[Plura-list] The FCC wants your broadband measurements; Murder Offsets

[Cory Doctorow]

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I'm appearing at the FITC conference on next Tuesday!

* Panel: "Intersection: Seeing Our Failures from the Future"
https://fitc.ca/presentation/intersection-future/

* Keynote: "Interop: Self-Determination vs. Dystopia"
https://fitc.ca/presentation/interop/

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Today's links

* The FCC wants your broadband measurements: Big Cable doesn't want us
to confuse the issue with relevant facts.

* Murder Offsets: Greenwashing will kill us all.

* This day in history: 2006, 2016, 2020

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current
writing projects, current reading

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🕴🏽 The FCC wants your broadband measurements

The FCC long epitomized "regulatory capture" - an agency whose
leadership worked a revolving door with the industry it oversees; a
crooked beat-cop who served as willing accomplice to decades of fraud,
leaving Americans to struggle with overpriced, underperforming broadband.

There have been many terrible FCC chairs and commissioners, but even in
that crowded, manure-strewn field, one man stands out as the worst FCC
chair in American history, Ajit Pai, the former Verizon lawyer who
became Trump's FCC chairman.

Pai set many precedents, such as accepting millions of comments in
support of his anti-Net Neutrality order even though they came from dead
people, people whose identities had been stolen, and a series of random
strings prepended to "@pornhub.com".

Although he resigned last year, he continues to set precedent, refusing
to surrender his official Twitter account after leaving office, and
blocking his critics,  Americans who are therefore excluded from the
public records of his FCC activities.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210408/23022846580/ajit-pai-should-not-still-have-his-government-twitter-account.shtml

*Any* successor to Pai was going to be an improvement, but Biden's FCC
chair, Jessica Rosenworcel, is shaping up to be objectively *fantastic*.

Last month, she issued a call for Americans to create an official record
of their disappointments with their ISPs.

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

The Rosenworcel hits keep coming! This month, she inaugurated an
objective, data-driven survey of American broadband performance, calling
on Americans to use and report speed-test apps that document their
shitty, overpriced connectivity.

https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-371522A1.pdf

The FCC Speed Test App was first released in 2014 and has been under
development ever since, but Ajit Pai studiously ignored these results in
favor of the rosily juked stats the telecoms industry frauded up for the
FCC's delectation.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/12/fcc_internet_speed/

The news that the FCC is using its own 7-year-old app to gather data on
real-world broadband performance shouldn't be surprising and uplifting,
but it is. It's a tribute to just how uniquely terrible Pai's run was,
and what a great monster of history he turned out to be.

After a year of lockdown when the American people relied on broadband to
deliver employment, education, health, family life, civics, politics, as
well as news and entertainment, the unforgivable nature of Pai's rule
became undeniable.

Pai was the worst, but he was carrying out a long tradition of official
FCC forbearance for underinvestment, monopoly and price-gouging. We
can't afford that any longer - and, it seems that with Rosenworcel, we
won't be asked to.

jacme31, CC BY-SA, modified; Fly, CC BY, modified)

Murder Offsets (permalink)

The Climate Ad Project's "Murder Offsets" PSA is a brilliant
anti-greenwashing piece, comparing the way environmental criminals buy
"carbon offsets" for their pollution to a system where murderers escape
culpability by buying "murder offsets."

https://climateadproject.com/offsets/

To be sure, markets created the climate emergency by allowing firms to
reduce their costs by externalizing them on the rest of us - juicing
profits by polluting rather than switching to cleaner, more expensive
production techniques.

But it doesn't follow that markets will solve these problems if only
weforce firms to internalize these external costs - say, by creating
carbon offsets with tradeable credits.

The externalizing of costs didn't occur in a vacuum: it was deliberate,
and self-accellerating.

Executives at companies like Exxon knew they were on track to literally
drive our species to the brink of extinction.

They diverted some of the profits they received from this externalizing
activity to a sophisticated disinformation campaign to create climate
denial.

The idea that these executives simple "responded to incentives" - rather
than the idea that they are deliberate, cold- blooded murderers - is
laughably naive.

