decided long before they ever came near the book, they put their names on the reviews and many of them are listed as verified purchasers. On the flip side, for the 5-star positive reviews, you have folks like Tim Karr from Free Press, though that's really about it (there is also Dane Jasper, the CEO of awesome local ISP Sonic.net, but he's an actual expert in the field, not just some think tank policy analyst like everyone else).

The problem comes in when you look at everyone else. As mentioned, a very large number of the reviews seemed to follow a similar pattern -- so I figured why not see if we can compare the 1-star reviews to the 5-star reviews in some manner. To keep it fair, I removed the named DC policy folks from the calculations, though even if you add them back in the numbers are pretty striking. First, I looked at what percentage of the reviews included some sort of folksy reference to their job (e.g., "I'm a truck driver and my experience is...", to the fact that they lived somewhere rural or non-metropolitan, or that they were a student). In reading the reviews, these all felt extremely inauthentic, because there's nothing about Crawford's book that should lead someone to discussing any of those things. It's irrelevant -- but if you're a clueless DC astroturfing firm trying to sound like everyday common folk, it might be something you do.

Fifteen of the 1-star reviews make such a mention. That's 58%. Of the 5-star reviews, there was only one single mention of anything having to do with rural settings, and it was someone delving more deeply into the issue of rural broadband, rather than anyone trying to sound folksy. No one mentioned their down home job or that they were a student. So if we include that one pseudo-mention, it's 2.5%. In other words, something is pretty clearly off with those 1-star reviews.

My second check was to look at whether or not the reviews had one of the following three criteria: they were a verified purchaser, they were enrolled in Amazon's "REAL NAME" program, or they had reviewed other products besides just Crawford's book. While this is a rather crude measure, I figured that having any of those things be true at least suggested that there was a real person behind the review. Having none of those three things might still mean they were a real person who legitimately bought the book and was giving a legitimate opinion, but at the very least it couldn't be proven. To give the benefit of the doubt to the Crawford haters, here I added back in the known policy wonks -- who were basically the only 1-star reviewers to qualify as humans under these criteria. Without this, I think only two of the remaining 26 reviewers could meet the criteria. In the end, even with the known DC policy insiders, only 11 out of the 31 reviews, or 35% met the criteria.

Of the 5-star reviews, 80% met the criteria. And, even this is somewhat misleading. Of the reviews that did not meet the criteria of provably human, nearly all of them mention that they're leaving a 5-star review solely to counteract the obvious shill 1-star reviews. I think that's counterproductive in many ways, but it suggests that those reviews weren't directly "shill" reviews, but rather response to astroturf reviews.

As a further check, I compared the average number of other products reviewed by each group -- the 1-star reviewers and the 5-star reviewers. That really wasn't a fair fight. The average number of "other" reviews by those who gave Crawford's book a 1-star review: 1.4. And that's almost entirely due to one person, Richard Bennett, who has 24 other reviews. Of those who gave it a 5-star review, the average is 113.9. Yes. 1.4 vs. 113.9. Okay, the 5-star reviews are also skewed heavily by one reviewer, Loyd E. Eskildson who has over 4,000 reviews. So, to be fairer, I cut out that outlier and the 5-star reviewers still had an average of 13 other reviews (I didn't even bother to take out Bennett's outlier on the 1-star reviews). Using the other (probably better) tool, we could also compare the median other reviews for each group. For the 1-star reviews, it will surprise no one to find out that the median is 0. For the 5-star group, the median is two.

Basically, no matter how you slice it, there's some sort of statistical anomaly going on here that makes it pretty clear that someone was pushing a ton of fake astroturfing reviews on Crawford's book, and didn't even care to take the time to hide it well. As I said, even if you don't fully agree with the book, I'd hope we can all agree that this is a pretty disgusting move by whatever lobbyists/shills/think tanks dreamed up this astroturfing campaign just because they don't like what the book says. Can't fight on the merits, huh?

Filed Under: amazon reviews, astroturfing, broadband, susan crawford, us

Broadband In Crisis: Does The US Need Regulation To Force Meaningful Competition?

from the two-internets dept

Susan Crawford believes telecommunications in America are going through the biggest crisis ever, and this is just as bad as the banking crisis was. Monday, at the Freedom 2 Connect conference, the Internet law scholar and former Special Assistant for Science, Technology and Innovation Policy at the White House, laid out what's wrong with broadband in America, hinting and what needs to be done to fix it. It's not going to be easy.

"The stakes are extraordinarily high, this has been an incremental crisis for a long time but now it's an actual crisis," said Crawford, whose book analyzing these issues, Captive Audience, will be published in November. The central issue is the so-called digital divide and what Crawford refers to as the "looming cable monopoly." Due to deregulation, which was predicated on the premise that the free market and competition would protect consumers, cable companies have found themselves with an inordinate amount of power to control the Internet and broadband access while, at the same time, traditional phone companies like AT&T are struggling to keep up and veering towards wireless services.

To support her thesis, Crawford presented some stunning numbers. In the last two years, Comcast market share has grown from 16.3 million subscribers to 18.5, a 14 percent growth. Time Warner Cable has grown 10 percent, from 9.2 to 10.7 million customers. Meanwhile, DSL subscribers have plummeted: AT&T and Verizon market share is down 22 and 21 percent respectively.

So, while it's good to be Comcast, it's not good to be an American citizen. Without competition, there's no drive to improve the service. The average speed of an Internet connection in the United States is around 5Mbit/s. An astoundingly low number if you look at other western countries. South Korea, for example, has an average of 50Mbit/s. And faster connections are starting to be implemented around the world. One gigabit connections are available in countries like Japan, Portugal or Sweden and at much better prices than in the U.S. – in Hong Kong, connecting at one gigabit per second costs $26 a month while in Chattanooga, TN, it costs $350.

What does this mean to the average citizen? It means the United States are giving up their leadership. Crawrford said this means “the next Google won't come from America.” And, even within U.S. borders, there's a fundamental problem: you either pay premium for a mediocre service or you are left behind.

“We end up with two Internets, two societies in America,” Crawford said to me in an interview.

One America does some tweeting and Facebook on their inferior, slower wireless devices. The other America not only gets to enjoy video online, but they can also apply for jobs, do video-conferencing, get an education online and, ultimately, live in the 21st century. Crawford argues that this digital divide ends up creating inequality between the haves and have-nots in America.

The only solution, Crawford argues, is for the government to intervene and regulate. Internet access, particularly high-speed access, should be treated “as a utility, just as electricity, gas and water.” Doing so would make the Internet a natural monopoly in which the government would provide the pipe and guarantee equal opportunity of access to everybody.

It might not happen immediately, but Crawford hopes that, with her influence and that of other thinkers like her, this will come to the forefront of the public discussion. She believes that, eventually, in every district, there will be elected officials who understand and care about these issues. That will be when we'll be able to look for a solution. "We make this a voting issue, that's how we fight back."

Filed Under: competition, freedom 2 connect, hong kong, internet law, japan, portugal, south korea, susan crawford, sweden
Companies: comcast