There are plenty of times when I have questioned why something that the USPTO granted a trademark on should be allowed to be registered at all. But one example that flummoxes me the most is that you can go out there and trademark area codes. You don't hear about this all that much, but AB InBev made this somewhat famous when it acquired Chicago's Goose Island Brewing, including the trademark for its "312" brand of beer, and proceeded to file for trademarks on allllllll kinds of area codes.

Why? Why can a company lock up an identifier for a geographic region in any market designation? The answer according to some is that the USPTO has decided that area codes aren't purely geographic descriptions.

If consumers encounter an area code being used as a trademark, will consumers likely think that product comes from the region identified by the code, or will it be viewed as a tribute to the region?   Perhaps we’ll see if A-B expands its use of area codes. The USPTO generally does not consider area codes to be merely geographically descriptive and thus area codes used as trademarks are registrable without a showing of acquired distinctiveness.

Someone is going to have to explain this to me. Go throw the term "area code" into Google. The returning results will be of one or two categories. Either you will get a link to a series of tables that match a given area code with a state, city, or county, or you will get an actual map showing where specific area codes lie in different regions. Both of those things are denoting geographic reasons. The area code has the word area in it. What the absolute hell is the USPTO talking about?

Because this is still causing problems with some individuals using area code marks to bully everyone else.

Fred Gillich, the owner of Too Much Metal and 414 Milwaukee, started his 414 brand in 2012. His stylized version of the area code appears on T-shirts, hats, glassware and flags – one of which hung from City Hall last spring. Beard MKE, a local retail company, partnered with Cream City Print Lounge, also Milwaukee-based, to create a "414 All" shirt to benefit the Cream City Foundation that works to protect the rights of the LGBTQ+ community.

Gillich sent Beard MKE a cease and desist letter earlier this month, and was not satisfied with the company's response. And so he went to social media and made a post calling out Beard MKE for using the 414 area code on a shirt with the image below.

The response to Gillich attempting to publicly shame another group that was handing proceeds from merch sales bearing the "414" area code to charity was almost universally negative. Comments from legal experts mostly amounted to: "Yeah, the USPTO gave him the mark, so he can bully whoever he wants over it." As though nobody can get to the next logical question, which is to ask why this is allowed at all? The mark is so broad, and so tied to a geographic region, it serves as the source identifier of nothing at all, save maybe an entire region.

And Gillich has made a habit of this sort of thing.

"This is not the first time he's done this to a small business and no one has the time or the money for legal support," says Crosby.

Gillich says he just wants companies to partner with him rather than use the trademarked 414 without permission.

"I survive on my creativity and when I see it being appropriated, the question becomes who's hurting whose small business?" says Gillich. "I am protecting my livelihood."

Ah, yes, the creativity of noticing that you live in a certain area code and then trademarking it. Hey, USPTO, bang up job here, fellas.

Last month we wrote about how the newly appointed head of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) had cleaned house, getting rid of the heads of the various organizations under the USAGM umbrella. That included Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting... and the Open Technology Fund. The general story making the rounds is that Pack, a Steve Bannon acolyte, planned to turn the famously independent media operations into a propaganda arm for the Trump administration. Leaving side the concerns about why this is so dangerous and problematic on the media side, we focused mostly on the one "different" organization under the USAGM banner: the Open Technology Fund.

OTF is incredibly important to a functioning and open internet -- especially one where freedom and privacy to communicate can work around the globe, with a focus on funding audited, open source technologies. Last week, Vice had a detailed story about what it describes as "the plot to kill the Open Technology Fund." In it, it notes that Pack wants OTF to fund two apps that are not open source, Freegate and Ultrasurf. While both claim to be about helping circumvent internet censorship, most activists don't trust those apps. Indeed, it notes that the developer behind Ultrasurf agreed to a security audit by the US government, but then threatened the company who did the audit with legal action if it made the report public:

VICE News has learned that Ultrasurf recently underwent a security audit to assess if the app contained any critical security flaws. The audit was conducted at the request of the State Department as a condition of funding, but the report has not been published.

