Big telecoms are in the business of making money and increasing their strangleholds on the marketplace. They do not really care what happens to the majority of the country in the long run, because making money in our current financial system is based on quarterly earnings, and the people making money at a telecom today will be elsewhere tomorrow. It’s a similar system to our current Republican administration. Fleece the public for what you can, disable as many checks and balances as you can, and then run, run, run. To that end, telecoms spend a prodigious amount of money on lobbyists, who in turn grease the palms of our elected officials. Part of the lobbyist’s job is to come up with talking points that can be used to defend the need to, say, end net neutrality. Frequently those talking points are as idiotic as one might imagine, all for the purpose of bullshitting the American public into, in this case, losing their consumer protections.
Techdirt’s Mike Masnick has an enjoyable story of receiving a draft of some telecom lobbyist’s talking points. As he explains, there isn’t much in the way of surprises. The focus of the lobbyist is to take advantage of the justifiably bad press that websites like Facebook and Twitter are getting for their privacy breaches and lack of ethics, transferring the blame onto websites in the hope of distracting the public while providing cover for congressional leadership to ignore the many abuses of internet service providers (ISPs) against consumers.
Privacy
MESSAGE: Here is the modern reality of consumer protection: the greatest risks are posed by companies on the internet’s edge. Privacy is a shared responsibility -- and the burdens and obligations can not rest solely with ISPs and must be applied equally across the internet ecosystem.
- The increased scrutiny of Facebook and other edge provides (sic) offer a significant opportunity for Congress to implement clear and consistent rules that apply equally to all companies in the internet ecosystem. And when they begin the process of establishing best practices for privacy, they will need to look no further than broadband providers.
- For years, our members have embraced strong consumer privacy policies, because they understand the success of any digital business depends on earning their customers’ trust.
- Consumers and companies alike deserve one set of protections and rules of the road. This is the best way to ensure consumer protection while also providing the necessary flexibility for a competitive and innovative marketplace.
As Masnick points out, this line of reasoning is madness when you consider that the biggest threats to personal privacy and security are the telecoms themselves, as they have considerably more of private citizens’ data than any single website ever could.
Telcos have historically sucked up all your clickstream data and sold it to databrokers, while pretending it was no big deal. The telcos have regularly used incredibly sneaky and intrusive spying practices (way beyond anything Google and Facebook have done) including deep packet inspection and undeletable supercookies. And who can forget when the telcos wanted to sell you back your privacy, and raise your subscriber fees $30/month if you didn't want them to snoop on all your internet activity? And who can forget that it was just weeks ago that Verizon launched a VPN without any privacy policy at all?
It’s an interesting gambit from the same ISP lobbyists that brought you the Republican reversal of FCC privacy rules stopping them from selling your personal data. This comes just years after it was revealed that AT&T worked for decades with the NSA to facilitate illegal spying on American citizens. According to Masnick, one section of the talking points contains the description “Verizon Throttling Fire Responders,” but that section has yet to be filled in with hot air. I guess they’re still hoping to workshop an excuse for how and why Verizon throttling fire departments during one of the largest wildfires in the history of California is … not a big deal.
There are pages and pages of talking points, all of them easily refutable, with greatest hits like:
- There is “tremendous competition in the communications market.”
- Telecoms have been doing all kinds of great broadband deployment.
- The federal government needs to wrestle away net neutrality control from the states (now that they have gotten rid of net neutrality on the federal level).
It’s all exactly as infuriating as you might imagine. But at least it was already obvious to most of us.