michael o'rielly – Techdirt (original) (raw)

In His Last Two Weeks, Ajit Pai Finally Finds A Backbone And Refuses To Move Forward With Trump's Ridiculous 230 Attack

from the too-little-too-late dept

On Thursday, a day after his boss helped incite a mob to storm the Capitol, only then did outgoing FCC chair Ajit Pai finally “distance” himself from Trump and say he won’t go forward with Trump’s plan to have the FCC reinterpret Section 230.

In an interview on C-SPAN’s “The Communicators,” Pai told Protocol and C-SPAN co-host Peter Slen that he does not intend to move forward with a rule-making on Section 230, which was laid out in Trump’s social media executive order. He said he won’t “second-guess” the decisions made by Facebook and Twitter to bar Trump from posting. And he said the president bears some responsibility for the riots that engulfed Capitol Hill on Wednesday.

Specifically on 230, this was the exchange:

On Oct. 15, you said that you intend to move forward with a rule-making for clarity on Section 230. What’s the status of that?

The status is that I do not intend to move forward with the notice of proposed rule-making at the FCC.

And why is that?

The reason is, in part, because given the results of the election, there’s simply not sufficient time to complete the administrative steps necessary in order to resolve the rule-making. Given that reality, I do not believe it’s appropriate to move forward.

If you could, what do you think should be done on Section 230?

There’s now a bipartisan consensus among elected officials that the law should be changed. Obviously the president believes it should be repealed, President-elect Biden has campaigned repeatedly on its repeal, but within Congress there appears to be a consensus also that it should be revised or reformed in some way. Obviously in terms of changing the law, that’s a decision for lawmakers to consider, but I do think there are certain bipartisan consensus areas forming regarding how it should be revised.

It’s a very complicated issue, one that I think Congress will have to study and deliberate on very seriously. I personally would think about it more carefully in terms of the immunity provision, for example, but those are the kinds of things that I think the next administration and Congress will think about very carefully.

He’s trying to escape this one with his reputation intact, and no one should let him get away with it. He could have spoken up earlier. He could have actually defended the 1st Amendment and the fact that internet websites have the right to moderate as they see fit. That’s what his ideologically aligned colleague on the FCC, Mike O’Rielly, did in calling out that social media moderation is not an issue for the government. Pai sat by and said nothing, and watched as his colleague, who had backed up every other nonsense position Pai has taken for years, got fired for it.

Then Pai could have done the correct thing and refused to even bother to take up the issue of CDA 230 after the NTIA, under orders from Trump, sent over a petition. He chickened out and asked for comments, wasting everyone’s time. Then, he could have taken those comments — in which every single substantial comment explained how he had no authority and shouldn’t be engaging at all — and decided not to move forward. But, he spinelessly moved forward with it anyway, pushing out a laughable legal justification that was diametrically opposed to everything he had said about the net neutrality issue.

It’s only now — with two weeks left in the Trump Presidency, after more and more people (including Republicans) have come to realize that maybe Trump is a destructive mess who helped incite a riot at the Capitol — that Pai pretends to find a backbone and push refuse to move forward on this issue. And he does it in the weakest possible way — saying that he’s run out of time. It’s a spineless move from someone who has spent nearly all of his years in public office publicly patting himself on the back for standing by his “keep government out of business” principles.

Obviously, Pai has made a political calculus here, and he’s hoping to slide away from this mess and the stench associated with it on the same day that a bunch of other Republicans hoping to revitalize their reputations are doing so as well. But it’s not principled to wait until the politically convenient point to do what you should have done months ago. The truth is simple: Pai isn’t the principled defender of “free markets” and “light touch regulation” he has positioned himself as over the years. He’s just another political hack who took the convenient path.

Filed Under: ajit pai, donald trump, fcc, free speech, michael o'rielly, section 230, social media

Trump's FCC Nominee Asked Fox News To Help Destroy Section 230 To Help Elect More Republicans

from the free-speech? dept

We’ve written a few times about Nathan Simington, who is currently nominated to take over Michael O’Rielly’s seat at the FCC. As you’ll recall, O’Rielly’s renomination was withdrawn after he dared to give a talk in which he noted, accurately, that the 1st Amendment means that the government cannot regulate how private companies handle content moderation. Simington, in contrast to O’Rielly, has been at the center of various efforts to force social media companies to host speech they do not wish to host (a clear violation of the 1st Amendment, which does not allow for the government to compel speech).

