Three Companies Impersonated Millions to Influence Internet Policy
ag.ny.gov
ag.ny.gov
Wow. Just wow. How can anyone at these companies be avoiding jail time?
And who hired them? Is there no money trail?
Says a bunch of companies received millions in fines a few years ago and it names AT&T, Charter, Comcast and some lobbying group.
Who would vote for that system?
I read your comment as “…corporate defrauders…” and it made just as much sense in context.
Yes, this is disenfranchising. But not being heard while some company pretends to speak for you is even more disenfranchising.
That will become less effective as companies become increasingly centralized, with just a few having many, many brands.
So your second intuition about proof of identity is better, but the minute you invent a foolproof identity system and it gets widly used (by fiat or even voluntarily), you give a tremendous amount of power to the issuer/manager of it, as they basically hold the power of also removing/altering your public identity at their whims. You also make it harder and harder to remain anonymous and preserve your privacy, two things that might seem useless in a functional democracy, but unfortunately democracies are not perfect and they can turn into totalitarian systems where the wet dream of dictators is exactly this: having total control over every individual, especially the ones who would dare signing petitions against them.
This is by far not something humans have solved systemically, we have the technical solutions to build such systems, and governments tend to push to implement them, but as someone who cares about privacy/censorship resistance I do my best to build alternative, opt-in, systems to go around them.
Think of the inertia that mag stripe only payment cards have in the USA, and think about how long it's taken to get chip cards rolled out. And then consider that we don't have the more secure chip and pin variant that Europe has, and (to the best of my knowledge) don't have any plans to go that route in the future.
A bad solution with broad penetration and huge network effects is one that can't easily be changed in the future. Let's do imagine some worst case scenarios and think about what it would involve to harden a system against them before rolling it out to everyone.
Between astroturfing, AIs, trolls, and foreign involvement, we are increasingly in need of a countering force. We are currently suffering under the tyranny of the anonymous!
It is astonishing that so many people are still swayed by such outdated cyberpunk ideologies! The arguments of the 1990s do not make sense given the realities of the 2020s.
Are you? What happens if this "need" isn't filled? Just because you can't probe popular opinion with an open comment system, it doesn't mean it is a requirement for society to work. We have systems to vote that work and don't have these issues. Simple paper ballots work really well.
> It is astonishing that so many people are still swayed by such outdated cyberpunk ideologies
Private companies and governments have never collected as much data as they do now, mostly without real consent, and they are getting the means to exploit this data very efficiently now with AI. The cypherpunk ideology (cyberpunk is a fictional sci-fi genre, although it's kinda related with its themes) applies more than ever in this context, it actually predicted the situation we are living, so I can't agree with you when you claim it is "outdated". Individuals should value their ability to be anonymous if they intend to remain somewhat free, this is the "counter" to mass surveillance.
I can’t come up with a better argument than I’ve made in these two articles:
https://www.williamcotton.com/articles/the-tyranny-of-the-an...
https://www.williamcotton.com/articles/authentically-human-i...
They are both short reads.
A decentralized way to issue and authenticate private keys, so as to eliminate the trust requirement- not just transferring it to a certificate issuer- seems needful.
Not only could it help eliminate the manufacture of consensus in OP, such a technology would have broad implications for trust and might lend itself to anti-counterfeiting measures.
Although such a development would also amount to solving the problem of Byzantine consensus so I would feel most fortunate to see it happen in my lifetime.
Oh, I assume this will be run by companies. What is stopping them from impersonating you? Or impersonating you after you're dead? How can we trust these companies not to sell access to identities? Further, why not sell/rent your access to your own identity?
Partly it's audit: check some randomly chosen votes, look for anyone not remembering casting their vote.
Partly it could be cryptography: you keep a private key and sign your vote with it. Your public key is stored by a trusted centralized institution, or several (see GitHub and signed commits), so anyone can verify your vote, but nobody can fake it.
I wouldn't want my employer, for instance, to be able to verify that I voted for their preferred candidate for state representative and take retaliatory actions against me if I didn't.
I mean voting for various petitions, etc, the stuff outlined in the article.
Better fraud protection during general elections would be great, too, but it's a different and more complex area.
