Gab CEO Ironically Pines For Net Neutrality
ISPs, looking to undermine, FCC authority managed to frame the whole net neutrality debate as partisan" as to sow dissent, prevent consensus, block reform, and justify the 2017 repeal. But the idea was never really partisan. Despite headlines and DC rhetoric, a massive bipartisan majority of Americans actually supported the rules.
Why? Because net neutrality rules were imperfect, stop gap guidelines in the absence of competition to prevent telecom monopolies from politically or economically abusing their market power.
If you actually care about preventing AT&T or Comcast from ripping you off, blocking competitors, or stifling political speech, it made sense to support net neutrality (more on that here). AT&T and Comcast lobbyists cleverly turned that on its head, portraying modest level amounts of accountability as government run amok" and socialism for the internet." Many politicians dutifully played along.
Of course, things have changed a little in the years since big telecom and the GOP worked hand in hand to kill net neutrality and lobotomize the FCC's consumer protection authority. You've now got the same FCC Commissioners that called net neutrality severe government over reach" trying to force the FCC to police social media, despite having none of the authority to do so.
Enter Gab CEO Andrew Torba, who like most right wingers these days, is upset because social media giants have belatedly started moderating the race-baiting propaganda the GOP now uses for recruitment in the wake of shifting demographics and an aging electorate.
Gab CEO now worries "about censorship at the ISP level, with ISP's blocking access" https://t.co/aXeOqSFywv
- John Hendel (@JohnHendel) April 14, 2022
Hoping to cash in on the endless Elon Musk buys Twitter" news cycle, Torba offered Musk a board seat at Gab. He noted that that the steady flood of bigotry and hate speech on the platform has made it hard to do business, forcing it to develop its own payment processors, email services, and servers (?). But he's now worried that big ISPs will also step in and start filtering Gab content:
What we are missing at the moment is an ISP. I fear that the next big leap of censorship is at the ISP level, with ISP's blocking access to Gab.com. You solve that problem with Starlink. Together we can build infrastructure for a free speech internet.
There are a lot of underpinning legal issues here as they apply to the debate over common carriers, but I'm not wading into that because my interest lies elsewhere.
As we've long noted, net neutrality wouldn't be necessary if you had effective competition among U.S. broadband providers aimed at disrupting U.S. monopolies. But we don't have that thanks to widespread state and federal corruption, and we aren't likely to have it anytime soon.
Due to the limit of physics, Starlink lacks the capacity to offer satellite broadband to more than like 800,000 subscribers worldwide anytime soon. About 20-40 million Americans lack access to broadband, and another 83 million live under a monopoly. So again, Starlink is a helpful niche solution, not a truly disruptive force.
Back to net neutrality. The repeal didn't just kill net neutrality rules, it basically gutted much of the FCC's consumer protection authority and power over these monopolies. So by supporting the repeal of net neutrality (again, just because AT&T, Comcast, and Ted Cruz said it was bad) many on the right effectively undermined any way to hold telecom monopolies accountable for pretty much anything.
A lot of partisan pundits who applauded that had no actual idea what they were applauding. And a lot of the right wing politicians who demonized net neutrality have long since been twisting themselves into pretzels to justify their attacks on big tech." Enter this weird myopia where big tech has been widely criticized, and companies like AT&T and Comcast have been treated like adorable little angels.
Amusingly, telecom lobbying and policy guys on Twitter got immediately nervous and defensive about Torba's comments:
ISPs probably wouldn't just censor a site like Gab outright, because it would upset potential customers and campaign contributors. Especially a company like Dallas-based AT&T, which actively created and funded OAN. But as the EFF notes, ISPs are still part of the infrastructure free speech stack and do still pose a risk to speech online, and it's adorable that Gab executives noticed.
But after the right wing worked arm in arm with telecom for years to dismantle net neutrality and telecom consumer protection, it would be amusing if net neutrality saw a less informed push of support from the right, which, up to this point, has oddly given telecom giants a free pass.
It would also deliver ironic justice to an industry that literally had to use dead and fake people to support their attack on net neutrality because the rules had broad, bipartisan support. Especially given how hard the telecom lobby has worked to intentionally gridlock the FCC at 2-2 commissioners to keep the public from getting what it wants: a restoration of the rules.