Simington was the guy who apparently wrote the original executive order that kicked off the ridiculous (and still unconstitutional) FCC review process of Section 230. He also works at NTIA, which is run by Adam Candeub, a guy who has spent the last few years attacking (or misrepresenting) Section 230, after he filed a failed lawsuit against Twitter on behalf of a white supremacist. When the lawsuit was filed, Candeub appeared not to understand 230 when I engaged with him in an email exchange. Since then he’s spent the intervening years, trying to change 230 to match his false belief of what it should be.

So, perhaps it shouldn’t be too surprising that it’s now been revealed that Simington and Candeub appeared to spend some time over the summer trying to get Fox News’ bloviating talking heads to start attacking Section 230 as well, hoping that this would spur the FCC on towards action (again, which legally it cannot do) against the law.

Simington, a senior adviser in a key Commerce Department tech agency, wrote that the popular Fox News host could help sway the FCC to act on Trump’s proposal before Election Day. He also suggested that democracy hinged on the ability of the commission ? which has not traditionally regulated social media ? to target Silicon Valley companies.

The actual letter to a Fox News staffer, in which Simington notes that this is part of a scheme with Candeub (who is cc’d) is really stunning. Having a government official asking a media personality to assist the government in pushing through an unconstitutional attack on the 1st Amendment is staggering — and should immediately raise questions as to why either Simington or Candeub are part of the government. Simington flat out admits that he’s trying to force the FCC to take action to help support the President and others “down ballot” in the election.

That is not supposed to be how government officials act. Campaigning/electioneering efforts are not supposed to be done by current government staff who are paid by our taxpayer dollars. This is a hugely problematic stance, and should call into question both Simington and Candeub’s role in government. It certainly should preclude Simington from being considered for a position on the FCC itself.

As discussed, my boss, Dept. Ass’t Sec’y Adam Candeub (CC’d), is strategizing about how best to present the NTIA’s petition to the FCC re CDA 230. We hope that FCC rulemaking will uphold press and communication freedoms while restraining social media companies from behavior that, absent certain case law re CDA 230, would be illegal.

As you know, this is a hot issue right now, not merely per the President’s major social media executive order, but also (1) Senator Cruz’s recent actions re Twitter, coming out of his long-standing concerns about the partiality and bias emerging from social media’s de facto content creation via moderation, promotion and demotion, and (2) Senator Hawley’s new social media bill.

We therefore hope that there might be some way of engaging with Ms. Ingraham on our piece of this issue. Any additional support we might be able to obtain could help to get the FCC on board more quickly and thereby ensure a freer, fairer social media landscape going into the elections this fall. This is of concern both to the presidency and also down-ballot, and given the emerging role of social media as a replacement for mass media, our democracy will be weakened if we cannot respond to this issue quickly and effectively.

If you have some time tomorrow, I’d love to talk further about this, whether re engaging with Ms. Ingraham or generally for our own planning.

Senator Richard Blumenthal (a long term vocal critic of Section 230) seems to recognize how problematic this is:

?This email shows that Mr. Simington was an active and eager soldier in President Trump?s attempted assault on the First Amendment,” Blumenthal said in a statement to POLITICO. “Mr. Simington was willing to bully the very agency he?s been nominated to join in order to do the electoral bidding of the Republican party on the taxpayer dime.

“I am demanding that Mr. Simington explain himself in follow-up questions for the record, and I certainly hope he will be more forthcoming in his written responses than he was during his hearing,”

In any normal administration this would be a massive scandal, abusing the power of government to help a specific party/candidate. Remember all the (mostly exaggerated) fuss about the IRS paying extra attention to conservative non-profits? That was one of the biggest scandals of the Obama era, in part because it was government employees supposedly making decisions based on politics (even though the details showed it wasn’t quite that bad). This is worse. Here they are flat out admitting that they are trying to work with Fox News to use the levers of government to unconstitutionally change the law in order to help their preferred political party win in an election.

Filed Under: adam candeub, election, fcc, free speech, laura ingraham, michael o'rielly, nathan simington, ntia, politics, section 230
Companies: fox news

Congress, With Nothing Important On Its Hands, Seeks To Rush Through Nomination Of Anti-230 FCC Commissioner

from the no-other-priorities? dept

You might think that Congress has more important issues on its hands, with a pandemic still going on, issues around disinformation and the election, massive fires still burning in parts of the US, a record number of hurricanes pounding the south… but it appears that Congress thinks the most pressing issue is gutting Section 230. As you’ll recall, right after FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly made some generally straightforward statements about how the 1st Amendment wouldn’t let the government interfere with social media platforms, Trump informed O’Rielly that his nomination to stay at the FCC had been rescinded.

