November's Real Heroes: Election Workers

Hoboken voting location, 2024.

They’ve endured a global pandemic, power outages and even swarms of bees to help oversee one of the most accurate election processes in the world.   But nothing has presented a larger threat to millions of U.S. election workers and volunteers than the scourge of disinformation coursing across social networks in 2024. Complicating matters further is the small handful of bad actors who seem determined to transform these online lies into acts of violence at the polls and during the vote's immediate aftermath. This disinformation includes lies about noncitizen voters that some of the most powerful online influencers are spreading, including X owner and reactionary propagandist Elon Musk. Musk is Bad Actor Number One when it comes to amplifying this election falsehood. He marked his second anniversary at the platform’s helm by continuing to boost the false claim that Democrats were transporting hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants into battleground states to skew the vote toward the party's candidates. Again, none of this is true. “Election experts agree that noncitizens voting in federal elections is virtually nonexistent,” reports Issue One, a national pro-democracy group that works to strengthen and defend the country’s election systems. But that doesn't spare election workers from having to deal with the lie's consequences. The money driving the disinformation In its most recent report, Issue One revealed some of the dark web of secretive donors supporting the spread of such election disinformation. It’s a rogues’ gallery of former Trump administration officials with extensive ties to Project 2025, the far-right effort to dismantle U.S. democracy — and the system of checks and balances at its core — and replace it with an authoritarian regime. Musk himself is a major source of support for the disinformation network. He has funneled tens of billions of dollars into efforts to remake U.S. politics in his image. In 2022, Musk spent $44 billion to take control of Twitter (now X), and has spent tens of millions more in an apparently illegal effort to pay for votes this year in Pennsylvania. Wired’s Vittoria Elliott recently revealed Musk as the money (more than $100 million and counting) behind a political action committee created to compile and amplify false reports of election fraud — and use these lies to disrupt the vote count. Elliott’s reporting links Musk’s effort with the disinformation-spewing “Election Integrity Network” that Issue One exposed. Shelter from the storm In the eye of this tornado of lies stand the election workers themselves. For years, members of this mostly female civic workforce have warned about threats to their safety. In 2021, the U.S. Department of Justice set up its Elections Threat Task Force to assess threats of violence against election workers and, when needed, prosecute those who act on these threats. David Becker, founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, has led efforts to safeguard U.S. election processes, paying particular attention to the election administrators and public servants who voters encounter as they cast their ballots. “The fact is somehow the hundreds of thousands of election workers and the millions of volunteers who worked on the 2020 election managed the highest turnout we had ever had in American history,” he said during a recent Free Press webinar. And they did so, Becker added, in the middle of a global pandemic. “Their work has withstood four years of more scrutiny than any election … in world history,” he said. In that time, Becker noted, they’ve been threatened and harassed “not because they did a bad job, but because they did an outstanding job. They’re American heroes in many ways [but] as we head into this election, they're exhausted.” Unfortunately, these heroes aren't getting any relief from the technology platforms, which have retreated from previous commitments to safeguard election integrity. And this retreat isn’t just happening at Musk’s X. X is backsliding, but so are other platforms In an analysis released on Nov. 1, my colleague Nora Benavidez and I found that nearly every platform has avoided dialogue and accountability around the elections. “With few exceptions, the election-integrity problem has worsened since a 2023 Free Press research report found that the largest and most widely used platforms — Meta, X and YouTube — were backsliding on commitments they made in the wake of the 2020 elections, as ‘Big Lie’ content overwhelmed much of social media,” we wrote. Recent reporting and research indicate a trend of declining social-media engagement on public posts that provide useful information about the voting process, including information that would debunk the sorts of lies that vilify election workers. This trend has been documented most extensively on Meta-owned platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads, that have hundreds of millions of users in the United States.   According to Free Press’ 2024 polling, more than half of voting-age Americans are using social-media apps to access news this election cycle. These platforms have the expertise to implement election-integrity measures. They have the resources to invest in human moderators and staffing. But over and again tech execs like Musk and Mark Zuckerberg demonstrate their true values when they choose not to spend more on election protection. Poll workers pay the cost of this negligence. Since the 2020 vote, and the false rightwing claims about its legitimacy that followed, many election workers have faced a "campaign of intimidation" from members of the Stop the Steal movement, foreign agents and political operatives. With more and more people in the United States using social networks as a source of news and information about voting, it falls on companies like Google, Meta and TikTok to stop recycling widely disproved lies about the voting process and stand with election workers in defense of our democracy. While the concern is real, the swarm of disinformation shouldn't keep people from the polls. “What the voters of this country are experiencing is that voting for the vast majority of people is going to be convenient and easy and secure and safe,” Becker said during the Free Press webinar. “And that’s the message I really want voters to understand … as some people might be on the fence wondering whether they should turn out or not. Turn out and vote. You’re going to have a good experience.” Let’s hope he’s right.

