Teachout

It may not be a surprise to our regular readers that our biggest audiences, as measured by Google’s analytics, are concentrated in New York City, Albany, and the upstate cities of Rochester-Buffalo-Syracuse — all in New York, closely followed by Washington, D.C., and Southern California. Stop the Cap! is headquartered in Rochester, N.Y., but the broadband issues affecting upstate New York are identical almost everywhere, because companies like Charter and Comcast, AT&T and Verizon dominate in many states.

For the benefit of our New York readers, we would like to take a moment to endorse one candidate for our state’s next attorney general. Who wins this race will have a ripple effect on almost all of our readers, because New York’s long history providing oversight of critical public and private utilities impacts not only on the people living here, but often sets precedents that deliver real benefits to consumers across all 50 states.

New York needs a strong and active attorney general, especially at a time when a pervasive culture of corruption in Washington, D.C. and Albany continues to fester. An attorney general can provide independent oversight and investigate behavior the current Congress and state legislature refuse to do for partisan reasons. Corruption, corporate influence, and pay-for-play politics is a bipartisan problem.

Our last attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, horrified us after revelations he allegedly physically assaulted some of the women he dated while also claiming to be a strong ally for the #MeToo movement. Many of his public policy positions were admirable, but his irresponsible, reckless, and unforgivable behavior reminded New Yorkers how flawed many of our state’s elected officials are. Schneiderman was just the latest to resign over a decade of resignations including a former governor, legislative leaders, aides, and elected officials from Buffalo to Long Island.

What New York needs now is a new generation of not-well-connected politicians that have no interest in joining an insider network of good ‘ole boys (and girls) who cynically cut deals and look the other way for political expediency. We need leaders that pledge loyalty, not to the party they belong to, but to the people they were elected to serve. That means an end to “everybody does it” campaign trolling for corporate cash, friendly (usually secretive) meet and greets with Wall Street, and wink and nod pledges of “understanding” by those taking frequent trips through the revolving door of public office and industry. New York has seen the impact of these practices in major scandals up and down the state involving deep pocketed construction companies, Wall Street banks, wealthy donors, and various well-connected business interests looking for contracts or tax breaks.

This time, there is a candidate that will deliver exactly what New York needs in an attorney general. Zephyr Teachout couldn’t be more independent if she tried. She wrote a book on political corruption, ran against New York’s current governor Andrew Cuomo, has been involved in a number of public policy groups advocating campaign finance reform, sunshine laws, protection from voter suppression, and providing stronger oversight of corporate interests, including a willingness to break up corporate monopolies.

On telecommunications issues, she couldn’t be a stronger candidate:

• She opposed Charter Communications acquisition of Time Warner Cable.
• She is tired of unopposed, competition-killing mergers like AT&T and Time Warner (Entertainment), Inc.
• She favors net neutrality.
• She supports public/municipal broadband, and for spending public money to resolve rural broadband problems.
• She will continue a lawsuit against Charter Communications for failing to meet its obligations to customers.
• She will fight the pervasive and corrosive impact of corporate political contributions and their distortion of public policy.

New York voters have several options to choose from for our next attorney general. Among the Democrats, New York City Public Advocate Letitia James has taken on Charter/Spectrum downstate and railed against Verizon’s broken FiOS commitments in New York City. While she now seems intent on carefully investigating Charter’s performance, that comes a little late. New York City has faced a number of problems with telecom companies breaking their commitments, many while James was in office. Those companies do not seem to be afraid of her. Her campaign platform seems focused on downstate issues that are likely not going to attract significant support upstate.

New York’s primary day is Sept. 13.

Leecia Eve is the establishment favorite for attorney general. Her website says little about her positions, but her resume speaks uncomfortable volumes about her close ties to the Clintons and the D.C. Democrats that enabled the telecom industry’s era of consolidation while doing almost nothing to stop monopoly abuse. Even worse, she is a veteran of D.C.’s revolving door, moving between government and private business in an all-too-familiar game that rarely turns out well for constituents. The deal breaker for us is Eve’s current job — a lobbyist for Verizon New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. She actually calls that experience a plus. Not for us. There are far better choices.

Sean Patrick Maloney is the first openly gay member of Congress elected from New York. Previously, he was a partner at two global law firms and ran a high-tech business. He is dubbed ‘the upstate candidate’ because he currently represents the 18th district, which includes all of Orange County and Putnam County, as well as parts of southern Dutchess County and northeastern Westchester County. His district includes Poughkeepsie. He is considered to the right of the other candidates, likely reflecting the more conservative upstate views of his district, where Donald Trump won over Hillary Clinton by just under two points in the 2016 presidential election.