It seems pretty clear that in the world of Trump, all that he wants out of his FCC is to act as his own private speech police. To that effect, he not only put in place the obviously unconstitutional executive order pushing NTIA to petition the FCC to “reinterpret” Section 230 of the Communications Act — the law that enables social media to exist in its current form — but has since put pressure on the FCC to move forward with that effort. While some had hoped that maybe Ajit Pai would find a backbone and his long-stated principles in his giant Reese’s mug, he has proven he has neither, and moved forward with the process to make the FCC the internet speech police.

Of course, there remains a problem. O’Rielly is still there, and both the Democrats on the FCC have made it clear they disagree with this plan. When the announcement was made that O’Rielly’s nomination had been pulled, I heard from multiple FCC experts who told me there was “no way” that a new Commissioner could be nominated, vetted, paraded before the Senate, and voted on before January 20th. However, it appears that a Senate that has decided it can rush through a candidate for an open Supreme Court seat rather than deal with the actual problems of the country can also do the exact same thing for an FCC Commissioner.

Last month, Trump nominated the guy who wrote the unconstitutional executive order, Nathan Simington, to the seat, and again I was told that his nomination was unlikely to be reviewed by the Senate before the new session began next year. Not so, apparently. As Politico reported last week, the Senate Commerce Committee has agreed to rush through his nomination in “near record time” with a hearing set for November 10th.

It’s going to be fascinating to watch all those Senators who spent years claiming they were absolutely, 100% against the FCC regulating anything to do with the internet do total 180s and make sure that Simington is ready to become the speech police for the internet.

Filed Under: fcc, free speech, michael o'rielly, nathan simington, nomination, section 230

Apparently The New Litmus Test For Trump's FCC: Do You Promise To Police Speech Online

from the snowflake-central dept

Last month we wrote about how President Trump withdrew the renomination of FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly just days after O’Rielly dared to [checks notes] reiterate his support for the 1st Amendment in a way that hinted at the fact that he knew Trump’s executive order was blatantly unconstitutional. Some people argued the renomination was pulled for other reasons, but lots of people in DC said it was 100% about his unwillingness to turn the FCC into a speech police for the internet.

While it seems quite unlikely that Trump can get someone new through the nomination process before the election, apparently they’re thinking of nominating someone who appears eager to do the exact opposite: Nathan Simington, who wants the FCC to be the internet speech police so bad that he helped draft the obviously unconstitutional executive order in response to the President’s freak-out at being fact checked.

Three sources close to the matter say Nathan Simington, a senior advisor at the NTIA within the commerce department, has emerged as a leading candidate to take over Republican Commissioner Mike O?Rielly?s seat at the FCC.

Simington is said to have helped draft the administration?s social media executive order, and his nomination would be a victory for Republicans who want to see the FCC take a larger role in regulating social networks.

You can see the Trumpian logic here: “O’Rielly gently pushed back the tiniest bit on our plan to ignore the 1st Amendment and compel social media companies to host the propaganda and disinformation we spew, so let’s replace him with someone who supports that singularly stupid argument. How about the guy who drafted the executive order!”

The idea that “will you support the FCC being the speech police” is now the Republican litmus test for being an FCC Commissioner is a freakish 180 from the history of Republican FCC Commissioners who have spent decades arguing against that on the things they actually have authority over (with the notable exception of obscenity, which GOP Commissioners have, at times, wanted to police). Either way, this seems like yet another example of the Republican party not having any core principles other than punishing the companies and people that Trump doesn’t like.

Filed Under: bias, fcc, michael o'rielly, nathan simington, ntia, section 230, social media

NTIA Follows Trump's Unconstitutional Order To Request The FCC Review Section 230

from the there-are-problems dept

As we mentioned on Friday, on Monday, the NTIA followed through on a key part of Trump’s executive order on Section 230, asking the FCC to weigh in on interpreting the law. Everything about this is crazy. The NTIA request was almost certainly written by a recently hired lawyer who has spent the last couple of years attacking Section 230. He’s also the same lawyer who sued Twitter on behalf of a white supremacist, and when I had reached out to him over email to ask him how that made sense under 230, insisted to me that Section 230 was a narrow statute that only applied if it was about protecting children. I can’t say for sure, but my email exchange with him suggested to me that he was wholly unaware of Section 230 prior to me asking about it. Either way, that case failed spectacularly, and Adam Candeub has spent the past two years attacking 230 on various panels. And now he’s deputy secretary at NTIA in charge of this issue.

