Tales of the Sausage Factory

“I pledge to give to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance. I pledge to work toward a world where everyone may sit under their own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make them afraid. A world that scatters light and not darkness in our paths, and makes us all in our several vocations useful here, and in due time and way everlastingly happy.”

We live now in a time when it is the duty of those of us committed to the success of the American Experiment in self-rule to remember the promises and values which the founders of our country made the foundation of governance. Whatever their past success, whatever the sincerity of those who wrote the words, it falls on us to do our part to make these foundational values real. To quote the words of our first President: “If we have wisdom to make the best use of the advantages with which we are now favored, we cannot fail, under the just administration of a good Government, to become a great and a happy people.”

[Commentary] Setting aside my personal feelings about democracy, freedom to peacefully protest, and how the Sioux concerns seem rather justified in light of the Alabama pipeline explosion, this has now raised an interesting communications issue that only a Federal Communications Commission investigation can solve. Are police jamming, or illegally spying, on communications at the protest and associated Sacred Stone Camp?

I have seen a number of communications from the protest about jamming, particularly in the period immediately before and during the Oct 27 effort by police to force protesters off the land owned by Dakota Access Pipeline. The FCC needs to send an enforcement team to Standing Rock to check things out. Given the enormous public interest at stake in protecting the free flow of communications from peaceful protests, and the enormous public interest in continuing live coverage of the protests, the FCC should move quickly to resolve these concerns. If law enforcement in the area are illegally jamming communications, or illegally intercepting and tracking cell phone use, the FCC needs to expose this quickly and stop it. If law enforcement are innocent of such conduct, only an FCC investigation on the scene can effectively clear them. In either case, the public deserves to know — and to have confidence in the Rule of Law with regard to electronic communications.

[Harold Feld is the senior vice president at Public Knowledge]

I’ve been writing about the “shut down of the phone system” (and the shift to a new one) since 2012. The Federal Communications Commission adopted a final set of rules to govern how this process will work last July. Because this is a big deal, and because the telecoms are likely to try to move ahead on this quickly, the FCC is having an educational event on Monday, September 26.

For communities, this may seem a long way off. But I feel I really need to evangelize to people here the difference between a process that is done right and a royal unholy screw up that brings down critical communication services. Yes, astoundingly, this is one of those times when everyone (at least at the beginning), has incentive to come to the table and at least try to work together. No, it’s not going to be all happy dances and unicorns and rainbows. Companies still want to avoid spending money, local residents like their current system that they understand just fine, and local governments are going to be wondering how the heck they pay for replacement equipment and services. But the FCC has put together a reasonable framework to push parties to resolve these issues with enough oversight to keep any player that participates in good faith from getting squashed or stalled indefinitely. So, all you folks who might want to get in on this — show up. You can either be there in person or watch the livestream. Monday, September 26, between 1-2 p.m.

[Commentary] I am the last person to deny anyone a good snarky gloat. So while I don’t agree entirely with AT&T’s policy blog post taking a jab at reports of Google Fiber stumbling in deployment, I don’t deny they’re entitled to a good snarky blog post. (Google, I point out, denies any disappointment or plans to slow down.) “Broadband investment is not for the feint hearted,” But the irony faeries love to make sport.

The following week National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) had a blog post of their own. Using the publicly available data from the Federal Communications Commission’s Form 477 Report, NDIA showed that in Cleveland’s (OH) poorest neighborhoods (which are also predominantly African American), AT&T does not offer wireline broadband better than 1.5 mbps DSL – about the same speed and quality since they first deployed DSL in the neighborhood. This contrasts with AT&T’s announcement in August that it will now make its gigabit broadband service available in downtown Cleveland and certain other neighborhoods. There are two important, but rather different issues here — one immediate to AT&T, one much more broadly with regard to policy. The more important issue is the return of redlining on a massive scale. Thanks to improvements the FCC has made over the years in the annual mandatory broadband provider reporting form (Form 477), we can now construct maps like this for neighborhoods all over the country, and not just from AT&T. As I argued repeatedly when telecommunication companies, cable companies and Silicon Valley joined forces to enact “franchise reform” deregulation in 2005-07 that eliminated pre-existing anti-redlining requirements – profit maximizing firms are gonna act to maximize profit. They are not going to spend money upgrading facilities if they don’t consider it a good investment.

[Commentary] As we end 2016, we have an unusually large number of vacancies in both the executive branch and the judiciary. As anyone not living under a rock knows, that’s no accident. Getting President Barack Obama appointments approved by the Senate was always a hard slog, and became virtually impossible after the Republicans took over the Senate in 2015. This doesn’t merely impact the waning days of the Obama Administration. If Hillary Clinton wins the White House, it means that the Administration will start with a large number of important holes. Even if the Democrats also retake the Senate, it will take months to bring the Executive branch up to functioning, never mind the judiciary. If Clinton wins and Republicans keep the Senate, we are looking at continuing gridlock and dysfunction until at least 2018 and possibly beyond.

