Quite possibly the single most consequential action of the Trump administration short of nuclear war is their efforts to destroy net neutrality.[1] They claim they are "restoring Internet freedom",[2] being the freedom of major Internet access providers like Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and Spectrum (formerly Chartered and TWC) to block, throttle, alter (including stripping encryption), and redirect your requests for information from the Internet.[3]
This is an issue that many people have not even heard of.
It's not well known partly because the mainstream media have a conflict of interest in reporting on it.
It's consequential, because if Trump's Federal Communications Commission (FCC) succeeds in destroying net neutrality, it will be much harder for individuals and small businesses to reach an audience,[4] and much harder for Internet entrepreneurs to develop new ways of using the Internet.[5] That's because Internet access providers have in the past and will in the future, block, throttle, alter, and redirect content they don't like and increase their rates to deliver content at the standard high speeds that everyone now expects.[6] Internet access providers do not want competition from individuals, small businesses and Internet startups.
Net neutrality is the principle that all traffic on the Internet should be treated equally by Internet access providers.
Net neutrality means that anyone with an Internet connection can compete in the marketplace of ideas based solely on the quality of their presentation.[7]
Less than three years after Dwight Eisenhower's presidency, he wrote that everyone he had communicated with who was knowledgeable about Vietnam agreed “that had elections been held at the time of the fighting [leading to the defeat of the French in 1954], possibly 80 percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh”.[12] If Eisenhower had supported Vietnamese elections planned for 1956, the US would not have supported a government whose mistreatment of its own population was a primary contributor to its defeat in 1975. However, Eisenhower felt unable to do this, apparently because Ho Chi Minh's popularity was virtually unknown in the US.
If all of Eisenhower's sources agreed about this, why was the US public so uninformed?
Eisenhower was hoping to be elected to a second term as President in 1956 and may not have wanted to explain why he had "lost Vietnam to Communism."
How terrorist groups end (n = 268): The most common ending for a terrorist group is to convert to nonviolence via negotiations (43 percent), with most of the rest terminated by law enforcement (40 percent). Groups that were ended by military force constituted only 7 percent.[13]
A 2008 RAND study reported that among the 268 terrorist groups they found that ended between 1968 and 2006, more terrorist groups won than were defeated militarily. Far more effective were negotiations, like those with the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, and law enforcement.
Why is the West using the least effective approach to terrorism?
After being relatively stable for the 50 years from 1925 to 1975, the incarceration rate in the US shot up by a factor of five in the last quarter of the twentieth century. This increase in incarcerations occurred without a corresponding change in crime rates. This change has been explained as a product of decisions by mainstream commercial broadcasters to focus on the police blotter while firing nearly all their investigative journalists. A few popular programs like “60 Minutes” were exceptions.[14]
The incarceration rate is a function of public perception of crime, which is unrelated to the crime rate, at least in the US between 1925 and 2014.
That works for a couple of reasons. First, the crime rate is low enough that most people's perceptions of crime come primarily from the media. Second, public policy tends to be set by what sounds right, ignoring substantial bodies of research on what policies are actually effective, because they are rarely featured in the mainstream media.[15]
Major broadcasters made out like bandits, while their audiences were largely unaware of what they had lost from the near elimination of investigative journalism.[16]
Every media organization in the world sells changes in audience behaviors to the people who pay their bills.
Media organizations rarely bite the hands that feed them. They must flinch before disseminating any information that might offend a major advertiser or anyone else with substantive control over their budgets or operations.[17]
Many if not all major problems facing humanity today are impacted by these two issues. Other factors impact different major problems differently, but media funding and governance is an underappreciated universal issue.[18]
Better media in general and net neutrality in particular are threats to major leaders the world over,[19] which explains the “Great Firewall of China”[20] and why Turkey is blocking Wikipedia.[21] Net neutrality makes it easier for the bottom 99.5 percent of the human population to obtain better information on options available to them and to organize to better defend and promote their own interests.[22]
One theory, based on "following the money", would seem to explain the difficulties in achieving progress in these and other intractable problems:
The most important information Americans need to protect their interests is rarely fit to print in the New York Times, because it would offend major advertisers -- and is similarly not fit to disseminate in other commercial media.[23]
Broadband Capital Expenditures by U.S. Broadband Providers ($ billions, 1996-2015)[24]
Everyone, including major Internet access providers and the Trump administration officially agrees with net neutrality.[25] However, Trump and his supporters claim that the 2015 Title II Order that made it possible to enforce "net neutrality" increased regulatory uncertainty, which forced major companies in this market to reduce their capital expenditures (CapEx) for investments in new high speed Internet infrastructure.