Trump's FCC Ripped Away Open-Internet Protections. We're This Close to Winning Them Back

A majority of commissioners is set to return to the agency the authority it needs to act as a strong advocate for a user-powered internet.

Later this week, the Federal Communications Commission is expected to reverse a Trump-era decision that stripped away essential open-internet protections. In a Thursday vote, a majority of commissioners will return to the agency the authority it needs to act as a strong advocate for a user-powered internet.

They will do this by reclassifying broadband-access services as telecom services subject to Title II of the Communications Act. Title II authority allows the FCC to safeguard Net Neutrality and hold companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon accountable to internet users across the United States.

Title II authority gives the FCC the tools to make the internet work better for everyone, ensuring that internet service providers can’t block, throttle, or otherwise discriminate against the content everyone accesses online. But it also gives the FCC the regulatory means to ensure that broadband prices and practices are “just and reasonable.” The agency will be able to step in to stop price gouging, safeguard user privacy, protect public safety, eliminate junk fees, and stop other abusive behavior from providers.

During a Capitol Hill press conference last week, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said, “There are a lot of things in this country that divide us, but Net Neutrality is not one of them.” Rosenworcel cited poll after poll that show that people across the political spectrum overwhelmingly support the 2015 Title II Net Neutrality safeguards that the Obama FCC put in place. The same polls show majorities opposed the Trump FCC’s 2017 repeal of these protections.

“Bringing back the FCC’s authority over broadband and putting back net neutrality rules is popular, and it has been court-tested and court-approved,” she added. “[W]e have an opportunity to get this right. Because in a modern digital economy, it is time to have broadband oversight, national Net Neutrality rules, and policies that ensure the internet is fast, open, and fair.”

Back to the future
The rules up for a vote on April 25 are identical to the 2015 rules. The FCC will enforce them in the same way. And the draft order text that the agency will finalize and adopt already makes this clear — in some cases, going further than the 2015 order did — with a chance before the vote occurs for the FCC to make this language even stronger.

Losing Title II hurt people, which is why millions protested the Trump FCC’s action. Not only did its 2017 repeal gut the Net Neutrality rules, it also surrendered the agency’s power to protect communities from unjust or unreasonable practices by these internet-access goliaths.

This had troubling consequences during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, when Trump FCC Chairman Ajit Pai asked broadband providers to sign a voluntary pledge to preserve people’s vital internet access (he couldn’t force providers to do this since he’d abdicated the agency’s authority to compel these companies to keep users connected). Despite Pai’s claim that the pledge was a success, reporting by Daily Dot found that many of these same companies still cut users’ connections during a national emergency, when everything from work to health care had shifted online.

A 2019 study by Northeastern University and UMass Amherst found that ISP throttling of network services happens “all the time.” Researchers analyzed data from hundreds of thousands of smartphones to determine whether wireless providers were slowing, or throttling, data speeds for specific mobile services. They found that “just about every wireless carrier is guilty of throttling video platforms and streaming services unevenly.”

In everyday terms, this means that companies like AT&T are picking winners and losers online. Allowing such throttling to continue opens the door to more content-based discrimination. This isn’t just about economic favoritism — for example, an ISP slowing down a competitor’s online app so people would use their product instead — but, potentially, the blocking of political messages that gigantic communications companies don’t like.

This isn’t a hypothetical. In 2005, the internet service provider Telus blocked access to a server that hosted a website supporting a labor strike against the company. And in 2011, the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that several ISPs were intercepting user search queries on Bing and Yahoo and directing them to “results” pages that they or their partners controlled.

The say-anything lobbyists
Lobbyists working for these large internet-access companies like to say that Title II authority offers “a solution in each of a problem” that doesn’t exist. And you can bet they’ll repeat a lot of these lies in the aftermath of this week’s vote.