It may seem odd for me to say, and meaning no offense to his replacement Bob Quinn, but I am sorry to see Jim Cicconi retire from AT&T at the end of August. For those who don’t play in this pond, Cicconi has been AT&T’s Lobbyist in Chief here in DC since 2005. It may therefore seem odd that I am sorry to see him go, particularly since Cicconi was so damned good at his job. But, as I have said many times before, I’m not here because companies are evil, nor do I believe the people working for them necessarily delight in crushing consumers, strangling puppies and tossing destitute widows and orphans on the street in rags in the dead of winter.

[Commentary] Greenlight, the muni provider of Wilson (NC), took advantage of the Federal Communications Commission’s 2015 municipal broadband order and began offering gigabit broadband in Pinetop (NC), population 1400. Pinetop lies in Edgecomb County, next door to Wilson County. Under the 2010 North Carolina anti-muni law, Greenlight could serve anyone in Wilson County but not go outside Wilson County to neighboring Edgecomb County. But Wilson decided to take a shot and honor Pintetop’s request to provide service (Greenlight already provides electric service in Pinetop as a munipal electric provider, so it wasn’t much of a leap). The legal situation on this is now somewhat complicated. The 6th Circuit had not stayed the FCC’s preemption order in 2015, so it was totally legal for Greenlight to offer service. What is unclear now is how to read NC law now that it is “un-preempted” by the Sixth Circuit overturning the FCC. I admit I have no idea how to even begin to answer this question.

[Commentary] While that seems obvious, we often miss it in policy debates. But it is rather important to keep in mind when reading Tennessee v. FCC. In a case released August 10, the Sixth Circuit reversed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) 2015 Order preempting restrictions the state of Tennessee and the state of North Carolina imposed on their municipalities with regard to providing broadband service. While Commissioners Pai and O’Reilly are certainly entitled to their victory laps, it is equally important to applaud Chairman Wheeler and Commissioners Rosenworcel and Clyburn for doing what they believed was both the right policy and the right call under the law. The petitions from the City of Wilson, NC, and from the Electric Power Board of Chattanooga, TN, raised novel questions of law. The FCC’s Order was a test case. On a very narrow and murky legal question, the FCC majority bet wrong — at least according to the 6th Circuit. I thought the FCC majority had the better argument. But I can’t say the Sixth Circuit was utterly wrong in holding the contrary.

[Commentary] Every now and then, I am reminded that the cable news networks such as Fox and MSNBC are members of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA). But seeing this recent blog post reminded me. While faux outrage and hypocrisy are hardly rare in Policyland, you rarely find this level of self-righteous sanctimony outside of cable news. As some folks may recall, I recently opined that AT&T choosing to sulk like Achilles in his tent rather than engage meaningfully in the ongoing rulemaking process.

NCTA — which also opposes the business data service (BDS, formerly special access) proceeding and has adopted the same strategy of acting like a disappointed 6 year old — chooses to deliberately misconstrue this as something other than the Federal Communications Commission’s standard, open ex parte process. What magnifies this almost to the level of self-parody is that NCTA is engaged in exactly this behavior on set-top boxes (STBs), where it has popped out with a sudden alternative #ditchthebox to the FCC’s #unlockthebox proposal. In all cases, of course, NCTA paradoxically insists that any refusal to negotiate around their proposals is somehow a sign that the FCC has impermissibly pre-decided. But if the FCC considers anyone else’s response to their proposals, or engages with stakeholders outside of the comment and/or reply comment period, it is a “smoke filled room.”

[Commentary] The 1.1 million public comments the Federal Communications Commission has received on its network neutrality proceeding do not simply reflect the talking points we see in the mainstream media and debated in Washington (DC) policy circles. We have started to see some data crunching of this data, with a range of results.

Perhaps most tellingly, the number of individual comments opposing net neutrality regulations as unnecessary and overly burdensome government regulation of the Internet is so small as to be statistically irrelevant to data visualization analysis.

So what are the big trends? The individual comments skew almost entirely in favor of having net neutrality rules, the number of unique individual comments not derived from templates is unusually high, people are really thinking about this and really engaged with it -- more so than with other comparable regulatory proceedings, and most individuals thinking about this care about net neutrality in ways not addressed by mainstream coverage.

Specifically, they care about net neutrality as an expression of fundamental values of basic fairness, opportunity, the American Dream, and preserving free expression and diversity of views.