consumers – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Streaming Video Prices Rise While Quality Falls, Following Cable TV’s Lead

from the enshittify-everything dept

Streaming video still provides some meaningful advantages to traditional cable: it’s generally cheaper (assuming you don’t sign up for every service under the sun); customer satisfaction ratings are generally higher; and users have more power to pick and choose and cancel services at a whim.

But the party simply isn’t poised to last.

Thanks to industry consolidation and saturated market growth, streaming giants have started behaving much like the traditional cable giants they once disrupted. As with most industries suffering from “enshittification,” that generally means steadily worse service at higher prices to appease Wall Street’s demand for improved quarterly returns at any cost (even long term company health).

As a result, Netflix has started acting like password sharing, something it advocated for for years, is a dire cardinal sin. Amazon now thinks would be fun to increase the number of ads it runs, charging Amazon Prime users even more money to avoid them. Consumers are paying more for streaming than ever as layoffs abound, streaming catalogs shrink, and the underlying product quality gets worse.

Ars Technica points to a recent flood of surveys from TiVO, CableTV.com, and Whip Media that all show that streaming customers continue to report a drop in the quality and customer satisfaction of streaming services over the last few years. When asked why this is happening, TiVo analysts suggest the problem is simply that companies are struggling to make streaming profitable:

“The amount of new original content overall on SVODs may be down [year over year] as many streamers continue to struggle to hit profitability targets. Without new original content (or exclusive content deals), perceptions of value/differentiation may decline.”

You’ll notice that neither the trend-studying organizations nor Ars discuss several important things. One, the pay for fail-upward media sector executives (like Time Warner CEO David Zaslav) continues to skyrocket despite both strategic missteps and quality problems. Two, that mindless consolidation and a “growth for growth’s sake” merger mania mindset is only accelerating all these problems.

Or three, that this is all driven by Wall Street’s insatiable need for improved short-term quarterly improvements at any cost, regardless if that ultimately harms consumers, workers, or the product itself. It’s simply not good enough to provide an affordable product people really like; the need for improved quarterly returns at impossible, permanent scale inevitably results in a sort of product cannibalization and destructive performance art (see: the AT&T Time Warner Discovery mergers) that’s not really subtle.

Companies can mitigate this erosion if they’re in sectors where there’s still subscriber growth to be had or if they’re able to expand into additional business opportunities. But streaming subscriber growth has hit a wall, and there’s nowhere else to really go if your product is quality film and television.

So instead we get more creative ways to be annoying and nickel-and-dime customers for ever-sagging product quality. This results in an enshittification cycle that absolutely will drive more users to either free services (Twitch, TikTok, YouTube) or piracy, at which point streaming executives will blame everything (younger generations! VPNs!) but their own choices.

It’s exactly what cable TV executives did. And many of those folks now work in streaming, having been financially incentivized every step of the way to have learned nothing from the experience.

Filed Under: competition, consumers, enshittification, prices, streaming, tv, video
Companies: disney, netflix, warner bros. discovery

T-Mobile Users Flood FCC With Complaints About ‘Price Lock Guarantee’ That Wasn’t

from the I'm-not-dead-yet! dept

Thu, Oct 31st 2024 05:29am - Karl Bode

We’ve noted repeatedly that in the wake of the Sprint T-Mobile merger, wireless carriers immediately stopped trying to compete on price (exactly what deal critics had warned the Trump administration would happen when you reduce sector competition).

Recently, T-Mobile imposed another 3−3-3−5 per month price hike on most of its plans — including customers who believed they were under a “price lock” guarantee thanks to a 7 year old promotion.

That 2017 promotion was pretty misleading; it promised T-Mobile contracted customers that they could “keep their price until THEY decide to change it” and that “T-Mobile will never change the price you pay for your T-Mobile One plan.” But there was a big catch: T-Mobile didn’t really mean that your price would never change, only that T-Mobile would pay your final monthly bill if the carrier raised the price and impacted customers decided to cancel.

