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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 months

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Big Telco’s fury over FCC plan to infuse telecoms policy with facts

I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library on Monday, November 13 at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!

Reality has a distinct anti-conservative bias, but conservatives have an answer: when the facts don't support your policies, just get different facts. Who needs evidence-based policy when you can have policy-based evidence?

Take gun violence. Conservatives tell us that "an armed society is a polite society," which means that the more guns you have, the less gun violence you'll experience. To prevent reality from unfairly staining this pristine ideological mind-palace with facts, conservatives passed the Dickey Amendment, which had the effect of banning the CDC from gathering stats on American gun-violence. No stats, no violence!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment

Policy-based evidence is at the core of so many cherished conservative beliefs, like the idea that queer people (and not youth pastors) are responsible for the sexual abuse of children, or the idea that minimum wages (and not monopolies) decrease jobs, or the idea that socialized medicine (and not private equity) leads to death panels:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

The Biden administration features a sizable cohort of effective regulators, whose job is to gather evidence and then make policy from it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/23/getting-stuff-done/#praxis

Fortunately for conservatives, not every Biden agency is led by competent, honest brokers – the finance wing of the Dems got to foist some of their most ghoulish members upon the American people, including a no-fooling cheerleader for mass foreclosure:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/06/personnel-are-policy/#janice-eberly

And these same DINOs reached across the aisle to work with Republicans to keep some of the most competent, principled agency leaders from being seated, like the remarkable Gigi Sohn, targeted by a homophobic smear campaign funded by the telco industry, who feared her presence on the FCC:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/19/culture-war-bullshit-stole-your-broadband/

The telcos are old hands at this stuff. Long before the gun control debates, Ma Bell had figured out that a monopoly over Americans' telecoms was a license to print money, and they set to corrupting agencies from the FCC to the DoJ:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/14/jam-to-day/

Reality has a vicious anti-telco bias. Think of Net Neutrality, the idea that if you pay an ISP for internet service, they should make a best effort to deliver the data you request, rather than deliberately slowing down your connection in the hopes that you'll seek out data from the company's preferred partners, who've paid a bribe for "premium delivery."

This shouldn't even be up for debate. The idea that your ISP should prioritize its preferred data over your preferred data is as absurd as the idea that a taxi-driver should slow down your rides to any pizzeria except Domino's, which has paid it for "premium service." If your cabbie circled the block twice every time you asked for a ride to Massimo's Pizza, you'd be rightly pissed – and the cab company would be fined.

Back when Ajit Pai was Trump's FCC chairman, he made killing Net Neutrality his top priority. But regulators aren't allowed to act without evidence, so Pai had to seek out as much policy-based evidence as he could. To that end, Pai allowed millions of obviously fake comments to be entered into the docket (comments from dead people, one million comments from @pornhub.com address, comments from sitting Senators who disavowed them, etc). Then Pai actively – and illegally – obstructed the NY Attorney General's investigation into the fraud:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/06/boogeration/#pais-lies

The pursuit of policy-based evidence is greatly aided by the absence of real evidence. If you're gonna fill the docket with made-up nonsense, it helps if there's no truthful stuff in there to get in the way. To that end, the FCC has systematically avoided collecting data on American broadband delivery, collecting as little objective data as possible:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/26/pandemic-profiteers/#flying-blind

This willful ignorance was a huge boon to the telcos, who demanded billions in fed subsidies for "underserved areas" and then just blew it on anything they felt like – like the $45 billion of public money they wasted on obsolete copper wiring for rural "broadband" expansion under Trump:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/27/all-broadband-politics-are-local/

Like other cherished conservative delusions, the unsupportable fantasy that private industry is better at rolling out broadband is hugely consequential. Before the pandemic, this meant that America – the birthplace of the internet – had the slowest, most expensive internet service of any G8 country. During the lockdown, broadband deserts meant that millions of poor and rural Americans were cut off from employment, education, health care and family:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/12/ajit-pai/#pai

Pai's response was to commit another $8 billion in public funds to broadband expansion, but without any idea of where the broadband deserts were – just handing more money over to monopoly telcos to spend as they see fit, with zero accountability:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/26/pandemic-profiteers/#flying-blind

