The hits just keep on coming for US federal agencies affected by the massive Solarwinds hack. State-sponsored hackers -- presumably Russian -- leveraged Solarwinds' massive customer base and compromised update server to infect systems around the world. Here in the United States, a possible 18,000 Solarwinds customers are affected… as are their users and customers, which brings the possible number of infected back up into the millions.

The DHS's cyber wing, CISA, issued a warning about the hack, noting that the only solution was to air gap affected systems and delete the compromised Orion software. Hours later, the entity warning other federal agencies about the hack announced it too had been hacked, making the whole thing a bit Monty Python-esque.

The list of federal agencies affected by this advanced persistent threat continues to grow. The Department of Commerce was one of the first to discover a breach. This was followed by announcements of suspected breaches at the US Postal Service and the Department of Agriculture. The Defense Department has also noted it's affected, although it has yet to deliver any specifics about the multitude of agencies it oversees.

The DHS, Department of Energy, and the National Nuclear Security Administration have also been breached. The latest news adds a couple more federal agencies/operations to the list.

The DOJ says it's been breached, but appears to believe the damage is minimal. That doesn't seem to jibe with the details of the statement, which says an email system used by damn near everyone was the target.

On Dec. 24, 2020, the Department of Justice’s Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) learned of previously unknown malicious activity linked to the global SolarWinds incident that has affected multiple federal agencies and technology contractors, among others. This activity involved access to the Department’s Microsoft O365 email environment.

After learning of the malicious activity, the OCIO eliminated the identified method by which the actor was accessing the O365 email environment. At this point, the number of potentially accessed O365 mailboxes appears limited to around 3-percent and we have no indication that any classified systems were impacted.

There's a lot of sensitive information floating around the DOJ, given the large number of federal investigations and prosecutions it oversees. The breach could be even more severe than this indicates, given this breach announcement, which affects an adjacent branch of the government.

The AO [Administrative Office of the US Courts] is working with the Department of Homeland Security on a security audit relating to vulnerabilities in the Judiciary’s Case Management/Electronic Case Files system (CM/ECF) that greatly risk compromising highly sensitive non-public documents stored on CM/ECF, particularly sealed filings. An apparent compromise of the confidentiality of the CM/ECF system due to these discovered vulnerabilities currently is under investigation. Due to the nature of the attacks, the review of this matter and its impact is ongoing.

Hackers may have obtained access to sealed dockets and documents, including warrants, affidavits, and other investigative/prosecutorial filings that haven't been made public. Not only would this include investigative techniques, information on informants, and other sensitive information tied to ongoing investigations and prosecutions, it also affects a multitude of private individuals and companies who have been allowed to litigate under seal to protect personal/confidential info that could cause serious damage to litigants if made public.

Sure, there's a presumption of openness in the court system, but there's still a lot of stuff filed under seal, at least temporarily. Publication of sealed documents could conceivably cause damage to people, places, and things… even if the government tends to overstate the damage when asking judges for secrecy.

For the time being, the US Courts system will require all sensitive filings to be done in paper form or via "secure electronic devices." These will be stored in a standalone system that's completely walled off from the CM/ECF system that's accessible via PACER. This new process won't affect every sealed document, though -- just the ones the courts consider to be "highly-sensitive."

[M]ost documents similar to and including presentence reports, pretrial release reports, pleadings related to cooperation in most criminal cases, Social Security records, administrative immigration records, and sealed filings in many civil cases likely would not be sufficiently sensitive to require HSD [highly sensitive court documents] treatment and could continue to be sealed in CM/ECF as necessary.

Given the interconnectedness of the internet of government things, a breach in one location can easily result in cross-pollination. Just because an agency hasn't discovered a breach yet doesn't mean a malicious hacker hasn't established a foothold in the system. The end of this long international nightmare is still well over the horizon. The popularity of Solarwinds' products made it too tempting of a target to pass up.

