independence – Techdirt (original) (raw)

from the you-have-zero-credibility-whatsoever dept

Mike has already highlighted FCC boss Ajit Pai’s rank hypocrisy in his support of Trump’s brain fart of an executive order targeting social media. This is, after all, a guy that crowed for literally the better part of the last decade about how some modest net neutrality rules (read: some basic consumer protections aimed at policing widely disliked telecom monopolies) was “government run amok” and a “government takeover of the internet.” Now, as Trump attempts to bully the FCC into policing social media giants it has no authority over, a decade worth of purported principles are somehow, mysteriously absent.

Of course this grotesque, comical hypocrisy isn’t reserved to Ajit Pai.

Back in 2014, before the former FCC passed net neutrality rules, the Obama White House expressed some basic support for net neutrality (and reclassifying ISPs as common carriers under the Communications Act to ensure the FCC could enforce the rules). This wasn’t anything nefarious or even unordinary. President George W. Bush urged FCC Chairman Michael Powell to vote on deregulating media ownership. Bill Clinton wrote a public letter to Chairman Reed Hundt to ban hard liquor advertising on television. Ronald Reagan urged Chairman Mark Fowler to drop his proposal to rescind the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules governing TV networks.

We’ve had plenty of criticisms of Obama era policy. But Obama’s support of net neutrality was legal, ordinary, and had the broad support of countless experts and the majority of U.S. consumers. That didn’t matter to the modern GOP. In its now well-established bad faith style, the party (with AT&T and Comcast’s covert help) immediately began circulating the talking point that Obama’s support of net neutrality had broken some nonexistent law, and was, as countless news outlets parroted at the time, an effort to illegally “bully” the FCC into passing what were, despite a lot of pearl clutching, some fairly basic consumer protections:

“Just as Obama used executive actions in an unprecedented fashion on immigration, so too has he now set a precedent by bullying an independent regulatory body into following political orders.”

This idea that Obama had broken the law or was “bullying” the FCC by expressing support for a very popular policy position would soon be utterly everywhere. An endless sea of GOP pundits could be found writing op-eds about how the Obama White House had broken the law by simply wanting the FCC to protect consumers from telecom monopolies. That Obama was strong-arming the FCC would soon become a gospel narrative. And the rhetoric was even supported by a certain former reality TV star and failed steak salesman of note:

Obama?s attack on the internet is another top down power grab. Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine. Will target conservative media.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 12, 2014

That was, of course, all bullshit pushed by telecom monopolies that simply didn’t want to face anything even resembling accountability for decades of anti-competitive behavior. But the narrative that Obama had somehow broken the law was also a favored talking of Ajit Pai, who also, repeatedly, tried to insist that Obama’s totally legal support of a policy widely supported by the vast majority of experts and real fucking human beings was somehow a nefarious, illegal government power grab:

“On November 10, President Obama asked the FCC to implement his plan for regulating the Internet, one that favors government regulation over marketplace competition. As has been widely reported in the press, the FCC has been scrambling ever since to figure out a way to do just that. The courts will ultimately decide this Order?s fate. And I doubt they will countenance this unlawful power grab. Litigants are already lawyering up to seek judicial review of these new rules. Given the Order?s many glaring legal flaws, they will have plenty of fodder.”

Fast forward to 2020. Net neutrality (and FCC authority over telecom in general) is largely dead thanks to AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon lobbyists and an FCC willing to ignore both objective data and sleazy efforts to manipulate the public record. And the same GOP folks who threw a monumental hissy fit about Obama’s “illegal takeover of the internet” are dead silent as a corrupt, criminal buffoon tries to bully the FCC into shoehorning an incoherent brain fart into genuine, real-world policy that ignores the Constitution, common sense, and widespread concern from an absolute chorus of policy experts.

The same folks who repeatedly claimed that natural telecom monopolies shouldn’t be treated as a common carrier, have pivoted 180 to claim that non-dominant social media platforms like Twitter should be. The same folks who spent years insisting the FCC had no right or authority over the parts of the internet it actually had authority over now insist the FCC must regulate the parts it has no authority over. The same folks who whined incessantly about the perils of the Fairness Doctrine now mindlessly support something arguably worse.

All to keep social media giants from policing toxic political disinformation to protect GOP power, now highly reliant on online disinformation to gloss over what are usually, much like the net neutrality repeal, largely unpopular policies.