The drop in 2015 CapEx sounds big at almost a billion dollars but is less than three quarters of the annual changes since 1996. This is visible in the accompanying plot of U.S. Broadband CapEx investment, cited but not plotted in the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on "Restoring Internet Freedom" published May 18 by Trump's FCC.[26] The damage they claim does NOT make sense if one actually looks at the available data.
To save the nation from this minuscule damage, which they claim is major, they propose transferring net neutrality enforcement to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the antitrust division of the Department of Justice.[27]
Those opposing this action argue the following:
1. History records that the Title II Order provides the only way that a typical American will be able to find an Internet access provider who will NOT block, throttle, alter (including stripping encryption), or redirect their requests for information from the Internet.[28] FTC and antitrust enforcement cannot adequately protect consumers, small businesses and Internet startups.[29]Previous abuses by Internet access providers[30] led to several things:
eight years of increasing activism on this issue,
multiple lesser remedies by the FCC that were blocked by courts,
3.7 million comments on a proposed FCC action in 2014
that led to the Title II Order, and
almost 22 million comments on “Restoring Internet freedom” filed by the August 30 deadline.[31]
2. All relevant data that is reasonably available and credible indicate that the Title II Order is working to benefit society as a whole without seriously damaging Internet access providers.[32] The New York Times said Trump's FCC had to cherry-pick their data to get numbers supporting their desired policy change.[33] Ernesto Falcon, Legislative Council with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that the publicly traded companies in that market have not mentioned the Title II Order in their filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which is the only place with credible penalties for misleading comments. There, they've said that business is good.[34]Free Press analyzed 26 different financial measures that could reflect the impact on the industry of the Title II Order. Only five of the 26 were negative. Only two seemed statistically significant, and those showed improvements (not damage as Trump's FCC claims). It's not clear if any of these changes resulted from the Title II Order.[35]
3. Since the Title II Order, consumers have benefitted from being able to use Internet applications and devices that had previously been blocked.[36]
4. If the FCC decides to move forward with parts of their proposed changes, “the result will have a disastrous effect on innovation in the Internet ecosystem”, according to Internet engineers and pioneers:[37] Without enforceable net neutrality, effective deployment of new Internet capabilities would require permissions that would rarely be profitably available to a startup.
However, it seems likely that this issue will move from the FCC to Congress, because the stakes are huge, as indicated above. Ernesto Falcon, Legislative Council for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said, “People need to take it to the next step, which is ... meet your elected officials, your two Senators and member of the House ..., because it’s only through mobilization that we’ll win this.”[38]
Many consumer advocacy groups are organizing around this issue through a coalition called “BattleForTheNet.com”.
FCC Restoring Internet Freedom (2017): Federal Communications Commission (May 18, 2017), Restoring Internet Freedom, WC Docket 17-108(PDF), U.S. Federal Communications Commission, retrieved 2017-09-01
↑This included incidents in 1999 where an individual tested security measures on the U.S. Southwest border and two others tried to enter the cockpit of an America West flight. None of these three seem to have been part of the 19 suicide mass murderers of September 11, 2001. See s:Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001/Part 4 (Declassified), pp. 418-419 and 433-434. This document is officially available from the web site of the U.S. House Intelligence committee. However, a link to that web site from the Wikipedia article on "The 28 Pages" is generally unresponsive. Anyone questioning the veracity of the Wikisource version of this document is encouraged to ask a representative in the U.S. House of Senate about this -- and post any responses to the "Discuss" page associated with this article.
↑The leadership of ISIL reportedly came, at least initially, almost exclusively from Saddam's military officers: These men were thrown out of work by the U.S. "De-Ba'athification" program without reasonable alternatives for how to use their time constructively. The rest of them have largely been inspired by the Wahhabi / Salafist branch of Islam, which has been promoted for decades by Saudi Arabia. This is the most violent strain of Islam. Other motivation includes revulsion over the death and destruction created by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the corruption in the post-Saddam Iraqi government sustained by U.S.-imposed censorship of the Iraqi media, and torture of prisoners at places like Abu Ghraib. For more, see the Wikiversity article on "Winning the War on Terror," accessed 2017-09-01. This includes the observation from Lt. Col. Brian Steed, who teaches history at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in Leavenworth, is fluent in Arabic and the author of a recent book on ISIS, that islamic terrorists comprise between 0.03 and 0.14 percent of Islam. This is his personal, professional observation and is not an official policy of the U.S. government.