The petition to the FCC is performative nonsense, just like the Executive Order that preceded it. The FCC has no authority over internet edge providers. It has no authority to interpret Section 230. That’s for the courts. And if Congress doesn’t like how the courts have interpreted the law, then it’s on Congress to change the law. The FCC has literally no authority at all to deal with this issue. And, you would think that since we’re living in an era where the current FCC, under Chair Ajit Pai, has been literally giving away whatever authority the FCC actually has regarding the area it does have oversight concerning (namely internet access providers), that it would take a similar hands off approach to the NTIA request. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem likely.

Pai has remained basically silent on this issue since the executive order came out. His fellow Republican Michael O’Rielly has suggested it’s probably unenforceable gibberish. However, the third Republican on the Commission, Brendan Carr, has spent the last few months gloating and tweeting Trumpian nonsense about how “big tech” is censoring conservatives and something must be done (that this is 100% diametrically opposed to his views on regulating broadband access providers is not something he thinks you should concern yourself with — this is a Trumpian world we’re living in and so all that seems to matter regarding regulatory control is which companies you like and which you don’t like).

Carr published a hilariously ridiculous plan to regulate big internet companies in Newsweek to coincide with the NTIA petition, which he knew was coming. He claims — hilariously incorrectly — that the success of big internet is not because of the free market, which he as a good Republican has to pretend to support, but rather through “crony capitalism” like… Section 230. In fact, he flat out misleads everyone in claiming that Google abused its power to shut down the comments of The Federalist because it’s a conservative publication. Carr ignores that Google did the same thing to us, even though he knows they did it to us, because I told him about it and he follows me on Twitter.

But to argue that 230 is crony capitalism is to ignore facts (apparently, a Carr specialty). Section 230 does not favor any particular company. It applies equally to all websites, including small ones. Indeed, our empirical study showed that 230 helped create more competition, not less.

On the Democratic side, Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel seems to be alone in being willing to call bullshit on this ridiculous NTIA petition:

Section 230 has been called ?the twenty-six words that created the internet,? and it has helped free expression flourish online for decades. Like most things with the internet, it has its supporters and detractors. It has those who want to see it continue in its current form and others who want to adjust it to reflect the realities of the current digital age. But if you look far and wide, you won?t find a community that believes having the FCC use Section 230 to regulate speech online is the way to go.

Still, the Administration is insisting. Remember, at the highest level of our government we?ve had rants about social media bias and accusations that certain companies are stifling speech. But the First Amendment is not present to protect the President from media. It?s present to protect media from the President. Nonetheless, those rants eventually found their home in an Executive Order?which brought this issue to the FCC.

As a Commissioner, I don?t think we should take the bait. While social media can be frustrating, turning the FCC into the President?s speech police is not the answer. The FCC needs to reject this effort to deploy the federal government against free expression online. In fact, if we honor the Constitution, we will do so immediately.

I worry my colleagues at the FCC won?t. I also worry that this petition is not just about changing the law. Because any legal expert worth their salt will tell you that changing the law like this is not the job of a regulatory agency like mine. It?s the job of Congress. I think the NTIA knows that. But even just proposing something like this has consequences. Governments that threaten to chill speech can discipline private sector actors without changes in law ever becoming necessary. So what we have here is an invitation from the President for the FCC to chill online speech and organize it in his favor. We need to reject this loud and clear.

Kudos to Commissioner Rosenworcel for being willing to speak out so clearly and forcefully on this silly dog and pony show for an insecure President. It’s too bad that the Commissioners on the other side of the political spectrum haven’t been willing to say things this clearly, and you have someone like Carr who seems all too willing to suck up to the President on this unconstitutional attack on free speech.

And it is unconstitutional. Our post last week dug into the many, many reasons why it’s unconstitutional, but at the simplest level it’s this: it’s an attempt to pressure internet companies to leave up speech that is supportive of the President, no matter how false or how dangerous that content might be. That’s not what the government is supposed to be doing.