Net neutrality was, we were told, government utterly run amok. It was, we were told, the very worst example of government out of control. Yet here we have a corrupt and unqualified president genuinely bullying the FCC to support the most idiotic power play imaginable, and the lion’s share of the GOP sits nodding in bobble-headed support. Worse, when Commissioner Mike O’Rielly made some incredibly tame statements pointing out Trump’s EO might not be enforceable, he was fired, soon to be replaced by someone more willing to kiss Trump’s ass. Largely to crickets by the GOP.

There’s Luddite politicians engaged in inconsistent policy, and then there’s what the modern GOP has become: a bad faith dog and pony show, heavily reliant on disinformation, lodged somewhere in the telecom sector, Rupert Murdoch, and Oracle’s lower colon, using a stunning array of disinformation, bogus data, ever-shifting talking points, and complete bullshit to justify corruption and feckless fealty to an idiot king. When the bill comes due for the GOP’s blistering hypocrisy and bad faith bullshit (and sooner or later it will come due), it’s going to be incredibly well earned.

Filed Under: ajit pai, barack obama, donald trump, fcc, hypocrisy, independence, interference, net neutrality, regulations, section 230, tom wheeler

Google Removed Catalonian Referendum App Following Spanish Court Order

from the this-seems-problematic dept

Last month, we wrote about the crazy situation in Spain, where the government was so totally freaked out about a Catalonian referendum on independence that it shut down the operators of the .cat domain, arrested the company’s head of IT for “sedition” and basically shut down a ton of websites about the referendum. The Washington Post now has an article with even more details about the digital attacks in both directions around the Catalonian independence referendum, including hack attacks and DDoS attacks. But one thing caught my eye. Apparently, the supporters of the referendum had created an app called “On Votar 1-Oct.” The app had a bunch of the expected functions:

The app, available on Google Play until just before 7 p.m. on Friday, helps people to find their polling station via their address and shows the closest polling stations on Google Maps via GPS, the name of the town or keywords.

It also allows users to share links to polling station locations.

But the Spanish government was so freaked out by the referendum and anything related to it, that it ran and got a court order demanding Google take the app out of Google’s app store:

The court order told Google Inc?at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View CA 94043 (USA)?to take down the app located at that URL and also to block or eliminate any future apps submitted by the user with e-mail address “onvotar1oct@gmail.com” or identifying as “Catalonia Voting Software”.

The judge says in her ruling that the tweet with the app link is “only a continuation of the actions of the [Catalan government] to block” Constitutional Court and High Court orders “repeatedly”.

In the Washington Post article, the CTO of the Catalonian government explains why this is so disappointing:

?I?m a tech guy,? says Jordi Puigner?, chief technology officer of the Catalonian government. ?So I?ve always been a great fan of Google and its principles of respect for digital rights. But now I?m really disappointed with the company.? (Puigner??s office was also occupied by police during the referendum, he says.)

And you can understand why he’s disappointed. But, the real problem here, seems to be going back to the same problem we keep identifying over and over again: deep centralization of the digital world. Part of the very promise of Android was that it was supposed to be open, and people weren’t supposed to be locked into just Google’s app store. And, indeed, there are competing app stores — but the general argument around them (with the possible exception of Amazon’s competing Android app store) is that if you want to keep your device secure, you’ll only download via Google’s app store.

And then we’re back to a problem where there’s a centralized choke point for censorship — one which the Spanish government is able to exploit to make that app much more difficult to access. Google, for its part, said it took the app down because it had received a valid court order. And, that’s true, but it’s also opening up yet another path to widespread censorship. Google has stood up against similar situations in the past, but the decision of whether or not a movement should be stifled should never come down to whether or not a giant company like Google decides its worth taking a moral stand against a legal court order. The problem is much more systemic, and its built into this world where we’ve started to build back up gatekeepers.

For nearly two decades, I’ve argued that the real power of the internet was not — as many people initally argued — that it got rid of “middlemen,” but rather that the middlemen turned into enablers rather than gatekeepers. In the old world, when only some content could get released/published/sold/etc., you had to rely on gatekeepers to choose which tiny percentage would get blessed. The power of internet platforms was that they became enablers, allowing anyone to use those platforms and to publish/release/sell/distribute things themselves, often to a much wider audience. But there’a always a risk that over time, former enablers become gatekeepers. And it’s a fear we should be very conscious about — even if it’s not done on purpose.