All that changed after the 2020 election. Pai was removed from office (and immediately blocked me on Twitter) (oh, diddums), and his successor, Biden FCC chair Jessic Rosenworcel, started gathering evidence, soliciting your broadband complaints:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/23/parliament-of-landlords/#fcc

And even better, your broadband speed measurements:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#fly-my-pretties

All that evidence spurred Congress to act. In 2021, Congress ordered the FCC to investigate and punish discrimination in internet service provision, "based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin":

https://www.congress.gov/117/plaws/publ58/PLAW-117publ58.pdf

In other words, Congress ordered the FCC to crack down on "digital redlining." That's when historic patterns of underinvestment in majority Black neighborhoods and other underserved communities create broadband deserts, where internet service is slower and more expensive than service literally across the street:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/10/flicc/#digital-divide

FCC Chair Rosenworcel has published the agency's plan for fulfilling this obligation. It's pretty straightforward: they're going to collect data on pricing, speed and other key service factors, and punish companies that practice discrimination:

https://www.fcc.gov/document/preventing-digital-discrimination-broadband-internet-access

This has provoked howls of protests from the ISP cartel, their lobbying org, and their Republican pals on the FCC. Writing for Ars Technica, Jon Brodkin rounds up a selection of these objections:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/internet-providers-say-the-fcc-should-not-investigate-broadband-prices/

There's GOP FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, with a Steve Bannon-seque condemnation of "the administrative state [taking] effective control of all Internet services and infrastructure in the US. He's especially pissed that the FCC is going to regulate big landlords who force all their tenants to get slow, expensive from ISPs who offer kickbacks to landlords:

https://www.fcc.gov/document/carr-opposes-bidens-internet-plan

The response from telco lobbyists NCTA is particularly, nakedly absurd: they demand that the FCC exempt price from consideration of whether an ISP is practicing discrimination, calling prices a "non-technical aspect of broadband service":

https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/110897268295/1

I mean, sure – it's easy to prove that an ISP doesn't discriminate against customers if you don't ask how much they charge! "Sure, you live in a historically underserved neighborhood, but technically we'll give you a 100mb fiber connection, provided you give us $20m to install it."

This is a profoundly stupid demand, but that didn't stop the wireless lobbying org CTIA from chiming in with the same talking points, demanding that the FCC drop plans to collect data on "pricing, deposits, discounts, and data caps," evaluation of price is unnecessary in the competitive wireless marketplace":

https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/1107735021925/1

Individual cartel members weighed in as well, with AT&T and Verizon threatening to sue over the rules, joined by yet another lobbying group, USTelecom:

https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/1103655327582/1

The next step in this playbook is whipping up the low-information base by calling this "socialism" and mobilizing some of the worst-served, most-gouged people in America to shoot themselves in the face (again), to own the libs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/useful-idiotsuseful-idiots/#unrequited-love

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/10/digital-redlining/#stop-confusing-the-issue-with-relevant-facts

Image: Japanexperterna.se (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/japanexperterna/15251188384/

CC BY-SA 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

Mike Mozart (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeepersmedia/14325839070/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeepersmedia/14325905568/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeepersmedia/14489390566/

www.ccPixs.com https://www.flickr.com/photos/86530412@N02/8210762750/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

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disabledunitypunk · 7 months

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I wanna talk about a real problem in marginalized communities, but especially the disabled community.

The conflation of "privilege" with "oppression".

Here's two examples that I'm directly pulling from experience.

I am not intellectually disabled. I have fluctuating cognitive disabilities, but I have privilege over people with intellectual disabilities.

I also have significantly disabling chronic illness to the point where at times I have not been able to engage with hobbies due to being too sick. Disabled people who are less sick and more able to pursue activities they enjoy have privilege over me.

It's something that's not neat and simple, either. An intellectually disabled person who is able to engage with hobbies vs me? We would essentially both have privilege over each other on different axes. You can't then determine that one of us is ultimately generally more privileged than the other, because that's not how it works. Like if you have privilege x and they have privilege y, it isn't x-y=positive or negative privilege. You can't "solve" that equation because x and y aren't variables that can be substituted for number values.

So, first taking the example of hobbies - a recent controversial post we made that invited harassment. People were quick to tell us what our own experience was and that we weren't experiencing ableism - because they had had the privilege of never experiencing it. That was lateral ableism, and not okay.