Throughout the 20 years of debate around Title II and Net Neutrality, the powerful phone and cable lobby has demonstrated a willingness to say anything and everything to avoid being held accountable. They’ll say that Title II’s open-internet standard is a heavy-handed regulation that will undermine investment in new broadband deployment; in reality, executives from these companies have said publicly that their capital expenditures aren’t impacted in any way by Title II rules. The lobbyists will say that Net Neutrality is a hyper-partisan, politicized issue — ignoring public polling (see above) that shows internet users on the political left, right, and center overwhelmingly support the sorts of baseline protections offered under Title II.

The fight for this week’s victory predates the Trump FCC repeal of strong Title II rules in 2017. By restoring safeguards that millions fought so hard to make a reality, the FCC is recognizing the broad-based grassroots movement that coalesced in 2005 around the then-obscure principle of Net Neutrality and built a movement focused on retaining the people-powered, democratic spirit that was baked into the internet at its inception.

Without baseline open-internet protections, internet users are subject to privacy invasions, hidden junk fees, data caps, and billing rip-offs from their ISPs. In addition, without Title II oversight the FCC is severely limited in its ability to promote broadband competition and deployment, bringing this essential infrastructure within reach of people in the United States who lack access.

The FCC will change all of that later this week. It will respond to overwhelming public opinion and stand up for internet users against a handful of monopoly-minded companies that for too long have dictated media policy in Washington.

Come Thursday, I and many of the amazing advocates who’ve been fighting this fight for the past 20 years will be on hand at the FCC to witness the final vote. It will be a moment to appreciate our hard work and thank the agency for restoring to Americans their all-important online rights. Join us in celebrating!

To ‘Save Local News,’ Policymakers Need to Understand What Needs Saving

 Originally published at Tech Policy Press.

Northwestern Medill Local News Initiative State of Local News 2023

As lawmakers around the world struggle with ways to “save local news,” it’s worth asking who this sort of journalism benefits and whether new policies prioritize their needs. That’s why new research from Northwestern University’s State of Local News Project is so important.

Northwestern reports that the availability of local news depends largely on the wealth of the community where you live. According to project data, counties with an average household income of more than $80,000 can support 10 or more news outlets. Meanwhile, counties with household incomes of $54,000 or less are more likely to be news deserts.

“In communities with little disposable income to put toward news subscriptions or donations and no local philanthropies, cost-cutting becomes the only option,” writes project director Sarah Stonbely. “This creates a self-reinforcing spiral of lower quality and declining readership and, ultimately, closure.”

According to Stonbely, nearly 3,000 local newspapers have shuttered operations over the past two decades, leaving approximately half of the nation’s 3,143 counties with one — or zero — news outlets. 248 more counties are at risk of becoming news deserts in the near future.

Avoid a trickle-down approach
The crisis is real, and policymakers in multiple jurisdictions have started to talk about the roles they can play to solve it — but some of their solutions would do more harm than good. Many of those advocating to save local news in the United States are lining up in support of bills like the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA). This legislation would force Big Tech companies like Google and Meta to compensate news publishers for featuring links and content summaries in their search results and on their social networks.

The JCPA (and its California cousin the CJPA, an even worse link-tax plan) take a trickle-down approach to saving local news, awarding big media conglomerates like Fox and “vulture capitalist” funds like Alden Global Capital with large payouts from tech platforms — leaving crumbs for the local and ethnic media outlets that serve lower-income communities.

A recent Free Press Action report finds that California’s link-tax approach (which is also part of a package of bills introduced last week in Illinois) — would result in a massive giveaway to large and very profitable media outlets, including those that focus on spreading hate and disinformation. Meanwhile, independent media outlets, which are closest to the communities they serve and in most need of support, would likely see little-to-no benefit.

“Smaller community-focused outlets are innovating and pushing the entire field of journalism forward, away from the boardroom’s focus on quarterly profits, and toward a future where impact is not measured in revenue growth,” says my Free Press Action colleague and report co-author Alex Frandsen. “Yet any payouts such outlets would receive would be — at best — the leftover crumbs from revenue pies gorged on by already-wealthy media companies.”

And yet ill-conceived Big Tech bargaining and link-tax legislation has captivated lawmakers and some advocates in the United States and other countries, including Australia and Canada.

These bills’ apparent momentum reveals the failure of some lawmakers and advocates to even try to to understand the problem at hand: how to support local news and civic information as the public goods that they are.

Many JCPA and CJPA supporters in the antitrust community seem to support this sort of legislation because it really sticks it to Big Tech, which they see as Public Enemy No. 1. And indeed the big platforms have resorted to some drastic measures to prevent passage of these and similar bills elsewhere.