A since deleted FAQ supposedly made that clear, but the original announcement didn’t.

So in addition to T-Mobile being sued, the FCC has been getting flooded with complaints about the dodgy promotion after T-Mobile’s recent price hike. More than 2000 annoyed customers have flooded the agency with complaints about how they’re very much alive, but their supposed cost savings isn’t:

“I am still alive and T-Mobile is increasing the price for service by $5 per line. How is this a lifetime price lock?” one customer in Connecticut asked the Federal Communications Commission in a complaint that we obtained through a public records request.

“I am not dead yet,” a customer in New York wrote bluntly, saying they had bought a plan with a “guarantee for life.”

Promising one thing and delivering another is, of course, a proud, longstanding telecom industry tradition (see: “unlimited data,” “up to” speed promises, or endless bullshit fees that jack up the cost of your bill).

The FCC declined to comment to Ars Technica as to whether it was actually conducting any sort of investigation into T-Mobile’s behavior. The FTC and FCC could both take action here; but whether anybody actually will remains an open question, especially given telecom and the current corrupt Supreme Court’s joint efforts to declare all corporate oversight effectively illegal.

Telecoms (and the Republican and right wing think tanks that routinely support them) very much want regulators that exist as the policy equivalent of a decorative gourd. Extensions of the government that occasionally put on a hollow performance on issues like privacy and consumer welfare, but never actually do anything about the cause of any of the problems, most notably the steady drumbeat of competition-eroding consolidation for which consumers and labor always pay the ultimate price.

Filed Under: cellular, consumers, fcc, mergers, price lock guarantee, promotions, telecom, wireless
Companies: t-mobile

Comcast, Charter Sue FTC Over Efforts To Make Canceling Services Easier

from the it-is-my-god-given-right-to-be-fraudulent dept

Tue, Oct 29th 2024 05:22am - Karl Bode

Earlier this month the FTC announced it was modifying some existing rules to crack down on companies that make it extremely difficult to cancel services. The agency’s revamp of its 1973 “Negative Option Rule” requires companies be completely transparent about the limitations of deals and promotions, requires consumers actively consent to having read terms and deal restrictions, and generally makes cancelling a service as easy as signing up.

So of course, cable and media giants like Comcast and Charter, who’ve built an entire industry on being overtly hostile to consumers, are suing.

Under the banner of the NCTA (The Internet & Television Association), Comcast and Charter filed a lawsuit late last week in the Republican-heavy 5th circuit, claiming the new rules are “arbitrary,” “onerous,” “capricious,” and an abuse of the industry’s existing authority. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) (with members ranging from Disney to Google) also joined the lawsuit.

Corporate members of most of these organizations have a long, proud history of misleading promotions and making it difficult to cancel services. The Wall Street Journal, for example, historically made it annoyingly difficult to cancel digital subscriptions. And telecoms, of course, have historically made misleading their customers via fine print a high art form.

Kind of like hidden and misleading fees, we’ve cultivated a U.S. business environment where being a misleading asshole to the consumer is simply viewed as a sort of business creativity, not the fraud it actually is. That (plus corruption) has historically resulted in a feckless regulatory environment where this stuff is only fecklessly and inconsistently enforced. Usually with piddly fines and wrist slaps.

Telecoms have always been at the forefront of insisting that any effort to change this paradigm is regulatory over-reach. Thanks to recent Supreme Court rulings like Loper Bright (specifically designed to turn U.S. regulators into the policy equivalent of decorative gourds), they have more legal leverage than ever to crush corporate oversight with the help of a very broken and corrupt MAGA-heavy court system.

The flimsy logic pushed by the extraction class to justify the dismantling of Chevron deference was that feckless U.S. regulators (who again, in reality, can rarely take action against the worst offenders on a good day) had somehow gotten too bold, and that recent Supreme decisions had rebalanced things so that “out of control” regulators can’t act without the specific approval of Congress.