Note: There may be people who DIDN'T have that privilege who were also saying the same - though everyone I saw talking about this specifically mentioned their ability to do hobbies, and that was who the main part of my response was directed at. However, I even specifically responded briefly to any people who were doing that - much more gently - to basically say that if they were being assimilationist out of fear that they didn't have to be, and to remind them that they aren't bad if they can't have hobbies.

On the other hand, way back when I first started this blog, I talked about reclaiming the r slur as someone who had significant trauma from being called it as a kid. I talked about how the reason I was called it was specifically because of my social issues due to my developmental disorders while being a gifted kid.

To make it clear - I was called the r slur for not understanding social cues and rules as a "smart" kid, because that's one of the things it meant to them. They weren't insulting my intellectual intelligence, but rather my social ability - at most, you could argue they were insulting my social intelligence - which having a low amount of WAS actually a feature of my disabilities.

I also spoke about how I wasn't reclaiming it to continue treating it as a bad thing, to insult even just myself, but rather to say "so what if I am? that's not bad". Y'know, the whole point of reclaiming.

I was told what my own experience was and that I was experiencing misdirected ableism because they were actually insulting traits I didn't have and therefore they were actually hurting intellectually disabled people but not me. Not because they had the privilege not to experience what I did - but because me having privilege was treated as the right to tell me I had never experienced the ableism they had.

They were treated not just as the experts on ableism against intellectual disabilities - which they are, of course - but also the experts on ableism against people who specifically DON'T have intellectual disabilities when it takes the same or similar forms as ableism against intellectual disabilities.

We all know that bigots don't wait to find out your correct identity before attacking you. We all know that there are identities commonly mistaken for others, that can set you up for repeated abuse over an identity you don't have. But what we refuse to acknowledge is that there are types of bigotry that can manifest identically in some ways for two different identities - and that anyone who experiences that bigotry is an expert on it and deserves to have a place in the conversation about it.

Someone with intellectual disabilities fundamentally cannot know that people without intellectual disabilities DON'T face the same kind of ableism on the basis of other disabilities that person DOES have because they have not ever lived that experience, just as, say, I couldn't say that an intellectually disabled person never faces specific kinds of ableism I face due to being a wheelchair user, because I am not intellectually disabled.

What I can say: "I face these types of ableism because of these disabilities and this is how they manifest."

What I can't say, because it is erasure and lateral ableism no matter my relative privilege: "You don't face this type of ableism for [disability I don't have] because it's exclusive to [disability I have] and any ableism that manifests that way is actually an attack on me."

Fundamentally, you cannot say that someone with a different disability DOESN'T face a specific type of ableism because you are not an authority on the experience of that disability. You are an expert on the experience of your disability. You cannot claim exclusive experiences because to do so, you would have to experience the disabilities you don't have while also not experiencing the ones you do. You would have to verify experiences that you simply don't have - in multiple places and contexts and presentations and as multiple people.

Oh wait, there's a simpler way to do that.

Listen to people about their experiences of their own disabilities and the ableism they face for it.

(Plaintext: Listen to people about their experiences of their own disabilities and the ableism they face for it.)

It's not ableist to say "no, you aren't the only disability that faces this ableism" or "no, it isn't targeted at you when it's aimed at me" or "actually, bigots also use [slur] to mean [definition specifically attacking my disability]". It is however ableist to tell people that because they have an axis of privilege over you, they can't talk about their own oppression on an entirely different axis because you've decided that experiencing similar oppression means you're the only person who experiences said oppression.

Or to put it more simply: Experiencing a type of ableism does NOT give you the right to speak over others when they say they experience it too for different reasons. Having something bad happen to you as a group does not give you proof that you're the ONLY group it happens to.

"X is caused by y, therefore x is ONLY caused by y" is quite literally a logical fallacy. It's called fallacy of the single cause (at least it's a nice obvious name, honestly).

This is the same discourse as cripplepunk. In fact, it's the primary motivator behind most slur discourse, and the reason why I'd honestly rather have blanket permission issued within oppressed groups I'm in* for everyone to reclaim in good faith** any slur that affects that group.

**What does "reclaim in good faith" mean? It means reclaiming only for self-usage, and only for self-usage specifically in a positive way - so no "ugh, I'm such a useless cripple", for example. True reclamation does require use of it against you/your disability in the first place, however, part of not being a cop about it is assuming that anyone who uses it in a positive sense for self-labeling has in fact experienced that. In short, it involves believing people about the oppression they explicitly say or imply through their reclamation that they've experienced.