Political expediency is also driving this legislation forward: these bills have received a forceful tailwind of lobbying support from trade groups representing powerful media conglomerates and commercial broadcasters — the same profitable companies that would benefit from (but don’t actually need) payments from the likes of Meta.

Who should really benefit
What bills like the JCPA and CJPA don’t do, however, is address the real-world impacts of the local-news crisis — which are, as Sarah Stonbely reports, far more acute in low-income communities. These are the same communities that the large media conglomerates lobbying for this legislation have ignored or misrepresented.

Free Press Action has urged lawmakers to reassess the current state of local news instead of trying to turn back the clock to a supposed golden age for journalism that existed pre-internet. We’ve called on legislators to reinvest in programs to fund public-interest media at the local and state levels. Alongside our allies, we’ve encouraged them to replant noncommercial media systems that can and must play a role at a time when the market economics of local news no longer work. And we’ve urged them to reimagine how critical local news and civic information get distributed and to whom, at a time when two local newspapers are shutting down each week and news deserts are spreading, especially in low-income communities.

While lawmakers are right to want to do something to support a more resilient local news and information sector, they need to be explicit about what needs saving and why. Efforts shouldn’t focus on bolstering the established news industry; instead, policymakers should prioritize ways to promote a public good: local-accountability journalism in service of the people who need it the most.

CNN OpEd: Here’s What’s at Risk if Big Tech Doesn’t Address Deceptive AI Content

Last Friday, 20 technology platforms agreed to better label and curtail AI-generated disinformation that’s being spread online to deceive voters during a busy election year. They pledged to provide “swift and proportionate responses” to deceptive AI content about the election, including sharing more information about “ways citizens can protect themselves from being manipulated or deceived.”

This voluntary commitment, signed by Google, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, TikTok and X, among others, does not outrightly ban the use of so-called political “deepfakes” — false video or audio depictions — of candidates, leaders and other influential public figures. Nor do the platforms agree to restore the sizable teams they had in place to safeguard election integrity in 2020. Even at those previous levels, these teams struggled to stop the spread of disinformation about the election result, helping to fuel violence at the US Capitol Building as Congress prepared to certify President Joe Biden’s victory.

In response, the platforms have pledged to set high expectations in 2024 for how they “will manage the risks arising from deceptive AI election content,” according to the joint accord. And their actions will be guided by several principles, including prevention, detection, evaluation and public awareness.

If the platforms want to prevent a repeat of 2020, they need to be doing much more now that technology has made it possible to dupe voters with these deceptively believable facsimiles... [read the full commentary at CNN]

How the Media Can Atone for Enabling the Rise of Trumpism

For far too long, media execs have played along with Donald Trump’s strongman charade, aware that his tele-presence is a boon for ratings and revenues. Now, U.S. democracy is reaping what they have sown.

At a speech delivered on Veterans Day, Trump used rhetoric nearly identical to that used by Adolf Hitler 80 years earlier. 

Rather than honoring veterans as one might expect of a political speech on this day, Trump used the occasion to label his adversaries “vermin” — promising that, if elected, he would use his power to “root out” all his political enemies.

The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake found the parallels: Hitler frequently used vermin references to justify the murder of Jews and others across Europe, while “Trump has used it more broadly to suggest that his opponents are subhuman” and deserve punishment.

Parroting Hitler should not be considered normal behavior in any U.S. election cycle. But the media have grown used to covering Trump’s extremism as if it’s standard political fare. This time, though, some journalists rightly saw his Veterans Day speech as very dangerous.

“It’s important to emphasize that Trump’s rhetorical excesses are not new. To know anything about the Republican is to know that he, on a nearly daily basis, finds new and needlessly provocative ways to shock, offend, insult, and degrade,” wrote Steve Benen for MSNBC.

What is new, however, is the growing number of reporters and commentators being more explicit in their use of the term “fascist” to describe Trump’s beliefs — and “dictatorship” to describe what his return to power would represent for the future of U.S. democracy.

The media aren’t sounding these sorts of alarms enough, according to Margaret Sullivan, who wrote about the mounting evidence that Trump is indeed a fascist. “The press generally is not doing an adequate job of communicating those realities,” she said. “Instead, journalists have emphasized Joe Biden’s age and Trump’s ‘freewheeling’ style. They blame the public’s attitudes on ‘polarization,’ as if they themselves have no role.”

Sullivan urges more members of the press to report on the dark prospect of a second Trump presidency. They should “ask voters directly whether they are comfortable with [Trump’s] plans, and report on that. Display these stories prominently, and then do it again soon,” she wrote.