This was because the developer of Ultrasurf wanted a reference to “a high-severity bug” removed from the report, according to a source at the company that conducted the audit, Cure53.

The developer, who uses the pseudonym Clint to protect his family in China, subsequently threatened Cure53 with legal action if they ever published the report. Clint told VICE News the audit was “sort of like a trap” and that the report was not made public because it would reveal too much about his source code.

Let's be clear: if publishing a security audit about your software will reveal too much about your source code your app is not secure.

So why would OTF under Pack's command suddenly be interested in funding these closed source, highly questionable apps? You guessed it:

Mainly because prominent individuals with strong links to Pack have spent the better part of the last decade repeatedly pushing these apps to receive tens of millions of dollars in funding from the U.S. government, without providing any evidence that the technology will succeed.

The two loudest proponents of these technologies are Michael Horowitz, a former director of the Project for International Religious Liberty at the Hudson Institute, and Katrina Lantos Swett, the president of the Lantos Foundation Human Rights and Justice.

The former heads of OTF told Vice that they received a threatening call from Swett basically saying that if OTF didn't fund these questionable apps, she would lean on Pack to retaliate against OTF:

In March, around the time Trump decided to pressure Republicans in the Senate to confirm Pack’s appointment, Libby Liu, OTF’s CEO, and Laura Cunningham, OTF’s president, got a phone call from Swett and her colleagues to discuss funding for large-scale circumvention tools to help people in China bypass the Great Firewall.

Swett described it as “a very professional and a very cordial call,” but that’s not how Liu and Cunningham remember it.

“It was quite threatening,” Cunningham told VICE News. “They said that they were very close with Michael Pack [and] told us that there was a lot of disappointment that we were not funding the most effective circumvention tools out there. Their advice was that if we wanted to make sure we stayed in CEO Pack’s good graces, that we needed to reorient our funds immediately to support those technologies.”

Liu says Swett and her colleagues “lectured us, you know, round robin-style, and threatened us.”

Vice also shows Horowitz showing up on Steve Bannon's radio show last month directly saying that Libby Liu should be fired (though he mistakenly claims she's part of Radio Free Asia, which used to house OTF, but OTF has been spun out separately from RFA for a while now):

In that video, you see Bannon ask Horowitz to repeat the name of who he wanted fired, and apparently write down Liu's name while saying "okay." Days later, Liu and Cunningham were both fired by Pack (incredibly, Liu had already resigned, but Pack doubled down and fired her anyway).

In response, OTF itself and the board members of many of the USAGM organizations have now sued Michael Pack, arguing that he has no right to fire people:

Although funded by Congress through grants administered by the Agency, the four organizations targeted by Mr. Pack are not part of the government. Their employees are not government employees. They are private, nonprofit organizations with their own leadership and independent boards of directors. That is by design. Their mission, collectively, is to promote the free flow of information worldwide, especially in countries where authorities restrict freedom of expression. They do this through global efforts to combat online censorship and news broadcasts in 61 different languages, reaching 400 million people each day. But they can only be effective in countering disinformation and censorship if they are rightly perceived as independent, professional, and fact-driven—not as official mouthpieces for some partisan agenda. To ensure the integrity and credibility of this vital work, their independence from political interference is protected by a strict “firewall” embodied in statutes, regulations, and binding contract provisions. Mr. Pack’s actions this past week constitute the most egregious breach of that firewall in history.

[....]