A small Idaho ISP by the name of Your T1 WIFI has decided to punish Twitter and Facebook for perceived "censorship"...by censoring them. In an email to subscribers posted to Twitter, the company claims it will be blocking customer access to both websites by default moving forward. To access the websites, users apparently will need to contact the company to be added to a whitelist:

While the company doesn't specify what "censorship" its customers are complaining about, the complaints were likely driven by Twitter's decision to ban Trump after he violated the company's terms of services by inciting a fatal insurrection. Or perhaps they're complaining about the steady purging of QAnon conspiracy theorists for espousing bogus claims of election fraud. Either way, the ISP claims to ingeniously be combating what they claim is censorship...by embracing the exact same thing:

"Our company does not believe a website or social networking site has the authority to censor what you see and post and hide information from you, stop you from seeing what your friends and family are posting," the email states. "This is why with the amount of concerns, we have made this decision to block these two websites from being accessed from our network."

There are ample problems here. The first being that "Conservative censorship" isn't actually a thing. What hyperventilating partisans deem as "censorship" in our broken modern discourse is usually just Facebook and Twitter belatedly enforcing their own terms of service (which is different than censorship). While the platforms certainly do sometimes boot people for stupid reasons, more often than not such bans are simply the natural consequence of behaving like an asshole on the internet. Don't want to be blocked, banned or limited? Don't be an asshole on the internet.

The other problem, of course, is that there's an endless parade of research showing that internet filters are stupidly expensive and don't work. They're usually easily bypassed with only a modicum of technical knowledge, and they pretty routinely result in collateral damage (aka the accidental blocking of legal, legit websites). In this case, blocking access to Facebook by proxy blocks access to all the systems Facebook ties into, including automated login systems. The end result is likely to be more of an avoidable headache than a real solution to a real problem.

I reached out to contact Your T1 WIFI, but their 1-888 number resolved to a woman's voicemail box that didn't even mention the name of the company. However, company owner Brett Fink spoke to a local CBS affiliate and contradicted his own company's email by claiming they weren't blocking anybody:

"In a phone call with KREM, the owner of the company, Brett Fink, again said the websites would only be blocked for customers who asked.

"We've had customers asked to be blocked by it. That is what the email was about, so no we are not blocking anybody, only the ones that have asked for it," Fink said."

Again, that's not what the company's own email to its subscribers states:

"Please let us know and we can add you to the allowed list to be able to not be blocked from going to these sites and the ones that do want to be blocked will have to do nothing they (Twitter and Facebook) will just not show up."

So that certainly sounds like a DNS-level IP blacklist, which users have to call in to be whitelisted from.

Of course in the wake of the Trump net neutrality repeal this doesn't run afoul of federal rules...because there are no federal rules. But it's still a problematic, dumb idea and a slippery slope for an ISP to inject itself into the information stream in such a hamfisted fashion. With industry BFF Ajit Pai on the way out, and the Biden administration purportedly keen to restore net neutrality, it's extremely unlikely any major ISPs would follow down this particular rabbit hole and draw regulatory scrutiny. Still, it should add some interesting...flavor to the debate when it inevitably heats up later this year.

Either way, engaging in blocking to protest "censorship" that isn't actually happening isn't a great look.

Since Twitter and Facebook banned Donald Trump and began “purging” QAnon conspiracists, a segment of the chattering class has been making all sorts of wild proclamations about this “precedent-setting” event. As such, I thought I’d set the record straight.

1. “Deplatforming Trump sets a precedent”

That says:

Deplatforming Donald Trump, a sitting US president, sets a dangerous precedent.

It has less to do with his views and more to do with intolerance for a differing point. Ironically, those who claim to champion free speech are celebrating.

Big tech firms are now the new oligarchs.

First of all, the only “precedent” set here is that this is indeed the first time a sitting US president has been deplatformed by a tech company. I suppose that if your entire worldview is what happens in the United States, you might be surprised. But when you look outside that narrow lens, you would see that Facebook has booted off Lebanese politicians, Burmese generals, and even other right-wing US politicians…nevermind the millions of others who have been booted by these platforms, often without cause, often while engaging in protected speech under any definition.