Maloney’s campaign positions are thin, mostly focused on blocking Trump Administration policies that impact New York, particularly those on immigration. He also claims he will fight to stop corruption in Albany, but has said little else.

He is, by far, the most strident candidate in the race, reflecting a ‘tough talk’ style, sometimes laced with profanity, that usually doesn’t hurt candidates in New York politics. His message: he won’t take any crap from the president or his supporters.

“I don’t give a f**k what the Trump fans say. That’s not what this is about,” Maloney said in response to a question about Trump supporters’ feelings about his sexual orientation and family. “This is about speaking from the heart. About a family I’ve built for 25 years that’s in the crosshairs of these assholes. And doing something about it.”

He’s also upset about the less-than-robust response from fellow Democrats to rhetorical bomb-throwers on the right during the last two years of Donald Trump’s presidency.

“It feels like the people who are fueled by hate, demagoguery and anger have their sh*t together, and those of us who want to talk about love and hope and inclusion have been hiding in the shadows,” he said. “And it’s time to get out of the shadows and at least defend our ground. But I’d rather even get on offense.”

Maloney’s strong beliefs and style seem better suited to Congress than the state attorney general’s office. Although no stranger to grandstanding, the AG’s office usually spends most of its time reaching private settlements with offenders or taking them to court.

The Republicans have endorsed Keith Wofford for attorney general. His platform is wrapped around the premise the attorney general’s office in New York has been too hostile to companies in New York, essentially extorting settlements and deal conditions that hurt corporate interests while spending too much time on oversight and compliance and not enough time on attracting new businesses and jobs. That’s a philosophy former Oklahoma AG Scott Pruitt (who served as the president’s EPA administrator until his resignation in July) would strongly endorse.

“The business environment here is horrible— and the attorney general has been a big part of that problem,” Wofford writes. “Recent AGs have twisted New York’s laws, strong-armed companies to settle flimsy lawsuits, and used New York companies as a piggy bank. This has driven away jobs and investment. And the cost falls upon all New Yorkers, who are denied jobs and opportunity — because businesses refuse to invest here, or simply leave.”

After two years of the Trump Administration’s scandalous performance allowing corporate foxes to patrol the hen houses, Wofford’s double-down on Trump’s policies is woefully out-of-place.

For all these reasons, Stop the Cap! strongly endorses Zephyr Teachout for New York’s next attorney general. She is right on our issues and will instinctively fight to stop consumer abuse, often before it starts. She will be immune to the influences of corporate cash and the kinds of cozy Albany-insider politics that have allowed corruption to fester for too long.

New York regulators have given Charter Communications two additional weeks to submit its plan to discontinue service in the state after the Commission voted 4-0 in July to de-certify its merger with Time Warner Cable.

Charter’s additional request for an extension of the deadline to ask for a re-hearing of the Commission’s decision to evict Charter from New York remains under consideration.

“Good cause exists to extend both deadlines,” Charter’s attorneys argued. “Granting a short extension would allow time for discussions between Charter and the [PSC] before the initiation by Charter of additional Commission or court proceedings.”

The Commission agreed to a delay for the exit plan, acknowledging the PSC’s staff and commissioners may need additional time to consider Charter’s plan and take action to modify it, if necessary. Charter now has until Oct. 9, 2018 to submit its plan. The delay also gives Charter time to pursue alternative judicial and administrative appeals, most likely in the form of a lawsuit against the state.

If Charter loses its appeal, it will likely have to sell its New York operations in all but a few small communities in New York where it operated cable systems before the merger deal was announced.

The Commission published both Charter’s Aug. 17 request and the Commission’s agreement at the same time on its website Monday morning. Today’s decision also marks a change in tenor for the Commission, which had been increasingly hostile towards Charter in the weeks before deciding to evict the company.

Updated 8/21: Corrected article to reflect the fact Charter’s extension request for a re-hearing is pending and no decision has been made yet.

Goei

While Wall Street and the tech media seems excited about the prospect of 5G and other fixed wireless home broadband services, Altice, which owns Cablevision and Suddenlink, dismissed wireless broadband as inadequate to meet rapidly growing broadband usage.

