A week or so ago we posed this choice: “At the end of the day, somebody is going to be in control of the mapping. It will either be the public, and the public interest, as represented by NTIA, or the industry.”
It appears that may have been, at least in part, a false choice. The NTIA has already started backing off its data-collection notice, in this Federal Register notice.
There was no reason to give away much of anything to start. Certainly, the mapping notice of funds availability (NOFA) had its numerous problems. Fixing it would require a month or so delay to get it right — something some of us requested.
NTIA didn’t do that. But in the face of the massive industry lobbying, NTIA started making concessions. The biggest one is that it backed off of the detailed speed data. Instead of reporting maximized advertised upstream and download speeds at the address level, NTIA now requires only speeds across service areas or local franchise areas.
That change is a monumental mistake, made for no reason. Speeds across such a wide area can very widely. At the address level, it would be possible to see where and how service is being deployed. At the service area level, it all averages out — the god and the bad, demonstrating nothing at all.
NTIA also lifted restrictions for reporting the crucial “middle mile” connection data, and for the average revenue per user. The second one wasn’t going to be reported anyway, because the phone and cable companies weren’t going to give it up. The middle mile data may have been more accessible. It certainly wasn’t worth surrendering.
If this mapping exercise is going to be worth even 1/10 of the money Congress appropriated, it’s about time for the government to step away from the table with the industry, remind itself of its public interest obligations and quit giving away the store. It doesn’t matter if it was a “good deal” or a “bad deal” to make those changes. There was no reason for any deal. Either scrap the program, extend the deadlines and start over, or hold the industry to some meaningful commitments. NTIA has to choose, and these choices to start the gradual surrender process are not at all auspicious.
It's good to see that the NTIA had some sense.
Address-level data on providers and their speeds would enable anticompetitive tactics that would allow incumbents to destroy competitors, eliminating consumer choice. In fact, it would effectively be gathering and publishing providers’ customer lists. And if it included prices, it would be reporting their exact revenues! Government has no business doing this. This is a census, not a strip search.
"Anticompetitive?" I don't think so.
To ISP: I really think you are missing the boat. The Census doesn’t publish everything, but they do collect complete data and verify its accuracy. There’s a big difference between collecting and reporting. If you go take a look at the American Community Survey (ACS) on the site: http://www.census.gov, you will see that there are clear guidelines for the point(s) at which they will not publish the data they have collected to protect the privacy of individuals — to make sure they cannot be identified. I would expect no less of the NTIA—which, like the Census Bureau, is part of the Commerce Department.
My understanding is that these lobbyists and their clients are asking for something normal citizens could never get: a free ride on reporting data to the governing authority. This is not an issue of confidentiality protection, with which the Commerce Department is not only experienced, but also quite careful. The real issue is that some bodies (e.g. corporate bodies) are lobbying to be more equal than human bodies (AKA, citizens). It is immoral, unfair, and flies in the face of the notion that all people (in Latin, corpora, meaning “bodies;” the linguistic root of the word “corporation”) are created equal and are to be treated as such.
The notion that someone is trying to prevent fair competition appears to me to be a willful misrepresentation of the facts, designed to mobilize people against a perfectly reasonable request by means of hyperbole and distortion. It kind of reminds me of the notion of “Obama Death Camps” now in high currency among the lunatic fringe.
Data Chicken, indeed
Sorry, “Anonymous,” but this isn’t what folks like Public Knowledge are arguing for. They want every ISP’s finely detailed business information — right down to the exact addresses they serve and how much every customer is paying — to be published. They say as much, both in the article above and elsewhere (see, for example, http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/retrieve.cgi?nativeorpdf=pdf&id_document=7019934110). They don’t just want this data chicken to cross the road: they want chicken cordon bleu. At ISPs’ expense. And at the public’s expense — both in taxpayer dollars used to gather the data and consumer choice lost due to the anticompetitive tactics the data would enable.
Why? To serve the agenda of Google, which is, indeed, a large, evil corporation. Google spends lots of Googlebucks in DC, much of it on astroturf (phony “grass roots”) lobbying by groups which claim to be acting in the public interest but in fact have Google’s interests at heart. In fact, Google even sends employees to work within the offices of some of these groups, including Public Knowledge.
Google’s astroturf groups in DC have formed a rather tight knit clique, by the way. Note that several of them have their names on the FCC filing cited above. They also give one another’s lobbyists dubious awards on a regular basis.
