Daily Digest 12/6/2017 (FCC Breaking With 50 Years of History)

[Commentary] Scrapping the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC’s) net neutrality rules will harm consumers and content creators, and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) isn’t going to be able to stop it.  As a commissioner at the FTC, I can vouch for the fantastic competition and consumer protection work our small agency does with its dedicated and hardworking staff. There are many things it is equipped to do well. But protecting the open internet is not one of them. The FTC does not have specialized expertise in telecommunications. We don’t have engineers with technical experience in data network management practices. We don’t even have jurisdiction over common carriers. These are very real and significant limits to the effectiveness of our tools in ensuring that networks are open and free of harmful discrimination. After-the-fact enforcement by the FTC is not a substitute for clear preemptive rules. There are other problems with relying solely on the FTC. It can be costly, difficult, and time consuming to detect and prosecute discriminatory conduct–particularly for an agency like the FTC that lacks the FCC’s technical expertise in data network management. If anyone expects the FTC singlehandedly to be able to provide the net neutrality protections that Americans overwhelmingly support, let me disabuse them of that notion. We lack the tools, the expertise, and the resources to carry out such a charge on our own. [FTC Commissioner Terrell McSweeny]

Last week, AT&T Senior Vice President Bob Quinn tried (and failed) to undercut Network Neutrality supporters by insisting that Free Press has been foretelling doom and gloom since 2010. That’s when the Federal Communications Commission adopted weak open-internet rules that didn’t cover mobile access. Quinn claims that none of Free Press’ predictions about carriers engaging in mobile blocking ever came true — but he conveniently overlooks how AT&T blocked FaceTime on its cellular networks in 2012 and 2013. When in this latest piece of AT&T propaganda they accuse Free Press of making falsely dire predictions in 2010, that’s a cool story for them to tell. It’s just not true. Of course, AT&T does accidentally tell the truth from time to time. It’s bound to happen when the company changes its story so often. AT&T contradicts itself from moment to moment and from year to year in different proceedings at the FCC, and then contradicts much of what it says to politicians in the disclosures it makes to its own shareholders. For instance, a lot of the current fight over keeping the Title II Net Neutrality rules is about broadband investment. One of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s main arguments is that broadband investment declined because of Title II. Free Press has shown time and again that Pai’s claim simply isn’t true, and that broadband providers’ aggregate investment has gone up since the FCC adopted the rules Pai now threatens. But more important than these aggregate numbers is what AT&T itself told the FCC back in 2010. It’s nonsensical to expect infrastructure investment to go up every year. Investment is “lumpy”: Carriers build and upgrade networks, then reap the benefits while making new investment plans. Perhaps it’s time for AT&T execs to quit while they’re behind and abandon their flimsy and hypocritical crusade against Net Neutrality protections. Something tells us they won’t, no matter how many times they pretend to forget all their past statements and misdeeds.

Diversity groups supporting Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai's network neutrality rule rollback have been meeting with FCC officials to make sure that those diverse interests continue to be protected and advanced in a new net-neutrality enforcement regime. According to The Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council and the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters, they have held five meetings over the past few days with representatives either the staffs of all five commissioners and/or their bosses to advise them to rethink not preserving the FCC's Sec. 706 authority to prevent violations of "core net neutrality principles." Sec. 706 is the congressional directive to the FCC to make sure advanced telecommunications is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion. That was the authority that undergirded the first Open Internet Order that was not based in Title II. They said that "even assuming that the FTC agrees top allow net neutrality complaints to jump to the head of its rather long complaint queue, there is still a learning curve and a big "'unknown' associated with an enforcement paradigm that has never before been attempted." They said that if the FCC does not want to retain a Sec. 706 backstop, it should issue a further notice of proposed rulemaking FNPRM or find some other way to address the impact of removing reliance on Sec. 706 on bridging the digital divide, small businesses and online participation. They also want the FCC to open a new docket on digital redlining while stating in the Restoring Internet Freedom proceeding that digital redlining (not providing advanced communications) based on race, ethnicity or income is out of bounds. "If the loss of Section 706 enforcement constrains the FCC’s ability to put an end to digital redlining, that would be devastating," they said.

The Russian government declared the broadcasters Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty “foreign agents” on Dec 5, in retaliation for a similar action against Russian state-run news outlets in the United States. The Kremlin-financed television station RT America and its affiliated news agency, Sputnik, complied in Nov with an order from the Justice Department that they registered as foreign agents. This followed a report by American intelligence agencies in January that concluded that the Kremlin was using RT America as a tool “to undermine faith in the U.S. government and fuel political protest.” Russian lawmakers and government representatives were infuriated by the decision, rushing through the retaliatory legislation within days. President Vladimir V. Putin signed the law at the end of November. But earlier fears that the law might extend the registration requirement to major Western news organization were allayed when the act made no mention of them.

We agree that fake news and misinformation are real problems that deserve serious attention. We also agree that social media and other online technologies have contributed to deep-seated problems in democratic discourse such as increasing polarization and erosion of support for traditional sources of authority. Nonetheless, we believe that the volume of reporting around fake news, and the role of tech companies in disseminating those falsehoods, is both disproportionate to its likely influence in the outcome of the election and diverts attention from the culpability of the mainstream media itself. As troubling as the spread of fake news on social media may be, it was unlikely to have had much impact either on the election outcome or on the more general state of politics in 2016.  A potentially more serious threat is what a team of Harvard and MIT researchers refer to as “a network of mutually reinforcing hyper-partisan sites that revive what Richard Hofstadter called ‘the paranoid style in American politics,’ combining decontextualized truths, repeated falsehoods, and leaps of logic to create a fundamentally misleading view of the world.” In sheer numerical terms, the information to which voters were exposed during the election campaign was overwhelmingly produced not by fake news sites or even by alt-right media sources, but by household names like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN. Without discounting the role played by malicious Russian hackers and naïve tech executives, we believe that fixing the information ecosystem is at least as much about improving the real news as it about stopping the fake stuff.

Reps Keith Ellison (D-MN), David Cicilline (D-RI), Ro Khanna (D-CA), Mark Pocan (D-WI), Rick Nolan (D-MN), Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) introduced the Merger Retrospective Act to curb the harmful effects of corporate monopolization on working people. Rep Ellison’s bill attempts to illuminate the impact of corporate mergers on the American economy by directing the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice (DOJ) to assess each merger’s effect on price, quality, and availability of products and services at the merged firm, as well as employment reduction and worker compensation.

Russian disinformation isn’t the only deceptive political advertising on Facebook. The pitch designed to lure President Donald Trump’s critics is one of more than a dozen politically themed advertisements masking consumer rip-offs that ProPublica has identified since launching an effort in September to monitor paid political messages on the world’s largest social network. As the American public becomes ever more polarized along partisan lines, swindlers who used to capitalize on curiosity about celebrities or sports are now exploiting political passions. Although these scams represent only a tiny fraction of the more than 8,000 politically themed advertisements assembled by the Political Ad Collector, they raise doubts about Facebook’s ability to monitor paid political messages. In each case, the ads ran afoul of guidelines Facebook has developed to curb misleading and malicious advertising.

[Commentary] On November 16, the Federal Communications Commission granted TV licensees the right to provide what it euphemistically called “the next generation TV broadcast standard.” Although this giveaway of spectrum rights (popularly known as the “public airwaves”) to media plutocrats had substantial benefits for the American public, it also had needlessly high costs.