[Plura-list] Help news, not news-barons; Impunity for NYPD cops who brutalized BLM protesters; Aviation bailout cost $666k/job

[Cory Doctorow]

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I'm speaking at three more events this week!

Today: Digital Markets Act: What’s in it for citizens?
https://www.eff.org/event/digital-markets-act-whats-it-citizens

Fri: World Ethical Data Forum https://worldethicaldataforum.org/wedf-2020

Fri: "The Future You" with Brian David Johnson
https://www.changinghands.com/event/march2021/brian-david-johnson-future-you-break-through-fear-and-build-life-you-want

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Today's links

* Help news, not news-barons: EFF on the proposed antitrust exemption
for news.

* Impunity for NYPD cops who brutalized BLM protesters: Only two
officers face serious discipline.

* Aviation bailout cost $666k/job: Socialism for capitalists.

* This day in history: 2006, 2011, 2016, 2020

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

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💂🏼‍♀️ Help news, not news-barons

More often than not, when I encounter a proposal to address monopoly
power, I return to that old Irish joke: "If you wanted to get there, I
wouldn't start from here."

Today, it's the proposal to save American news media by granting an
exception to antitrust law so the news companies can form a cartel to
bargain with the ad-tech duopoly represented by Googbook.

Let's start with the sleaziness of Googbook's ads. The ad-tech markets
are rigged from asshole to appetite. Googbook defrauds buyers and
sellers, collude to rig prices, and trouser billions for their trouble.
It's not just sleazy, it's criminal.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#adtech

Publishers are victimized by this fraud. The ad-tech duopoly uses funny
accounting to shift billions from publishers of all kind to their own
balance sheets (advertisers also suffer, but we're talking publishers at
the moment).

The news industry deserves our sympathy for this, but they keep
squandering it by saying stupid things like "Google steals from us by
linking to our websites." These stupid things are credulously repeated
by both the left- and right-wing press.

https://prospect.org/blogs/tap/will-google-stop-stealing-content-from-the-media/

Google and Facebook don't steal from publishers by sending them traffic.
They don't steal from them by including short snippets from their
articles. Neither of those things are stealing.

Googbook steals from publishers through ad-fraud and price-rigging.

It is frankly baffling to me that the news media has decided to ignore
the vast, multi-billion-dollar fraud that is ad-tech in favor of the
nonsensical proposition that directing readers to your articles and
engaging in fair use quotation are crimes.

Writing for EFF's Deeplinks blog, my colleagues Katharine Trendacosta
and Danny O'Brien describe the flaws in the Journalism Competition and
Preservation Act, which proposes antitrust exemptions to news
organizations to help them push back against Googbook.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/antitrust-exemption-news-media-wont-take-us-back-time-big-tech

To understand why this proposal is before the Congress, you have to
understand that the dominant school of antitrust enforcement in the west
is the "consumer harm" standard, popularized by Robert Bork when he was
serving as Ronald Reagan's court sorcerer.

Bork was the Qanon of antitrust. He insisted that if you read the US's
four founding antitrust statutes closely enough, you'd learn that
despite the *explicit* language saying monopolies were bad because *they
are monopolies*, Congress only intended to shut down *bad* monopolies.

What's a bad monopoly? A monopoly that raises prices. If you can't prove
that a merger will lead to higher prices, it should be permitted. If you
can't prove that higher prices after the merger were caused by monopoly,
they should be forgiven.

Of course, Bork determined whether high prices could be attributed to a
monopoly through complex economic models that only he and his friends at
the University of Chicago economics department could create and
interpret, and the models always said monopolies were fine.

Thus monopolies began to form in every industry, taking over one part of
the supply chain or another. Once that happened, that element of the
supply chain started to gouge everyone else. Every other part of the
supply chain had to monopolize in self-defense.

Bork's version of antitrust is pro-monopoly, but anti-cartel. If six
companies form an agreement to insist on a certain price, the FTC will
flay them alive. But if they merge into *one* company and fix the
prices, the FTC is fine with it.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/16/wage-theft/#excessive-buyer-power

That's why the news industry wants the Journalism Competition and
Preservation Act. Ad-tech is a duopoly and Googbook colludes to rig the
ad market, stealing billions from publishers. Publishers, meanwhile, are
highly concentrated, but not so concentrated as Googbook.

They want to form a cartel to collectively bargain for more money from
Googbook, but they need an antitrust waiver first, or the FTC will chain
them to a boulder and send an eagle to peck out their liver every day
for 1,000 years.

We need an active, independent news media. But if you want to get there,
I wouldn't start from here. The news industry today is not a collection
of scrappy, independent businesses devoted to telling the truth. Those
businesses are long gone, emulsified by Googbook's frauds.

