Daily Digest 11/30/2017 (The Movement to Stop FCC Chairman Pai)

As internet service providers have poured millions of dollars into killing net neutrality protections, they have made one common refrain: that the Federal Communications Commission's fairly modest net neutrality rules somehow destroyed network investment in the United States. Never mind that any time a journalist fact checks these claims they find they're indisputably false. ISP lobbyists, lawyers, executives and hired mouthpieces continue to repeat the claim -- as if redundancy somehow creates truth itself. In fact there's nearly a half-dozen different ISP executives on public record admitting to investors that this claim net neutrality hurt sector investment is false. If that's not enough for you, you can check out any publicly available SEC filing or earnings report from the last two years (several journalists have, and found the industry's claim here to be utterly unsubstantiated). The fact that companies like Altice are still investing in massive fiber to the home projects, and wireless carriers are breaking spending records as they hoover up spectrum for 5G also clearly contradict this claim. If investment is stalling anywhere, it's in uncompetitive parts of the country -- an issue that won't be fixed by gutting regulatory oversight of one of the least liked, and least-competitive business sectors in American industry. And yet, the claim that net neutrality killed investment continues to play a starring role in Ajit Pai's quest to dismantle popular net neutrality protections, and countless media reports on the subject. That's in large part because large ISPs like Verizon, Comcast and AT&T hire economists, academics, and other policy parrots to actively cherry pick CAPEX data (by say, taking a dip in CAPEX tied to Charter ending its deployment of digital adapters and blaming it on net neutrality) until it supports this false assertion.

My fellow FCC Commissioners would benefit from hosting their own public forums and listening to the concerns raised by consumers and small businesses. Doing so would allow them to hear first-hand on what it means to access the internet without fear that their broadband provider will slow down or block their favorite online applications and services. My colleagues would benefit from hearing concerns about broadband providers’ poor service, surprise price hikes, and inadequate customer support, so, why won’t they? If the federal government is not willing to stand by these basic protections, surely states and localities will step in to fill the gap? Sadly, the Chairman’s proposal tramples over the rights of these communities and will actually prevent them from adopting any related consumer protections — an action I believe is likely unlawful and will no doubt be litigated in court. Now it is time to listen but if the FCC’s majority is unwilling to take this simple step, then the most responsible way forward is for the Chairman to withdraw his proposal prior to the December 14th scheduled vote. Consumers and small businesses count on the FCC to be the standard bearer when it comes to upholding and protecting the public interest. We should to do the right thing. We ought to listen to what the American people are saying. We must stand up, speak out and work to ensure that the internet remains a platform for innovation and free expression in the decades to come. [FCC Commissioner Clyburn]

An examination of how Comcast's net neutrality promises have changed over time reveals an interesting tidbit—Comcast deleted a "no paid prioritization" pledge from its net neutrality webpage on the very same day that the Federal Communications Commission announced its initial plan to repeal net neutrality rules.  Starting in 2014, the webpage, corporate.comcast.com/openinternet/open-net-neutrality, contained this statement: "Comcast doesn't prioritize Internet traffic or create paid fast lanes." That statement remained on the page until April 26 of this year, according to page captures from the Internet Archive's WayBack Machine. But on April 27, the paid prioritization pledge was nowhere to be found on that page and remains absent now. What changed? It was on April 26 that FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced the first version of his plan to eliminate net neutrality rules. Since then, Pai has finalized his repeal plan, and the FCC will vote to drop the rules on December 14.

The impending repeal of net neutrality rules is being used by Charter Communications to fight a lawsuit that alleges the company made false promises of fast Internet service. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in February filed the lawsuit against Charter and its Time Warner Cable subsidiary. Meanwhile, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai submitted a proposal to roll back the FCC's net neutrality rules and to preempt state governments from regulating net neutrality on their own.  Schneiderman's lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court doesn't allege violations of the core net neutrality rules (i.e., blocking or throttling specific websites). Instead, the lawsuit says that TWC promised Internet speeds that it knew it could not deliver and that the slow speeds affected all kinds of websites and online services. The suit also alleges that TWC deceived the FCC in order to get a better score on the commission's evaluations of Internet speeds.