The NTIA’s petition reads like it was written in an alternate universe that is divorced from reality. It pretends that the FCC needs to regulate speech to protect free speech, which is not how any of this works. The petition misrepresents the law, the same way that Trumpists have been misrepresenting Section 230 in court, including this silly claim:

These platforms function, as the Supreme Court recognized, as a 21st century equivalent of the public square.

And then it has a footnote pointing to the Packingham ruling ignoring that that ruling is saying simply that the government cannot pass laws that kick people offline, and does not say that companies can’t kick racists and assholes off of their own platforms. Indeed, in the more recent Halleck case, the Supreme Court made it abundantly clear that it does not consider social media to be a state actor subject to such regulations. For NTIA to pretend otherwise is ridiculous, and shows just how biased this petition is.

As for the specific requests, it wants the FCC to do the following:

Again, none of these are within the FCC’s authority, and even if they were they have no binding or persuasive power at all. The courts have already ruled on these issues for the most part, and there’s little to clarify here. If Congress was upset about the court’s interpretations, it’s had nearly 25 years to clarify and it has not. There is no role here for the executive branch, let alone an independent agency tasked with overseeing broadband access and public spectrum, not regulating the internet.

The FCC should listen to Rosenworcel and tell the administration “that’s not our job, and you shouldn’t even ask.”

Filed Under: ajit pai, brendan carr, donald trump, executive order, fcc, free speech, jessica rosenworcel, michael o'rielly, ntia, section 230

The Pai FCC Is Oddly Quiet About Trump's Plan To Have The Agency Police Speech

from the selective-silence dept

Thu, Aug 15th 2019 06:37am - Karl Bode

So last week, you probably saw the leaked plan by the Trump administration to try and “fix” the nonexistent censorship of Conservatives on social media. According to the leak, a large part of the plan would involve having the FCC, which has no real authority in this area, police speech on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Most legal experts I’ve spoken to say the plan is illegal and utterly nonsensical, and the FCC has no authority to do this under Section 230 or anywhere else. The order would also undermine most of the logic the Pai FCC used in its effort to repeal net neutrality.

Oddly though, an FCC that has been very vocal on this subject when convenient has been oddly mute since the story broke, with none of the agency’s three Republican Commissioners (Ajit Pai, Brendan Carr, or Mike O’Rielly) making so much as a peep about the terribleness of the latest Trump “plan.”

This kind of silence is uncharacteristic. O’Rielly, for example, was positively apoplectic recently when he proclaimed (falsely) that community broadband posed a dire threat to free speech. Carr has similarly expressed great disdain previously at the idea of government regulating speech on social media platforms, and hyperventilates over telecom sector free speech rights any time someone even faintly suggests giants like Comcast should be held accountable for decades of abysmal service:

The First Amendment operates as a restraint on the government. Disappointed that my Democrat FCC colleagues now invoke it as a basis for infringing the free speech rights of entities we regulate.

— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) June 6, 2019

Then there’s Pai, who attacked net neutrality extensively by insisting it was the equivalent of the Fairness Doctrine, the exact type of solution Trump is now proposing for social media. Pai has routinely tried to play both sides of this debate, insisting he’s a stalwart defender of free speech, yet demonizing platforms like Twitter for nonexistent censorship when it makes for a good sound byte. He’s also repeatedly stated we can’t possibly hold bumbling monopolies like AT&T and Comcast accountable on the state or federal level because it would violate their First Amendment rights (a belief those companies share).

All of this endless hand wringing over free speech, and yet when the President of the United States says he wants to use the FCC to police speech on social media (again with near zero authority to do so), all three of these free speech patriots are suddenly quiet.

And while you could argue that they didn’t comment because the plan hasn’t been made official yet, that didn’t stop them from loudly deriding a similarly undercooked, leaked plan by the Trump administration to nationalize the nation’s 5G networks. That plan was largely just the lobbyist brain fart of a Peter Thiel-backed company named Rivada Networks (supported by folks like Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich), yet Carr, O’Rielly, and Pai all had plenty to say about the unworkability of that plan (largely because such a plan is AT&T and Verizon’s worst nightmare).

The trio’s fellow commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel offered up what was probably the most concise reaction to having the FCC police Facebook and Twitter:

As many have surmised this could all amount to a giant hill of bupkis. The administration may have just been floating a trial balloon that has now, clearly, popped. After all, in the Trump era you can never tell what’s serious policy and what’s the passing brain fart of whoever has the President’s ear at one particular moment.