But corporations didn’t lobby the unelected Supreme Court because they were just honestly concerned about the balance of policy power among “unelected bureaucrats.” They did it because they know they’ve already lobbied Congress into absolute, corrupt dysfunction on nearly all meaningful reform and corporate oversight (guns, health, whatever). Now they’re taking aim at the already shaky authority of federal U.S. regulators. Once they’re done there, they’ll take aim at state consumer protection power.

Companies like Comcast envision a world in which there’s really no functional state or federal corporate oversight whatsoever. It really doesn’t matter the subject (net neutrality, transparency label requirements, privacy, efforts to stop racial discrimination in broadband deployment, annoying cancellations). They sue claiming regulatory overreach. And thanks to the corrupt Supreme Court and decades of demonization of the regulatory state as uniquely and purely harmful, corporations have a better chance of winning than ever.

And of course this isn’t just happening in telecom and media. It’s happening across every industry that touches every aspect of U.S. life, often in potentially deadly or hazardous ways (see this ProPublica report). Having federal regulators that can’t do anything without it being dismantled by the whims of an errant, logic-optional 5th Circuit Republican Judge will cause endless legal chaos and grind most meaningful reform to a halt, just the way industry designed it.

It’s the culmination of a fifty-year strategy by large corporations, it won’t be in any way subtle, and annoying cancellation obstacles will likely be the least of our worries as the chaos mounts in the years to come. Court reform (Supreme Court term limits and court expansion chief among them) is utterly essential, unless we really do want a world in which corporate power is the only power that matters.

Filed Under: 5th circuit, cancel, chevron, click to cancel, consumers, fine print, ftc, lina khan, loper bright, telecom
Companies: charter, comcast, esa, iab, ncta

Your ISP Now Requires A Broadband ‘Nutrition Label’ To Clearly Show You You’re Being Ripped Off

from the transparently-terrible dept

Mon, Oct 28th 2024 05:29am - Karl Bode

After countless years pondering the idea, the FCC in 2022 announced that it would start politely asking the nation’s lumbering telecom monopolies to affix a sort of “nutrition label” on to broadband connections. The labels will clearly disclose the speed and latency (ping) of your connection, any hidden fees users will encounter, and whether the connection comes with usage caps or “overage fees.”

Initially just a voluntary measure, bigger ISPs had to start using the labels back in April. Smaller ISPs had to start using them as of October 10. In most instances they’re supposed to look something like this:

As far as regulatory efforts go, it’s not the worst idea. Transparency is lacking in broadband land, and U.S. broadband and cable companies have a 30+ year history of ripping off consumers with an absolute cavalcade of weird restrictions, fees, surcharges, and connection limitations.

Here’s the thing though: transparently knowing you’re being ripped off doesn’t necessarily stop you from being ripped off. A huge number of Americans live under a broadband monopoly or duopoly, meaning they have no other choice in broadband access. As such, Comcast or AT&T or Verizon can rip you off, and you have absolutely no alternative options that allow you to vote with your wallet.

That wouldn’t be as much of a problem if U.S. federal regulators had any interest in reining in regional telecom monopoly power, but they don’t. In fact, members of both parties are historically incapable of even admitting monopoly harm exists. Democrats are notably better at at least trying to do something, even if that something often winds up being decorative regulatory theater.

The other problem: with the help of a corrupt Supreme Court, telecoms and their Republican and libertarian besties are currently engaged in an effort to dismantle what’s left of the FCC’s consumer protection authority under the pretense this unleashes “free market innovation.” It, of course, doesn’t; regional monopolies like Comcast just double down on all of their worst impulses, unchecked.

If successful, even fairly basic efforts like this one won’t be spared, as the FCC won’t have the authority to enforce much of anything.