The ‘F’ word
Sullivan is right, of course. The media need to report more on the rise of fascism in America, and they also need to reflect on their role in enabling this.

For decades the former president has capitalized on the media’s obsessive attention to paint an alternative vision of himself — one in which he features not as a twice-impeached, criminally indicted sexual abuser who sought to overthrow a democratic election that he lost, but as a decisive and winning strongman, the only person with the power and charisma to make America great again.

In 2016, then-CBS CEO Les Moonves said that devoting so much airtime to then-candidate Trump “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” At the time, Moonves was praising Trump for the bumper crop of political-ad dollars brought in during the contentious 2016 election, but he was not alone.

Former media executive Jeff Zucker has arguably done more than any single person to burnish the 21st-century caricature of Donald Trump. While an executive at NBC, he greenlit The Apprentice, which remade Trump from a bankruptcy-spawning loser into a boardroom genius with impeccable business savvy.

When Trump entered the political fray in 2015, he did so with an Apprentice tailwind. Zucker, who by then had transitioned to the top job at CNN, trained the network’s cameras on his celebrity candidate while denying equal time to Trump’s Republican opponents. Ratings were also Zucker’s rationale for keeping Trump center stage in 2016.

The media chose Trump in 2016 well before most Republican voters had a chance to vote for any of the other GOP candidates in the race.

And it didn’t end there. In 2020, Mathias Döpfner, head of German media giant Axel Springer, sent a message asking the company’s executives if they wanted to “get together for an hour on the morning on Nov. 3 and pray that Donald Trump will again become President of the United States of America.” Döpfner justified this question by praising the Trump administration for supporting issues, like corporate tax breaks and reining in big tech, that benefitted Axel Springer.

The profit incentive
If you’re noticing a pattern, it’s this: Democracy suffers when a commercial media system showcases fascist demagogues for profit.

That seems obvious enough, but it’s worth repeating: News media companies rely on ratings and related advertising revenues to survive. In other words, the news business is about putting on a show that will draw the largest numbers of viewers. And Trump — like Hitler and Mussolini before him — is a camera-ready showman.

More important matters like correcting Trump’s many falsehoods or reporting on the troubling consequences of a second Trump presidency are secondary for those who just want to draw more attention to their primetime offerings.

Former executives, like Moonves and Zucker — who for a variety of unsavory reasons have since left their companies — and existing ones, like Döpfner, were saying that as long as Trump’s autocratic extremism made them richer, there was no need to worry about the consequences. Never mind that, if elected, he’d likely use his power to undermine media freedom and silence dissenting voices.

The commercial U.S. media system needs to undergo deep reckoning for accommodating the rise of Trumpism. This atonement should be reflected in a shift in the ways large outlets report on Trump, but also by recognizing the commercial incentives that drive media to lead with the Trump Show, damn the far-right repercussions.

Without calling themselves to account for the damage they’ve done, media executives will never quit their Trump habit — not in 2024, nor at any point after.

Sink, Sank, Sunk: One Year in and Musk's Twitter Is Circling the Drain

It’s been one year since Elon Musk took ownership of Twitter and proceeded to strip it of all its social value.

Let that sink in. When he took charge of the platform, Musk called Twitter the internet’s “de facto town square.” Under his leadership, Musk insisted, the online forum would become “important to the future of civilization.” Very few people believed him at the time. Far fewer do now.

Twitter on Oct. 27, 2023, is a lot worse than it was on Oct. 27, 2022, when Musk carried a porcelain sink into the company’s San Francisco headquarters. (Get it? Me neither.) As it turns out, the joke’s on Musk, on the banks that helped him finance this disastrous deal, and on anyone else who still believes he cares about protecting free speech and facilitating civil discourse online.

And Musk’s biggest failings over a year of catastrophic decisions occurred during the very first days of his tenure, when he abandoned an early commitment to the sort of content moderation that makes civil discourse possible … and social-media enterprises successful.

Musk's biggest mistake
Within a week of taking over, Musk met with civil-rights leaders, including Free Press Co-CEO Jessica J. González. He pledged to “combat hate and harassment” on the network and “enforce [Twitter’s] election integrity policies.” But soon after this meeting, Musk announced sweeping layoffs, firing a large percentage of Twitter employees, including many of those responsible for upholding the company’s critical brand-safety, election-integrity and content-moderation standards.

Things quickly went downhill from there.