Their assets were snapped up at fire-sale prices by "hedge funds,
private equity ghouls, and giant media near-monopolies." They are
debt-loaded zombies puppeteered by vulture capitalists and billionaire
dilettantes with pretensions of saviorhood.

And while the beloved papers of yesteryear were finished off by the
internet, they were easy pickings, thanks to Wall Street's financial
engineering. Long before Craig started Craiglist and diverted the easy
money of classified ads, the newspapers were being hollowed out.

The newspaper families sold out to corporate raiders in leveraged
buyouts that left the papers drowning in debt. These corporate geniuses
merged papers into chains and fired local reporters *and* local
salespeople, consolidating them to realize "efficiencies."

They flogged off the papers' head offices and printing plants, often
selling the presses themselves, leasing back the assets they'd once
owned, exposing themselves to rent- and interest-shocks.

*Then* the internet came along, and an industry that had weathered
innumerable technological shocks from the telegraph to 24-hour cable,
from radio to satellites, was too sickly and starved to do it again.

The internet is good at providing classified ad alternatives, but firing
the sales agents who'd spent a lifetime building relationships with
local merchants left the papers with no home court advantage.

And switching from reporters with distinctive insights and audiences to
wire-services meant that when the newspapers went online, much of what
they published was word-for-word identical to their competitors.

If you want to get there, don't start from here. Saving the press by
allowing the scumbags who bought the husks from the sociopaths that
produced them is a fool's errand. We don't need collective bargaining
for media companies: we need collective bargaining for JOURNALISTS.

And we need to fix the ad-tech market: unwind mergers, prosecute fraud,
introduce competition.

That's what they edged towards in Australia with the news bargaining
effort.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/21/paltrow-industrial-complex/#facecrook

The Australian proposal mandated algorithmic transparency, a ban on
retaliation against publishers that opt out of the duopoly, and other
measures that were a welcome step to cleaning up the dirty ad-tech market.

But none of that came to fruition: instead, the Australian process
turned into a pissing match between Facebook and Rupert Murdoch, and the
two giants eventually struck a private deal that sidestepped any of
these requirements.

As Danny and Katharine write, "Congress should focus its attention on
making the sweeping changes to antitrust law we so desperately need.
Figure out how to curb these oligopolies’ power."

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💂🏼‍♀️ Impunity for NYPD cops who brutalized BLM protesters

Last summer, a bizarre war broke out over the NYPD's disciplinary
records, long shielded from public scrutiny. The state legislature
ordered these records published, the NYPD got a judge to block the
order, but not before Propublica got a copy.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/27/ip/#nypd-who

These records were pretty dismal reading, even though they really only
served to confirm the obvious fact that the NYPD was completely out of
control, incapable of applying even symbolic sanctions to cops who
commited strings of violent crimes against the people of New York.

But of course, we knew that already. We knew about the string of police
killings that went unpunished, no matter how egregious. To get a sense
of how off-the-rails the NYPD is in Eric Umansky's expose of the ghastly
2019 murder of Kawaski Trawick.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#Kawaski-Trawick

Trawick was Black. The NYPD murders and maims Black people with
especial, sadistic vigor. Despite a prohibition on the lethal
choke-holds that killed Eric Garner in broad daylight, NYPD officer
continue to choke, and choke, and choke Black men.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/21/i-cant-breathe/#chokeholds

No surprise, then, that NYC was one of the focuses of last summer's BLM
uprising. And no surprise that the protesters who turned out to demand
an end to the NYPD's racist campaign of terror were subjected to
unimaginable acts of official violence.

Now, Umansky reports on the Civilian Complaint Review Board's progress
in investigating the cops who punched, kicked and trapped demonstrators,
a progress report Propublica shamed the CCRB into releasing.

https://www.propublica.org/article/only-two-nypd-officers-face-serious-discipline-from-a-watchdogs-investigations-into-abuse-of-black-lives-matter-protesters

It's been nine months since the uprising, since the whole world saw
endless videos of the NYPD's acts of egregious, unprovoked acts of
violence. In that time, the CCRB has brought serious disciplinary action
against two NYPD officers.

Two.

Nine months after the uprising, "60% of the agency’s 297 protest-related
cases are still open...75 cases were closed before a full investigation
could be completed."

How can this be?

Well, NYPD officers "[wore] protective gear with incorrect shield
numbers." They "repeatedly said it had no body-worn camera footage of an
incident" ("only to have investigators later discover that there was, in
fact, footage").

As for those two officers facing serious discipline, have no fear:
"commissioners have often used their discretion to overturn not only the
CCRB’s recommendations for punishments but also rulings by NYPD hearing
officers and even guilty pleas agreed to by police officers."