It’s all very demonstrative of a U.S. telecom industry that’s been broken by monopoly power, a lack of competition, and regulatory capture. As a result, even the most basic attempts at consumer protection are constantly undermined by folks who’ve dressed up greed as some elaborate and intellectual ethos.

Filed Under: broadband, consumers, fcc, fees, high speed internet, nutrition label, telecom, usage caps

24,000 Abandoned Redbox DVD Rental Kiosks Are Leaking Sensitive Customer Information

from the privacy-shmivacy dept

Thu, Oct 24th 2024 04:00pm - Karl Bode

You probably remember Redbox, the DVD-rental kiosk company that went went bankrupt last June. The story behind the bankruptcy is interesting, in case to you missed it. The company failed to pivot to streaming (you might recall the failed joint venture with Verizon), and the bankruptcy has been profoundly ugly in a scorched Earth kind of way.

Frustrated employees (who stopped receiving health insurance last May) have apparently been stripping the company for parts, including selling used DVDs all over eBay. The company’s kiosks have also been left abandoned everywhere. 404 Media had a good story about how some innovative tinkerers have been making interesting use of the abandoned machines (of course they’re capable of running Doom).

But Ars Technica notes another problem: many of the abandoned machines still have the sensitive data of customers left on the hard drives. That includes rental histories, email addresses, zip codes, and, in some cases, credit card numbers, all going back to at least 2015:

“[The Redbox] logged lots of information, including debugging information from the transaction terminal, and they left old records on the device. This probably saved them some time on QAing software bugs, but it exposed all their users to data being leaked.”

There are numerous mistakes here, including storing any of this data locally and logging way more data during transactions than was reasonably needed. Flaws that transparent security research could have identified and prompted a fix for before it became a problem.

Redbox and its corporate parent, Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, clearly not only sucked at business, but sucked at sucking at business. They were warned about potential privacy violations during bankruptcy proceedings. Pretending for a minute the U.S. isn’t too corrupt to pass modern privacy laws, there’s not much of a company left to hold accountable for the privacy-related “oversight.”

Now a lot of this data is old. And however bad this sounds it can’t hold a candle to the data collected on you by a vast array of dodgy international regulators, who routinely leak vast U.S. consumer datasets into the wild because the U.S. is literally too corrupt to pass a basic privacy law or regulate data brokers.

Still, it’s a problem: as the Wall Street Journal notes, there’s an estimated 24,000 of these abandoned rental kiosks scattered all over the U.S., and retail landlords are struggling like hell to just find somebody to come take them away.

Filed Under: bankruptcy, consumers, data, dvd rental, kiosks, privacy, red box kiosk, security
Companies: chicken soup for the soul, redbox

U.S. Finally Restricts Sale Of Location Data To Foreign Adversaries, But We’re Still Too Corrupt To Pass A Basic Internet-Era Privacy Law

from the very-late-to-the-party dept

Thu, Oct 24th 2024 05:32am - Karl Bode

Back in February, the Biden administration issued an executive order preventing the “large-scale transfer” of Americans’ personal data to “countries of concern.” The restrictions cover genomic data, biometric data, personal health data, geolocation data, and financial data, with the goal of preventing this data from being exploited by foreign intelligence agencies.

This week the administration fleshed out their planned restrictions in more detail. In a new fact sheet outlining plans for a new national-security program restricting the bulk transfer of consumer data, the government says it will focus primarily of the sale to “countries of concern” including China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela.

The executive order and proposed rule defines “bulk” as such:

“The proposed rule would establish the following bulk thresholds: human genomic data on over 100 U.S. persons, biometric identifiers on over 1,000 U.S. persons, precise geolocation data on over 1,000 U.S. devices, personal health data on over 10,000 U.S. persons, personal financial data on over 10,000 U.S. persons, certain covered personal identifiers on over 100,000 U.S. persons, or any combination of these data types that meets the lowest threshold for any category in the dataset.”