Still, you’d think a trio of FCC Commissioners who proclaim to be champions of free speech would have had something to say about the plan given the scale of its stupidity. Yet they’ve refused to issue any comment whatsoever after more than a week. It’s almost as if they’re not actually being ideologically consistent, and are remaining mute simply out of blind partisan allegiance and support of Trump’s clearly idiotic plan to blame social media for the fact that many people just can’t stop being grifting assholes on the internet.

And while there’s certainly plenty of very real problems with Facebook and Google (especially on the privacy front), it’s been kind of overlooked in tech policy circles that a lot of the animosity in DC toward “big tech” right now originates with telecom giants eager to elbow in on Silicon Valley online ad revenues. It is, as they say, always about the money.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, administrative law, ajit pai, anti-conservative bias, bias, brendan carr, donald trump, executive order, fcc, free speech, michael o'rielly, policing speech, social media
Companies: facebook, google

FCC Commissioner O'Rielly: Nobody Takes Me Seriously After Voting Down Every Consumer-Friendly FCC Policy This Year

from the obstruction-junction dept

Thu, Jul 23rd 2015 09:35am - Karl Bode

FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly will never be confused with a consumer advocate or champion of the people. He’s voted down nearly every consumer-friendly FCC initiative that has come down the pike, whether that’s net neutrality, raising the base definition of broadband to 25 Mbps, or fighting back against state protectionist broadband laws written by ISPs to protect their uncompetitive geographic fiefdoms. O’Rielly most recently made waves by proudly declaring, as an employee of an agency tasked with ensuring timely deployment of broadband to all Americans, that he really didn’t think broadband was all that necessary.

Hand in hand with anti-net-neutrality Commissioner Ajit Pai, a former Verizon regulatory lawyer, the two form sort of a knee-jerk, objectionist Commission superhero that opposes everything in its path under the pretense of a deeper, mysteriously undefinable ethos. The dynamic duo have even objected to holding AT&T accountable for ripping off taxpayer money earmarked for the poor.

With that as a backdrop, it was entertaining to see CNET push forth a bit of a puff piece helping O’Rielly portray himself as some sort of unfairly ostracized hero of the Commission, whose insights aren’t being taken seriously:

“It takes time and effort to soldier on and make your arguments,” he said…”I do the work you’d expect me to do. I read every item. I do my homework. And I make substantive suggestions. But I’m often shot down.”

Of course it’s actually O’Rielly that’s doing the shooting, bravely voting no on nearly every single issue of the day. When AT&T was fined for throttling “unlimited” connections and lying about it, O’Rielly stood up for the little guy, bravely calling the FCC’s behavior “Draconian” (Pai, in contrast, compared the FCC’s behavior to Kafka). Still, O’Rielly lays the blame at the feet of Wheeler and company:

“O’Rielly and his Republican colleague, Ajit Pai, have opposed all the major Democrat-supported issues that have passed, in large part due to philosophical differences they have with their colleagues across the political aisles on these issues. But O’Rielly said what has truly frustrated him is what he sees as an unwillingness by the FCC leadership to find consensus on any issue.

Partisan patty cake at the Commission is certainly nothing new. Except as we’ve noted, most people on both sides of the aisle think Wheeler is actually doing a shockingly good job for a former industry lobbyist many expected little from. He’s shaken off fifteen years of the status quo, and is actually doing something about the woeful state of broadband competition instead of paying politically-safe lip service to the idea. He also managed to implement real net neutrality protections, an idea that’s supported by Democrats and Republicans alike.

It’s repeatedly unclear to me how you can be a career obstructionist, then cry when policy and conversation moves on without you. Indeed, O’Rielly tells CNET he’s just a hard working fellow who desperately wishes the there was “more receptivity to finding common ground.” CNET responds by failing to ask O’Rielly a single difficult question regarding how he aligns this hallucinated persona with his actual anti-consumer and anti-Internet voting record.

Filed Under: broadband, consumer protection, fcc, michael o'rielly

The FCC's Historic Day: Voting Yes For Net Neutrality, Voting No On Protectionist State Telecom Law

from the lobbyists-lose dept

Thu, Feb 26th 2015 10:32am - Karl Bode

Today was, no hyperbole intended, probably one of the more historic — albeit at times one of the dullest — days in FCC history. The agency, led by a former lobbyist for the cable and wireless industries few expected anything from, bucked a myriad of low expectations and voted 3-2 to approve Title II-based net neutrality rules after an unprecedented public-driven tech advocacy campaign. While net neutrality will likely get the lion’s share of today’s media attention, the FCC also today voted to begin a prolonged assault on ISP-driven, protectionist state telecom law.