*Note: I am specifically NOT a person of color or a member of an oppressed ethnoreligion/ethnicity, and recognize that dynamics of racial and ethnic oppression may be unique in some ways. However in disabled, queer, plural, alterhuman, and other marginalized spaces I do occupy, these are my feelings.

It is lateral ableism to tell another disabled person that they haven't experienced a type of ableism or didn't experience it due to their ACTUAL disability and therefore have no right to reclaim what was used to hurt them.

It is ableism to say "the bullet meant to shoot you, that hit you, was designed in part to hurt me, and therefore any time someone is shot with it, it was actually an attack on me. Hand over the bullet and never keep it or use it as you please again or you're basically shooting me with a different bullet." (For those that struggle with metaphors, the bullets are ableism.)

It's ducks saying that deer have no right to reclaim shotgun shells. Yes, slugs are more common than buckshot, but there's literally a type of the same exact kind of ammo designed for use on the deer too. In just the same way, some slurs and other forms of ableism are more typically used against one group but even have a (sometimes identical) variant specifically designed for use against other groups. "Mental cripple" and "retard" for sociodevelopmental disabilities are prime examples of this.

This is a wider problem in marginalized communities. "If you have any privilege at all, ever, you need to sit down and shut up about your own experiences. Only our least privileged members are the experts on any of our experiences. They make the rules about which of your own experiences you're allowed to talk about and what you're allowed to say about them." What's important to note, is that this is coming as much from the members with said privilege as the ones without.

And yes, this is an EXTREMELY insular community issue, but it's not mutually exclusive to the fact that large portions of the community DON'T listen to the less privileged ones about their own experiences! Just like the hobbies example (which, I know people may dismiss or cry 'false equivalence', but I want to again note that it primarily affects bedbound people who are too sick to do things they enjoy, and therefore less privileged by any metric).

I specifically referenced that example because it's exactly more privileged members speaking over less privileged members about the less privileged members' OWN experiences.

In fact, I'd say it's in fact a RESPONSE to that kind of being spoken over. It's an extreme pendulum swing in the other direction - "you need to shut up and LISTEN to us about our experiences". Which, if it stopped there, would be perfect! It's the part that follows it - "therefore, if we experience something, we're the ONLY people who are allowed to talk about it and the only people who even experience it".

I've seen time and time again, too, that even if you conclusively prove you experience something, the goalposts just get moved.

"Well, you experience it but not systemically."

"Okay, but you experienced it less."

"It didn't hurt you as much because it was meant to hurt me instead."

"Well, you're probably reclaiming it as an insult." (despite no proof of such, or even proof to the contrary)

"Well, if you experienced it systemically and it did hurt you and you experienced it just as much, it's actually because of [other identity that we begrudgingly acknowledge is affected] and not [identity that you say actually caused you to experience it] and it therefore isn't even [same type of bigotry] but [completely different type] instead."

"Well, even if you experienced it systemically as much as I did, it still hurts me more because it's about my identity and not yours, even though you were the one literally being attacked with it."

And if all that fails it's "no, that's not why you experienced it" or "no, you didn't experience that".

All examples I touched on earlier in this post, but still important to talk about specifically.

The person being hurt by a type of ableism, including slurs, is the person who they are being used against, period. It doesn't matter if they have "the right" disability. It doesn't matter what group the slurs or ableism is primarily used against. The bigots are TRYING to hurt the person they are specifically using the bigotry against, and that person is the one who ends up hurt by it. Full stop, no argument.

And if someone is hurt by a word, especially repeatedly, they have a right to reclaim it. Period.

At the end of the day, does this matter all that much? It's just community microaggressions, right?

Here's my feelings on it: I'm never going to let petty infighting get in the way of fighting for total disabled liberation. Just because some individuals are guilty of lateral ableism doesn't mean I won't fight for a world in which they face no ableism. It would be ableist of me to leave them behind over something like this. Not to mention, there's no need for anyone to be considered an authority on ableism in a world where there is none.

That being said, it is still a minor hurdle on the way to disabled liberation. If we police our own community and shut down discussions of ableism, how can we effectively fight for our right to not be policed or shut down by abled people? We're demonstrating that it's acceptable behavior.