While it’s certainly smart to finally start tracking the sale of sensitive U.S. consumer data to foreign countries in more detail (and blocking direct sales to some of the more problematic adversaries), it’s kind of like building barn doors four years after all the animals have already escaped.

We’ve noted for most of the last two decades how a huge variety of apps, telecoms, hardware vendors, and other services and companies track pretty much your every click, physical movement, and behavior, then sell access to that data to a broad array of super dodgy and barely regulated data brokers.

These data brokers then turn around and sell access to this data to a wide assortment of random nitwits, quite often without any sort of privacy and security standards. That’s resulted in a flood of scandals from stalkers tracking women to anti-abortion zealots buying clinic visitor data in order to target vulnerable women with health care misinformation.

This continues to happen for two reasons: at every last step, U.S. leaders put making money above public safety and consumer protection. And the U.S. government has discovered that buying this data is a fantastic way to avoid having to get pesky warrants. This all occurs to the backdrop of a relentless effort to turn all U.S. consumer protection regulators into decorative cardboard cutouts.

So nothing has changed foundationally. We’re literally too corrupt to pass even a baseline privacy law for the internet era, and outside some scattered efforts we really don’t consistently regulate data brokers. Those data brokers in turn have been so fast and loose with broad consumer datasets, it’s been utterly trivial for foreign intelligence agencies around the world to gain access to that data.

It’s nice that it’s 2024 and the U.S. government only just realized this is all a problem, and some basic guard rails are better than nothing, but it’s still not good enough. The U.S. needs comprehensive internet-era privacy laws that hold companies and executives accountable for lax security and privacy standards, and anything short of that (like freaking out exclusively about TikTok) is performance.

Filed Under: behavioral, consumers, data brokers, executive order, genomic, intelligence, location data, privacy, security, wireless

FTC Investigating John Deere Over ‘Right To Repair’ Violations

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

Tue, Oct 22nd 2024 05:12pm - Karl Bode

A few years ago agricultural equipment giant John Deere found itself on the receiving end of an antitrust lawsuit for its efforts to monopolize tractor repair. The lawsuits noted that the company consistently purchased competing repair centers in order to consolidate the sector and force customers into using the company’s own repair facilities, driving up costs and logistical hurdles dramatically for farmers.

John Deere executives have repeatedly promised to do better, then just ignored those promises.

Earlier this year John Deere found itself under fire once again, this time by Senator Elizabeth Warren, who sent a letter to the company noting that company is violating The Clean Air Act by failing to inform users in tractor manuals of cheaper repair options. Now comes word that the FTC is investigating whether the company’s efforts to monopolize repair have violated the FTC Act:

“The investigation, authorized on Sept. 2, 2021, focuses on repair restrictions manufacturers place on hardware or software, often referred to by regulators as impeding customers’ “right to repair” the goods they purchase. The probe was made public through a filing by data analytics company Hargrove & Associates Inc, which sought to quash an FTC subpoena seeking market data submitted to it by members of the Association of Equipment Manufacturers.”

If the FTC takes action, hopefully it’s more comprehensive than some of the earlier antitrust busting efforts during Lina Khan’s tenure.

In addition to intentionally acquiring repair alternatives to monopolize repair and drive up consumer costs, John Deere also routinely makes repair difficult and costly through the act of software locks, obnoxious DRM, and “parts pairing” — which involves only allowing the installation of company-certified replacement parts — or mandatory collections of company-blessed components.

More recently, the company has been striking meaningless “memorandums of understanding” with key trade groups, pinky swearing to stop their bad behavior if the groups agree to not support state or federal right to repair legislation.

Last March, Oregon became the seventh U.S. state to pass “right to repair” legislation making it easier, cheaper, and more convenient to repair technology you own. The bill’s passage came on the heels of legislation passed in Massachusetts (in 2012 and 2020), Colorado (in 2022 and 2023), New York (2023), Minnesota, Maine and California. All told, 30 states are considering such bills in 2024.