Free Press and our allies launched the #StopToxicTwitter coalition soon after Musk reneged on his pledge to combat the spread of hate and disinformation. We urged the platform’s top advertisers to pause all placements on Twitter until they received assurances that Musk would safeguard their brands. Advertisers left Twitter in droves: Within three months of the launch of #StopToxicTwitter, more than 500 advertisers stopped their Twitter spending, sending a powerful message to Musk that they would not bankroll the unchecked spread of hate and disinformation. The advertiser exodus, which continued through the year, is a major contributor to the precipitous drop in revenue at Twitter.

Earlier this month, the marketing firm Ebiquity reported that only two of its clients (which include 70 of the top-100 advertising brands in the United States) are now spending on Twitter — down from 31 the month before Musk took control. This aligns with Musk’s own assessment, made last month, that U.S. advertising revenue has sunk 60 percent since he acquired the company.

Instead of meeting advertiser and advocate demands for a safer and more civil public forum, Musk has responded by suing a research organization and #StopToxicTwitter partner — the Center for Countering Digital Hate — that has documented the increased spread of vitriol and lies across his network. He also threatened to sue another organization that had led criticism about the dramatic rise in antisemitic content on Twitter over the last year.

Musk’s decision to grant a “general amnesty” to thousands of previously banned accounts, including those belonging to vile neo-Nazis, white supremacists and conspiracy theorists, has further kept advertisers at bay. More recently, he's used his blue-check, pay-for-engagement scheme to give a soapbox (and even revenues) to all sorts of grifters and propagandists, including many people seeking to drown legitimate public discourse about the Israel/Gaza crisis in lies.

In Musk’s distorted worldview, his critics are to blame for Twitter’s sinking fortunes. On top of that, this self-proclaimed “free-speech absolutist” has used his considerable resources to silence anyone who disagrees with him.

“That the wealthiest man on the planet is using his money, influence and even legal action to threaten and silence critics, including our coalition partners, is reprehensible,” Jessica J. González said. “Musk bought an advertising platform and advertisers have made themselves clear: They want no part of the toxic stew of hate and lies that Musk has enabled. The only one Musk has to blame for X’s declining fortunes is himself.”

Through it all Musk has chosen to ignore a fundamental truth for social-media ventures: Effective content moderation is essential to growing healthy online communities and company revenues. As Musk’s Twitter circles the drain toward insolvency, he has repeatedly demonstrated this lack of basic business smarts about online platforms.

“It’s kind of a rite of passage for any new social media network,” Mike Masnick wrote about the content-moderation learning curve. “They show up, insist that they’re the ‘platform for free speech’ without quite understanding what that actually means, and then they quickly discover a whole bunch of fairly fundamental ideas, institute a bunch of rapid (often sloppy) changes … and in the end, they basically all end up in the same general vicinity.”

Musk has yet to arrive there and after a year of failures he likely never will. The proof for Twitter is in its bottom line. The advertisers that have left Twitter have put their money where their values are. And they aren’t likely to return in any significant way unless and until Twitter can make assurances that their brands aren’t underwriting the amplification of hate and lies.

We hoped Musk would have learned this lesson at the beginning: Twitter’s business will live or die on the decisions he makes or doesn’t make about content moderation.

But one year after Musk carried a sink through Twitter’s front door, all of his decisions have been wrong, with consequences that continue to undermine free speech, imperil democracy, and harm people both at home and abroad.

Why ISPs Can't Stop Lying About Net Neutrality

No single issue seems to scare large phone and cable companies more than Net Neutrality.

That’s because Net Neutrality is built on the sound legal notion that broadband access must be classified under Title II of the Communications Act, which gives the Federal Communications Commission the comprehensive authority it needs to hold powerful companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon accountable.

Lawyers and lobbyists working for these companies don’t like this, and they are willing to tell all manner of lies to prevent the FCC from restoring the popular rules that the Trump administration dismantled in 2017. Restoring Title II oversight would enable the FCC to protect Net Neutrality — and to track service outages, rein in abuses by monopoly-minded internet service providers (ISPs) and help make broadband more affordable, ubiquitous and competitive.

One of the things we’ve learned during the COVID-19 pandemic is that high-speed internet is not a luxury item but essential infrastructure. Broadband allows people to access education, employment, health-care services, emergency alerts, voting information and more. If you believe that the agency charged with oversight of this infrastructure needs the ability to stop ISPs from ripping off or otherwise abusing internet users, you should support Title II reclassification.

