Cable Companies Are Astroturfing Fake Consumer Support to End Net Neutrality | Hacker News Reader

Cable Companies Are Astroturfing Fake Consumer Support to End Net Neutrality

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Cable companies have been astroturfing the net neutrality issue for years. In the Boston area in 2006, a Verizon astroturfing scheme was blown out of the water when a local blogger became suspicious after receiving a strange email from a local college student (1). Comcast has also employed professionally run astroturfing campaigns to serve its own ends (2). It would not surprise me if both companies have their anonymous shills drop by HN from time to time to pollute the waters.

1. http://borderlinenewtonwaltham.blogspot.com/2006/09/lies-cab...

2. http://stopthecap.com/2011/11/15/comcasts-snake-oil-astrotur...

There is some genuine concern about any regulations involving the internet. But the need for Net Belligerence only arises in stifled and monopolized markets. The solution would be to break open the myriad of rules that make it hard for independent ISPs to expand: from local right-of-way's to utility poles to telecom regulations.

When bandwidth is expanding in a Moore's law manner, Net Neutrality begins to be less relevant. ISPs under market forces will expand their network capacity to meet demand. It's monopoly ISPs that want to forego that investment to squeeze out content distributors.

In the end, even if Net Neutrality is passed, that still leaves entrenched monopoly ISPs with outdated networks (and terrible customer support). Even if the big ISPs get broken up and get forced to inter-connect, there remains the problem of local regulations, right-of-way's and utility poles (local utilities are also monopolies under political control).

Alternatively, regulate the last mile as a utility and create a wholesale/retail market. Also called "structural separation."

I would say that as "further regulate", as in the companies in questions, the cablecos and telcos ("AT&T", Century, Verizon) are already regulated government enabled monopolies.

They do a pretty good job of regulating government.

It would be more accurate to say it's a mutually beneficial relationship.

Is this not what the government did to the telephone companies providing internet services, which subsequently caused them to stop investing in their infrastructure, thus resulting in the current market situation, where only cable companies provide broadband?

Nope, or at least not directly. AT&T and Verizon (US Worst/Century never really cared about this) stopped when the Great Recession hit. Since new home construction also took a big hit, there was also less demand (although I know Century is spending non-trivial sums to wire up new residences for people attracted to North Dakota Bakken formation hydrocarbon extraction).

> Is this not what the government did to the telephone companies providing internet services, which subsequently caused them to stop investing in their infrastructure, thus resulting in the current market situation, where only cable companies provide broadband?

Last I checked, they never split up Bell into separate retail, wholesale, and infrastructure divisions operating as separate companies. Look at BT's organisation for how it's better done: BT Wholesale sell everything from the exchange to the backbones to retailers, and BT Openreach (generally) maintain the last mile. Then, there's a market of retail ISPs who buy services and space in the exchanges from BT Wholesale, BT Openreach, and other companies, and sell a whole Internet service to businesses and consumers.

If BT Wholesale or BT Openreach didn't get off their arses, there's now enough money floating around in the right places for any retail ISP or group of ISPs to invest in replacing them. They don't really want to, as there'd be a bunch of red tape and figuring out how the regulations apply, but they could if they needed to. We also have Ofcom, which is a very strong telecoms regulator which keeps this market running fairly (i.e. various parts of BT can't give out special discounts to retail ISPs, new services fall under the same regulations, etc).

We've had a few bumps, but all in all, it's going well for us. Many in the cities and large towns now have access to 70Mbps fully unmetered, unshaped Internet access through a number of ISPs for no more than their previous Internet package cost, and they can also often get Internet access through American-style cable companies (Virgin being the big one).

We're still trying to solve the problem of investment in rural areas, but there's actually been a couple of success stories regarding independent community ISPs, and I've noticed various towns you'd generally regard as "small" having their exchanges being upgraded to support fibre.

Or have homeowner associations own the last mile. Give them he ability to switch their entire local network from provider to provider to get better service and/or lower prices.

That sort of model could be used for all sorts of utilities.

Collective ownership is not a bad thing when its very, very local. Especially when individuals have a direct, immediate say in who's acting on their behalf.

People don't even trust their HOAs to tell them when and where to store their trash cans. Maybe a better type of entity exists that is less susceptible to petty, hyper-local personality politics.

>susceptible to petty, hyper-local personality politics

Well, that puts most small local municipal governments out of the running too.

