Ever since he killed Net Neutrality with dirty tricks and illegal tactics,
Donald Trump’s FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has been claiming that his actions
had stimulated broadband growth in America, a claim his spokesvillain
repeated yesterday in response to Democrats introducing legislation to restore Net Neutrality.
But the data that Pai has touted was badly distorted due to a monumental
error (or, less charitably, a massive fraud) by a company called
Barrierfree, who seem to have incorrectly completed their their “Form
477” report of broadband availability in a way that vastly overstated
the availability of their service, creating an error of such magnitude
that it distorted the figures for the whole country.
Barrierfree – the trading name of the Barrier Communications
Corporation – claimed that it its first year of operation, it had made
fixed wireless and fiber service available to 62 million people – 20%
of the population of the USA. In reality, Barrierfree offers a small
number of people access to a poky wireless service that caps out at
25mbps.
Companies submitting Form 477 are instructed to enumerate each “census
block” where they offer service; Barrierfree appears to have simply
reported that service was available in every census block in every state
it operates in.
The extent to which this distorts Pai’s figures can hardly be
overstated: for example, Barrierfree’s claims account for 2m of the the
5.6m rural connections that Pai claimed had been made in 2017/8.
More importantly, Barrierfree’s entries allowed Pai to avoid a
legislative duty – under Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act –
to intervene if the FCC determines that broadband deployment isn’t
happening quickly enough.
The incorrect claims by Barrierfree were detected by the nonprofit Free
Press, who found it obvious that there was no way that a company like
Barrierfree could go from zero availability to deployment serving 62
million people literally overnight.
Motherboard’s blockbuster story
about mobile carriers selling your realtime location data into a
marketplace where bounty hunters and other villains can buy it for just a
few dollars has triggered an urgent, national conversation about the
fact that, in the year since the first stories about this emerged, the
carriers have not only failed to live up to their promises to put a stop
to it, but seem to have made it even worse.
So naturally, the Congressional committee that oversees the FCC – which
regulates the carriers – wants to be briefed on this so that they can
do their job, serve the American people, and get this situation under
control.
But to do that, they need to hear from Ajit Pai, the former Verizon
executive whom Donald Trump installed as Chairman of the FCC. And Pai
says he’s staying in his office with his giant novelty Reese’s mug, and
Congress can go fuck themselves, because there’s a shutdown on, and this
isn’t “a threat to safety.”
What’s more, the FCC committee that has been investigating this issue
has stopped all work, because again, having the location of every US
cellular phone owner being tracked in realtime and sold for a few
dollars to any scumbag with a credit card “is not a threat to safety.”
