Tag: New York Times

Trump Junior and Russia

This weeks’ Fifth Column Podcast had an excellent discussion of Donald Trump Jr. and his attempt to get opposition research from the Russian government.

I have been pretty skeptical that the Trump administration and campaign actually did anything wrong with regard to Russia. I thought Trump was a poor candidate because he seemed very comfortable with authoritarians like Putin, which together with many positions he’s taken made me concerned about authoritarian policies he’d implement. Some of that concern has been well founded (e.g. appointing Jeff Sessions, removing an FBI Director he didn’t like), but in other places it has not. Trump seems to be bothered by criticism and a free press, but it’s clear the press is as robust and independent as ever.

I also thought Trump surrounded himself with really bad people, some of them with obvious terrible connections to the Russian government, like Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and Michael Flynn (all of whom were fired). Again, this points to his friendliness with authoritarians and perhaps his incompetence with whom he surrounds himself with, not that he’s had contact with the Russian government itself.

I thought the intense media scrutiny over Russia wouldn’t provide anything, and it was dragging on for far too long. I thought the worst thing we would find would be that Trump fired FBI Director Comey for investigating his ties to Russia, not for any connections to Russia itself. But I was wrong. The New York Times reporting on this was so impressive that Donald Trump Jr., the target of the Times‘ article actually felt it would be better if he published these emails himself!

Thus, I’m literally typing these word for word from Trump Jr.’s twitter account. He got an email saying “…and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father. This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump”

Trump Jr’s response: “…if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer”.

I don’t know if this is illegal, as Trump Jr. has some amorphous relationship with the Trump campaign and allegedly isn’t involved in the administration at all, despite regularly going on TV to defend the administration. However, it’s at the very least unpatriotic and seems pretty unethical. If agents of a foreign government are reaching out to you to attack political opponents, your response should be to forward it to the FBI, not to set up a meeting as soon as possible. Trump was elected to “drain the swamp”.  I thought that meant that many legislators are too close to special interests or are lobbied by large companies to pass favorable legislation. This is certainly problematic, but actively trying to get help from foreign governments to get into office seems at least as bad. Donald Trump Jr. is a swamp monster if ever there was such a thing.

Additionally, just like Hillary Clinton lied constantly about her email scandal (she didn’t have a private server; ok she did but there was nothing classified; ok it was classified but it was secure…), it turns out Trump Jr. and many other campaign members just straight up lied about having pursued Russian opposition research. Trump Jr. stated in a March interview that he had met people that were Russian but not meetings “…that were set up. None that I can think of at the moment. And certainly none that I was representing the campaign in any way, shape or form.” Here’s a full timeline, it’s pretty damning. This is the undermining of democracy that I thought Trump supporters claimed he was there to fight.

I wish all presidents were subjected to this sort of scrutiny. We had wall to wall media coverage for months with very few real stories until this week. The Obama administration crushed leakers and transparency, blocking FISA requests in an unprecedented manner. They brought government secrecy to a new level, while waging wars in several middle eastern countries without Congressional approval. Trump has only been in office for 6 months, and so it’s not hard to argue that the Obama administration was much worse in terms of doing illegal things, murdering civilians, spying on Americans and journalists, etc. Yet, media coverage has been much more aggressive on Trump (at least from the left, while the right-leaning media has often been at least as sycophantic as anything we saw under Obama on the left).  I guess it’s better late than never, but the media needs to be far more adversarial in the future long after Trump is gone.

 

Unpopular Net Neutrality Opinions

Net neutrality has benefits, and regulation has a role in ensuring its continuing existence, but there are several problems inherent in FCC telecom policy and the debate about net neutrality.

History

The new FCC chair (and Trump appointee) Ajit Pai has proposed reclassifying internet service providers as not “common carriers” under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act, thus reducing the available regulatory options for the FCC.

Net neutrality is the concept that all internet traffic should be treated identically by Internet Service Providers (like cable companies) or governments regardless of content, protocol, users, destination, sources, etc. It means that loading a webpage from this blog would not cost you more than loading a webpage from a large company, assuming the content size is similar.

The FCC has broadly promoted net neutrality in the past. Around 2008, the FCC blocked Comcast from slowing the speed of its users who were utilizing BitTorrent to download videos. Comcast appealed and won, with an appellate court ruling that the FCC did not have the anciliatory jurisdiction over Comcast’s network (Comcast v FCC). The FCC next tried to issue an Open Internet Order in 2010, but in Verizon v FCC, that order was largely vacated, as the same appellate court ruled that the FCC could not regulate ISPs unless it classified them as common carriers under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act. In 2015, the FCC classified ISPs as common carriers under Title II and enforced net neutrality rules.

Problems with Title II

A big problem with Title II is that it was written in 1934, 21 years before Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, was born. In fact, the vast majority of Title II is so useless that when Tom Wheeler proposed ISPs be classified as common carrier, he said that of the 61 Title II sections, the FCC would forebear from applying the entire title except six sections (201, 202, 208, 222, 254, and 255).