“In terms of usage patterns, our customers are taking an average download speed of 162 Mbps as of the second quarter of 2018, which is up 74% year-over-year,” Dexter Goei, CEO of Altice USA told investors on a recent conference call. “[Our customers now use] over 220 GB of data per month, which is up 20% year-over-year, with 10 in-home connected devices, on average. If you take the top 10% of our highest data consuming customers as a leading indicator, they are using, on average, almost 1 terabyte of data per month with 26 in-home connected devices. To support these usage patterns, which are mainly driven by video streaming and the proliferation of new over-the-top [streaming] services, it requires a high quality fixed network like ours. There is no substitute.”

Goei argued America’s wireless carriers are not positioned to offer a credible, serious home broadband alternative.

“For example, so-called unlimited data plans from the U.S. mobile operators start capping or significantly throttling customers at 20 GB of usage per month,” Goei said. “Over 60% of our customers are now using over 100 GB of data per month right now, which the mobile operators do not and will not have the capacity to match on a scaled basis unless they overbuild with a new dense fiber network.”

Altice just so happens to be building a dense fiber network, scrapping Cablevision’s remaining coaxial cable in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut in favor of a fiber-to-the-home network that will eventually reach all of its customers.

Molinaro

Charter Communications has found itself an ally in Marc Molinaro, Republican candidate for New York’s governor, who attacked Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday for ordering the removal of Spectrum from New York State.

“We’ve got a megalomaniac on our hands, a veritable ‘Putin on the Hudson,'” Molinaro charged, defending the cable company for being attacked by the governor and “his surrogates” for political purposes.

Cuomo “put his thumb on the scale of a major PSC decision,” said Molinaro. “I think Andrew Cuomo got furious with NY1 News and effectively pulled the plug on an entire cable system as punishment to NY1, and as a warning to others he can affect who dare to ask him tough questions.”

Molinaro has repeatedly claimed the Public Service Commission is in the back pocket of the governor’s office.

Cuomo vs. NY1 – Spectrum’s 24-hour news channel in New York City

Molinaro’s campaign has been critical of an ongoing spat between the governor and reporters from NY1, Spectrum’s 24-hour news channel in New York City.

Earlier this month, Cuomo bristled at a question about improper campaign contributions from Crystal Run Healthcare, a health insurance provider in Middletown. NY1 reporter Zack Fink asked if the governor was considering returning those contributions and launching an internal investigation.

Gov. Cuomo

GOV. CUOMO: […] If the ongoing investigation finds any fraud, then as we’ve always done, we will return the donations. That’s standard operating procedure. We’re doing it in this case; we’ve always done it.

But speaking of fraud, Charter Spectrum has been executing fraud on the people of this state. They were given a franchise for a very specific set of conditions. It is a very valuable franchise. Many companies could have been given the franchise. Charter Spectrum said that they would increase cable access to the poor and rural communities around the state. That was the condition of them getting the franchise. I promised this state 100% high-speed broadband. Why? Because high-speed broadband is going to be the great equalizer, the great democratizer.

Whether you’re a business, an individual, you’re going to need high-speed broadband to be competitive. Charter Spectrum defrauded this state. They are defrauding consumers. Charter Spectrum is running ads that say we are ahead of schedule and at no cost to the taxpayer. The Public Service Commission said they’re behind schedule, not on schedule, and certainly not ahead of schedule. And to say it is no cost to the taxpayers is also a fraud, because that’s the condition upon which the taxpayers gave you the franchise. So you are defrauding the people of this state. That’s a fraud.

Fink

ZACK FINK (NY1): You said the PSC is looking into new operators. Is it the PSC’s place to do that or is it the market’s?

GOV. CUOMO: Are you speaking on behalf of Charter Spectrum or yourself?

ZACK FINK (NY1): No, I’m just asking a question. You brought it up so I’m curious. You said Friday that the PSC was looking at potential new operators.

GOV. CUOMO: Well, the Public Service Commission is saying that Charter Spectrum violated their franchise agreement. If you violate your franchise agreement, then you lose the franchise agreement and then they would have to find another operator without disruption to any of the consumers or the good workers of Charter Spectrum.

Viewers of NY1, a Spectrum News channel, never saw this exchange, which was widely covered elsewhere by the New York media. Viewers also didn’t see an on-the-record call-in by the governor made later than day to NY1’s newsroom to discuss the exchange. News of the call leaked after nobody at NY1 would publicly discuss it or why the news channel refused to air it.

Cuomo’s opponents on both his left and right criticized the governor over his treatment of the NY1 reporter.

“I’ll come right out and say it. It looks to me like Andrew Cuomo is trying to send a chilling message to the news media, ’don’t mess with me’, and I hope the inspector general can prove me wrong,” Molinaro said in a statement.