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel now has the votes needed to restore the agency’s rightful authority to protect internet users in this way, and has announced her plan to do just that.  To undermine this effort, the industry’s coin-operated sock-puppets have cranked up their Title II myth machine. Free Press is duty bound to debunk these industry lies as we have an untold number of times in the past.

So let’s set the record straight … again.

Myth #1: Title II is ‘heavy-handed internet regulation.’

Despite what these companies claim, Title II authority is not a regulation of the internet itself. Rather, it gives the FCC oversight of monopoly-minded broadband providers that provide last-mile connectivity to users. These ISPs don’t represent the internet any more than lumber companies like Georgia Pacific and Weyerhaeuser represent the forest.

If there are going to be rules for the online road, they must be designed to protect the rights of internet users, and not the profit margins of massive — and massively unpopular — phone and cable companies.

For all the fear-mongering about more regulation, the draft of the “notice of proposed rulemaking” that Rosenworcel released offers a light touch. For example, it explicitly refrains from imposing 26 Title II provisions, while also “clarifying that the commission will not regulate rates.”

“They say this is a stalking horse for rate regulation,” Rosenworcel said. “Nope. No how, no way. We know competition is the best way to bring down rates for consumers. And approaches like the Affordable Connectivity Program are the best bet for making sure service is affordable for all.”

Myth #2: Title II rules are a ‘solution in search of a problem.’

This is the most prolific talking point of the anti-Net Neutrality set. Just Google it. Their claim is that ISPs would never, ever throttle content that they don’t like while prioritizing websites and services that they do. That myth has been thoroughly busted. Over the past two decades, providers both in the United States and abroad have violated Net Neutrality — and they’ll continue doing so absent Title II oversight.

And while these companies now claim to respect the open internet, they have also said that they need to violate open-internet principles to implement new discriminatory pay-to-play business models.

So which is it? The answer is that ISPs will do whatever they can to maximize their profits — like that time that the wireless services of AT&T, Sprint and Verizon blocked access to Google Wallet, a mobile-payment system that competed with a service that all three companies had a stake in developing. Or that time Comcast secretly blocked peer-to-peer file-sharing technologies that its customers were using over its network.

The problem is real. The solution is Title II oversight. 

Myth #3: The Biden FCC should be focusing on ‘real problems,’ such as obstacles to broadband deployment and accessibility.

The largest obstacles to broadband deployment and accessibility are the ISPs themselves. This problem came into full view at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis as people came to rely more heavily on broadband to learn about vital health-care services, search for work, access remote schooling and connect to other essential benefits. At the time, Trump FCC Chairman Ajit Pai implored ISPs to “Keep Americans Connected” — even though he ditched his own agency’s authority to challenge broadband providers that cut people off during such emergencies.

And while hundreds of ISPs signed Pai’s toothless and voluntary pledge, there were widespread reports that these same companies continued to shut off hundreds of internet connections, leaving many people across the United States without access to this lifesaving infrastructure.

Even prior to the pandemic — thanks again to the Trump FCC’s decision to repeal the Title II Net Neutrality rules — the agency lacked the authority it needed to monitor and address broadband outages that threatened public safety. This was especially problematic during times of natural and man-made emergencies, like forest fires, flooding and hurricanes.

Reclassifying broadband access as a Title II service will allow the FCC to require that ISPs address such internet outages. Title II classification also supports FCC efforts to ensure that we have resilient networks that are capable of withstanding and recovering from disasters. And it gives the agency a path to prevent ISPs from throttling first responders’ emergency communications, which occurred when Verizon throttled a fire department’s allegedly “unlimited” data during 2018’s deadly California wildfires.

Myth #4: The FCC’s Obama-era Open Internet Order hampered capital investments, delaying new broadband deployment and innovation.

This is a favorite fib repeated by Trump FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and parroted by industry mouthpieces. It’s also easy to debunk using freely available Securities and Exchange Commission data on broadband capital expenditures before, during and after the two-year period that Title II oversight was in effect.

If broadband investment is the FCC’s preferred metric, then there’s only one possible conclusion: Net Neutrality and Title II were smashing successes. According to Free Press research, capital investments by publicly traded ISPs were 5 percent higher following the FCC’s 2015 Open Internet vote when compared to the two years prior to the adoption of these rules. During this time, cable-industry physical-network investments increased 48 percent compared to the amount invested during the prior two years. Cable ISPs’ core network investments accelerated dramatically in 2016, representing the highest single-year jump since 1999.