Mr. Pack’s actions are unlawful in at least two critical respects. First, with respect to Open Technology Fund—an independent nonprofit dedicated to advancing global Internet freedom— Packlacks any legal authority whatsoever to remove its officers or directors. The statutory authority and bylaws on which Mr. Pack purported to rely do not remotely confer any such authority.Second, although Pack does have limited statutory authority with respect to personnel decisions at the other three organizations, that authority is strictly constrained by statute, regulation, and contract. With respect to all four organizations—Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, and Open Technology Fund—Mr. Pack’s attempt to remove the organizations’ officers and directors across the board constitutes an impermissible breach of the “firewall.” So does his attempt to freeze funds. Indeed, in each of its grant agreements with these organizations, the Agency has pledged to honor these statutory and regulatory obligations and is prohibited from “tak[ing] any . . . action that may tend to undermine” the organizations’ “journalistic credibility or independence.”Mr. Pack’s actions impermissibly breach the “firewall.” It is hard to conceive of a more serious breach of the organizations’ legally protected independence than the wholesale decapitation of their leadership by an ideologically-oriented maker of political films, installed by the President for the stated purpose of altering the organizations’ content.

On top of that, it seems that these moves by Pack to clean house have at least raised surprisingly bi-partisan concerns in Congress. A group of Senators led by Marco Rubio have sent a letter to Pack demanding an explanation and making it clear that USAGM is supposed to be independent of politics.

As the United States faces global challenges in the information space, it cannot afford to invest in an enterprise that denigrates its own journalists and staff to the satisfaction of dictators and despots, nor can it be one that fails to live up to its promise of providing access to a free and independent press. Congress set up these networks, and its governance structure at USAGM, to preserve the grantees’ independence so they can act as a bulwark against disinformation through credible journalism.

We urge you to respect the unique independence that enables USAGM’s agencies and grantees to help cultivate a free and open world. Given the bipartisan and bicameral concern with recent events, we intend to do a thorough review of USAGM’s funding to ensure that United States international broadcasting is not politicized and the agency is able to fully and effectively carry out its core mission.

Beyond Rubio, the letter is signed by some fairly powerful Senators on both sides of the aisle: Dick Durbin, Lindsey Graham, Pat Leahy, Jerry Moran, Susan Collins and Chris Van Hollen. Will it convince Pack to back off? Who knows, but at least it's nice to see that in this one very important area, some Senators have the backbone to push back against what appears to be a very swampy, corrupt move by this administration.

Hong Kong was handed back to China in 1997 with the understanding the Chinese government would not strip away the rights granted to Hong Kong residents prior to the handover. The Chinese government has no intention of honoring that agreement, which has prompted months of protests.

The Hong Kong government has consummated its acquiescence to the Chinese government with the adoption of a harsh law that directly targets dissent and protest under the guise of securing the nation. Hong Kong residents weren't informed about the contents of the new law until after it was passed and adopted. The BBC runs down the key aspects of the new law -- none of which appear to respect the rights supposedly granted to Hong Kong residents.

Crimes of secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces are punishable by a minimum sentence of three years, with the maximum being life

Inciting hatred of China's central government and Hong Kong's regional government are now offences under Article 29

Damaging public transport facilities can be considered terrorism

These are all things the Chinese government claims must be implemented to secure the nation. And these are all things that conveniently allow the government to imprison Hong Kong residents. It also allows them to target dissidents and opponents abroad, thanks to the government granting itself extraterritorial reach.

This Law shall apply to offences under this Law committed against the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region from outside the Region by a person who is not a permanent resident of the Region.

The law also says residents found guilty of these crimes cannot run for public office. This seems unnecessary, especially as many vocal anti-government activists have either chosen to go silent or leave the country completely.

The court process for adjudicating these cases has been streamlined to allow the Chinese government to imprison as many protesters and activists as possible. The chief executive of Hong Kong -- who has already gone on record as supportive of the "long overdue" law -- can appoint judges to oversee these trials. The Chinese government retains the option to take over prosecutions in cases where it feels local prosecutors just aren't trying hard enough. And decisions made by the newly-formed "national security commission" cannot be challenged in court.

