Slashdot Mirror
FCC Falsely Claims Community Broadband an 'Ominous Threat To First Amendment' (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The Trump FCC has declared towns and cities that vote to build their own broadband networks an "ominous threat to the First Amendment." The claims were made last week during a speech given at the telecom-funded Media Institute by FCC Commissioner Mike O'Rielly. In his speech, O'Rielly insinuated, without evidence, that community owned and operated broadband networks would naturally result in local governments aggressively limiting American free speech rights. "I would be remiss if my address omitted a discussion of a lesser-known, but particularly ominous, threat to the First Amendment in the age of the Internet: state-owned and operated broadband networks," claimed O'Rielly.
In his speech, O'Rielly highlighted efforts by the last FCC, led by former boss Tom Wheeler, to encourage such community-run broadband networks as a creative solution to private sector failure. O'Rielly subsequently tried to claim, without evidence, that encouraging such networks would somehow result in government attempts to censor public opinion. "Municipalities such as Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Wilson, North Carolina, have been notorious for their use of speech codes in the terms of service of state-owned networks, prohibiting users from transmitting content that falls into amorphous categories like 'hateful' or "threatening," O'Rielly claimed. The closest O'Rielly gets to supporting evidence appears to be a 2015 white paper written by Professor Enrique Armijo for the ISP-funded Free State Foundation. That paper similarly alleges that standard telecom sector language intended to police "threatening, abusive or hateful" language somehow implies community-run ISPs are more likely to curtail user speech. But municipal broadband experts say the argument has no basis in fact.
In his speech, O'Rielly highlighted efforts by the last FCC, led by former boss Tom Wheeler, to encourage such community-run broadband networks as a creative solution to private sector failure. O'Rielly subsequently tried to claim, without evidence, that encouraging such networks would somehow result in government attempts to censor public opinion. "Municipalities such as Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Wilson, North Carolina, have been notorious for their use of speech codes in the terms of service of state-owned networks, prohibiting users from transmitting content that falls into amorphous categories like 'hateful' or "threatening," O'Rielly claimed. The closest O'Rielly gets to supporting evidence appears to be a 2015 white paper written by Professor Enrique Armijo for the ISP-funded Free State Foundation. That paper similarly alleges that standard telecom sector language intended to police "threatening, abusive or hateful" language somehow implies community-run ISPs are more likely to curtail user speech. But municipal broadband experts say the argument has no basis in fact.
That's an interesting perspective, since it's the FCC that is in charge of actual censorship.
They're the ones who won't let you swear on broadcast television, not your local municipality.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
It's stunning how dishonest this administration has been. I mean, all politicians lie, but none have ever done it with such relish and fervor as the Trump administration, and certainly none has ever come close to the sheer volume of falsehoods. It's a daily torrent of horseshit.
"Community broadband is a threat to the First Amendment" is like saying "Republicans are the ones who want to protect coverage for pre-existing conditions," even though they've voted like 60 times to end coverage for pre-existing conditions.
I guess what surprises me most is that there are so many willing participants, like the FCC, and the GOP caucus in congress and members of the cabinet. They lie and then they laugh at you for buying it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
So........ municipal broadband threatens free speech? We have a thing to prevent that kind of thing.......
THE FIRST ADMENDMENT!!!!!!!!!!
What kind of fucking morons do these ass clowns think we are? Is that the intelligence level they expect to deal with?
Yeah, I can certainly see that local police monitoring could get unconstitutional real fast, just a buddy-buddy arrangement, no need for warrants.
But as far as First Amendment rights, I'd think we'd be better off with municipal-run broadband, if it were considered a government agency. Then if a city starts blocking "hate groups" or whatever, we'd have constitutional protections we wouldn't have with a private monopoly.
Personally, I just want people to have a choice of ISPs - that solves almost everything. Make the "last mile" a utility (and just a dumb pipe). Let many ISPs, local and giant, compete for the no-monopoly business from there.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The main fact-checking sites (FCS) give T the worst scores ever of any major politician. If these sites are significantly flawed, then take say 15 evaluations from each and carefully explain how they are clearly wrong. (Two is not a sufficient sample size.) I welcome your results...
While I've disagreed with some of their scoring logic, for the most part FCS appear to be reasonably accurate, based on spot-checking scrutiny I've done.
T, on the other hand, has failed my spot-checking test bigly. T-or-FCS: one or the other is really out of whack. Enlighten me with your careful attention to details in the "fifteen" test. (Actually, both can be out-of-whack, but that still means T is a significant liar. Two wrongs don't make a right.)
Table-ized A.I.
Really interesting take on what's the real threat to the First Amendment when it's the Government that is bound by it. Corporations are in no way accountable to free speech protections, and this is how we loose them.