2020 alone saw the (wrongful, even in light of platform policies) deplatforming of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people using terms related to Iran (including a Los Angeles-based crafter’s “Persian dolls” by Etsy) in an overzealous effort by companies to comply with sanctions, the booting of Palestinian speakers from Zoom on incorrectly-analyzed legal grounds, the deplatforming by Twitter of dozens of leftist Jews and Palestinians for clapping back at harassers, and so much more.

2. “This is the biggest online purge in history!”

That says:

I’ve lost over 15,000 followers today – insane how many accounts are getting terminated in the largest online purge in history

Twitter has been purging accounts of QAnon conspiracists and other right-wing accounts over the past week or more. Many of these accounts engage in dangerous rhetoric, including encouragement of violent insurrection against a democratically elected government. It is indeed interesting, particularly when one compares it to the company’s inaction against similar rhetoric in India and elsewhere. But what it isn’t is the “largest online purge in history”—not by a long shot. I would suggest that that occurred two years ago, when Twitter kicked off more than a million alleged ISIS accounts with zero transparency and the “freeze peach” galaxy brains didn’t blink.

3. “AWS kicking Parler off its servers is a step too far/is unprecedented/marks new territory in the digital rights debate”

That says:

Companies like Amazon should either get out of the hosting business, or remain agnostic about what their customers use their services for. As a very long term user, all the way back to the beginning of S3, their move today is disturbing and unacceptable.

To be completely fair, I am of the belief that infrastructure companies play a different role than platforms designed to host user speech/user-generated content, and that decisions like this should not be taken lightly. But let’s not pretend it hasn’t happened before (to be fair, Dave Winer is not doing that, and he is quite aware of the company’s history on these matters). In 2010, AWS famously booted WikiLeaks after no more than concern from the State Department—that is, WikiLeaks hadn’t been charged with anything—kicking off a series of deplatformings of the group. But WikiLeaks is not the only example here: Sanctions—or at least some legal interpretations of them—have meant that ordinary folks from countries like Iran can’t use AWS freely either. Last January saw a massive purge of Iranian users from various platforms, likely instigated by the Department of Treasury (though thus far, we have no proof of that). Some might suggest that this is a legal requirement of Amazon, but as GitHub demonstrated this week, there are indeed workarounds for companies that care enough about internet freedom.

4. “This is communism!”

Uh no, this is capitalism. Platforms have this much power because unbridled American capitalism is what y’all wanted. It is also not “Orwellian,” I can assure you.

5. “The Google Play store/Apple store booting Parler sets new precedent.”

Uh actually, no it doesn’t. Does anyone remember that Apple forced Tumblr’s hand hardly two years ago by threatening to kick it out of the App store if it didn’t do something about the child sexual abuse imagery it was unknowingly hosting, resulting in a near-total ban on nudity and sexual content on the site? Anyone?

5. “Twitter won’t let you hashtag #1984”

That says:

Twitter won’t let you hashtag #1984, a dystopian novel about an evil Big Tech government that spies on everyone, censors and manipulates speech, punishes wrong-thought, and tortures dissidents for sport.

There’s Orwellian, and then there’s banning references to Orwell Orwellian.

Twitter has never allowed number-based hashtags, next?

Got more examples? Shoot them to me on Twitter.

Republished with permission from Jillian C. York's website.

Last week Senators Hawley and Cruz used their platform and power as United States Senators to deliberately spread disinformation they knew or should have known to be false in order to undermine public confidence in the 2020 Presidential Election results. Their actions gave oxygen to a lawless and violent insurrection that nearly overran—literally and physically—our democratic government.