On the other hand, if a true, non-astroturf consumer watchdog group dares to report on Google’s lobbying, Google engages in nasty tricks such as trying to have the group’s funding cut off.
Your assertion that ISPs are corporate lobbyists is false and disingenuous. I, like many small competitive ISPs, am a sole proprietor. That’s right: we’re not a corporation. We are, literally, a “Mom and Pop” business. When we go to Washington — though we tend to stick to our knitting and only rarely do it — we come as citizens representing ourselves, not as corporate lobbyists. And we have very good reason not to want our detailed proprietary data published: it would allow the large telephone and cable companies to destroy our businesses, harming consumer choice and taking our customers off the Net. If you are in favor of forcing us to reveal that data, than you are in favor of enabling anticompetitive practices that would put us out of business. Period.
Point of Clarification
ISP, I did not conflate corporate ISP’s and lobbyists. I merely stated that big, moneyed corporations have the ability to hire lobbyists, pay for advertising and PR campaigns, and make ‘strategic investments’ in certain members of Congress. This makes it a lot easier for them to convince legislators and government officials to bend the rules on their behalves. Neither you nor I have the ability to do that. That is the thing I regard as anti-democratic and morally indefensible.
My point, as stated in the initial paragraph of my comment, was that there is a difference between collecting granular data and sharing it in all its granularity. In fact, to be clear, I was arguing that all corpora, both human and organizational, be treated equally not just on paper, but in practice.
Here’s an example from the world of Health Care, about which I just read in yesterday’s New York Times. Corporations are buying mailing lists with individuals’ complete prescription histories, including their social security numbers, then using the information to mount direct mail campaigns, targeted at these same individuals. No consumer was ever asked for permission and in fact some were quite shaken when they received advertisements for drugs to treat past medical problems. This, in turn, caused them great emotional pain. Rhetorical question: why is this kind of privacy violation apparently OK when applied to individuals but not when applied to corporations?
I would recommend that in cases like broadband mapping, corporations be compelled by the government to provide everything to the NTIA or the FCC or some other high-level department within the administration. Meanwhile, a series of strict ethical standards—with teeth in the form of enforcement criteria and the authority to act thereupon—should be developed to govern disclosure. This way, both the public interest and the privacy concerns of providers could be protected—guided by a clear set of ethical standards and legal remedies.
By the way, this is not pie-in-the-sky. Such methods are already in place in numerous professions and seem to work just fine, with very little fuss and almost no paperwork. I can say this without reservation, because as a member of one such profession, I know it for a fact.
Form 477 already takes us more than a man-week
“Anonymous,” you obviously have no Earthly idea of what it’s like to be an ISP, and are therefore unqualified to comment. The FCC’s Form 477 — which requires less data than the lobbyists are requesting — already takes us nearly two man-weeks to compile, which is a very heavy cost for a small company. And, no, the government has no reason to rifle our records. If it tries, we will likely respond not by filing the data but by filing a class action lawsuit.
Letting Go
ISP, I’m not pretending to know what it’s like to be an ISP. I never have, and don’t think I’ll start now. I’m sure you have your problems, as I have mine. Mine are different, but problems are problems. What I do not understand is why you are reacting as if I am somehow attacking your business. I am not.
You are experienced at running a small ISP. However, I am an expert at performing high-stakes research. I know what to do with data—how to:
1. Design studies that measures what you intend them to measure, consistently, over time and place
2. Collect information properly, in ways that are not unduly burdensome (burdensome methods beget bias, something we abhor ;-),
3. Handle data ethically, with appropriate protections for private information,
4. Analyze it according to the highest standards of professional practice,
5. Find patterns that are sufficiently robust to merit confidence, and
6. Present the ‘story’ told by the data in ways that are meaningful to non-statisticians. Note: it is impossible to make data-driven decisions responsibly without a full grasp of what you are seeing and where the limits of its applicability lie.
A cardinal rule of statistical analysis is that a truncated data set cannot produce an accurate result. This is because naturally occurring variability is essential to achieving an accurate picure of reality, as it is for generalizing beyond the immediate case.
How about this? I am not trying to do your job. I do not think it wise for you to try to do mine. Since it seems that instead of talking with one another, we are talking past each other, I think it’s time to stop. This doesn’t seem productive.
Handling data ethically...
…means not revealing proprietary information that is provided in confidence, or which would damage competition or harm small businesses. And that means that Connected Nation’s approach is the right one, and the one advocated by Public Knowledge is the wrong one.