Christmas comes early for Comcast and AT&T, thanks to Ersatz Santa, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai.

In the view of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and his Republican colleagues serving as members of the Federal Communications Commission, Monday – June 11, 2018 is Internet Freedom Day, marking the official end of net neutrality. Republican FCC commissioners, working hand-in-hand with the nation’s largest telecommunications companies, successfully abolished a pro-consumer rule that ensured all internet traffic was treated equally by your internet service provider, with a ban on paid fast lanes and other types of traffic discrimination. 

The FCC website has a new look today, one that discourages consumers from bringing internet-related complaints to an agency that has invited consumers to reach out about unresolved internet problems since the earliest days of internet access.

While much of the country is focused on the Republicans’ successful repeal of open internet protections, many might have missed the fact the FCC also intends to ‘pass the buck’ on your internet problems to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), an agency that can take a year or more to bring action against companies suspected of violating the law.

Consumers who visit the FCC’s Consumer Complaint Center will find a stripped down resource that now primarily exists to forward consumer complaints to another federal agency. Chairman Pai has made certain the experience is as discouraging as possible for those who manage to find their way to the FCC’s complaint department (emphasis ours):

If you choose to file an informal complaint with the FCC about an Internet-related issue, we will share the information you provide, including your name and contact information, with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Your complaint may be used to investigate cases or in a legal proceeding.

Before proceeding with your submission, please note that an informal consumer complaint should only be filed at the FCC if you have a specific issue with your provider.

If you are interested in submitting an informal complaint about an Internet-related issue, please complete this form.

The old form made no mention of the FTC, which is central to Pai’s new “hands off” policy at the FCC.

This morning, Pai told CBS that the Federal Trade Commission will now work to prevent such cases of “bad apples in the internet economy” from ripping off consumers.

“We’ve empowered the FTC to take action against any company that might act in any anti-competitive way,” said Pai. “The consumer is going to be protected and we preserve the incentive for companies to build out better, faster, and cheaper internet access. Consumers need to be protected and the FTC is the only one under current law that can do that.”

But Pai’s claims don’t ring true to Gigi Sohn, who served as a counselor to former FCC Chairman Thomas Wheeler.

Sohn

“Should consumers or innovators have a complaint about fraudulent, discriminatory, privacy violating or predatory pricing practices of broadband ISPs, the FCC won’t answer their call,” Sohn said. “For the first time since the creation of broadband, the agency will not take responsibility for protecting consumers or competition.”

Neither will the FTC, which warns would-be complainants upfront on its website: “The FTC cannot resolve individual complaints, but we can provide information about what next steps to take,” which is equivalent to calling the fire department because your house is on fire and receiving a booklet that explains how to acquire and use a hose to put the fire out yourself.

ISP’s no longer need fear having a federal agency like the FCC following every consumer complaint. The FTC claims it may share your complaint with local, state, federal, and foreign law enforcement partners, or may be used to investigate cases or hold a legal proceeding. But unlike the guidelines the FCC answered to under the Obama Administration, there is no requirement to force a provider to quickly respond to you, no easy access to statistics detailing received internet-related complaints (such as the tens of thousands of complaints about data caps, throttling, and net neutrality collected by the FCC under the last administration), and no significant likelihood of action. Want an example? The FTC has been charged with ending the scourge of automated robocalls that generated more than 275,000 complaints last year… from the state of Ohio alone. In the last two years, the FTC issued press releases touting cases brought against a total of three alleged telemarketers. Has your phone stopped ringing?

Under the Trump Administration’s FCC, it is open season on consumers, and the complaint department is now closed.

A well-coordinated campaign to manufacture news of a phony cyberattack and give false information to the press to explain why the FCC’s electronic comment system crashed while news of net neutrality went viral has been exposed.

Internal agency emails reviewed by Gizmodo show a clear intention by some agency officials to deceive the media and the public about the nature of serious outages in the regulator’s electronic public comment system during high profile coverage of net neutrality, blaming the outages on an organized distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack that appears to have never happened.

On the night of May 7, 2017, John Oliver did a segment about net neutrality on his HBO show Last Week Tonight. At the end of his piece, he urged viewers to send comments to the FCC in support of net neutrality. It was the second time Oliver’s viewers brought the FCC’s electronic comments system to its knees. After intense demand effectively locked up the system after Oliver discussed net neutrality in 2014, the FCC promised to improve the commenting system to accommodate more traffic. FCC chairman Thomas Wheeler said in 2014 the downtime could be attributed to massive interest in the issue of internet freedom from ordinary Americans.