They should have known better and there is every reason to believe they did know better. There is every reason to believe that they intended their actions to further their craven attempt to solidify their own desired political power, even though it came at the expense of our Constitutional order and democratic norms and likely *because* it came at the expense of our Constitutional order and democratic norms, which would otherwise have stood against their ambition. They are, after all, highly educated people, bearing credentials from some of our most esteemed academic institutions. It is impossible to believe they did not know what they were doing.

Just as it is impossible to believe they did not know what they were doing when they railed against Section 230. At first glance it may seem like an irrelevant quibble to take issue with their position on Internet policy when viewed in comparison to the actual, violent insurrection they also invited. But it is indeed worth the attention, for the same reasons that their other anti-democratic behavior is so troubling. Because one of the reasons we have rights of free expression in America, and the Constitution to guarantee them, is because free expression is so necessary as a check against tyranny. And for those like Hawley and Cruz who are rooting for the tyranny, getting rid of those speech protections is a necessary first step to advancing that anti-democratic end.

Which is what gutting Section 230 would do. While the First Amendment would, of course, in theory still be there to protect speech, in practice those rights would become illusory. When it comes to online expression, Section 230 is what makes those speech rights the First Amendment protects real and meaningful. And that's exactly what Hawley and Cruz want to prevent.

They want to prevent it because they can see how Section 230 stands in their way. They can see how platforms exercising their First Amendment rights to choose which user speech to facilitate could lead to those platforms choosing not to facilitate their poisonous propaganda, and they understand how stripping platforms of their Section 230 immunity effectively takes away platforms' ability to make that choice by making it too legally precarious to try.

They also can see how stripping platforms of their statutory immunity could force platforms to suppress user speech that challenges them. Section 230 allows platforms to have a free hand in enabling user speech because it means they don't have to fear enduring an expensive legal challenge over it. Without the statute's currently unequivocal protection, however, they won't be able to accommodate it so willingly. They will be forced to say no to plenty, including plenty of socially valuable, Constitutionally-protected speech against government officials like Hawley and Cruz, lest these platforms make themselves vulnerable to expensive litigation over it—which, even if unmeritorious, would do nothing but drain their resources. Every change to Section 230 that Hawley and Cruz have demanded would erode this critical protection platforms depend on to enable all this user expression and lead them to second guess whether they could continue to. And it would thus leave Hawley, Cruz, and their corrupt compatriots free to continue their nefarious efforts to consolidate their control over the nation without much fear of complaint.

The problem is, though, so would all the changes to Section 230 also being championed by Democrats. Campaigning against Section 230 has not been the exclusive domain of Republicans. Plenty of Democrats have joined them, from Senator Blumenthal (D-CT), to Rep. Eshoo (D-CA) and Rep. Malinowski (D-NJ), to even Senator Schatz (D-HI). And, of course, perhaps the most prominent Democrat of them all: President-Elect Joe Biden. Their reasons for agitating against Section 230 may be different than those cited by Republicans, and their proposed changes may vary in specifics as well, but, whether they realize it or not, the effect of all these changes would be the same as what Hawley and Cruz have advocated for: the erosion of First Amendment protections online. Which will only grease the skids for the Hawleys and Cruzes of the world as much as all the changes they themselves have been calling for.

Every policymaker appalled by what has just transpired and eager to preserve our system of self-government must take heed. Our inherently fragile democracy cannot survive without free speech, and no policymaker who wishes to ensure its survival can afford to do anything to undermine it. But when it turns out, as it does now, that the policy demanded by democracy's saviors is the same exact policy sought by its enemies, those who wish to save it need to think again about what they really ought to be asking for.

While we've been discussing the troubling actions the Chinese government has undertaken against Hong Kong for some time now, the movements are starting to reach a rapid pace. It was only in July that Beijing unveiled a sparkling new and impossibly vague "national security" law that was perfectly tuned to make any pro-democracy talk or demonstrations in Hong Kong offenses that would result in lengthy prison time. This was the result of months of protests that served to embarrass a Communist government that prides itself on full control. Again, that was only June. In August, the arrests of media members who were pro-democracy began, followed by the ouster and then arrest of pro-democracy lawmakers in November.