Reactions have been immediate. Pro-democracy books have been pulled from libraries by the Hong Kong government in order to review them for violations of the new law. And protesters are now carrying blank signs, since the law makes the existence of any anti-Chinese government words a potential violation of the new law, possibly putting protesters in line for life in prison.

No one seems to be immune from the new law. The Hong Kong police apparently visited a restaurant to warn it of a violation of the new law. It responded by covering its menu and windows with blank Post It notes.

But even blank notes can carry a message:

After months of battling a rebellious region, the Chinese government has placed Hong Kong firmly under its control. There will be no more "one country, two systems." The only system the Chinese government is willing to back is its own. With countries like Australia and the UK opening their doors to Hong Kong citizens wishing to flee, the government may not have nearly as many people to place under its jackboot. But those who choose to stay run the risk of being jailed for years for complaining about a government willing to jail people for complaining.

The President's favorite sycophancy channel, OAN (One America News) has seen no shortage of headlines in the recent weeks for its dubious "news" programming. Said programming has included claims that elderly people are Antifa agitators, that the coronavirus was created in a North Carolina lab as part of a "deep state" plot, all while banning polls that dare to suggest that dear leader may not be doing all that hot in the wake of corruption, incompetence, and a raging pandemic. That's before you get to media allegations that the outlet has some uncomfortable parallels to Russian state TV.

But the people hyperventilating over the network's Trumpist disinformation and pole position in the White House briefing room often forget to mention that the channel doesn't actually have all that many viewers. While the channel currently reaches 35 million potential households (notably fewer actually watch), that's a far cry from the 119 million TV households that have access to major news networks like CNN and Fox News. Major cable TV providers like Dish, Charter, and Comcast don't carry the channel at all, leaving Verizon and AT&T as the only major cable TV providers that think it's worth it.

And even that could be changing. The company's contract with AT&T/DirecTV, first signed in 2017 and expiring in 2021, could be in trouble. Most notably because of the tough terms affixed to carriage at a time when cable providers are already being pushed to cut expensive dead weight due to cord cutting:

"One hurdle to getting carried by other major TV providers may be OAN’s contract with DirecTV. Under the terms, DirecTV is required to make OAN available to 85% of its subscribers, and the channel must seek the same arrangement with other pay-TV companies, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. In addition, OAN and its sister channel, AWE, which stands for “A Wealth of Entertainment,” charge pay-TV providers a monthly fee of about 15 cents per subscriber, according to Herring."

Cable providers have been cutting dead channel weight for several years as they work to try and cut their own costs -- to in turn prevent more cable TV customers from cutting cable TV out of their diet entirely (it's not really working). Sources told Bloomberg those conditions are likely too onerous for AT&T/DirecTV, and if that falls apart, OAN would lose access to yet another 19 million US households:

"Together, those provisions may be too onerous to entice big cable-TV providers to carry the network, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the contract is private. And OAN will have a large chunk of its audience at stake when it negotiates a contract renewal with AT&T, which has about 19 million pay-TV customers."

OAN, to this point, has tried to frame AT&T's decision to carry disinformation as an act of bravery:

"We are very pleased that AT&T seems to want to offer programming for everybody and not just people with one viewpoint," he said.

But if you're familiar with AT&T, you know it's not about bravery, it's about profitability. The company is swimming in debt from a recent slate of megamergers and losing customers hand over fist due to debt-recouping rate hikes. It's in the process of firing employees en masse (despite a parade of huge favors from the Trump administration), and examining every opportunity to save a buck. Combine that with growing OAN criticism and the potential for a looming political sea change, and concerns that OAN is on the cusp of being a major league media player don't appear entirely warranted.

Data isn't secure just because nothing happened to it when it was still in your possession. It can still "leak" long after the storage device has gone onto its second life in someone else's hands.

The Fort Huachuca Military Police were just apprised of this truism by Twitter user KF, who had purchased some used Axon body cameras on eBay. The cameras still contained their microSD storage cards. And contained on those storage cards were a bunch of recordings (including audio) that hadn't been wiped by the MPs before the cameras ended up on eBay.