While the new laws are promising progress for right to repair activism, in most instances companies in those states are just ignoring the laws with no repercussions so far.

Filed Under: consumers, drm, ftc, hardware, independent repair, parts pairing, right to repair, tractors
Companies: john deere

New FTC Rules Make It Easier To Cancel Services, Punish Companies For Being Annoying Little Shits About It

from the annoyance-isn't-a-business-model dept

Thu, Oct 17th 2024 05:21am - Karl Bode

While FTC boss Lina Khan certainly has had some growing pains, she’s fought for consumer protection and antitrust reform in a way that U.S. regulators haven’t seen for the better part of a generation.

Whether it’s taking on automaker privacy abuses, supporting right to repair reforms, or taking aim at Amazon’s attempt to dominate the entirety of online retail, she’s notably different from the feckless revolving door careerists that usually stock regulatory agencies, which is why the Barry Dillers, Reid Hoffmans, and Mark Cubans of the world are so hot and bothered.

Enter the FTC’s latest effort: cracking down on the predatory and annoying ways companies try to prevent you from cancelling services. Cemented by AOL in its heyday, and perfected by everybody from the Wall Street Journal to your broadband and wireless phone provider, corporate America loves to make it as annoying as possible to simply cancel services, often actively hiding any way to do so.

The FTC says its new revamp of the FTC’s 1973 “Negative Option Rule” requires companies be completely transparent about the limitations of deals and promotions, prohibits them from making cancelling services difficult or impossible, requires consumer actively consent to having read terms and deal restrictions, and generally makes cancelling a service as easy as signing up.

“Some businesses too often trick consumers into paying for subscriptions they no longer want or didn’t sign up for in the first place,” Khan said. “The proposed rule would require that companies make it as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to sign up for one. The proposal would save consumers time and money, and businesses that continued to use subscription tricks and traps would be subject to stiff penalties.”

Most of the FTC’s new guidelines will go into effect in 180 days, with some in effect within 60 days after publication in the Federal Register. The rulemaking updates started way back in 2019. There’s a fact sheet here that explains the proposal in more detail.

Consumer groups like US PIRG were pleased.

“For years, too many companies have used questionable tactics to trap customers in recurring payments even if they no longer want or need their services,” US PIRG Consumer Watchdog Director Teresa Murray said of the rule changes. “Subscriptions and memberships have often been like a visit to the Hotel California: ‘You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.’ Now, you’ll be able to leave.”

Trade groups representing everything from media companies and telecoms to car wash operations called the rules “burdensome and unnecessary.” Publishers and Advertisers like the News/Media Alliance also complained about the rules, insisting they would “confuse customers” (one alliance group member, the WSJ, worked for years to make subscription cancellation as annoying as humanly possible, and didn’t seem too upset about consumer confusion at the time).

I’d suspect that, as in most sectors, these organizations will likely file suit to scuttle the new rules, insisting that several recent decisions by a corrupt Supreme Court have effectively made U.S. consumer protection effectively illegal without the specific, uncharacteristically-competent approval of a Congress too corrupt to function. They’re having more success on this front than you might think.

Again, there’s a lot of grumbling about Khan, but most of it oddly omits the numerous and popular consumer protection reforms she continues to implement cracking down on obvious consumer pain points the government previously spent decades doing nothing about.

Filed Under: barry diller, cancellations, consumer protection, consumers, ftc, lina khan, subscriptions

Fossil Fuel Companies Use Fake Consumer Groups And Fake Local News Orgs To Derail Solar Efforts In Ohio

from the absolute-artifice dept

Tue, Oct 15th 2024 05:22am - Karl Bode

A favorite tactic of U.S. corporations looking to dismantle consumer protection reforms (or anything they don’t like, really) is to create entirely fake consumer groups custom-built to confuse voters and journalists. Such groups are usually used in combination with think tanks and other pseudo-objective organizations to muddy the waters, confuse constituents, and mislead the press when it comes to reform.