And while one can imagine the Chinese government doing a bit of breath-holding in December as the American political system buried itself in bullshit thanks to one man's inability to admit defeat, it appears January was the start date to re-kick off the attacks on Hong Kong. In the early morning hours of Wednesday, 53 Hong Kong citizens were arrested under the national security law, all accused of, well...

By late morning on Wednesday, at least 53 Hong Kong residents — former lawmakers, activists and an American lawyer among them — had been detained under Beijing’s new national security law, and their offices and homes raided. Accused of subversion, they face up to life in prison for holding a primary vote last year ahead of legislative elections that were ultimately postponed and which many of them were barred from contesting.

The raids, which involved more than 1,000 officers, marked the most dramatic onslaught in Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s transformation of once-freewheeling Hong Kong into a city gripped by fear under authoritarian rule.

This was predicted by many, me included. With Trump never all that concerned with human rights in China and now all the more distracted with a combination of rounds of golf to be played and living in some aggrieved fantasy land, the Chinese government is quite clearly going to take every authoritarian action it can now, before the new administration is in place. This should also serve as a lovely indication of just how dumb the claims are that Biden and Harris are somehow compromised by China. Were that true, China would be holding off until January 20th, and yet they are not.

The Hong Kong authorities are, as ever, playing along with their puppet-masters.

John Lee, Hong Kong’s secretary for security, lauded the police operation as “necessary” and accused those involved in the primary of attempting to paralyze the government by seeking to win a majority in the legislature.

I'll give you a moment to reread that last bit again. Those arrested are accused of trying to "paralyze" Hong Kong's government by winning elections. The argument, in other words, is that pro-democracy advocates are too dangerous to be allowed to be elected, so they are being forcibly removed from society via aggressive actions instead.

It's almost poetic, then, that these arrests came on the same day that Donald Trump and his enablers fostered and promoted an insurrection by his supporters at the Capitol, all to achieve precisely the same goal. That it failed is good, but of no material importance when it comes to America's current and future standing to apply pressure on China to cease its actions in Hong Kong. You can be damned sure that Chinese state television will be playing the videos and images of the chaos that occurred in DC on Wednesday on loop for its citizens as a way to rebut any words Joe Biden might have on the topic of Hong Kong.

And so, as authoritarian regimes light fires around the world, it's worth pausing and reflecting on just how much was lost on Wednesday in America. Our dignity. Our peace. Our moral authority. Our standing.

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What a week the first week of January has been! As democracy and its institutions were tested in the United States, so were the Internet and its actors.

Following the invasion of the Capitol Hill by protesters, social media started taking action in what appeared to be a ripple effect: first, Twitter permanently suspended the account of the President of the United States, while Facebook and Instagram blocked his account indefinitely and, at least, through the end of his term; Snapchat followed by cutting access to the President’s account, and Amazon’s video-streaming platform Twitch took a similar action; YouTube announced that it would tighten its election fraud misinformation policy in a way that it would allow them to take immediate action against the President in the case of him posting misleading or false information. In the meantime, Apple also announced that it would kick off Parler, the social network favored by conservatives and extremists, from its app store on the basis that it was promoting violence associated with the integrity of the US institutions.

It is the decision of Amazon, however, to kick off Parler from its web hosting service that I want to turn to. Let me first make clear that if you are Amazon, this decision makes total sense from a business and public relations perspective – why would anyone want to be associated with anything that even remotely hinges on extremism? The decision also falls within Amazon’s permissible scope given that, under its terms of service, Amazon reserves the right to terminate users from their networks at their sole discretion. Similarly, from a societal point of view, Amazon may be seen as upholding most peoples’ values. But, I want to offer another perspective here. What about the Internet? What sort of a message does Amazon’s decision send to the Internet and everyone who is watching?