I mostly say about giving a ton of identifying info so that your vote can be reliably tracked back to you: not only email (with a one-time link to confirm the email works), but also a phone number, postal address, maybe even some government ID like SSN or driver license number. It removes any expectation of anonymity from the vote or signature, and this is by design. Fraud of the kind the article mentions would be easily detectable by a random check of 1-2% of the signatures (and more is suspicious patterns are noticed). As a side effect, it would make a vote or a signature a much more conscious, committed decision.
Yes, fraud can still happen. But if you fake 100,000 comments eventually you will be discovered and held responsible. What this would reduce is systemic fraud at scale.
I'm pretty sure the Venn diagram of people without access to government issued ID and legal, eligible voters is two distinct circles.
They have a register of random documents issued by 3rd parties that they will accept as proof of ID.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/24-things-that-require-a-...
When they are poor enough they either don't or have incredibly limited funds. I'm not sure what you don't understand about this
Personally I think a verified voter ID should be both required (so as to prevent voter fraud) and provided freely to everyone.
Others have commented on your point about money already
STATE AG used Federal IG investigation to extract money from these crooks.
Why didn't FBI raid these companies?
They raided a ex-Presidents private residence for papers.
Identity Theft x 1 Million counts
> They raided a ex-Presidents private residence for papers.
Because that's not really how the FBI works. Recovering classified material from someone not entitled to be in possession of it is totally different. You probably want to read more, you seem to be speaking only at a very surface level, probably more than just Facebook too.
That said, while your rational for why they should be raided by the FBI is insane. I'm with you on the underlying idea. It seems crazy to me too that no federal agency is seeking charges under 18 USC 1001. How'd they avoid that?
This is the most galling aspect of that article - crickets on who paid them to do the deed. The companies named are obviously front company for hire. The clients are telecomms that require FCC licenses to operate. They should get their licenses revoked.
Even supposing they did it this way, and people gave their informed consent (fat chance, but for the sake of the hypothetical), that's still fraud. Unless every single comment had a "written and submitted on behalf of X by firm Y" disclaimer, it's still misrepresenting the comments as coming directly from individuals.
Regardless of what fine print unwary consumers agreed to, the agencies being deceived didn't agree to any of it.
$615k seems like a slap on the wrist for what they did.
This is only trumped by by sovereign immunity, for starting wars or oil spills or releasing viruses or whatever. "Bush is gone, let's move on - why are you still on that?"
State Power is great isn't it?
"Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility."
Stock ownership is rewarding because it's risky. Let it be risky.
Which is generally why responsibility stops with the board of directors, because there’s no way there was criminal intent through four layers of indirection. (Except shell companies, of course.)
In principle though, I think partial ownership of a harmful company should expose you to some liability, whether or not the CEO listens to you.
People seem to not realize this.
We should undo it. It was a mistake
C-corps have limited liability (now), but piercing is much easier for bad acts, and they have lots of regulation and formality (historically) that helped prevent bad acts in the first place.
The LLC changed a lot here - you could form businesses basically structured any way you want, with almost no regulations, and still not be liable. Outside of constructing an LLC to do totally illegal things (like rob banks or something), you and your shareholders are pretty much never liable.
That is definitely not true of C-corps, and was even less true historically :)
For limited liability in general: General forms of limited liability are about 100-150 years old, depending on country. IE before 1850, it was pretty rare. I believe new york has an earlier statute, but it was uncommon.
LLC's are not corporations, either, under most state law, they are special forms of companies.
The alternative mind you, was sometimes double liability for shareholders, who both lost their investments, and had to pay for excess loss.
I'm actually okay with that - it's a good way to ensure better diligence and less risk.
It's true that LLC's enabled innovation that would have been slower, but at a tremendous cost - enabling almost any risk to be taken for free is to me, a lot worse than slower innovation. It also lead to totally perverse things (toxic dumping, etc) and shareholders didn't worry or care because at most they lost some of their investment, and most of the time, could easily pull it out before the shares dropped, and move on to investing in the next horrible thing. In the old world, they would have been responsible for the entire cost, even if they pulled out.
Limited liability is a bad idea as long as people can do horrible things to each other and the world faster than you can (or should) make them strictly illegal.
People can always think of horribly destructive ways to make money, and ensuring not just personal, but shareholder liability for them, is one of the only ways to keep things in check.
These things would happen a lot less if the ROI was not as high, and in particular, if downside risk was not minimal.
Your friendly billionaire is going to invest a lot less in arms dealers if the downside risk is not just their 1 million investment, but their entire fortune.