Most likely, yes, but once in a while you have a solid group of like-minded, motivated people that can come together and produce the municipal broadband success stories we read about. I'm sure there are a few rare, decent HOAs out there, too.

I don't know about that. Our trash cans are in the trash room here. But I'm sure some of these arrangements are more disorderly than others.

In any case, most HOAs and municipalities are fixed. They typically don't expand or contract based on people removing their property from the arrangement. If people could vote with their feet, these entities would have to be responsive.

When people were nomadic, they lived together in groups and did many things collectively. And if the arrangement became oppressive, they left. That was a natural check on corruption. We need the same ability, even though we are no longer nomadic.

"The solution would be to break open the myriad of rules that make it hard for independent ISPs to expand: from local right-of-way's to utility poles to telecom regulations."

Well, and the shitload of money that stringing last-mile wire costs.

Also, 47 new telcos would like you to know they'll all be digging trenches in your yard next week. Because freedom.

The bigger issue is the inherent moral hazard with a monopoly-level company delivering media (via CaTV) and internet service (which, as a platform, provides direct competitors of CaTV).

As a person living abroad, I find it quite amusing to watch the struggle for decent internet in the US. The Time Warner / Comcast merger seems to be a done deal, and looks like net neutrality is going away soon.

Everyone hates these companies, there's a strong grassroots movement to fix the policies, and you guys actually do deserve better. The amount of corruption evident in these developments is staggering, and yet there seems to be no real possibility of the opposition succeeding in their goals.

I agree completely. It's difficult to watch this without feeling deeply cynical about our particular implementation of democracy. The wants of the wealthy few are being given precedence over the needs of the many.

> particular implementation of democracy

What about the implementation is causing the results you dislike? I think it may be less the system itself and more the specific choices of voters that are causing the undesirable results.

But you don't get to change the voters, only the system (well ... besides re-education camps or similar I guess).

So if the specific choices of the voters are consistently against their own interests it has to be the systems fault. POSIWID [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what...

Yeah I agree. The citizenry is the citizenry. No changing that. The tricky thing is to design a system where it is more difficult for them to make certain choices (arguably bad ones). Taken too far, you end up without a democracy anymore.

Although I think representative government is important, perhaps even more important is the protection of rights of those people not in the majority. You hear this constant drum beat from the American conservatives advocating for more democracy in the world. Certainly, that is an element of a solution. But that alone will just end up with mob rule and life for those outside the mob will be terrible.

Which American conservatives advocate for more democracy without rule of law and strong protection of individual rights (particularly property rights)? None I've heard.

I'm pretty sure most American conservatives advocate for less democracy (corporations are people, my friend!), less rule of law (if not by voting, by actions: be it sexual misconduct -- from rape to child molestation -- or outright abuse of power for personal monetary gain) and less individual rights (from gay marriage to the surveillance state).

While I don't agree with the simplistic neo-conservative view of just try to spread democracy everywhere, I think your critiques are unfair.

> corporations are people, my friend!

Of course they are. Corporations are groups of people pooling their resources. Why would people lose rights by acting together with other people?

> less rule of law (if not by voting, by actions: be it sexual misconduct -- from rape to child molestation

I don't think there is any wing of American politics in favor of rape or child molestation. I'm assuming this comment refers to a particular event that I'm not aware of.

> or outright abuse of power for personal monetary gain

That's just power + human nature. I don't think it follows party lines.

> less individual rights (from gay marriage to the surveillance state).

I agree, conservatives have been stupid on gay marriage. Why would the same people who always advocate family values want to prevent people who care deeply for each other from forming new families?

As for the surveillance state, that seems to be about the same on both sides of the political spectrum.

>Why would people lose rights by acting together with other people?

Well, they as individuals don't. And shouldn't! Why would preventing corporations from funding politicians prevent the individual members of a corporation from funding politicians? Organizations probably shouldn't be donating to political campaigns or political action committees, be they unions or banks or technology companies. Politics is for the individual, not the conglomerate. Otherwise you're knee deep in lester-land[0] and all the quid pro quo corruption that results from it.

>I don't think there is any wing of American politics in favor of rape or child molestation.

Oh, the politics doesn't favor it, but a lot of (both)-wing politicians tend to get caught diddling people they're not supposed to[1], including minors.

>that seems to be about the same on both sides of the political spectrum.

That's because there really is only one side of the political spectrum in this country :) Right wing (democrats) or extremist right wing (republicans). There is no left in this country, there's just "left of."

0.http://www.lessig.org/2013/04/lesterland-the-talk-the-ebook-... 1.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_political_sex_s...