One question I cannot answer without more specific legal expertise is whether Wheeler’s rule only allows the application of those sections, or if in the future the FCC can unilaterally decide (without a vote) to apply other sections of Title II, now that ISPs are seen as common carriers. For example, Section 224 of Title II relates to pole attachments. Can the future FCC regulate broadband providers’ pole attachments if they wanted to under Wheeler’s rule? Even if they cannot, they can certainly write a new rule that applies all of Title II with a full vote of the commission.

Perhaps a better solution would be for Congress to pass a new law allowing the FCC to regulate net neutrality, but bar the FCC from regulating ISPs under Title II otherwise. This would narrow the FCC’s focus officially to what consumers care about. Of course, that would require nuanced Congressional action which is likely impossible given the many competing interests in both houses.

Is Title II regulation overwhelming and innovation killing? Ajit Pai has argued so. The New York Times editorial board disagrees, but their argument seems quite lacking.  They dismiss Pai’s claim that broadband capital investment declined since Title II classification as “alternative facts”, but a simple Google search reveals why they found numbers that conflict with Pai. The source, the Free State Foundation, calculated a trend line of broadband capital expenditures since 2003. They calculated the expected expenditures after the Title II regulation as compared with the actual. So while capital expenditures actually increased after the regulation, they increased less than the trend line indicates they should have.

Is it misleading for Pai to say capital expenditures decreased? Yes, or at the very least it’s imprecise. Is it misleading for Title II proponents to say there has been no effect? Probably, although trend lines are tricky. Additionally, the Times argues that the pattern of increased consolidation in the telecoms industry is a symptom of a healthy economic sector. This is a non sequitur. Mergers and acquisitions could be symptoms of profitable or unprofitable companies, depending on who is buying who, but ultimately to me it seems more indicative that economies of scale exist. One possible explanation for recent increase in economies of scale could be an increased regulatory burden. I don’t know if that’s the case, but to suggest that Charter’s purchase of Time Warner is a symptom of a healthy telecoms sector is the Times projecting their own political views onto market actions.

Problems with Net Neutrality

Ajit Pai has argued (in this Reason interview) that ISPs were not favoring some internet traffic over others. This seems incorrect. Comcast v. FCC was specifically about Comcast reducing the speed of some types of traffic. John Oliver points out that Google Wallet was not allowed to function on phones on the networks of AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint since it competed with a joint electronic wallet venture of those companies. On the other hand, Google Wallet still out-competed the networks’ own payment system despite being banned on those platforms. Consumer response was so positive on other networks that the consumers demanded it on AT&T and Verizon. Eventually the joint venture folded and got absorbed by Google Wallet/Android Pay.

Moreover, a few phone networks have run afoul of net neutrality rules by giving consumers free data for certain services, e.g. T-Mobile allowing streaming music to not count against a customers’ data cap. If the service provided by the content producer is so profitable that it can afford to pay for its own bandwidth, is it wrong to give that bandwidth to customers free of charge?

The economics here is complicated. In a perfectly competitive market, content producers could only charge for the marginal cost of producing more content while ISPs could only charge the marginal cost of additional bandwidth. Consumers would pay each company for their respective consumption of their products.

But we don’t have a competitive market, either for content producers (only HBO has Game of Thrones, only Netflix has Stranger Things) and especially not for ISPs. Since cable ISPs are state granted monopolies, there is a solid argument for regulating them, as they have leverage over content producers. That argument does disappear though when there is competition, such as in the case of wireless broadband.

It is also worth pointing out that the importance of “neutrality” towards content is only narrowly valid. For example, bandwidth at certain times is more valuable. The Economist has suggested electric power be charged at different rates when used at different times. Similar arguments could be used for internet usage. It is also undeniable that some internet traffic really is more important, and consumers would be willing to pay more to have their bank notifications or business calls come through faster than YouTube videos, which they might be ok with allowing to buffer. Certainly we would want consumers making this decision and not ISPs, especially when there is little ISP competition for most end users. Additionally, such prioritization could be done by software on the consumer/LAN side of the router, and ISPs should likely just be dumb pipes that deliver what we tell them to.

Finally, we should be cautious about locking in rules even if they make sense today. Markets change over time, and there is a possibility that past rules will restrict innovation in the future. Since competition itself can defend against bad ISP behavior (perhaps even better than the FCC), having the FCC focus on increasing competition seems at least as vital as net neutrality. Interestingly, this is what Ajit Pai has argued for (see Reason interview above).

Conclusion

Today it seems likely that a policy of net neutrality by cable ISPs is more beneficial than not. It also seems likely that to protect that idea today, some form of regulation is needed on cable companies that are state granted monopolies in a given area. Such regulation is not as clearly necessary in wireless providers, and we should always be reviewing the importance of FCC regulations in order to avoid a curtailment of innovation. Additionally, any regulation should come from new Congressional legislation, not a law written 80 years ago. However, the benefits of net neutrality should not be taken as given. Variations in the consumer value of content priority as well as bandwidth scarcity during peak hours are perfectly acceptable ways to prioritize internet traffic. The problem arises when monopoly ISPs are doing the prioritizing rather than consumers.

 

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