But three years later, a new administration hostile to net neutrality and a new FCC chairman had a different story about just how interested Americans really were. Wheeler’s story was replaced by Ajit Pai’s claims that real people are not that interested in net neutrality and that the downtime, as well as what he calls “fake comments” left on the system, are the result of nefarious deeds by an unknown party or parties. Pai and his staffers have systematically attempted to de-legitimize and gaslight supporters of net neutrality. In condescending tones, Pai and his allies claimed ordinary Americans were hoodwinked into supporting net neutrality by radical internet groups that have managed to fool them. By also calling into question the legitimacy of millions of comments from net neutrality supporters, Pai and his industry friends have had an easier time decapitating net neutrality protections, despite their widespread popularity.

Gizmodo reports the FCC under Pai and the Trump Administration is extraordinarily secretive about the issue. The agency has refused to produce any credible evidence of a denial of service attack, even when members of the media have sued the agency for the information and members of Congress have demanded to see the evidence.

Gizmodo:

[I]n May 2017, under the Trump-appointed chairman, Ajit Pai, at least two FCC officials quietly pushed a fallacious account of the 2014 incident, attempting to persuade reporters that the comment system had long been the target of DDoS attacks. “There *was* a DDoS event right after the [John Oliver] video in 2014,” one official told reporters at FedScoop, according to emails reviewed by Gizmodo.

David Bray, who served as the FCC’s chief information officer from 2013 until June 2017, assured reporters in a series of off-the-record exchanges that a DDoS attack had occurred three years earlier. More shocking, however, is that Bray claimed Wheeler, the former FCC chairman, had covered it up.

According to emails from Bray to reporters, Wheeler was concerned that if the FCC publicly admitted there was an attack, it would likely incite “copycats.”

“That’s just flat out false,” said Gigi Sohn, former counselor to Chairman Wheeler. “We didn’t want to say it because Bray had no hard proof that it was a DDoS attack. Just like the second time.”

Bray’s exchanges with reporters, which took place via email, were obtained by American Oversight, a watchdog group, under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Gizmodo reviewed the more than 1,300 pages of records last week.

Bray

Most of the claims about a nefarious (and convenient) cyberattack seem to have originated from Bray, the senior official responsible for maintaining the comment system. A subsequent rambling response to the Gizmodo piece written by Bray was posted this morning to Medium.

In it, Bray recasts himself as a victim of a tech reporter who never called him and the general nature of partisan politics in Washington. Bray repeatedly claimed he was nobily working tirelessly to make sure “actual people” could comment on the high-profile issue of net neutrality. Unfortunately, he offered no proof in the form of logs or contemporaneous e-mails or written memos to prove what could be a plausible alternative theory of the traffic jam (namely, a person or persons unknown wrote poorly developed scripts to automatically submit comments to the FCC’s electronic comment system that had the unintended side effect of hopelessly clogging it.) In Washington, staffers confronting a high-profile problem likely to be noticed by their employers and become the fodder of political debate have learned the habit of saving everything, if only to avoid the kind of “guilty until proven innocent” standard of partisan-influenced investigations. The controversy has now achieved exactly the kind of high-profile prominence staffers generally dread.

“I have seen no evidence of a DDoS attack on the FCC comment system,” FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel told Gizmodo, in a direct contradiction of Bray. “But I did see millions of Americans write in to the FCC to stop its misguided effort to roll back net neutrality. It’s time for the agency to own up to what really happened.”

FCC staffers under the current chairman have a track record of being combative and secretive. There have been occasions when Stop the Cap! has tangled with Matthew Berry, Ajit Pai’s chief of staff. Berry, and other staffers, have been willing to engage in hand-to-hand combat on Twitter and other forms of social media and pass around pro-industry talking points routinely condemning the Obama Administration and the FCC under Chairman Tom Wheeler, while generally supporting large telecom companies:

Looks like broadband providers’ capital investments substantially increased in 2017 after declining in 2015 and 2016. Reversing the failed policies of the prior FCC is having a positive impact, and we’re just getting started! https://t.co/N80UTSpxV5

— Matthew Berry (@matthewberryfcc) May 15, 2018

When not on Twitter, staffers like Bray often serve as off-the-record sources for news services like FedScoop, while also feeding talking points and fake details about the cyberattack-that-wasn’t to the Wall Street Journal. The resulting article proved particularly useful to Bray and the FCC, which used the published news story as ‘independent evidence’ from ‘a third party’ that the attacks were real.

As investigative reporters made it clear they were not going to let the story go, top officials at the FCC have since circled the wagons and have done everything possible to keep the story from leaking out. In the more than 1,300 emails obtained by American Oversight in May, the FCC redacted every internal communication about the 2017 “cyberattack” and how to handle it in the press, citing attorney-client communications or the catch-all “deliberative process privilege” — the favorite obstructive choice of secretive federal agencies looking for a way around Sunshine Laws by denying access to any request for communications involving “governmental decisions and [how] policies are formulated.”

Gizmodo points out they also redacted discussions among FCC staffers about how to characterize the “attack” in response to inquiries from Congress. They even redacted a publicly posted Politico newsletter in full.