> Why would preventing corporations from funding politicians prevent the individual members of a corporation from funding politicians?

Even under Citizens United, corporations are still prohibited from funding politicians, per se. What they are permitted to do is make unlimited independent expenditures of their own funds in order to promote candidates, policies, etc.

And corporations are not just natural persons banding together, they are creations of government through which other people in society subsidize the downside risk of the people "banding together" in the corporation, including debts incurred -- so anything they are allowed to spend funds on is something that potentially something other people would be forced to pay for even though the people "banding together" were solvent.

The problem is voters have increasingly poor choice or say in the matter. Increasing concentration of wealth has shifted great electoral power to the few, both political parties are dependent on that wealth to finance their campaigns against each other, and ultimately answerable to it, hence there's no real choice for voters at the ballot box (other than on insignificant wedge issues), and it takes a herculean effort to compete in between elections with lobbyists who used to be Congressmen or staffers.

That may or may not be specific to America's "implementation", but that's the problem.

The history of Bell, AT&T and Comcast is quite complex:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_AT%26T

And in this context we should not forget about the United States Justice Department opened the case United States v. AT&T in 1974 (violation of anti-trust law).

I love that we use words like "astroturfing" to soften the behaviour of people (corporations merely being a collection of people acting as one).

We used to call it "lying" and "deception" as in "The cable companies have been lying and being deceitful about the net neutrality issue".

<sarcasm> So glad we have improved as a society </sarcasm>

ALL of them need reclassification to common carrier status. Then their exec staffs need to be Clockwork Oranged.

We are a laughing stock against the broadband in almst any other industrial state AND we have these mendacious toads astroturfing pure nonsense.

All the more reason we need proportional representation and the ability to overrule Congress via referendum.

The appearance of voter approval needs to be replaced with actual voter approval.

Any referendum process needs to have a robust way of ensuring that the descriptions of the proposals are unbiased, truthful, and complete. It's easy to make it look like a referendum makes a situation better by using words like "sets" when "changes" is more correct, and by never mentioning the status quo, for example.

The Swiss do it all the time and can vote directly on legislation already passed by the legislative body. It just takes a petition with enough signatures.

Yes, people that are dummy can be deceived. There is no system that will ever prevent that. But even dumb people learn to not vote for things that they don't understand.

To make a modest proposal, there is a business idea here.

Putin's junta has the Swedish (and other minority languages) comment fields filled up with propaganda.

The Russian comments are easily recognizable by the opinions (even the left wing extremists in Sweden are upset by 1930s style destabilisation and overtaking of areas in Europe).

But at least half the problem is the obviously bad language idioms etc. You can't just translate arguments and use them in all cultural environments. Also, the fake upvotes for the media which accept them are clunky and obvious. It is just not competently done astroturf.

All this goes for Chinese and Iranian political astroturfing etc as well.

To sell high quality astroturf as a service in different countries should be worth lots of money. Even big countries like Russia struggle to organize the service competently, then they have part time employees which aren't specialized.

Edit: I assume that e.g. China, if they don't go democratic, later will add a minority language/culture as work requirement for their armies -- note plural -- of censors. So there is a window of opportunity before some junta implement this and sell the service to other dictators and equally moral companies.

(For anyone missing the "modest proposal", this is tongue in cheek. At least mostly.)

Edit: Fixed clarity etc.

Israel seems to do astroturfing in english pretty well.

That was a not particularly subtle example the other way? :-)

Not that it really is relevant, but the other side in that conflict gets a very good showing in Swedish.

(E.g. Pallywood or torture between Palestinian groups were straight out censored in Swedish media. Swedes in general have no clue that more Jews were kicked out from the moslem world -- just for their religion, not in a civil war -- than the number of Palestinians which fled/was kicked out. And so on. You can fall off your chair laughing if you follow the Swedish news re Mideast in parallel with BBC/NY Times, which is the main reason I know anything about the subject.)

Well about half of all Jews speak english better than you or I.

Russia Today did a pretty good job impressing kids.

I like my humor like I like my wine: dry and produced in a manner which oppresses many people.

Honestly though astroturfing is pretty deplorable. A real business proposal is one which uses machine learning to detect it.

>> I like my humor like I like my wine: dry and produced in a manner which oppresses many people.

Always nice to find a kindred soul. :-) But I really prefer people I don't agree with, arguing teaches me more.

>> A real business proposal is one which uses machine learning to detect it.