Network neutrality regulations underpin the digital lives of many Americans, yet it is challenging to survey the public on such an inherently complex and technical subject. For this reason, Pew Research Center set out to analyze the opinions of those who had taken the time to submit their thoughts to the Federal Communications Commission.  Among the most notable findings: Many submissions seemed to include false or misleading personal information; There is clear evidence of organized campaigns to flood the comments with repeated messages; and Often, thousands of comments were submitted at precisely the same moment.

In a recent article, respected technology industry analyst and blogger Ben Thompson argued that he supports net neutrality, but thinks the Federal Communications Commission is right to repeal rules that ban broadband providers like Comcast and Verizon from blocking, slowing down, or otherwise discriminating against legal content. Thompson argues that designating broadband providers as common carriers is a "heavy-handed” way to enforce net neutrality, echoing industry voices, and FCC chair Ajit Pai. Thompson argues "pre-existing regulation and antitrust law, along with media pressure, are effective at policing bad behavior." But it’s far from clear that that pre-existing protections can prevent bad behavior by ISPs. The FCC spent years trying to find some way to police internet providers without labeling them as Title II carriers. It failed repeatedly, and Thompson doesn't offer a convincing alternative approach.

The internet is dying. Sure, technically, the internet still works. Pull up Facebook on your phone and you will still see your second cousin’s baby pictures. But that isn’t really the internet. It’s not the open, anyone-can-build-it network of the 1990s and early 2000s, the product of technologies created over decades through government funding and academic research, the network that helped undo Microsoft’s stranglehold on the tech business and gave us upstarts like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Netflix. Nope, that freewheeling internet has been dying a slow death — and a vote next month by the Federal Communications Commission to undo network neutrality would be the final pillow in its face.

[Commentary] I’ve got bad news for everyone who is working overtime to protest Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s campaign to eliminate net neutrality: You are being tricked. Pai is running a kind of shell game, overreaching (“go ahead and run all the paid prioritization services you want, Comcast!”) so that we will focus our energies on the hard-to-pin-down concept of net neutrality—the principle of internet access fairness that he has vowed to eliminate. Chairman Pai is hoping to use outrage over net neutrality to drive everyone into the mosh pit of special interests that is lobbying on Capitol Hill. There will be strident calls from every side for reworking the existing Telecommunications Act to ensure that net neutrality continues. Just watch: The incumbents will piously say, “We like net neutrality too! We just need a different statute.” That’s a trap.We have a perfectly good statute already, and the Obama-era FCC’s interpretation of that statute so as to ensure an open internet—including its labeling of these giant companies as common carriers, which was necessary in order for open internet rules to be enforceable—has already been found reasonable. On the Hill, the public will be out-lobbied at every turn by the essentially unlimited resources of Comcast, Charter, CenturyLink, Verizon, and AT&T. [Susan Crawford is the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.]

Is social media a net benefit to American society? Given the increasingly important role that social media plays in our daily lives, this is a question that all of us, including groups like the Media Institute, need to grapple with. Now, I will tell you up front that I don’t have an answer. And I won’t touch on particular policy issues, like social media’s role in elections. What I have in mind is something broader. With that, let me suggest two trends that I believe have lowered our discourse—and how social media has enabled each. First: Everything nowadays is political. Everything. Today, politics infuses everything from entertainment awards shows to natural disasters. And there is no respite from it. Virtually every aspect of American life seems to have been tainted in one way or another with politics. And everyone is expected to have an opinion. If they don’t, they are suspected of being on “the other side,” which is of course bad.... The second trend I’d suggest to you: The virtual is displacing the real. As we’ve become more accustomed to interacting on the Internet, we don’t prioritize or experience in-person conversations as much. And with the lack of personal contact, we’ve forgotten the mores that we used to learn through face-to-face conversations—mores like civility and tolerance.

President Donald Trump shared three inflammatory anti-Muslim videos on Twitter posted by a far-right British activist.  The videos — whose authenticity could not be independently verified — were first shared by Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of Britain First, which bills itself as a political party but has been widely condemned as an extremist group that targets mosques and Muslims. Britain First has previously posted a number of misleading videos, and the three Trump shared were provocatively titled “Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches!,” “Muslim destroys a statue of Virgin Mary!” and “Islamist mob pushes teenage boy off roof and beats him to death!” Fransen, 31, who lives in a London suburb, was convicted of religiously aggravated harassment in November 2016 after abusing a woman wearing a hijab. Fransen was arrested again earlier in Nov after comments she made during a speech in Belfast.