The whole thread is worth a read (here's an unrolled version if you prefer to go somewhere other than Twitter). No one seems to know how the cameras ended up on eBay, but it's pretty amazing they ended up in the secondary market with their recordings still intact.

What's more amazing (but somehow simultaneously less surprising) is that the recordings weren't encrypted or protected by a password. Axon responded to the Arizona Mirror's reporting of this secondary-market breach by saying it was "looking into the matter." It also said it would be putting more effort into telling its law enforcement customers what they should already know.

“We are… reevaluating our processes to better emphasize proper disposal procedures for our customers.”

What's more reassuring is that this data disposal carelessness is no longer as much of an issue for Axon customers. The cameras in KF's hands are first-generation models produced in 2015. Axon's latest version encrypts recordings and, presumably, forces officers to select passwords to ensure this encryption isn't rendered useless by a lack of login protection.

eBay also responded to questions from the Mirror, stating that it forbids the sale of surveillance devices like the ones KF was able to purchase. It also said sellers are responsible for making sure internal storage is wiped before making devices eBay says it does not allow to be sold on the site are made available for sale on the site.

Security matters. But situations that demand the utmost in care are too often handled in ways that an octogenarian using their first computer ever would find amateurish. KF's site contains this amusing/scary security test of police in-car camera systems -- cameras the researchers were able to view live after discovering zero authentication was needed to access this stream. And the system itself was only "protected" by the default login/password, which the researchers found in a PDF copy of the device's manual after a little bit of Googling.

For all the talk from law enforcement officials about the need to redact and/or withhold recordings out of concern for people's privacy, they don't seem to be very concerned that these recordings are ending up in the hands of the public. Nor does there seem to be much concern that recordings might be improperly accessed by other personnel with access to the devices while the cameras were still being used by the Fort Huachuca police. The lack of password protection is just as alarming as the apparent lack of proper disposal procedures. This is consumer-grade carelessness exercised by a taxpayer-funded entity with a whole lot of power and the obligation to be better public servants.

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Last week, as predicted, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted unanimously to replace the original EARN IT Act, with a new one. As part of the markup, they also voted to approve Senator Patrick Leahy's amendment which some might read to say that EARN IT cannot be used to block encryption -- but the reality is a lot more complicated. As I'll explain, this new bill is terrible in a different way than the old bill: it will create a new dilemma in which internet services will either feel compelled to encrypt everything or in which the only way you'll be able to use any internet service is if you hand over a ton of personal information to the service provider -- potentially putting your privacy at extreme risk.

First lets acknowledge an oddity about this new bill. Both bills involve the creation of a commission to come up with "best practices" in trying to stop "child sexual abuse material" or CSAM (the concept formerly known as child porn). In the old bill, if sites didn't follow the commission's best practices, they could lose their Section 230 protections. This resulted in fears that the commission would outlaw encryption as a "best practice." The new bill retains the commission, but for no recognizable purpose. Instead, it does away with the pretense and just says that a bunch of sites should lose Section 230 protections no matter what. It seems quite odd to first say "we need a commission to determine best practices" and then on a second pass say that before the commission has done anything we're just going to make massive changes to Section 230 based on... nothing at all. No evidence saying that this would create better outcomes. No evidence that Section 230 is a problem with regards to CSAM. Just... nothing.

Specifically, the new bill makes a change to Section 230 that looks similar to the change that was made with FOSTA, saying that you don't get 230 protections if you advertise, promote, present, distribute, or solicit CSAM. But here's the thing: CSAM is already a federal crime and all federal crimes are already exempted from Section 230. On top of that, it's not as if there are a bunch of cases anyone can trot out as examples of Section 230 getting in the way of CSAM prosecutions. There's literally no evidence that this is needed or will help -- because it won't.