To be clear, I don’t think Google wants to be a gatekeeper around things like apps. It would prefer not to be. But because the marketplace has become so important, and because Google’s role is so central, it almost has no choice. And when governments start issuing court orders to take down apps, suddenly Google is left with few good options. Either it censors or it picks fights with a government. And even if many of us would probably support and cheer on the latter as a choice, we should be concerned that this is even an issue at all. The solution has to be less reliance on centralized platforms and centralized choke points. Catalonians shouldn’t have to rely on Google to get a simple voting app out to the public. The next big breakthroughs need to be towards getting past such bottlenecks.

Filed Under: bottlenecks, catalonia, democracy, election, independence, play store, points of failure, referendum, spain
Companies: google

Remember When White House Insisted James Clapper Wasn't Overseeing Review Of Surveillance? About That…

from the we'll-just-redefine-"oversee" dept

You may recall that President Obama announced plans for an “independent group” of “outside experts” who would: “consider how we can maintain the trust of the people, how we can make sure that there absolutely is no abuse in terms of how these surveillance technologies are used [and] ask how surveillance impacts our foreign policy.” Except, three days later, it was revealed that the review board would be overseen by confessed liar to Congress James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence. After that got a ton of bad press, the White House hastily insisted that Clapper would not be associated with the group.

Right, so about that. According to the AP, the whole thing is more or less being managed by James Clapper:

… the review panel has effectively been operating as an arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA and all other U.S. spy efforts.

The panel’s advisers work in offices on loan from the DNI. Interview requests and press statements from the review panel are carefully coordinated through the DNI’s press office. James Clapper, the intelligence director, exempted the panel from U.S. rules that require federal committees to conduct their business and their meetings in ways the public can observe. Its final report, when it’s issued, will be submitted for White House approval before the public can read it.

Now, Clapper may not technically be on the committee or running it, but since everything is under control of his offices, and they’re working out of his offices, does anyone actually believe they’re even remotely “independent”?

Oh, and remember how President Obama described how this group would focus on making sure the systems couldn’t be abused and rebuilding the trust of the public? Yeah, that’s not actually their mandate (or, if it is, it got shoved way, way down on the priority list). Also, the whole promise of it being “independent” was already seen as a joke once everyone realized they were insiders, but even the official memo setting up the board did away with the claim (stated just days earlier by the President) that this would be an independent board. And the actual focus of the board is not, actually, on what has most people concerned:

The formal White House memorandum days later — effectively the legal charter for the group — does not specify anything about its role being independent of the Obama administration. It directed the panel to emphasize in its review whether U.S. spying programs protect national security, advance foreign policy and are protected against the types of leaks that led to the national debate in the first place. The final consideration in the White House memo told the panel to examine “our need to maintain the public trust.” There was no mention of the panel investigating surveillance abuses.

Basically, this board, which was proposed by the President — or so he told us — as a way to review the efforts and rebuild the trust of the American public, was actually set up to be something entirely different: a propaganda committee effectively overseen by James Clapper to talk up how awesome the surveillance state has become.

Filed Under: independence, james clapper, nsa surveillance, review board, surveillance

CEA Takes Away CNET's Role In Picking CES Best In Show; Awards Dish Hopper 'Best In Show'

from the ouch dept

The saga of CBS’s braindead decision to interfere with CNET editorial and order reporters to take Dish’s Hopper DVR out of the running for “best in show” (after they’d already given it the award) continues to have fallout. Beyond having one of its top reporters resign in protest, while having morale falling and, of course, handing Dish a perfect marketing opportunity, now it has pissed off the Consumer Electronics Association as well.

You see, CNET’s “Best in Show” award wasn’t just for CNET itself, but for the official CES show. Part of CNET’s deal with CEA was that its picks for “Best of CES” were the official awards for CES. Until now. CEA boss Gary Shapiro first slammed CBS in an editorial, and then CEA followed that up by officially ending CNET’s position as the official picker of the “Best in Show” for CES. In trying to save face, someone from CBS told The Verge (in the link above) that it “had already determined it would not attempt to partner with CES for the awards again.” Yeah, sure.

Oh yeah. CES also has now officially named the Dish Hopper with Sling as “Best of Show” saying it’s now the “co-winner” with the Razer Edge gaming tablet that CNET chose after CBS suits stepped in and decimated their editorial independence.

Filed Under: awards, best in show, ces, cnet, independence, journalism
Companies: cbs, cea, cnet, dish