This week, Molinaro turned up the heat by claiming the governor was “acting more like a third-world dictator trying to intimidate the news media into dropping stories than an elected democratic leader who respects the First Amendment and has nothing to fear from it.”

Cynthia Nixon, running for the Democratic nomination to the left of Cuomo politically, claimed his chastising of NY1 reporters was out of line, resembling how Donald Trump treats the press.

“Cuomo can’t hold himself up as New York’s answer to Donald Trump, and simultaneously threaten members of the press for doing their job,” Nixon said, asking the governor to apologize.

Cuomo’s spokesman Rich Azzopardi claimed the ongoing criticism of Charter is nothing new for Gov. Cuomo.

“The governor answered his question and made the same statement that he has made to Charter Spectrum reporters and reporters statewide numerous times over the past few months, communicating the facts of the state’s two-year dispute with Charter for failing to serve the citizens of the state,” Azzopardi said.

Cuomo has made offhand remarks about Charter since the company replaced Time Warner Cable in 2016. He criticized NY1 and other Spectrum News stations around the state for not covering the IBEW strike against the cable company or a lawsuit filed by the state attorney general over the cable company’s failure to deliver on advertised broadband speeds.

“They virtually blacked it out,” Cuomo said of Spectrum News during a press event held on the day the PSC voted to drop Charter as a provider in New York.

Azzopardi also denied Molinaro’s accusation that the governor was involved in the PSC’s decision to force Charter to leave New York and dismissed the Republican opponent for spreading unproven “conspiracy theories.”

Cuomo is widely expected to be re-elected, with both Nixon and Molinaro running significantly behind the governor in polls. The primary is on Sept. 13.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo discusses Charter’s broken promises to New York State during a visit to Rochester, N.Y.  (Courtesy: Democrat & Chronicle) (2:28)

Pai

The FCC under Chairman Ajit Pai “misrepresented facts and provided misleading responses” to the public and Congress about an alleged “distributed denial of service attack” (DDoS) that caused the FCC’s website to crash as millions of Americans shared their comments about net neutrality.

In a damning report released today by the FCC’s independent Inspector General, an investigation found the claimed attack never happened and the FCC’s ongoing public statements about it were demonstrably false.

The investigation into the alleged “attack” on the FCC’s electronic comment system (ECFS) on May 7-8, 2017 took several months to complete. Its findings were released after Pai was able to issue a broadly distributed press release critics claim is an effort to change the story and get ahead of the report itself, which was issued late this afternoon.

A DDoS attack overwhelms a website with a barrage of invalid traffic that eventually makes the target server unresponsive. The FCC claimed the attack was responsible for preventing people from leaving comments for hours after John Oliver brought up the subject of net neutrality on his HBO Show “Last Week Tonight” last year.

But in fact, it was the sheer volume of comments from the public that were responsible for slowing down the website — a politically inconvenient fact for net neutrality opponents (including Pai).

Highlights from the Inspector General’s 106-page report:

On May 7, 2017, at 11:30 pm EDT, the ECFS experienced a significant increase in the level of traffic attempting to access the system, resulting in the disruption of system availability. In fact, information obtained from, a contractor providing web performance and cloud security solutions to the FCC, identified a 3,116% increase in traffic to ECFS between May 7 and May 8, 2017.

The investigation matched traffic spikes to John Oliver’s show airing and the posting of videos and social media announcements about net neutrality.

On May 8, 2017, the FCC issued a press release in which the FCC’s former Chief Information Officer (CIO) Dr. David Bray provided the following statement regarding the cause of delays experienced by consumers trying to file comments on ECFS:

“Beginning on Sunday night at midnight, our analysis reveals that the FCC was subject to multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS)[2]. These were deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC’s comment system with a high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host. These actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC. While the comment system remained up and running the entire time, these DDoS events tied up the servers and prevented them from responding to people attempting to submit comments. We have worked with our commercial partners to address this situation and will continue to monitor developments going forward.”

Our investigation did not substantiate the allegations of multiple DDoS attacks alleged by Bray. While we identified a small amount of anomalous activity and could not entirely rule out the possibility of individual DoS attempts during the period from May 7 through May 9, 2017, we do not believe this activity resulted in any measurable degradation of system availability given the miniscule scale of the anomalous activity relative to the contemporaneous voluminous viral traffic.

Here is what a net neutrality campaign going viral looks like. As Oliver’s show reached more viewers, many took time to visit the FCC’s website to submit comments, causing the server to slow to a crawl.

The degradation of ECFS system availability was likely the result of a combination of: (1) “flash crowd” activity resulting from the Last Week Tonight with John Oliver episode that aired on May 7, 2017 through the links provided by that program for filing comments in the proceeding; and (2) high volume traffic resulting from system design issues.