This is why all "green" investing ends up being a market for lemons,
with "Environmental, Social, and Governance" (ESG) funds stuffed full of
the world's worst polluters, from fast fashion companies to giant oil
companies.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/24/greenwashing/#bargaining

It's why carbon pricing is disfavored by the people who've done the
deepest work on the scale of the crisis and the likely outcomes from
different interventions, like the authors of the excellent "Making
Climate Policy Work":

https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Making+Climate+Policy+Work-p-9781509541805

Cap-and-trade isn't working. The Paris Accord targets fall short of
what's needed, and what's been done falls short of the Paris Accord.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/04/experts-lay-out-their-case-against-carbon-pricing.html

Cap-and-trade implies that there's a "right way" to do carbon-intensive
industry, and moreover, that the market will find it. As the Murder
Offsets video makes clear, this is absurd.

If an activity threatens our species, decisions about whether and when
it will be carried out should be determined by democratically
accountable governments with evidence from experts - not from CEOs
buying free-market indulgences to absolve themselves of responsibility.

This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago Yochai Benkler releases new book under CC license
https://cyber.harvard.edu/wealth_of_networks/index.php/Main_Page

#15yrsago Scientific management’s unscientific grounding: the Management
Myth
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/06/the-management-myth/304883/

#5yrsago How the UK’s biggest pharmacy chain went from family-run public
service to debt-laden hedge-fund disaster
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/13/how-boots-went-rogue

#5yrsago Brussels terrorists kept their plans in an unencrypted folder
called “TARGET”
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160413/17113634175/brussels-terrorist-laptop-included-details-planned-attack-unencrypted-folder-titled-target.shtml

#1yrago Abolish Silicon Valley: memoir of a driven startup founder who
became an anti-capitalist activist
https://memex.craphound.com/2020/04/14/abolish-silicon-valley-memoir-of-a-driven-startup-founder-who-became-an-anti-capitalist-activist/

#1yrago Amazon fires tech workers for their warehouse worker solidarity
https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/14/abolish-silicon-valley/#hang-together-hang-separately

#1yrago Ticketmaster ends refunds for canceled events
https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/14/abolish-silicon-valley/#ripoffs

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/), JWZ
(https://www.jwz.org/blog/).

Currently writing:

* A cyberpunk noir thriller novel, "Red Team Blues." Yesterday's
progress: 1015 words (60534 total).

Currently reading: Analogia by George Dyson.

Latest podcast: Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results
https://craphound.com/news/2021/03/28/past-performance-is-not-indicative-of-future-results/

Upcoming appearances:

* Interop: Self-Determination vs Dystopia (FITC), Apr 19-21,
https://fitc.ca/presentation/interop/

* Book launch for Bruce Sterling's Robot Artists & Black Swans (Book
People), Apr 27,
https://www.bookpeople.com/event/virtual-event-bruce-sterling-robot-artists-black-swans

Upcoming appearances:

* Interop: Self-Determination vs Dystopia (FITC), Apr 19-21,
https://fitc.ca/presentation/interop/

* Book launch for Bruce Sterling's Robot Artists & Black Swans (Book
People), Apr 27,
https://www.bookpeople.com/event/virtual-event-bruce-sterling-robot-artists-black-swans

Recent appearances:

* The Right to Repair Movement, Monopolies, and Solarpunk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmosdDCrL-4

* The surveillance state, digital monopolies, and why we should be
worried (Podsongs)
https://anchor.fm/podsongs/episodes/Cory-Doctorow-on-the-Surveillance-State--digital-monopolies--and-why-we-should-be-worried-eso43k

* Conspiracy Theories (Utopian Horizons):
https://soundcloud.com/utopianhorizons/conspiracy-theory-w-cory-doctorow

Latest book:

* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone
technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political
cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution
and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet
analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a
solution.
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59
(print edition:
https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907)
(signed copies:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies
here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime,
gender, and kicking ass. Order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed
copy here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.

Upcoming books:

* The Shakedown, with Rebecca Giblin, nonfiction/business/politics,
Beacon Press 2022

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy"
DeVilla

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