↑Eisenhower, Dwight D. (1963), The White House Years: Mandate for change, 1953-1956, Doubleday, p. 372
↑Sacco, Vincent F (2005). When Crime Waves. Sage. ISBN 0761927832., and Youngblood, Steven (2017). Peace Journalism Principles and Practices. Routledge. pp. 115–131. ISBN 978-1-138-12467-7.. See also Sacco, Vincent F. (May 1995), "Media Constructions of Crime", Annals of the American Academy of Political & Social Sciences, 539: 141–154, reprinted as Sacco, Vincent F. (1998), Potter, Gary W.; Kappeler, Victor E. (eds.), Constructing Crime: Perspectives on Making News and Social Problems, Waveland press, pp. 37–51, esp. 42, ISBN0-88133-984-9, and the Wikiversity article on "Winning the War on Terror," accessed 2017-09-01.
↑On February 29, 2016 Les Moonves, President and CEO of CBS, bragged to an investor conference that the Trump campaign "may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS. ... The money's rolling in, this is fun." He'd said essentially the same thing the previous December. And in 2012, Moonves similarly noted that, "Super PACs may be bad for America, but they’re very good for CBS." Fang, Lee (February 29, 2016), "CBS CEO: "For Us, Economically, Donald's Place in This Election Is a Good Thing"", The Intercept, First Look Media, retrieved 2017-03-22. See also the discussion of this in the Wikiversity article on "Winning the War on Terror," accessed 2017-09-01.
↑For other examples of problems made intractable by flinching by mainstream media, see the Wikiversity article on "Winning the War on Terror," accessed 2017-09-01.
↑Kahneman (2011). See also the discussion of human psychology and how people make decisions, based on Kahneman, in Winning the War on Terror, Wikiversity, retrieved 2017-10-16
↑Censorship of Wikipedia has been documented in many countries including China, France, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, the United Kingdom and Uzbekistan. However, censorship of Wikipedia in many of these countries has been quite limited, with the well-known exceptions of China and Turkey.
↑This graph shows the income of the given percentiles plus the average from 1947 to 2010 in 2010 dollars. The 2 columns of numbers in the right margin are the cumulative growth 1970-2010 and the annual growth rate over that period. The vertical scale is logarithmic, which makes constant percentage growth appear as a straight line. From 1947 to 1970, all percentiles grew at essentially the same rate; the light, straight lines for the different percentiles for those years all have the same slope. Since then, there has been substantial divergence, with different percentiles of the income distribution growing at different rates. For more details see the help file for the "incomeInequality" data in the Ecdat package available from the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN; see r-project.org). We say 99.5 percent, because the 99.5th percentile doubled when the average annual income did between 1970 and 2010, but every percentile below that got a smaller share of those productivity improvements: The incomes of the 99th percentile increased only 73 percent, and the incomes of families making less increased even less. Meanwhile, the incomes of the top one hundredth of one percent almost tripled. See the accompanying chart. For more on the relation to income inequality, see EffectiveDefense reply comments (2017)
↑For a more in-depth discussion of this, see the Wikiversity article on "Winning the War on Terror," accessed 2107-09-01.
↑Joint Comments by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) documented both (a) statements supporting net neutrality and (b) actions inconsistent with those statements by several leading Internet access service providers. Internet access providers stand to gain billions of dollars in additional revenue by destroying net neutrality; ACLU and EFF have only their reputations to protect. ACLU reply comments (2017)
↑In addition to the EFF comments (2017), the Engineers' letter (2017), and the Wikipedia article on "Net neutrality in the United States", Commissioner Clyburn noted in her dissent in FCC Restoring Internet Freedom (2017) that FCC Chairman Pai and others complained in 2015 that the Obama administration had not invested enough time and other resources in economic research to evaluate the impact of their Title II Order before adopting it. However, Pai and others proceeded to overturn the Title II Order without any apparent consideration of research like what they had previously requested. In fact, there are two economists who are acknowledged leaders in studying "market power", focusing especially on the structure of telecommunications. They found, in brief, that there is little honest competition in this market, and this is a problem for the future of the international economy: Jean Tirole, who won the 2014 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for seminal research in this area, and Eli Noam, author and editor of many recent works in this area. See Crawford, Susan P (October 14, 2014), Nobel-Winning Message for the FCC: U.S. telecommunications policy makers long ago turned their backs on Nobel-winning economist Jean Tirole's sensible assessments of private communications utilities -- with disastrous results, Bloomberg, retrieved June 23, 2017,
Laffont, Jean-Jacques; Tirole, Jean (2000), Competition in telecommunications, MIT Press, ISBN0-262-12223-5 and Noam, Eli M. (2009), Media ownership and concentration in America, Oxford U. Pr., ISBN978-0-19-518852-3
↑We say, "seemed" rather than "were" statistically significant, because the assessment of statistical significance assumes statistical independence, which may not hold. See the summary in the Appendix to Friends of Community Media (August 30, 2017), Friends of Community Media Reply Comment in Opposition to Restoring Internet Freedom NPRM(PDF), U.S. Federal Communications Commission, pp. 8–11, retrieved 2017-08-30
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