The conclusion that the event involved multiple DDoS attacks was not based on substantive analysis and ran counter to other opinions including those of the ECFS subject matter expert and the Chief of Staff.

As a result of our reviews and the findings articulated above, we determined the FCC, relying on Bray’s explanation of the events, misrepresented facts and provided misleading responses to Congressional inquiries related to this incident.

The fact millions of Americans were willing to visit a little-known FCC comment website to share their passionate views on net neutrality ran contrary to Chairman Pai’s claims that many comments were faked, demonstrated a lack of understanding of how net neutrality worked, or were otherwise not to be taken seriously. Pai even called net neutrality supporters “Chicken Littles” during a July 25 congressional hearing.

Pai’s public statements downplaying public comments on net neutrality might lose credibility if the FCC admitted the issue of net neutrality went viral and Americans were sharing their views in unprecedented numbers. Instead, the FCC repeatedly questioned the veracity of the comments, claimed an engineered attack — not dissent — caused the website to crash, and refused to participate in an investigation with the New York Attorney General’s office to uncover the origin of the alleged attack.

Pai’s press release tried to shift attention away from this damning conclusion from the FCC’s Inspector General.

Pai, in an effort to get out ahead of the unflattering report from the Inspector General, issued a press release blaming the affair on the flawed “culture” of the Obama Administration.

“I am deeply disappointed that the FCC’s former Chief Information Officer (CIO), who was hired by the prior Administration and is no longer with the Commission, provided inaccurate information about this incident to me, my office, Congress, and the American people,” Pai said in a statement. “This is completely unacceptable. I’m also disappointed that some working under the former CIO apparently either disagreed with the information that he was presenting or had questions about it, yet didn’t feel comfortable communicating their concerns to me or my office.”

“Second, it has become clear that in addition to a flawed comment system, we inherited from the prior Administration a culture in which many members of the Commission’s career IT staff were hesitant to express disagreement with the Commission’s former CIO in front of FCC management,” Pai added.

Jessica Rosenworcel, the only remaining Democrat on the Commission, dismissed Pai’s attempts to lay blame for the problems on the former administration.

Bray – the scapegoat?

“The Inspector General Report tells us what we knew all along: the FCC’s claim that it was the victim of a DDoS attack during the net neutrality proceeding is bogus,” said Rosenworcel. “What happened instead is obvious—millions of Americans overwhelmed our online system because they wanted to tell us how important Internet openness is to them and how distressed they were to see the FCC roll back their rights. It’s unfortunate that this agency’s energy and resources needed to be spent debunking this implausible claim.”

Pai’s chief scapegoat is David Bray, the FCC’s chief information officer from 2013-2017. Pai accused Bray of misleading him and other FCC officials about the source of the slowdowns and interruptions on the website.

“Yes, we’re 99.9% confident this was external folks deliberately trying to tie-up the server to prevent others from commenting and/or create a spectacle,” Pai quoted Bray as telling him during the May 2017 incident. Bray also acted as an anonymous source for several reporters, claiming a similar DDoS attack occurred in 2014 over net neutrality, a claim hotly disputed by FCC Chairman Thomas Wheeler at the time and called “flat-out false” by Gigi Sohn, a senior counselor to Wheeler.

Fact or Fiction?: Bray claimed 4Chan’s “troll” army was invited to the fight by John Oliver.

Bray also claimed, without evidence, John Oliver “invited the ‘trolls'” from controversial website 4Chan to participate in the attack, suggesting the posting of Oliver’s segment on net neutrality was what “triggered the trolls.”

An exhaustive investigation of the FCC’s traffic logs found no evidence of an orchestrated DDoS attack, and the Inspector General used charts to show tremendous traffic spikes generated as Oliver’s campaign went viral.

Pai’s press release attempts to change the subject and divert attention away from the uncomfortable findings that suggest the FCC under his leadership openly deceived both the public and Congress. Instead of admitting he allowed the agency to continue claiming an outside attack on the FCC’s website was responsible for the incident, he praised himself and his office for what he claimed were findings that “debunk the conspiracy theory that my office or I had any knowledge that the information provided by the former CIO was inaccurate and was allowing that inaccurate information to be disseminated for political purposes.”

That directly contradicts the reports conclusion: “As a result of our reviews and the findings articulated above, we determined the FCC, relying on Bray’s explanation of the events, misrepresented facts and provided misleading responses to Congressional inquiries related to this incident.”