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💂🏼‍♀️ Aviation bailout cost $666k/job

Since January of 2001 - 20+ years! - I've been digesting all the news I
read that seems significant by writing summaries and analysis on a blog,
first on Boing Boing and then on pluralistic.net, my solo project.

This is an incredibly useful exercise, one that converts the fragmented
and chaotic news-cycle into a series of puzzle pieces that slowly click
together, building up a coherent picture of what's happened, what's
happening, and what might happen.

About a decade in, I started reviewing my older posts every morning,
going back one year, five years and ten years. I still do it, only now,
it's #1yrago, #5yrsago, #10yrsago, #15yrsago, and #20yrsago. I repost
the most significant of these each day in my blog and newsletter.

Today's edition contains a link to this one-year-old post, "American
Airlines blew billions, now it wants a bailout ," describing how AA
accumulated $30b in debt, mostly through stock-buybacks, and as begging
for billions more in public funds.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/18/diy-tp/#aa-crashes

This was - and is - outrageous. Over the period that AA was liquidating
its cash-reserves through financial engineering schemes that made
millionaires out of its stock-compensated C-suite, it was turning its
service into flying garbage.

Prices went up, seats got smaller, routes got centralized around
inconvenient, delay-plagued hubs. They lost bags. A year ago, Tim Wu
catalogued these sins and more for the NY Times.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/opinion/airlines-bailout.html

Wu proposed that a bailout for airlines (not just AA, but the whole
monopolized sector, which had all committed AA's sins to varying
degrees) should come with strings attached - ending surprise fees,
minimum seat standards, and an end to common ownership.

Common ownership? Yes. All the airlines' cap tables have high degrees of
overlap - that is, they all belong to the same investors. Or rather,
investor. Single. Warren Buffett is nipple-deep in each of the American
aviation giants.

Maybe you see Buffett as a folksy grampa. He's not. Don't let the old
car and modest home fool you. Buffett's a pure Rockefeller sociopath,
minus the flash. He only buys into monopolies, then squeezes customers
and suppliers, destroying their lives.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/10/folksy-monopolists/#folksy-monopolists

The airlines were no paragons before Buffett bought giant slices of all
the major aviation companies in the US, but afterwards, they got *much*
worse. They withdrew from routes they competed on, leaving one supplier
for each, who could raise prices without fearing competition.

They merged with one another. They squeezed their pilots, flight
attendants, mechanics and baggage handlers. They introduced absurd fees,
charging you for the privilege of selecting your seat in advance so you
could be sure you got to sit wiht your small children.

The seats themselves shrank. So did the meals - which now cost a pretty
penny. Canceling or changing a ticket became a luxury that cost more
than the ticket itself. But the airlines could cancel or reroute you, or
strand you on a runway.

If you didn't like it, they'd bring in uniformed thugs to literally beat
you bloody and drag you out of your seat.

https://consumerist.com/2017/10/18/two-chicago-aviation-officers-fired-for-role-in-dragging-united-passenger-from-flight/

Even if you thought that the US government should take measures to
ensure that there were still airlines plying the American skies after
the crisis ended, only Warren Buffett and other major airline
shareholders wanted this system to continue.

Well, it's been a year to the day since Wu's op-ed, and the NYT's Andrew
Ross Sorkin is back in the paper, assessing the bailout that Big Plane
got and what the public got in return.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/business/dealbook/airline-bailouts.html

All told, the airlines got $50B in public funds and saved 75,000 jobs.
That's $666k per job. Now, obviously, the airlines didn't spend three
quarters of a million dollars per employee over the past year - that
money has gone to their shareholders, not their employees.

The shareholders are happy about this. Shares in United have tripled
during the crisis. For United execs - paid in stock - that's a massive
payday. For Warren Buffett, who owns far more stock that United's
C-suite, it's a vast, permanent fortune.

The past year has seen the transfer of most of $50b from the federal
government to the wealthiest execs and investors in America. The
airlines weren't punished for squandering their pre-pandemic warchests
on buy-backs. They were rewarded for it.

The right likes to wring its hands about "moral hazard":

"If we ensure people who lose their jobs don't starve or end up
homeless, why would they show up for work?"

This is just cruelty dressed up as rationality.

But moral hazard IS real, and applies exclusively to remorseless plutes.
With the aviation bailout, the US government has signaled to airline
execs and investors that if you spend the company dry while enriching
yourself, Uncle Sucker will bail you out, no strings attached.

Other travel-related sectors - hotels, rental cars, restaurants, travel
agencies - didn't get bailed out. The airlines, meanwhile, got so much
money they literally can't figure out how to spend it all.