There are several actors participating in the way a message – whether an email, cat video, voice call, or web page – travels through the Internet. Each one of them might be considered an “intermediary” in the transmission of the message. Examples of Internet infrastructure intermediaries include Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), cloud hosting services, domain name registries, and registrars. These infrastructure actors are responsible for a bunch of different things, from managing network infrastructure, to providing access to users, and ensuring the delivery of content. These – mostly – private sector companies provide investment as well as reliability and upkeep of the services we all use.

In the broadcasting world, a carrier also controls the content that is being broadcast; with the Internet, however, an actor responsible for the delivery of infrastructure services (e.g., an Internet Service Provider or a cloud hosting provider) is unlikely or not expected to be aware of the content of the message they are carrying. They simply do not care about the content; it is not their job to care. Their one and only responsibility is to relay packets on the Internet to other destinations. Even if, for the sake of the argument, they were to care, at the end of the day, they are not the producers of the content. Like postal and telephone services, they have the essential role of carrying the underlying message efficiently.

Over the past year, the role and responsibility of intermediaries has been placed under the policy microscope. The focus is currently on user-generated content platforms, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. In the United States, policy makers on both sides of the aisle have been considering anew the role of intermediaries in disseminating dis- and mis-information. Section 230, the law that has systematically, consistently and predictably shielded online platforms from liability over the content their users post, has been highly politicized and change now is almost inevitable. In Europe, after a year of intense debate, the newly released Digital Services Act has majorly upheld the long-standing intermediary liability regime, but, still, there are implementation details that could see some change (e.g, all of provisions on ‘trusted flaggers’).

It is the actions like the one that Amazon took against Parler, however, that go beyond issues of just speech and can set a precedent that could have an adverse effect on the Internet and its architecture. By denying cloud hosting services, Amazon is essentially taking Parler offline and denying its ability to operate, unless the platform can find another hosting service. This might be seen as a good thing, prima facie; at the end of the day, who wants such content to even exist, let alone circulate online? But, it does send a quite dangerous message: as infrastructure intermediaries can take action that cuts the problem from its root (i.e., getting a service completely offline), regulators might start looking at them to “police” the Internet. In such a scenario, infrastructure intermediaries would have to deploy content-blocking measures, including IP and protocol-based blocking, deep packet inspection (i.e., viewing content of “packets” as they move across the network), and URL and DNS-based blocking. Such measures ‘over-block’, imposing collateral damage on legal content and communications. They also interfere with the functioning of critical Internet systems, including the DNS, and compromise Internet security, integrity, and performance.

What Amazon did is not unprecedented. In 2017, Cloudflare took a similar action against the Daily Stormer website when it stopped answering DNS requests for their sites. At the time, Cloudflare said: “The rules and responsibilities for each of the organizations [participating in Internet] in regulating content are and should be different.” A few days later, in an op-ed, published at the Wall Street Journal, Cloudflare’s CEO, Matthew Prince said: “I helped kick a group of neo-Nazis off the internet last week, but since then I’ve wondered whether I made the right decision.[…] Did we meet the standard of due process in this case? I worry we didn’t. And at some level I’m not sure we ever could. It doesn’t sit right to have a private company, invisible but ubiquitous, making editorial decisions about what can and cannot be online. The pre-internet analogy would be if Ma Bell listened in on phone calls and could terminate your line if it didn’t like what you were talking about.”

Most likely Amazon faced the same dilemma; or, it might have not. One thing, however, is certain: so far, none of these actors appears to be considering the Internet and how some of their actions may affect its future and the way we all may end up experiencing it. It is becoming increasingly important that we start looking into the salient, yet extremely significant, differences between moderation happening by user-generated content platforms as opposed to moderation happening by infrastructure providers.

It is about time we make an attempt to understand how the Internet works. From where I am sitting, this past year has been less lonely and semi-normal because of the Internet. I want it to continue to function in a way that is effective; I want to continue seeing the networks interconnecting and infrastructure providers focusing on what they are supposed to be focusing on: providing reliable and consistent infrastructure services.