When the corporations own all the conduits of speech, there will be no free speech.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
If you don't think capitalist ISPs are already doing that and more, you didn't even read todys tech news.
Chattanooga, TN for one turned up their municipal fiber ISP service in 2010. It's customer satisfaction usually ranks as the best among ISPs; No reports of wanton censorship. I am thinking we know how it plays out. We have evidence that those serviced love (...not like) their municipal ISP service. Why try to legitimize these unfounded, dishonest, scare tactics from the telecoms?
One other thing, since the First Amendment actually only protects us from government censorship, wouldn't it actually be better from a legal standpoint to get our ISP service from municipal organizations and that way if there was a claim of censorship we'd actually potentially have standing under the 1st amendment? Could be wrong but my understanding is corporations can censor you all they want since they are technically not the government (....or are they? LOL....[insert nervous laugh])
These same corporate telecoms just fought like hell to squash the FCC net neutrality rule which was designed to prohibit playing favorites with data packets. Now they want us to believe they are looking out for free, unfettered speech? Yah...right.
Governments are not legally allowed to implement content-related speech filters. Sure, it may take a lawsuit to fix that, but that lawsuit will succeed. Corporations usually are allowed to "censor".
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
It's hyperbole, but it's not completely ungrounded. The internet, as we all know, has a *lot* of porn on it. There are also a lot of people who would like to see porn banned. It gets a lot easier for them to get their way when the government is involved in operating an internet service, for much the same reason that the FCC is able to regulate indecency transmitted on government-allocated radio frequencies. The argument that "we don't want our tax money to pay for other people to watch smut" is going to be a pretty powerful one, and anti-porn activists generally do not consider themselves as violating the first amendment because they do not recognize pornography as a form of speech. Similar concerns can be raised about government being pressured to block copyright infringement.
But bizarrely, the federal government is currently dominated by a faction which supports banning the porn! There's a weird double standard going on here that shows the writer of this speech does not care at all about everything outlined in the above paragraph. The strongest argument that could be made in relation to the point raised is the possibility of anti-pornography efforts, but the FCC can't even acknowledge that possibility because they are allied to the people who are pushing it. Instead he is using the current bogeyman of liberal censorship of 'threatening' behavior - which every conservative is supposed to fear right now, though any attempt by a municipal provider to do that would likely be smacked down in the courts. It's quite the fear on the right though - you need only skim a few suitably skewed news sites to find them full of stories about how prominent right-wing activists have been 'censored' on social media and punished for their political views. Strangely though, very few of these stories actually repeat the contents of the banned posts, and the victims invariably turn out to be raging homophobes or conspiracy theorists. Usually both.
I can't even interpret this at near-midnight. It's too deep in political dog-whistles and codephrases. None of it makes any sense, and I don't think it's supposed to. It works because most of the country loves the first amendment in the abstract sense, but is also very eager to disregard it when they have an agenda to advance - usually while accusing everyone else of doing the same.
If the FCC really cared about preserving freedom of speech on the internet, they'd be doing everything they can to promote the use of universal encryption at every level. But they aren't doing to do that. It would get in the way of things like keeping television free of dirty words and making sure the government can issue warrants worth the effort.
This posts is bleh and rambling... I shouldn't write these while barely awake. Screw it, too tired to care. Night.
In th United States, the general idea is that freedom of speech is about protecting the speech you hate the most. Not for people you agree with.
While I think the examples you cite are abhorrent ideals, they are in fact protected speech. If you start banning one type of speech, who is to say that next it won't be YOUR speech that gets banned as it is critical regarding the government in power. Today you want to ban racist hate speech, tomorrow it might be the speech of for example Democrats who are critical of the President.
There are reasons why protection of freedom of speech is in the Constitution, to keep people who think they know better from limiting the speech of others.
Now kindly go fuck yourself.
Actually, consider an alternative:
Municipal broadband service might be well described as a 'lifeline'-like service, intended to be lowest cost, minimum necessary, to provide access to government services, universally required services such as job search, bill payment, enrollments, etc. It may not be intended to, nor even provide, access to a variety of services or sources. If this is disclosed, is it a problem?
Disclosure would be the first step.
So would LinkNYC be deficient if it did not provide access to pornography? Or games? Or would it be efficient? And if kiosks were relatively public, would pornography be a tolerable use, since it might, possibly, offend some casual observers? Should LinkNYC spend more money on privacy filters and such?
Of course, when we move on from pron and consider access to news, information, and opinion sources, we get into significantly less obvious use cases. But I, sadly, know people who are just as offended by seeing certain 'news' and opinion sources as they are seeing pron, even by accident, and they plainly tell me that these need to be kept off of municipal broadband systems.
Not simple, but worthy of discussion.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.