Cable giant Charter, for example, recently created a fake consumer group in Maine specifically tasked with lying to locals about the benefits of community-owned broadband efforts. AT&T funds more than a dozen different think tanks, all tasked with trying to convince the public and policymakers that dismantling U.S. corporate oversight will somehow result in effervescently efficient “free markets.”

The goal is to create a sound wall of fake pseudo-academic and public support against what are usually broadly popular reforms (basic corporate oversight, expanded use of solar, community owned broadband, more competition, whatever).

These tactics have been a cornerstone of cable, broadband, and telecom giants for years. But it’s also a the backbone of major energy companies’ in their efforts to undermine renewable energy reforms. Like in 2016, when a major Florida utility was caught using a fake consumer group it made up — combined with a “free market” think tank it funds — to derail efforts to ramp up solar use.

Utilities were caught again in 2023 creating fake consumer groups in Eugene, Oregon to try and derail the city’s efforts to ramp up the use of more efficient heat pumps. And now ProPublica tells the tale of yet another group of fossil fuel companies that are using fake local news orgs, think tanks, and fake consumer groups to undermine efforts to deploy solar across Ohio.

The fossil fuel industry was opposed to efforts to build a large solar farm in Knox County, Ohio. So to undermine the efforts, they began seeding local news outlets with criticism of the project, a lot of it coming from fake consumer groups like “Knox Smart Development,” developed by Ariel Corporation to spread lies about the effort to the local populace:

“The man who registered the group as a business — and who is its sole member and spokesperson — was an Ariel Corporation employee two decades ago and remained an acquaintance of a top executive there, Tom Rastin. The group’s website was owned for a time by a woman working as an executive assistant at Ariel.

And one of Knox Smart Development’s larger funders is Rastin, a Republican megadonor and a retired executive vice president at Ariel, according to records and sworn testimony. Rastin’s father-in-law founded Ariel and, until recently, Rastin and his wife, Karen Buchwald Wright, led the company. Wright is still the chairman, and her son operates it now. Rastin and Wright did not respond to questions for this story.”

Read the whole ProPublica story when you have a moment. It really explains in wonderful detail how this sort of modern sleazy influence effort works.

Telecom and energy giants gleefully exploit the slow death of local journalism, usually replacing it with a variety of pseudo-news gibberish mostly focused on propping up corporate interests. They then use these fake consumer groups to seed fake (or just lazy and understaffed) local news orgs with all manner of misleading bullshit designed to undermine anything they don’t like.

In a lot of areas, like in Knox County, local news outlets are being replaced with so-called “pink slime” fake local newspapers. A large chunk of them (including the ones involved in this story) are being financed and orchestrated by a company called “Metric Media,” which ProPublica describes as such:

“Metric Media’s nonprofit arm has received $1.4 million “for general operations” from DonorsTrust, a dark-money group that has received significant funding from Charles and David Koch, who made their billions in oil pipelines and refineries. The eight-company network that Metric is part of also has ties to conservative billionaires, including oil-and-gas-industry titan Tim Dunn, shipping magnate Richard Uihlein and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.”

So at the same time you’ve got a fake consumer group seeding the fake local press with fake arguments about a project, you’ve got think tanks (pretending to be objective academic enterprises) also peppering local policymakers with the same arguments. At the same time, companies hire K Street firms to hammer regulators with a lot of fake comments from fake (and sometimes even dead!) people, opposing reform.

These groups all work to stock local meetings with misinformed locals, pepper the region with misleading ads and fliers, and generally saturate a community with corporatist bullshit.

In addition to lobbying local, state, and federal officials, this can all be done relatively inexpensively, and if you hadn’t noticed, it’s very effective. Policy and government folks don’t seem to have the slightest interest in reining in any of it (with transparency laws, campaign finance reform, or much of anything else), so this kind of influence just continues — and continues to get steadily worse.