It is about time we show the Internet we care!

Dr. Konstantinos Komaitis is the Senior Director, Policy Strategy and Development at the Internet Society.

Bad news for folks "worn out" by the longstanding debate over net neutrality: it's about to be rekindled in a major way. But for those who are a bit too easily annoyed by having to revisit this well tread path, it's worth remembering that the debate about net neutrality is really about competition, policing monopolization, and having regulators and antitrust enforcers that aren't feckless cowards in dutiful sway to powerful natural monopolies. And either you care about these very real problems, or you don't.

With the Senate falling under Democratic control in the wake of the Georgia run off elections, Mitch McConnell, AT&T, and Comcast's dream scenario -- an FCC perpetually crippled by partisanship by McConnell -- is no longer happening. Big telecom had hoped that the rushed appointment of unqualified Trump sycophant Nathan Simington would bring the agency to a 2-2 partisan Commissioner tie. It's extremely clear McConnell then planned to block the appointment of a new FCC boss to ensure the agency was crippled and lacked the majority to reverse Trump's lengthy list of handouts to the telecom sector.

That's no longer possible, meaning the Biden administration, with a 3-2 Commissioner majority, should be able to pick their preferred FCC boss and get back to at least occasionally pretending that monopolistic behavior and consumer protection is something we take seriously. Net neutrality activists are, as you might expect, excited to reverse a lot of Trump era policies like the factually dubious and hugely unpopular repeal of net neutrality:

"Already, net neutrality advocates are barely containing their excitement. Reached for comment, Fight for the Future’s Evan Greer laid out a laundry list of progressive goals that can now be pursued, from overturning FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s order to implementing more aggressive privacy and connectivity policies.

“If Democrats take the Senate they should move quickly to confirm an FCC chair who will make it their first order of business to restore the Title II open Internet protections,” Greer said in a statement. “But they should also do more than that. The FCC can and should take steps to protect people’s privacy, and to ensure that everyone can afford Internet access during a time when many are working from home and sending their kids to school online."

Granted things could go one of several ways here. Yes, the Biden camp could appoint somebody with a backbone willing to quickly tread back into reclassifying ISPs as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act, giving the FCC the authority to once again adequately police obnoxious monopolies. The Democratic FCC could just vote along 3-2 party lines to restore net neutrality and FCC authority, given the courts have made it clear now several times it has that right. Even if this risks simply being reversed in 2024 should Democrats lose the White House.

But I can also see the Biden camp taking a far flimsier route, appointing somebody "safe" and unwilling to rock the boat; somebody like Obama's first FCC boss, Julius Genachowski, who was largely incapable of taking tough stands on any issue of substance.

Ideally, to avoid FCC regulatory ping pong, you'd prefer Congress pass a useful, well-crafted, new net neutrality law prohibiting ISPs like AT&T and Comcast from abusing their power as gatekeepers. But there too it's no certain bet that the Biden team genuinely sees holding telecom monopolies accountable as a priority (Biden's first 2020 fundraiser ever was at a Comcast lobbyist's home), wants to spend the time making it a priority with so many other urgent problems, or will be able to secure the necessary votes among heavily lobbied lawmakers who traditionally treat upsetting AT&T, Verizon and Comcast as a cardinal sin.

While Democrats are saying that restoring net neutrality is a top priority, I can see providing COVID relief to low-income Americans consuming most of the oxygen in the room, and quite justly. Under this scenario, a feckless new Democratic FCC boss could use COVID as a shield to justify not taking a tougher stance against telecom monopolies or restoring net neutrality ("there's more important things to do than revisit contentious issues!"), even if the restoration of the FCC's authority would go a long way toward giving the FCC the tools needed to accomplish any COVID-related goals.