As we've detailed before, the real scandal in all of this is not that internet companies are facilitating CSAM, but that the DOJ has literally ignored its Congressional mandate to go after those engaged in CSAM production and distribution. Congress tasked the DOJ with tackling CSAM and the DOJ has just not done it. The DOJ was required to compile data and set goals to eliminate CSAM... and has just not done it. That's why it's bizarre that EARN IT is getting all of the attention rather than an alternative bill from Senators Wyden, Gillibrand, Casey and Brown that would tell the DOJ to actually get serious about doing its job with regards to CSAM, rather than blaming everyone else.

But digging into the details, the real problem here is that, as structured, the new EARN IT Act would be a disaster in trying to achieve the goals the sponsors have set out for it. First off, thanks to the addition of Senator Leahy's Amendment, some may see the bill as one that effectively requires encryption to avoid liability for CSAM. Even that's not totally clear, however. While you can read Leahy's amendment to say that encryption is protected, the actual structure of the final bill punts many issues to state law, and that means having to comply with 50 different state laws. Some, like Illinois, have lower standards for the mens rea regarding CSAM, and the worry is that we won't know whether or not offering end-to-end encryption would be seen as violating state laws until long and costly cases go through their lengthy process.

Either way, this weird CSAM carveout from Section 230 is somewhat equivalent to the moderator's dilemma that other attempts to change Section 230 create. Because most of those other reforms put in place a "knowledge" standard, it gives many sites a reason to never look at the content on their platform. In this case, due to the explicit call out saying that encryption isn't impacted, that would effectively say that if you want to keep 230 protections, you should encrypt absolutely everything. Which, ironically, is the exact opposite of what Attorney General Bill Barr has been asking for.

But, as with the moderator's dilemma, there's also a flipside (if you don't want to ignore everything, then you have to greatly restrict what you allow through). Under the new EARN IT, the flipside is that the government more or less says that you are now responsible for being able to track and identify anyone on your service who is not using encryption -- meaning you would need to carefully verify every user of your platform. No more simple signups. No more anonymity. And, incredibly, this would mean that sites would need to collect a ton of data on every user. Want to use this new service? First submit your phone number, driver's license, etc.

At a time when people are saying they trust big internet companies less and less with their data, why would Senators Graham, Blumenthal, Feinstein, and Hawley (HAWLEY!?!?) be encouraging websites to collect even more (and more intrusive) data on all their users?

Since this is somewhat different than the traditional moderator's dilemma, it might be called the "censor's dilemma" or possibly the "middleman's dilemma," in that this is even more tied to the government's demand that websites block certain content entirely, which puts them in the role of a government middleman or censor (which, not coincidentally, would raise serious constitutional issues with the EARN IT Act turning private entities into state censors).

Either way it is difficult to see how these two outcomes are what Congress (or, for that matter, the DOJ) actually wants:

• Much greater encouragement for websites to encrypt everything
• Much greater encouragement for websites to demand much more personal and private information on users.

And yet, thanks to Congress' standard bungling, that's what we have with the current EARN IT Act. And while it might be nice if the law actually did encourage more encryption, don't pin your hopes on that. As noted above, it's not entirely clear that it really does lead to that outcome, and we might not know until after a whole bunch of litigation. Furthermore, if that is is the end result, it will almost certainly lead to a different kind of backlash and support for even worse laws that seek to blow up encryption through other methods.

In short: the EARN IT Act is bad. At best it might encourage more encryption, but it would also create a whole host of unintended consequences, including much less privacy and no more anonymity on many websites. It's difficult to see how that accomplishes any of the goals of the bill's supporters.

We've noted for a while that the "race to 5G" is largely just the byproduct of telecom lobbyists hoping to spike lagging smartphone and network hardware sales. Yes, 5G is important in that it will provide faster, more resilient networks when it's finally deployed at scale years from now. But the society-altering impacts of the technology are extremely over-hyped, international efforts to deploy the faster wireless standard aren't really a race, and even if it were, our broadband maps are so terrible (by design) it would be impossible to actually determine who won.