On the plus side, genuine local support for popular reforms can still overpower these kinds of sleazy efforts (like in community broadband, where local anger at Comcast or Charter often outshines any effort to mislead locals), but it’s indisputable that this kind of sleazy gamesmanship makes implementing even basic progress and reform much, much harder and time consuming than it has to be.

Filed Under: consumers, energy, fossil fuels, journalism, local news, propaganda, reform, renewables, solar, telecom
Companies: ariel

FCC Tries To Pre-Empt Telecom Industry Claim That The Supreme Court Neutered Its Authority To Protect Consumers

from the powerless-in-the-face-of-comcast-corporation dept

Thu, Oct 3rd 2024 05:23am - Karl Bode

As noted a few times, recent Supreme Court rulings have thrown most U.S. regulatory enforcement into operational and legal chaos. The dismantling of Chevron in particular now dictates that regulators can’t implement new rules or reforms without the explicit approval of Congress.

Two problems there: one, regulators ideally have very specific subject expertise Congress doesn’t have (think about Ted Cruz trying to craft a law managing spectrum auctions). Two, Congress has been lobbied into utterly corrupt dysfunction, ensuring these theoretical, better, clearer laws never actually arrive. Corporations have dressed Chevron up as some noble rebalancing of institutional power; in reality they’ve just taken a hatchet to the roots of corporate accountability.

This will impact every regulatory agency governing every industry touching every aspect of your lives, as corporations from a wide variety of sectors insist the regulators overseeing them now have no power to do anything they don’t like (ProPublica has a good recent breakdown of the broader impact).

This impact isn’t going to be subtle, and in many instances (labor, environmental, civil rights) it will prove fatal at significant new scale. On many fronts, the groundwork is being laid to make many regulators entirely decorative. I’ve repeatedly found that most people (including a lot of people in policy and media) don’t really understand what’s coming courtesy of the radical Roberts’ majority.

Over in telecom, the regional broadband monopolies (with their well-lobbied congressional allies in tow) are already busy trying to claim the FCC no longer has the authority to protect consumers, whether it’s policing predatory fees on your broadband bills, or trying to enforce basic net neutrality principles. Everything (including efforts to stop racism in broadband deployment) is being challenged anew.

The FCC has been firing off letters to various Senators trying to get ahead of the claim it can no longer do its job. In short, FCC boss Jessica Rosenworcel argues that the the Communications Act of 1934 and the Administrative Procedures Act gives the agency broad latitude to continue to function in the post-Chevron era:

“The staff at the Commission work diligently to ensure that all regulations have a firm grounding in the law and I remain confident that the Commission’s rules and decisions will withstand judicial review under the Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and other applicable precedent.”

One problem is we’re no longer operating in an environment where logic or precedent actually mean all that much. The top court of the land has shown it’s easily bribe-able by a free Winnebago. Lower courts are now stocked with all manner of Trump-era sycophants keen to see the last, already fairly pathetic vestiges of corporate oversight stripped away.

Telecom giants already take the FCC to court for pretty much every new ruling or reform it tries to implement, however minor. Their position has always been that the agency is powerless to stop them from taking advantage of captive broadband customers trapped under a monopoly or duopoly. But now those same companies have significant new legal leverage in their quest to dismantle oversight.

There are instances where the FCC might be able to prevail. There are also instances (like net neutrality) where states might jump in and fill the consumer protection void. But it’s anything but certain. And again, some variation of this same mess will be playing out in every sector that governs your lives, whether it’s the FCC trying to protect you from Comcast, or the EPA trying to protect you from cancer.

There’s a segment of journalists and policy folks who seem insistent that this isn’t going to be all that bad, or believe that the folks ringing alarm bells post Chevron are being hyperbolic. But as somebody who has watched regulators feebly try to protect consumers more than twenty years, I have no idea what reality they’re operating in.

Filed Under: broadband, chevron deference, consumers, fcc, high speed internet, major questions doctrine, net neutrality, regulators, telecom