There are lots of good articles on this:
https://www.bus.umich.edu/KresgeLibrary/resources/abla/abld_...
https://www.occ.gov/publications-and-resources/publications/...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-instituti...
etc
It’s exactly similar to everyone who participated in a pyramid scheme is liable for the last round of victims. Up to you to get informed.
An almost absurd question, but would it be possible to add love to company interactions?
A company might emulate love, but it’s really just veiled manipulation.
Then factor time:
1000000000000÷12÷30÷24÷60÷60
Somebody is making $32k profit per second. Who? That's about 5% margin/tax on $615k, so yeah, it's happening per second.
What if killing net neutrality was a given, but the administration wanted the appearance of due process…
God, I’ve grown jaded.
No, there's no collusion here. These are just state laws that are insufficient to compel the behavior we want. She got what she could and called it a victory. But a very progressive AG is clearly not in the pocket of the internet content industry.
It wasn't obvious whether the telcos were going to keep competing and improving or just become complacent as a cartel. Snowden's leaks were just about to be released. The distrust seemed very reasonable at the time.
In a few ways the "fast lane" idea did get implemented, but in terms of cost rather than the speed of access. Lots of bundles between telcos and streaming services exist now (i.e. Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, ESPN, YouTube TV, etc.).
- perhaps it includes auditing and reporting measures to ensure they aren't doing this things.
- maybe its really hard to guarantee exactly equal performance for all traffic and they examine the traffic and do different things depending on the domain to balance loads
Just because Netflix paid their providers, your local isp wants their cut as well.
Anything remotely resembling this existed almost a decade ago in a very different landscape, and what you're saying isn't even really reflective of the reality at the time. The vast majority of reasonable people were talking about what would gradually happen if the concept of net neutrality was totally thrown out; in the interim both sides have constructed more nuance, there is more public awareness, more partisanship, and thus different goalposts being fought over.
Now we have a ruling that the FCC can't limit state net neutrality law, because Verizon was literally fucking THROTTLING FIREFIGHTERS DURING A MAJOR WILDFIRE. Less "fast lane," more "death lane." ISPs know that the current environment won't tolerate their unchecked fantasies.
Can you explain your analogy? I'm unclear if the aquifer is the ISP, the video platform, or something else.
Here are some sources for anybody who doesn't want to believe this happened:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/verizon-throttle... https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/verizon-throttled-californi... https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/verizon-throttle-fir... https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/verizon-firefighter-data-s... https://finance.yahoo.com/news/verizon-explains-why-throttle...
These are not big operations, they were charging 7c a "lead", so each company made ~100k, and the CEO was running the script to send fake data himself.
It is. But its also state and local officials using state law to try to get any punishment for what is a fairly serious federal crime that, for some reason, the federal government has elected not to prosecute. [0]
Prosecuting that would have lead to a dangerous precedent for a lot of companies and government agencies involved in propaganda.
Propaganda (a.k.a , advertising/marketing) is broadly legal (though some specific methods and certain actors participating in certain kinds are restricted), deliberately making materially false statements to the government in the course of, and in order to influence, a government proceeding is prohibited. Firmly drawing the line between those things is a good thing.
No fine has ever been a threat to any company. The entire system is such a joke.
More consequences are due.
Justice was served.
He was a sales director at a company that ran network backbone and fiber lines. He was insistent that the Net Neutrality debate was dumb, because it was trying to negate the peering agreements that make the industry run. The way he told it, anyone with a big backbone chooses to invest in peering arrangements with other companies who also make similar arrangements. If you are pushing an undue amount of traffic relative to the other party, you invest more. His take was that Netflix was supporting Net Neutrality so they wouldn't have to invest more in their peering arrangements.
Now - this is a guy who historically is almost always on the wrong side of history. I thought it an interesting talking point, but even now having had some exposure to the peering arrangements between (say) Microsoft and Akamai, I still don't know enough to be able to say whether this is even a valid talking point. I'm very sure this is just something he was told, and repeated ad nauseum.
This seems like the right audience (since I wasn't posting here back then), to ask if there's any legitimacy to this talking point?
The moment Netflix setup caching servers in isp COs around the world they stopped caring about net neutrality. Strange.
If you’re pushing 15% of all internet traffic you’re going to end up peering, the best I can see net neutrality doing for Netflix is it sets the default payment to $0, giving them a better bargaining position going into any negotiation about peering arrangements, and probably gives them some legal protection against ISPs who might want to throttle Netflix traffic rather than agree to Netflix’s terms.