How else to account for United blowing $20m on a daffy electric
helicopter startup that went public through a scammy SPAC (the reigning
speculative garbage fire - until NFTs arrived on the scene).

The airline bailout did come with strings, but they were illusory.
Capping exec pay is meaningless when bailout money can be used to
inflate share prices and make overnight millionaires out of top
management. The warrants given to the Treasury are infinitesimally cosmetic.

The airlines aren't too big to fail. No company is. The lesson here is
that if Congress offers a blank check to a monopolist to save jobs, the
monopolist will charge the federal government $666,666.66 per job, and
pocket 90%+ of that.

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💂🏼‍♀️ This day in history

#15yrsago Marvel Comics: stealing our language
https://memex.craphound.com/2006/03/18/marvel-comics-stealing-our-language/

#15yrsago MPAA/RIAA/BSA: No breaking DRM, even if it’s killing you
(literally!)
https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2006/03/08/riaa-says-future-drm-might-threaten-critical-infrastructure-and-potentially-endanger-liv/

#10yrsago Up Against It: smart, whiz-bang space opera pits
astro-bureaucrats against rogue AIs
https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/18/up-against-it-smart-whiz-bang-space-opera-pits-astro-bureaucrats-against-rogue-ais/

#10yrsago Tim Wu in the Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/the-master-switch-tim-wu-internet

#10yrsago Anti-labor ads celebrate workers taking paycuts and CEOs
getting millions
https://www.cogdis.me/2011/03/is-this-what-they-really-want.html

#5yrsago FBI issues car-hacking warning, tells drivers to keep their
cars’ patch-levels current
https://www.wired.com/2016/03/fbi-warns-car-hacking-real-risk/

#5yrsago BART’s twitter manager drops truth-bombs, world cheers
https://gizmodo.com/i-would-like-to-buy-a-drink-for-the-poor-soul-who-ran-t-1765477706

#5yrsago Medusa’s Web: Tim Powers is the Philip K Dick of our age
https://memex.craphound.com/2016/03/18/medusas-web-tim-powers-is-the-philip-k-dick-of-our-age/

#5yrsago Apple engineers quietly discuss refusing to create the FBI’s
backdoor
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/technology/apple-encryption-engineers-if-ordered-to-unlock-iphone-might-resist.html

#5yrsago Chelsea Manning gets the US Army to cough up its “insider
threat” training docs
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/18/government-persecuting-whistleblowers-insider-threat-chelsea-manning

#1yrago 3D printed ventilator hero got a patent threat
https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/18/diy-tp/#patently-absurd

#1yrago How to split a single ventilator for four patients
https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/18/diy-tp/#ventilator-sharing

#1yrago John Green's mutual aid manifesto
https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/18/diy-tp/#nerdfighters

#1yrago American Airlines blew billions, now it wants a bailout
https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/18/diy-tp/#aa-crashes

#1yrago Charter orders all workers to keep showing up
https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/18/diy-tp/#sociopathy

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💂🏼‍♀️ Colophon

Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism
(https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/), Eric Umansky
(https://twitter.com/ericuman).

Currently writing:

* My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and
reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 528 words (117197 total).

* A short story, "Jeffty is Five," for The Last Dangerous Visions.
Yesterday's progress: 268 words (8623 total).

* A cyberpunk noir thriller novel, "Red Team Blues." Yesterday's
progress: 1087 words (32059 total).

Currently reading: Analogia by George Dyson.

Latest podcast: Privacy Without Monopoly: Data Protection and
Interoperability (Part 3)
https://craphound.com/news/2021/02/28/privacy-without-monopoly-data-protection-and-interoperability-part-3/

Upcoming appearances:

* World Ethical Data Forum keynote, Mar 17-19,
https://worldethicaldataforum.org/wedf-2020

* Digital Markets Act: What’s in it for citizens?, May 18,
https://www.eff.org/event/digital-markets-act-whats-it-citizens

* Launching "The Future You" with Brian David Johnson, Mar 19,
https://www.changinghands.com/event/march2021/brian-david-johnson-future-you-break-through-fear-and-build-life-you-want

*  Balancing Worldbuilding and Narrative (with Karen Osborne and Kali
Wallace), Mar 24,
https://ucsd.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_YSvD5IjGS7Su2z-xhQN1ZA

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

Recent appearances:

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

* Canadian Speculative Fiction (Unknown Worlds):
https://unknownworlds.podbean.com/e/canadian/

* Who Uses the Users? (This Machine Kills)
https://soundcloud.com/thismachinekillspod/48-who-uses-the-users-ft-cory-doctorow

* Technology, Self-Determination, and the Future of the Future (CERIAS)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yC_hBDS-RU

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.

This work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially,
provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link
to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are
included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the
basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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