There was a story on HN recently about CIA (NSA? Some TLA) wanting an irony/sarcasm detector. C Stross had lots of fun with it. I guess such a detector would need a full damn General AI -- and probably not even that is enough.

Some form of accredited user accounts (HN/slashdot style) could vote for if something should be flagged. I can't see anything better, really.

Re the Russian subject, I saw these on FB some time ago:

http://www.sptimes.ru/story/38052

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/04/pro-rus...

Edit: On consideration, re a detector: This is a type of spam, the comments seem to be written and then translated. The problem is that detectors need to recognize new comments/angles at least every week, maybe more than once a day. And quite quickly it would be rewritten to fool the detectors. I don't believe in automation here, but please prove me wrong.

> Russian comments are easily recognizable by the opinions

Really? It seems difficult to know without some sort of proof, otherwise there is no telling if you are marking false positives.

I don't think this is the same as spam. Spam is low quality and my guess why is to target those that will fall for whatever scam they are selling.

My guess is that any actual state sponsored propaganda on website comments would be pretty damn good.

OK, some more specifics...

For the strange opinions you just don't find -- e.g. conspiracy theories about all the West media being after Russia, which are only written in Putin's controlled media.

Then there were claims about Ukrainian right wing extremists (which got really few votes in the last election) and other strange things you only see in Putin's media.

Arguments were often just not relevant for Sweden. Like "but what about USA in Iraq" -- that only works in USA (and maybe Britain), if that. Even the Swedes that condemn the Iraq invasion, not so few, of course have no problems ALSO condemning that Russia starts to treat Europe like Hitler in the 1930s; military threats, destabilisation, annexations etc.

The Russians avoids all questions about where they were writing from and none claimed to not be Russian. If it was proved where they came from (e.g. logs from the proxies they use, or something), it would automatically be news in Sweden.

Then we have the obvious bad Swedish, the first month a lot seemed to be from Google Translate. The bad voting scraping (one comment posted a bit down in a comment tree -- 10-15 top votes in seconds; never happened otherwise).

I also posted a couple of links here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7865214

And so on...

Edit: And about a state's trolling/astroturfing being high quality: First, note the low quality of conspiracy theories from Putin's junta. The personal envoy of Putin, Sergej Markov, yesterday claimed that Sweden, Poland, Finland and the Baltics had Russophobia -- and threatened with a new World War if the countries joined NATO!! And other crazy stuff. That was worse than before 1991 -- and note that it wasn't for internal consumption by Russians only reading Putin's media! Also, see that about starting with Google Translate. There are lots of quite small languages in Western Europe. How do you to a reasonable cost quickly find enough people that know Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, etc, etc? Then you have to train them (or give them stuff to translate and post).

Edit 2: I hope the above is readable. Ask otherwise, I might have the energy to continue.

Edit 3: The main difference compared to spam is that spam has much less resources, it is much less work intensive. There are maybe one message per 100K receivers. With astroturfing in the end, most (probably not all) comments will be at least partly written individually. If the same comment is posted in many places, e.g. something like Disqus can detect them directly (or Google, for that matter).

>conspiracy theories about all the West media being after Russia, which are only written in Putin's controlled media.

I've written those in English (I'm USian), and I'm not in any way Russian. The slant of the coverage of the last Olympics in the US was negative to an absurd degree, and I've simply never seen that before.

(You wrote it a day later, so I didn't see it for a while.)

Disclaimer: I don't know much about media on sports and even less about the US media and sports.

But if you check Russia's Putin-controlled media, they insist that the slant is anti-Russian in all democracies. Which is a conspiracy theory.

Remember, we are talking about a junta which "can't" lose an election.

I think astroturfing would work best if you did something like a targeted Onion like site, where the cynical members of the population of the people you are trying to turn wrote the propaganda themselves in a "Mother Night" [0] sorta way.

The turfers would think they are writing satire when the are really the steel cut gears of vertically integrated oppression.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Night

Url changed from http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/cable-companies-b..., which points to this.

In a more abstract pov, govs are not bad, and companies are not bad. It's a false dilemma. BIG govs are bad, and BIG companies are bad. Notice the common attribute? It's about relative power. That's why companies "lose their ideals" (hello google), when they grow big. It's not about inner organization and communication. It's about BIG. The obvious solution for a society, is to limit the maximum power differential between entities. ("We the people", is one such entity.) The actual implementation of that, is left as an exercise to the reader :-) (..But history has shown, that I/we shouldn't be optimistic.)

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