This allows them to try and charge the customer more, but possibly more importantly to charge service providers for access to their customer base. The alternative is that you pay your ISP for X bytes and it doesn't matter what they are or who it's from.
And that the stated reasoning behind the neutrality debate was null and void, because it wasn't what the debate was really about.
The problem with your friend's reasoning about peering arrangements is that net neutrality is about getting what you paid for. If I go to the store and buy eggs and the farm decides it hasn't gotten enough money for the eggs, then the next time I go to the store to buy eggs, after I pay the store and get home, the farm sends someone to my house and demands an extra $3 from me (and only me). Something about that just seems off to me.
Pretty good deal if you ask me
Just call it the cost of doing business hah
That not mattering was then canceled out by another not mattering, because California passed the same rules so they effectively apply to everyone anyway.
They want to make their critics look like a minority or as if they don't exist at all, especially when much of the criticism is grassroots and organic from actual telecom customers who are often stuck with a monopoly's service.
[1] https://www.salon.com/2008/06/09/comcast_2/
[2] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/comcast-accu...
Comcast has been losing lately as more places have been repealing their municipal internet utility bans IIRC.
Legal for a fee. Amazing ROI.
I mean, you kinda are talking about visiting a colonoscopist on hacker news, so there's that.
Yet again, turns out it's OK if you're a corporation.
We can and should improve society.
Looking deeper I see you're likely correct, but honestly I disclaim responsibility for misunderstandings caused by Poe's law when I'm on this end. I see this trip people up all the time, so I know it's not just me. I see the sincere version of this statement made, defended, and doubled down on regularly, so no, I can't reliably tell the difference without a sarcasm marker (/s). I admit this is a weakness on my part, but I don't really feel responsible for it.
Yes, Poe's Law and all for sure…
> We can and should improve society.
We should, but what makes you think that we can?
That's not to say it isn't possible, but that it's unlikely should we continue the same way.
I think people are starting to understand that our relationship to work and to resource extraction is untenable and that momentum is building. Of course this has been understood for a very long time, but anything remotely opposed to capitalism has been demonized and had almost no role in mainstream discourse (at least here in the US). I think that's changing pretty quickly.
On a long enough timescale, my confidence we can build a utopian society approaches 1. I think the trick is surviving long enough to get there. I suspect that a more just society is an attractor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor). It may not be the only attractor, there may well be a totalitarianism attractor, but if we can get sufficiently close to the just society attractor we can get caught up in it's influence & remain stable in that state for a long time. Not by magic, it would take lots of work to maintain that society at it does to maintain ours, I'm saying society would reliably produce the people and conditions that allow it to maintain and improve itself. My diagnosis would be that our current society can create people with the ability to improve it but can't reliably create the conditions for them to succeed - but just because it isn't reliable doesn't mean it doesn't happen every now and again, so the trick is being able to make the best of whatever cards you're dealt and to stay in the game until you get a good hand.
This is mostly speculation based on my experiences and observations, I can't prove to you this is true (I can't, beyond a shadow of a doubt, prove it to myself). But it gives me hope, and I believe it reflects a truth about human nature rather than being a vain hope. So I offer it to whomever it may be useful, and if that isn't you, that's okay, feel free to discard it.
We've had something like social progress from then until, when? Reagonomics? 1981.
So maybe 50 years of socially progressive government. Out of 250. Pretty dismal.
Can you source this? Here's the closest I can find[1], an event in 2017 where a homeless person stole the wallet and wedding ring from a dead man after someone else murdered him.
1: https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2017/06/homeless_man_now...
The AG's name is written in huge letters on top, as if it was her, rather than her office, that mattered most. The name appears three times before the first paragraph of the article, and again in large, bold letters below the article. To an outside observer, this looks like a political personality cult, and the article itself reads like a PR fluff piece.
For comparison, this[1] is the official website of the German chancellor, the head of government, infinitely more important than an AG. His name is written as a regular-sized menu item, clearly subordinate to the office he occupies, and most of the articles use the term "The Federal Chancellor" to refer to him, rather than his name.
Taken as a whole, those websites paint a picture of radically contrasting administration styles, and aptly demonstrate just how incomprehensible US politics is for Europeans, and vice versa.