First, it’s important to note that despite a 3-2 vote approving the Title II-based rules, we won’t get to see the actual rules today. Despite claims by neutrality opponents that this is some secret cabal specific to net neutrality, the agency historically has never released rules it votes on (pdf) until well after the actual vote. It’s a dumb restriction that’s absolutely deadly to open discourse, but it’s not unique to one party or to this specific issue.

As for when we’ll actually get to see and start dissecting the actual Title II rules ourselves, we may be waiting weeks — in part, ironically, thanks to neutrality opponents on the Commission that spent the last few weeks professing to adore transparency:

“In fact, it could take weeks before the final rules are published, the official said. That?s because the two Republican commissioners, Ajit Pai and Mike O?Rielly?who oppose net neutrality of any sort?have refused to submit basic edits on the order. The FCC will not release the text of the order until edits from the offices of all five commissioners are incorporated, including dissenting opinions. This could take a few weeks, depending how long the GOP commissioners refuse to provide edits on the new rules.”

Commissioners Ajit Pai and Michael O’Reilly voiced their opposition to the new Title II-based rules by not only voting against them, but by trying to bore meeting attendees to death. Pai, a former Verizon regulatory lawyer, offered a mammoth speech in which he ironically lamented “special interests” and claimed repeatedly to only be opposing net neutrality out of a concern for consumer wallets. O’Reilly tried to top Pai with an even longer, duller speech that continually insisted the FCC was trying to conduct a secret, regulatory takeover of the Internet. A visibly emotional Wheeler was having none of it:

“This proposal has been described by one opponent as, quote, a secret plan to regulate the Internet. Nonsense. This is no more a plan to regulate the Internet than the First Amendment is a plan to regulate free speech. They both stand for the same concepts: openness, expression, and an absence of gate keepers telling people what they can do, where they can go, and what they can think.”

While the net neutrality rules are incredibly important, the FCC’s decision on municipal broadband may actually wind up being more meaningful over the long run. As we’ve noted for years, neutrality violations are really just a symptom of a lack of competition. Around twenty states now have laws in place — usually based entirely on ISP/ALEC model legislation — that prohibit towns and cities from improving their own broadband infrastructure — even in instances where nobody else will. In some cases these rules even go so far as to prohibit towns and cities from striking public/private partnerships to improve broadband service.

Specifically, the FCC voted 3-2 to approve petitions by EPB Broadband in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Greenlight in Wilson, North Carolina. Those petitions requested that the FCC use its authority to ensure timely broadband deployment using “measures that promote competition in the local telecommunications market, or other regulating methods that remove barriers to infrastructure investment.” While some politicians have lamented the FCC’s move as a trampling of states’ rights, these individuals ironically have had no problem with ISPs writing state telecom law that tramples those same rights. The justifications for these restrictions have never been coherently supported, and Wheeler was quick to highlight the hypocrisy of the position:

“You can?t say you?re for broadband and then turn around and endorse limits on who can offer it. You can?t say, ?I want to follow the explicit instructions of Congress to remove barriers to infrastructure investment,’ but endorse barriers on infrastructure investment. You can?t say you?re for competition but deny local elected officials the right to offer competitive choices.”

Needless to say, this is likely only a new chapter in the debate over both issues, the precise wording of the neutrality wording will be debated for months if not years, and you can expect ISP legal action on both fronts aimed at protecting the uncompetitive status quo. It also probably goes without saying that opponents of net neutrality and those who like it when AT&T, Verizon and Comcast are allowed to write protectionist telecom law aren’t taking the day’s events very well. One of the best freakouts of the day belonged to Hal Singer, author of that misleading study we’ve previously debunked claiming that you’d face $15 billion in new taxes under Title II:

With today's @FCC vote on #NetNeutrality, millions of innovation angels will die. It's our job to document the loss. pic.twitter.com/XGxT8EDx7u

— Hal Singer (@HalSinger) February 26, 2015

While some grieve the death of imaginary “innovation angels,” thousands of others are celebrating a rare instance where Internet activism was able to overcome lobbying cash and push a government mountain toward doing the right thing.

Filed Under: ajit pai, fcc, michael o'rielly, munibroadband, net neutrality, open internet, title ii, tom wheeler