Civic Engagement

Network neutrality advocates are planning two days of protest in Washington DC in Sept as they fight off plans to defang regulations meant to protect an open internet. A coalition of activists, consumer groups and writers are calling on supporters to attend the next meeting of the Federal Communications Commission on Sept 26 in DC. The next day, the protest will move to Capitol Hill, where people will meet legislators to express their concerns about an FCC proposal to rewrite the rules governing the internet. Participating organizations in the protest include Fight for the Future, Public Knowledge, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Center for Media Justice, Common Cause, Consumers Union, Free Press and the Writers Guild of America West.

Can calling government offices or officials to insult them — especially after being told to stop — be punished the way that calling a private individual to insult them might be? I think the answer should be “no,” and the lower court precedents on the subject seem to agree; but in two recent cases, government officials seem to think that such speech can indeed be criminalized.

Executives from a Los Angeles-based tech company said they are weighing whether to fight a judge's order to provide prosecutors with e-mail addresses and other information from people who visited an anti-Trump website in the months leading to Inauguration Day. The company, DreamHost, filed a motion with District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Robert E. Morin recently requesting that he put his order on hold while they consider whether to appeal. But prosecutors, concerned that such a delay could hinder their cases against dozens charged in Inauguration Day riots, have asked the judge to force DreamHost to turn over the data immediately.

In a year where DreamHost was looking forward to celebrating its 20th anniversary, the company instead has been propelled into a high-profile privacy rights case as a result of managing the server for a website that authorities say facilitated Inauguration Day rioting. DreamHost co-founder and co-Chief Executive Dallas Kashuba said in an interview that the potential implications go beyond this case. He said there is concern among tech companies that Internet users could become fearful of visiting websites if they know government authorities can monitor such information.

[Commentary] What does gigabit civic engagement look like? The initial winners of the Charles Benton Next Generation Engagement Award demonstrate not just what “could be” but what “is”. Civic engagement is about working to make a positive difference in the life of our communities. It is about developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values, and motivation to make that difference. It means improving the quality of life in a community, through both political and non-political processes. An engaged individual recognizes himself or herself as a member of the larger social fabric and, therefore, considers social problems to be at least partly his or her own. Such an individual is willing to see the community-wide dimensions of issues, to make and justify informed decisions, and to take action for the benefit of the community. My father spent a lifetime advocating for a holistic approach combining access to fast, fair, and open communications networks and the training to develop 21st century skills. He undoubtedly would have been extremely proud that his name is attached to this award and to the project winners in Louisville, Kentucky; Austin, Texas; and Raleigh, North Carolina.

The Federal Communications Commission’s public commenting process on network neutrality was such a debacle that the legitimacy of the entire body of comments is now in question. Many of the comments were filed with obviously bogus names.

Among the more visible cases of name theft: journalist and net neutrality advocate Karl Bode's identity was used without his consent for a comment favoring a roll back of the rules. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's name was used on hundreds of comments opposing his proposal, some threatening him with death or using racial slurs. John Oliver's name was used on more than 2,000 of comments as well. On a case by case basis, these forgeries are easy enough to spot. But in aggregate, they're making it harder to draw conclusions about the overall public sentiment of the proceeding. In May 2017, the FCC's site was also hit with what appeared to be a spambot submitting hundreds of thousands of anti-Title II comments with the exact same boilerplate language. The broadband industry is now using the chaos of the comments process to claim that the public actually supports repealing Title II.

Former FCC special counsel Gigi Sohn said, "I can’t imagine there is nothing they can do, and I’d love to see a citation to anything that says that they cannot remove a comment that has been proven to be fake." If anything, she says, the agency might have an obligation under the Administrative Procedure Act to remove fake comments from its consideration. "At a bare minimum, they should investigate these comments and if they can’t actually remove the comments, they can and should disregard them as part of their consideration of record."

After Charlottesville, Nazis, white supremacists, and the alt-right have become a lot less welcome on the web. So they’re building their own.

“Enough is enough,” read the Gab-makers’ Medium post from Aug. 10, two days before the Unite the Right rally. “The time is now for patriots and free thinkers inside and outside of Silicon Valley to organize, communicate in a safe way, and start building,” the post read, calling for the formation of a new group called the “Free Speech Tech Alliance,” which would build an alternative infrastructure where the alt-right wouldn’t be burdened by the social-justice priorities and liberal values of Silicon Valley—nor by the arguably monopolistic powers of the major nodes of the information economy, like Facebook, Google, Apple, and their peers. Gab, and a growing number of its compatriots in the “alt-tech” movement, want to build their own internet, one that can be a haven for hate.