ISPs continued to enjoy robust revenue and profit growth in the two years following Title II reclassification, even as wireless consumers saw greater cost declines during this same period. After the Trump FCC repealed Title II in 2017, however, the ISP industry recorded a year of lower aggregate investment. A 2018 decline came despite the Trump tax cuts, which — like massive deregulation at the FCC — were supposed to spur large investments. That didn’t happen.

All the available data indicate that the Obama-era decision to adopt strong rules worked as intended, benefiting internet users, broadband-access providers and the myriad businesses that distribute services over the open internet.

Don’t believe us? Then listen to the executives at major ISPs. After the Obama-era FCC reclassified broadband access under Title II, Comcast’s leadership told its investors that Title II “really hasn’t affected the way we have been doing our business or will do our business.” And Charter’s CEO said: “I mean, Title II, it didn’t really hurt us; it hasn’t hurt us.”

It’s important to remember that the internet economy is about far more than the size of these executives’ salaries or the dominance of their companies. Protecting broadband access under Title II is good for all businesses that rely on the internet to make a buck — a.k.a., nearly every business out there. Anyone who tells you otherwise is ignoring the numbers.

Myth #5: Net Neutrality is a ‘hyper-partisan, politicized’ issue.

This couldn’t be farther from the truth. 

If you’ve been on hold for hours with your phone or cable provider, you know the frustration of dealing with companies that feel no accountability to the public. It’s no secret that people loathe these companies: Major broadband providers have repeatedly ranked at the bottom of customer-service satisfaction indices.

Internet users want choices, privacy protections, and a free and open internet. These needs are practical, not political — which is why for years public polling has shown broad support across the political spectrum for Net Neutrality rules and FCC oversight. 

University of Maryland public polling in 2022 showed that majorities of voters from all major parties rejected the Trump administration’s repeal and supported reinstating the FCC’s power to protect internet users. It found that more than 72 percent of all those surveyed “favor reinstating Net Neutrality regulations,” including 65.4 percent of Republicans, 82 percent of Democrats and 67.5 percent of independents.

The overwhelming and ongoing cross-partisan support is why millions of people from all 50 states have called on the FCC to enforce Title II oversight, breaking all prior records for public participation in an agency rulemaking. 

Myth #6: The FCC lacks statutory authority over broadband-internet access; reinstating Title II is pointless because it won’t survive judicial review.

The FCC has clear authority to reinstate Title II. This authority has survived judicial review on multiple occasions, including a 2005 Supreme Court decision that upheld the agency’s right to exercise its expertise and discretion in interpreting these laws. Moreover, a 2016 U.S. Court of Appeals decision by the D.C. Circuit rejected a broadband-industry challenge and upheld the Obama FCC’s Open Internet Order in all respects, stating that the agency exercised its proper authority when it reclassified broadband-internet access as a telecom service under Title II. And in 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed that California also had the statutory authority it needed to enforce the state’s own Net Neutrality law.

The courts have consistently ruled that state and federal regulators have the power to protect everyone’s right to connect and communicate online, and can choose the correct legal path to prevent online discrimination and abuse by the likes of AT&T, Comcast and Verizon. In the case of the FCC, that path is paved by Title II.

Myth #7: It’s been nearly six years since the Trump FCC repealed the Open Internet Order and nothing bad has happened.

When Pai stripped internet users of the federal protections that flow from Title II oversight, dozens of state-level lawmakers and more than a hundred mayors rushed into the void to put in place local Net Neutrality protections of their own. This patchwork line of defense has managed to restrain the ISPs from moving forward on previously stated plans to throttle the connection of popular websites that don’t pay extra for using their pipes.           

Backed by a groundswell of grassroots activism, these leaders managed to hold the line via state laws, executive orders and ISP-contracting policies. The cumulative effect is a loose set of open-internet policies that have prevented much of the outright throttling and prioritization that many had feared. “But when you are dealing with the most essential infrastructure in the digital age, we benefit from one national policy,” Rosenworcel said as she announced her intention to restore a nationwide Title II standard to broadband access.

We agree. The United States needs a national policy so everyone, everywhere is guaranteed the same protections. Having this will help guide changing technology to better serve internet users, and prevent anti-competitive ISPs from stifling innovation and shutting out new entrants to cement their market dominance.

Free Press looks forward to helping Rosenworcel and her colleagues fix Trump-era FCC mistakes, debunk the industry lies and return these basic internet protections to people across the United States.

With a national Title II regime back in place, internet users will be able to log on knowing that their broadband provider won’t violate their online rights without being held to account. And that’s the truth.