A big component of the "race to 5G" includes the idea that we must "beat" China. So far, the general consensus is that the only way to "defeat China" is to mindlessly pander to U.S. telecom giants in the form of merger approvals, tax breaks, subsidies, and other perks. But these favors not only don't result in better or more broadly available networks as promised, they only cement consolidation, limited competition, higher prices, and generally poor customer service. The other part of "beating" China involves blacklisting Chinese gear makers like Huawei for spying on Americans, then refusing to share public evidence of doing so.

A lack of mid-band spectrum here in the States has resulted in measurably slower 5G networks than we're seeing in other countries, including China. And while US regulators focus largely on kissing entrenched providers asses via dubious, unpopular policy decisions (killing all telecom consumer protections, rubber stamping the Sprint, T-Mobile merger), China's State-owned carriers China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom have taken a wide deployment lead.

How much of a lead is largely impossible to given the unreliability of both US and Chinese data. Transparency isn't traditionally a priority for state-owned telecom agencies. While here in the US, ISPs have spent years lobbying against better maps, since better maps would highlight the industry's deployment and competition shortcomings. And while we have made some small progress toward better mapping, US wireless carriers, which have spent the last few years lying about where 5G is available, are already lobbying to exclude 5G networks from these improvements.

Comparisons on pricing are a little easier, though, there too, that's a race we're pretty clearly not winning anytime soon.

Here in the States, consumers already pay some of the highest prices in the developed world for 4G mobile data. So far, 5G looks to be even more expensive, with carriers like Verizon not only charging users $10 more for 5G, but banning HD and 4K video unless consumers pony up even more money.

While numerous aspects of China's state-owned telecom industry are ugly (surveillance, censorship) and unworthy of emulation, growing competition among MVNOs (mobile virtual network operators), only established in 2013, has driven down 5G prices to the point where users can nab a 5G connection starting around $10 per month:

"Prices have been coming down fast in the ongoing price war, with China Mobile now selling its entry level 5G package for just 69 yuan ($9.76 US) a month, 31% off the original price. A premium 5G package that originally was priced at 128 yuan ($18.08 US) now sells for 88 yuan ($12.43 US), if the customer signs a one-year contract.

China Unicom, another competitor, has responded with price cuts of its own, reducing some plan prices by 30 percent. A popular 5G package called “5G Refreshing Ice Cream” costs 90 yuan ($12.72 US) per month, not including a small prepaid service fee and a 12-month contract. A premium 5G package is priced at 103 yuan ($14.55 US) per month and comes with a 24-month contract."

Like here in the States, there's often monthly data limits (many of these plans have a 30 GB monthly cap). Still, these price points aren't even remotely comparable to U.S pricing, which is also notably higher than many European providers. That's likely to get worse now that the DOJ and FCC ignored experts that repeatedly warned approving the Sprint T-Mobile merger would drive up sector costs and drive down sector pay over the next three to five years.

There really isn't a "race to 5G." The speed at which a user in China, or Germany, or France gets connected really doesn't impact a U.S. user and vice versa. But even if there were a race, our regulatory incompetence all but ensures we can neither measure nor actually win it. In large part because, for the better part of thirty years, U.S. telecom policy has consisted of fecklessly pandering to industry giants, either by gutting consumer protections (net neutrality, privacy), doling out poorly-tracked subsidies, or rubber stamping competition-eroding mergers. As such, much of the U.S.' perceived superiority... doesn't actually exist.

And instead of fixing our own problems (reforming campaign finance laws to help firewall telecom policy from lobbying, supporting pro-competition polices to drive deployment and lower prices, fixing our broken broadband maps, blocking mergers that harm the market), our policy focus under the Trump administration has largely involved green lighting harmful industry consolidation, and crying about Chinese vendors like Huawei while pretending to care about government surveillance run amok.