An effort in Congress aimed at cutting down on repeat comments to the Federal Communications Commission’s consumer complaint database could end up limiting legitimate public input, lawmakers and allies say. House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) has drafted legislation to reauthorize the FCC, with the measure aimed at increasing transparency at the agency. But while the draft would officially require the agency to keep a database of consumer complaints — something the FCC is already doing and made publicly available last May — it specifically notes that the FCC would not be required to include “duplicative complaints.”

The draft legislation language about “duplicative complaints” in the consumer complaint database set off alarm bells for Gigi Sohn, who served as counselor to then-FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and is currently a fellow at the Institute for Technology Law & Policy at Georgetown University. “That’s not transparent at all,” she said. “If there are 1,000 complaints about something that Verizon or Comcast did, I as a consumer should have a right to see that there are 1,000 complaints.”

The reason why network neutrality is so important—and why this issue remains so fiercely contested—is that it amounts to the free speech principle for the internet. This open access concept is absolutely essential, net neutrality advocates argue, because the entire US economy—and indeed society—is now deeply rooted in internet connectivity. More than that, net neutrality ensures that US democracy will continue to thrive by allowing all voices—even unpopular ones—to be heard. "Net neutrality is what democracy looks like," said Winnie Wong, a veteran political activist involved in Occupy Wall Street, People For Bernie, and the Women's March on Washington. "Without it we can't tell the story of the struggle for social justice. If the government empowers corporate monopolies to dictate how and what we can share online, we'll never be able to advance our vision of racial justice, climate action, and economic equality." With so much at stake, US faith leaders are also getting involved. "An open internet is vital for our organizing efforts here in North Carolina, and around the country," said Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, a leading national justice organizer and President of Repairers of the Breach.

Facing such strong public opposition to his net neutrality rollback, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai may punt the issue to Congress, which is actually what the nation's largest ISPs want. The broadband industry's real goal, according to many tech policy experts, is to move this battle to the Republican-led US Congress, where deep-pocketed ISPs can lobby to craft internet policy rules that favor themselves. If the ISPs are successful, look for a spirited net neutrality debate this fall featuring Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN). This fight is far from over.

After months of debate, protests, and disruptions, the Federal Communications Commission’s comment period on its proposal to kill network neutrality is now over. The commission stopped accepting comments closing out with nearly 22 million total replies — setting an immense new record. The FCC’s previous comment record was just 3.7 million, set during the last net neutrality proceeding. But the process of receiving all those comments was far from smooth this time around.

The FCC’s website is fairly confusing. It’s also, apparently, susceptible to spam and other attacks, which we saw at multiple points across the past four months. All the while, the FCC’s chairman has been trying to explain that comments don’t really matter anyway, despite the commission’s requirement to act in the public interest and take public feedback. From the very beginning of the proceeding, FCC leadership laid out that it would be the quality, not the quantity, of the comments that made a difference. On the surface, that’s a reasonable argument, but it’s being set out as an excuse to ignore the overwhelming millions of comments in support of net neutrality in favor of few well-written filings by Comcast and the like. Now that the comment period has ended, the FCC will begin work on a revised version of its proposal, which it will then vote on and quite likely pass, making it official policy. The commission is supposed to factor public input into its revisions — and in fact, much of the original proposal was just a big series of open-ended questions — so it’ll probably be a little while before we see a final draft.

It’s entirely possible that the commission will go ahead with its original, bare-bones plan to simply kill net neutrality and leave everything else up to internet providers to sort out. But if the commission does decide to put in place some sort of protections, then we’ll have another debate to run through — one over exactly how effective those rules might be, and exactly how many ways companies can weasel around them.

The Federal Communications Commission's website already gets a lot of traffic—sometimes more than it can handle. But thanks to a weakness in the interface that the FCC published for citizens to file comments on proposed rule changes, there's a lot more interesting—and potentially malicious—content now flowing onto one FCC domain.

The system allows just about any file to be hosted on the FCC's site—potentially including malware. The application programming interface (API) for the FCC's Electronic Comment Filing System that enables public comment on proposed rule changes has been the source of some controversy already. It exposed the e-mail addresses of public commenters on network neutrality—intentionally, according to the FCC, to ensure the process' openness—and was the target of what the FCC claimed was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. But as a security researcher has found, the API could be used to push just about any document to the FCC's website, where it would be instantly published without screening. Because of the open nature of the API, an application key can be obtained with any e-mail address. While the content exposed via the site thus far is mostly harmless, the API could be used for malicious purposes as well. Since the API apparently accepts any file type, it could theoretically be used to host malicious documents and executable files on the FCC's Web server.