“Some of these messages are probably correctly redacted, but avoiding potential embarrassment is not a legitimate reason for the government to conceal an email,” Austin Evers, American Oversight’s executive director, said. “We were skeptical of the FCC’s explanations about its online comment system issues last May, and it’s clear that we still don’t have the full story about what happened.”

(Downdetector.com)

A significant number of Comcast Business Voice customers have been without phone service since 8:00am this morning, disrupting operations and forcing many companies to use social media to offer up alternative cell phone numbers for customers wishing to call.

“Some Comcast Business customers may be experiencing issues with their Business Voice service,” said Jennifer Bilotta, vice president of communications for Comcast in a terse statement. “We are working to restore service to these customers as soon as possible. We appreciate our customers’ patience as we work to resolve the issue and will provide additional updates as they are available.”

A survey of social media and news reports shows the largest outages are affecting customers in the northeast, California, Florida, Georgia, Chicago, Texas, and the Pacific Northwest.

An unconfirmed report suggested the outage would be over by around 5:00pm EDT.

As gigabit internet becomes more common across the United States, some ISPs are seeking a speed advantage by offering even faster speeds to residential and business customers. On Tuesday, Nokia announced Frontier Communications and Rochester, N.Y.-based Greenlight Networks would be upgrading their fiber networks to the company’s XGS-PON solution, which can handle 10 Gbps upload and download speeds.

“Next Generation PON technologies such as XGS-PON are increasingly being deployed as demand for ultra-broadband applications and services continue to grow,” said Julie Kunstler, principal analyst at Ovum, in a statement. “Providing operators with the ability to use the same passive and active plants, XGS-PON solutions like Nokia’s can be quickly deployed and used to capture 10Gbps service opportunities that help operators to improve the return on their existing fiber network investments.”

Many existing fiber networks currently rely on GPON (gigabit passive optical network) technology — which allows one fiber in a bundle of fibers to service multiple homes and businesses. GPON networks are typically capable of download speeds of 2.488 Gbps and shared upstream speeds of 1.244 Gbps. Many ISPs using GPON technology typically offer fast download speeds, but often slower upload speeds.

Next generation XGS-PON allows up to 10 Gbps in both directions over existing fiber networks. In fact, the technology is future proof, allowing operators to immediately upgrade to faster speeds and later move towards Full TWDM-PON, an even more robust technology, without expensive network upgrades.

Most providers are leveraging XGS-PON technology to deliver symmetrical broadband — same upload and download speeds — to residential customers and to expand network capacity to avoid congestion. XPS-PON technology also supports faster-than-gigabit speeds than can be attractive to commercial customers.

Frontier intends to deploy Nokia’s technology in ex-Verizon markets in California, Texas, and Florida, beginning in Dallas-Fort Worth. It will allow Frontier to beef up its FiOS network and market stronger broadband products to Texas businesses. In Rochester, Greenlight will use the technology to upgrade its fiber service, which competes locally with Frontier DSL and Charter/Spectrum. Spectrum recently introduced gigabit download speed in Rochester. Greenlight can now expand beyond its 1 Gbps offering, but more importantly, increase its maximum upload speed beyond 100 Mbps.

“Greenlight is constantly looking at ways we can deliver new services that fit every customer need. We pride ourselves on offering the fastest internet speeds available in the markets we serve and Nokia’s XGS-PON technology will play a critical part in our ability to deliver these services to our customers,” said Greenlight CEO Mark Murphy. “With Nokia’s next-generation PON fiber solution we will be able to deliver the latest technologies, applications, products and services quickly and reliably to our customers and ensure they have access to the ultra-broadband speeds and capacity they require now and in the future.”

Nokia points out its XGS-PON technology may also be very attractive to wireless companies considering deploying 5G services. Extensive fiber assets available in area neighborhoods will be crucial for the success of millimeter wave 5G technology, which relies on small cells placed around neighborhoods and fed by fiber optics.

NBC News will appeal to cord cutters and online news junkies with a new streaming network to be launched this summer, according to a report in Variety.

NBC News Digital is an experimental project from NBC News and will not duplicate existing NBC and MSNBC programming. Instead, the news division is hiring producers and talent to create new, original news shows for online audiences.

NBC News chairman Andrew Lack hinted that NBC was getting into the live-streaming business back in March, but had offered few details.

Most 24/7 news channels are behind the cable industry’s “TV Everywhere” authentication paywall, requiring viewers to prove they are current paid cable television subscribers to gain access.

NBC will face immediate competition from CBSN, the free digital streaming service from CBS offering live coverage of important news events and a regularly updated playlist of pre-recorded news segments and airings of CBS network news programming and features.

Fox News is working on its own subscription-based online news channel called Fox Nation that is expected to arrive by the end of this year.

In contrast, other cable news networks have been substantially cutting back on digital projects. CNN laid off its digital staffers in early 2018 and MSNBC relies exclusively on streaming material that has already aired on the cable news channel.