I've also done fact checking for academic publishers on topics that required deep diving into a lot of non-Western governmental resources and the web design (where there was a web presence) could get really interesting. I highly recommend going to peruse the websites of governmental entities in countries you don't ever think of - you see some weird/cool stuff.
There's other situations like community meetings for land use that are far more democratic. Although, those are mostly bad, because it means only people with lots of free time can attend them!
I haven’t lived in some of the alternatives, but I have visited some, and I feel fortunate to have been born in New Zealand.
Just make sure you don't have the wrong opinions. Such as not going with the medical coercion and banning of civil rights that occured from 2020.
Oh, my bad, that authoranianism is good and they deserved it - Signed, Mr G.
Do you suggest we move away from democracy or try to fix the failings of our systems?
Yes. Many places including new Zealand did unthinkable authortiarian things. Easily could be classified as torture.
> Do you suggest we move away from democracy or try to fix the failings of our systems?
How on earth did you arrive at "move away from democracy"?
Also, the coercive and sometimes violent authortiarianism perpetrated by govs with media/big tech collaboration (who saw massive profits from lockdowns) had little to do with democracy. In fact, extreme powers that go against different constituinal documents were enacted in the most damaging security theater ever.
The bad news is that they did this. The good news is that they thought this would help, so writing your representative perhaps isn't entirely useless?
Clearly democracy is better than the alternatives.
I agree, that fine is a joke and cast doubt on western democracy, but what I want to say, is like Chircill's:
Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.[1]
In practice absolute level of your belief doesn't matter, only a relative one when comparing with alternatives.
[1] https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form...
Were fined a few hundred thousand.
Why isn’t every individual involved in jail? Why haven’t all the company assets been seized?
Also, given that they were impersonating real living people, can we please get a list of those people? Or at least have the victims of identity theft, fraud, and I think for many on HN defamation?
The _only_ reason those details should not be available is to further protect these shit stains.
So while piercing the LLC veil seems unreasonably hard, putting every individual involved in jail seems not unreasonable.
Net Neutrality is "oking" monopolistic behavior, under a narrow set of stipulations. I don't trust Comcast any farther than I could throw their CEO.
I just don't see this ending well. I think the alternatives: expanding access, increasing competition, improving technology and promoting innovation, busting oligopolies at the state and municipal level is the way to go.
This is my opinion, so feel free to disagree. There are definite upsides to net neutrality right now for "here and now" problems, but it's not a good long term solution IMHO.
It's a great way to drown out the public's actual comments and drum up fake support.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/biggest-isps-pai...
I am guessing there is something inside Internet backbone data transfer that allows these companies to make tons of money/get large subsidies, provided that net neutrality is in place. I would love to understand that it is.
(1) Large ISP companies fight feverishly against net neutrality. (2) Based on past experience, it is inconceivable to me that they would so feverishly fight for the end-users' benefit. (3) Therefore, they fight against net neutrality because ending it is very beneficial to them. (4) If it's so beneficial to them, ending net neutrality is probably not so good for the end-users.
Which one?
Any traffic induces load on their systems/infrastructure and happens disproportionately based on the service being consumed (e.g. Netflix early days, instagram).
So the economic fight of Net Neutrality was based on bandwith-intensive services not paying for transit proportionate to their traffic volume (driven by consumers), and the maintenance cost being borne by the last-mile providers. Allegedly.
The problem comes from the fact that last-mile providers are monopolies in just about every place in the USA, meaning that they can already charge whatever they want to the consumer for the bandwidth _they_ consume. ISPs shouldn't be allowed to charge both directions for the single link they own going to buildings. And we don't want every building to have thousands of wires going to it for every new telecommunication company in existance, which is why we have Title II of the Communications Act.
By repealing net neutrality it allows last-mile providers (largely owned by major national media corporations) to unfairly compete against new technologies and media companies in the marketplace who's growth was fueled largely in part by requiring equal access to bandwidth.
On a humorous note, may be they started with how much a politician takes from lobbyists for their soul. We have seen them proposing absurd laws for very less.
It's difficult to say how much this 'influenced' policy but it sure gives a good smoke screen.
With the amount of money we have spent de-anonymizing the internet for profit we should have been able to disclose this earlier.
Is this actually a significant punishment? Will the decisions based on these fake comments be reconsidered or reversed?
Someone should sue these companies in civil court for damage done.
Put them in jail. Review the law.
“Enter your name to check if you were impersonated by these companies and join the class-action lawsuit…”