"The unprecedented regulatory power the Obama Administration imposed on the internet is smothering innovation, damaging the American economy and obstructing job creation. I urge the Federal Communications Commission to end the bureaucratic regulatory overreach of the internet known as Title II and restore the bipartisan light-touch regulatory consensus that enabled the internet to flourish for more than 20 years."

Numerous journalists like Jason Prechtel have submitted FOIA requests for more data (server logs, IP addresses, API data, anything) that might indicate who was behind the fraudulent comments, who may have bankrolled them, and what the Pai FCC knew about it.

Thanks to that effort, early last year, Gizmodo's Dell Cameron worked with Prechtel to link some of the fake comments to Trump associates and some DC lobbying shops like CQ Roll Call. Then late last year, Buzzfeed's Kevin Collier and Jeremy-Singer Vine showed how, unsurprisingly, the broadband industry funded at least some of the fraudulent efforts.

Keep in mind this sort of thing wasn't a one off; numerous regulatory agencies have been plagued by similar efforts for years. Generating bogus support for shitty government policy is now just an additional service many law, lobbying, and PR firms offer corporations and clients as an added service.

But much like astroturfing -- which often extends to real world protests -- it's such an obscure concept to most people it never warrants a second thought.

But it's ethically grotesque all the same, especially given it pollutes some of the only opportunities the public has to comment on harmful government policies.


At this point there's enough evidence to reasonably conclude that the broadband industry and GOP hired a bunch of K Street firms to "stuff the ballot box," and the FCC -- likely knowing the broadband industry's involvement -- took steps to try and help cover it up.

This lawsuit is likely to reveal even more data to help bolster that conclusion.

The question now is whether the courts (or anybody else) will actually care, and whether anybody's going to do anything about it.

..every state and society faces serious challenges. The difference lies in whether the underlying structures are healthy enough to effectively respond to those challenges. Viewed in this light, it’s less the arrival of the massive earthquake than whether the damaged infrastructure is rebuilt; not the crushing battlefield defeat, but whether competent new recruits and materiel can be found to replace what’s lost; not the feckless, no-clothes-having emperor, but whether the political system can either effectively work around him or remove him from power altogether. Successful states and societies are resilient when faced with even serious challenges. Falling empires are not...

Historians will look back at some enormous disaster, either ongoing now or in the decades or centuries to come, and say that it was just the icing on the cake. The foundation had already been laid long before then,
in the text of legislation nobody bothered reading,
in local elections nobody was following,
in speeches nobody thought were important enough to comment on,
in a thousand tiny disasters that amounted to a thousand little cuts on the body politic.

It took a long time, decades, for the true reality of the change to hit the Romans whose writings have survived to the present day. Aristocratic Roman officials in Italy maintained the same kind of administrative structure their fathers and grandfathers had, writing the same kinds of administrative letters for Ostrogothic kings of Italy that they had for emperors beforehand. The pull of the past is strong. The mental frameworks through which we understand the world are durable, far more so than its actual fabric. The new falls into the old, square pegs into round holes no matter how poor the fit, simply because the round holes are what we have available.

We don’t have to wait decades for all this to sink in. The nature of the problem and its scale are clear now, right now, on the cusp of the disaster. Maybe those future historians will look back at this as a crisis weathered, an opportunity to fix what ails us before the tipping point has truly been reached. We can see those thousand cuts now, in all their varied depth and location. Perhaps it’s not yet too late to stanch the bleeding.

Frontier's bankruptcy announcement forced the company to explain in great detail its finances, past investment decisions, and ultimately why it has refused to upgrade so many of its DSL connections to fiber to the home. This gives us a window into why ISPs like Frontier—large, dominant, with little-to-no competition—are choosing not to invest in better, faster, and more accessible Internet infrastructure.

The reason American Internet lags so far behind South Korea, Japan, and Norway isn’t because fiber isn’t profitable. It just falls under the old adage “you have to spend money to make money,” an anathema to American ISPs’ entrenched position of prioritizing short-term profit over making lasting investments.

So long as major national ISPs continue to operate with that same short-term mindset, they will never deliver high-speed fiber to the home broadband of their own accord.


Investors denounced fiber investment as a waste because Verizon would have to spend many billions more on fiber to get the same results as the cable giants would get with cable lines. Of course, these dollars-to-dollars estimates missed the real point: fiber has the vastly superior maximum speeds, while cable tops out at a tiny fraction of fiber's possible speed. Even though the superiority of fiber is obvious today, the thinking of big ISPs has not changed.

That blinkered, short-term mindset doesn't just explain America's anemic fiber rollout, it also explains so much about Frontier's bankruptcy. Frontier has filed papers explaining how it intends to escape bankruptcy, and these conclusively show that millions of Americans currently stuck in the DSL Internet slow-lanes could be upgraded to blazing-fast fiber without a dime in government subsidies.

...The revelations from Frontier's bankruptcy filings don't end there. Equally important is how Frontier cultivated, maintained, and abused its monopolies. ISPs like Frontier know exactly where they have monopolies, and therefore know exactly who has no choice and therefore is not worth spending money on.

The fact that Frontier—and its competitors—treat monopolies as a bankable asset would seem a sign that there should be some oversight. Since the FCC has removed its ability to oversee this industry since 2017 under the so-called Restoring Internet Freedom Order, that oversight will have to be from the states.

If you are hosting spreading events (house parties, large gatherings, etc.) during the Stay At Home order, you will be shut down by the city, and you can be fined as much as $5,000.

Do the right thing. Anonymously report tips to CPDTIP.COM.

chicago.gov/coronavirus