You can argue all you want that abled people should recognize that it's different and they don't have a voice in the conversation - but what about those who are explicitly telling abled people that it's okay to shut down THESE disabled people talking about THEIR experiences because they're privileged invaders in the conversation and abled people should use their privilege over us to act as an even higher authority and stop us?

What about the conflicting messages of "abled people use your power over these disabled people to force them not to talk about the ableism they experience, but not these OTHER disabled people doing the same thing".

It's one thing to make a blanket statement to say "hey, if someone is actually attacking the validity of a disabled (or any marginalized) identity or talking over them about their own experiences, then shut that down". Saying a given marginalized identity doesn't exist or is inherently harmful is always bad. Talking over someone on their OWN experiences, when they are simply talking about things they've directly experienced, is always bad. I don't think it's the end of the world to say "use your privilege to shut down ableism" to abled people.

The problem is telling abled people that someone TALKING about their own legitimate experiences is bad and it's okay to shut it down. Abled people should not ever be given permission to do so - whether using their own judgment or just doing so on the word of disabled people.

Even besides that, though, it's still ableism, and lateral ableism is also a barrier in the way of total disabled liberation. It is an active threat to unity, to our ability to organize and demand change. We can fight to remove it from our communities while still focusing our energy primarily outward on fighting for liberation within the larger abled world.

Finally, it's an issue because it creates more hierarchies to solve existing ones. It says "instead of addressing the actual ableism, we're just going to flip it so you're the one experiencing it instead". It's like the so-called "feminists" that just want a matriarchy. It's not about creating a safer environment, it's about being the one to perpetrate the harm currently being done to you.

So, in cases where neither group has any real systemic power over each other, it doesn't even do that - it simply creates an environment where the original harm continues to be perpetuated while another new harm occurs. It devolves into a petty slap fight, distracting from actual liberation while also causing both parties to be hurt. That's not acceptable praxis. It's not praxis at all.

Even with the harm being small in scale, it's still not okay. Two injustices don't make a justice, just as two wrongs don't make a right.

This is very much something we need to address - in disabled spaces being my focus here - but also in queer, plural, alterhuman, and other marginalized spaces. And all of stems from the idea that "privilege" is the same as having the power to oppress someone. It's the idea that if you have an axis of privilege over another person with the same overall marginalized identity as you, that you are equivalent to being nonmarginalized compared to them and therefore disagreeing with them in any way about your OWN marginalized experiences is bigotry.

Functionally, it's that you're a bigoted privileged invader of marginalized spaces if you dare to have an opinion on a shared type of oppression. And speaking as a transfemmasc person, mayyyyyybe we should actually kill that rhetoric forever.

#ableism #privilege #oppression #reclamation #cw guns #fwiw it seems people who are MORE privileged are MORE willing and likely to harass over this #while less privileged people are more likely to block #and I cannot overstate that harassment is never acceptable #which is why we also have a hard rule about simply ignoring or blocking when we're the ones in a position of privilege #and that should be your rule too #(I mean engaging respectfully if you disagree is fine either way tbc)#just having been on both sides it would not be okay for me in the cases where I am less privileged to tell people what they experience #in fact that's the whole reason I created this blog #cripplepunk discourse led me to advocate for all neurodivergent people being able to reclaim cripple and being included in cripplepunk #if they wanted to be and found meaning in doing so #because 1. cripple is not a physical-disability-exclusive slur #and 2. neurodivergence can be physically disabling #so if there was a movement that centered physical disability that didn't gatekeep a universal disabled slur #people physically disabled by their neurodivergence should STILL not be told that they're wrong/lying about that experience #and should be let into the space on the basis of their neurophysical disabilities #also a lot of times the posts that are like 'able-bodied NDs do not derail' are talking about experiences that both groups experience #and it's not 'derailing' to say 'hey I experience this too for a different reason!' even if said reason is not at all physically disabling #I've seen SO MANY physically disabled people say 'neurodivergent people don't experience this!!1'#and just sat there going 'I experienced this as a neurodivergent person before I became physically disabled for YEARS #and continue to do so due at least in part to my neurodivergence now that I have a physical disability that could also contribute to it #anyway #mod stars #unitypunk

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