Either way, expect all the same arguments to be dusted off for what feels like the eighty-fifth time. And while annoying, it's still a conversation we need to have. 82 million Americans live under a broadband monopoly, usually Comcast. 43 million Americans can't get any service whatsoever. The one-two punch of monopolization and chickenshit lawmakers and regulators is why Americans pay some of the highest prices in the world for broadband service that's routinely mediocre by any metric that matters. Monopolies have cornered the market, closed the door behind them, lobbied endlessly against any threat of disruption, and are now ceaselessly on the prowl for creative ways to nickel-and-dime captive customers.

Net neutrality (read: dumb, anticompetitive ideas only made possible by a lack of competition) gets the focus, but this is really about policing monopolization and driving more competition to market so there's an organic market penalty for bad behavior, whether that's a privacy violation or net neutrality skullduggery.

Again, maybe you really don't like net neutrality as a concept, and that's fine. But if you don't, you'd better be recommending real regulatory and antitrust reform that addresses monopolization and the myriad of problems that creates. If you're whining about how much you hate net neutrality--while downplaying, ignoring, or encouraging rampant monopolization and regulatory capture--you're sure as hell not helping and may even be part of the problem.

For four straight years, the Trump FCC couldn't even admit a lack of market competition is a problem, and went to great lengths to push fabricated data claiming the market was perfectly healthy. So whatever direction the Biden camp goes, it's likely to be an improvement from the fabricated post-truth delusion that has been the highlight of the last four years.

During its tenure the Trump FCC, directed by the telecom lobby, convinced the lion's share of DC that "big tech" is the root of all evil, while effectively gutting most oversight of telecom giants with 30-year track records of predatory, anti-competitive behavior. Whatever solution emerges from the Biden camp, it would be nice if it stems from an understanding that monopolistic jackassery is not somehow the exclusive domain of big tech, and we need more consistent, and far less pathetic antitrust and regulatory enforcement across the board.

And before the dumb hyperbole and decades-old arguments emerge anew, let's be clear about something: folks who argue that net neutrality didn't matter because the rules were killed and the internet didn't immediately explode (and there's a lot of them) are only advertising their own ignorance. As we've been covering for years, the Trump FCC's net neutrality repeal didn't just kill net neutrality. It hamstrung the FCC's ability to police telecom monopolies on a wide variety of fronts, whether that's recent bullshit attempts by ISPs to charge consumers "rental" fees for modems they already own, to policing the sneaky, bullshit fees cable TV giants and ISPs use to covertly jack up your bill and falsely advertise a lower price.

In short, anybody who thinks that gutting most meaningful oversight of monopolies like Comcast and AT&T resulted in "innovation," new investment, or free market Utopia has fallen into an ideological mud puddle. That said, it also remains true that if the broadband industry saw meaningful competition at scale, you wouldn't need net neutrality in the first place. A company in a competitive market can't engage in ham-fisted throttling or other bullshit, because consumers would flock to a (gasp) competitor.

But in a country where there's virtually no competition at modern speeds, our regulators are usually feckless chickenshits, and we're intent on rubber stamping every job and competition-killing merger than comes down the pike -- that can't happen. Net neutrality is an imperfect stopgap measure until we figure out how to fix this mess. And fixing this mess requires some backbone and standing up to politically powerful telecom monopolies welded to our intelligence-gathering apparatus. No easy feat.

Hopefully, whatever happens, a Biden FCC will at a minimum make better real-world data a priority so we can, for the first time, accurately measure the least competitive and most disconnected areas of the country, then embrace creative solutions that drive competition to market. Instead of what we've long been doing for thirty years, which is to use bad ISP data to blindly guess which areas of the country need help, then throw billions of dollars at giant companies for networks that (mysteriously!) always wind up half deployed.

Again, it's not yet clear how much backbone a Biden FCC boss will be have, or just how serious the Biden FCC will be about restoring net neutrality and FCC authority. But whatever the future of the FCC looks like, it might be nice if we stopped our generation-long trend of letting monopolies like AT&T and Comcast dictate the lion's share of state and federal policy, then standing around with a dumb look on our collective faces wondering why US broadband is a mediocre mess.