Author Archives: Sheila

Is The Internet A Common Carrier?

When we think of enterprises categorized as common carriers, we tend to think of those that transport–that “carry” passengers or goods for a fee, and that serve the general public. But the term applies to services other than transportation.

Pointing out that the Internet is a common carrier is critical to discussions of net neutrality, as Tom Wheeler–a former head of the FCC–has written in an article for the Brookings Institution.

As far back as England’s emergence from feudalism around 1500, there has been a common law concept that essential services have a “duty to deal.” The operator of the ferry across the river, for instance, could not favor one lord’s traffic over another’s; everyone had access, and everyone had to pay. When the telegraph was introduced in the United States 350 years later, the concept was applied to that new essential service. The Pacific Telegraph Act of 1860 provided, “messages received from any individual, company, or corporation, or from any telegraph lines connecting with this line at either of its termini, shall be impartially transmitted in the order of their reception.” When the telephone came along, the same concept was applied to it as a common carrier.

The Communications Act of 1934, under which the FCC operates today, established in Title II’s statutory language, “It shall be the duty of every common carrier engaged in interstate or foreign communication by wire or radio to furnish such communication service upon reasonable request therefor.” The Communications Act also established the concept that the actions of Title II carriers must be “just and reasonable.”

Wheeler says that today’s Internet Service Providers, or ISPs, want to be allowed to make their own rules– without any review as to whether those rules or their actions are “just and reasonable.”

The ongoing debate about net neutrality is usually focused on specific behaviors by ISPs–behaviors that privilege the delivery of messages that are financially beneficial to them, while slowing or even blocking those that aren’t.

As Wheeler reminds us, the term “net neutrality”– coined in 2003 by Columbia professor Tim Wu–should be understood as more expansive.

It was an innovative nomenclature that picked up on the ability of the ISPs to discriminate for their own economic advantage. Net neutrality became commonly described as whether the companies could create “fast lanes” and “slow lanes” for internet traffic. That such a problem was not hypothetical was demonstrated five years later when the Republican FCC fined Comcast for slowing the delivery of video content that could compete with cable channels.

But as Wheeler argues, limiting the conversation to blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization is misleading. The real issue pending before the FCC is “whether those that run the most powerful and pervasive platform in the history of the planet will be accountable for behaving in a “just and reasonable” manner.”

It is the conduct of the ISPs that is in question here. Because telephone companies were Title II common carriers, their behavior had to be just and reasonable. Those companies prospered under such responsibilities; as they have morphed into wired and wireless ISPs, there is no reasonable argument why they, as well as their new competitors from the cable companies, should not continue to have public interest obligations.

Don’t be misled by the all-too-convenient framing that net neutrality is all about blocking and throttling. The real issue is why such an important pathway on which so many Americans rely should be without a public interest requirement and appropriate oversight.

The public interest and the common good are two concepts that have lost considerable ground over the past few decades–and nowhere is the absence of those considerations more harmful than in the Wild West that is the current Internet. We can trace a majority of the political and social problems we face to the fragmented and un-policed  nature of the global information environment we inhabit. It’s ironic–and incredibly worrisome– that a platform invented to facilitate communication has morphed into a primary source of misinformation, conspiracy theories and algorithmic sorting.

The Communications Act of 1934–still in effect–established the  duty of “every common carrier engaged in interstate or foreign communication by wire or radio” to serve all comers “upon reasonable request.” The Act also established the rule cited by Wheeler, obliging such common carriers to act in ways that are “just and reasonable.”

According to Wheeler, the ISPs  want to continue to make their own rules without any review as to whether their actions pass the “just and reasonable” test.

Given the disproportionate impact on society of social media and internet platforms, imposing some oversight would seem to be “just and reasonable.”

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Why Republicans Hate Higher Education

Most recent coverage of “elite” colleges and universities has revolved around the much-derided performances of three college presidents at a congressional hearing on campus anti-semitism. I addressed that testimony–and the basis for finding it unsatisfactory–yesterday.

But as an article from the Washington Post reminds us, 

This was not the week’s only development in the intersection of higher education and politics, however. An assessment from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and reporting from the Chronicle of Higher Education both delineated the extent to which the efforts of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) to reshape education in his state have constricted educational opportunities, spooked instructors and threatened academic freedom. Those reports, despite affecting far more students, attracted much less attention.

The university system in Florida educates more than seven times the number of students in the three schools represented by those university presidents, and a report by AAUP summarizes the extent of the damage done by Governor DeSantis in his relentless attack on higher education in his state.

Academic freedom, tenure, and shared governance in Florida’s public colleges and universities currently face a politically and ideologically driven assault unparalleled in US history, which, if sustained, threatens the very survival of meaningful higher education in the state, with dire implications for the entire country.

The report detailed the legislative and executive efforts that resulted in changes not just to the leadership but also to the governing structures of the state’s universities–changes aimed at reversing efforts to expand diversity, and actually blocking the study of certain subjects, especially those implicating race.

As a number of media outlets have reported, professors are leaving the state in increasing numbers, and thanks to widespread recognition of what is happening to Florida’s universities, it has become difficult to recruit competent replacements.

The obvious question that arises is: why? What is the reason for the GOP’s animus toward higher education? Because–although DeSantis is “out front” in the assault– that animus is not confined to Florida. (For that matter, it isn’t confined to higher education–Republicans in numerous states have been waging an on-going war on the nation’s public schools.)

The linked article, written by Philip Bump, addresses the reasons for that animus.

It’s worth pointing out why this is a focus for DeSantis. Why is he trying to reshape higher education in Florida? What’s the problem he’s ostensibly trying to fix?
There are at least two clear, overlapping answers.

The first is that DeSantis, like many on the right, believe that colleges and universities deserve specific blame for the generally liberal political views of younger Americans. Young people are more liberal than older people, and young people are also more likely to have attended college. So it has become an article of faith on the right — despite a dearth of supporting evidence — that colleges are turning young people into liberals. And that, therefore, colleges need to be overhauled and their instructors scrutinized and purged.

This idea is not limited to colleges, it’s worth pointing out. The right regularly assumes that those who don’t share its politics must have been brainwashed somehow by someone. It seems likely that this is, in part, a function of the increasingly closed information universe in which the political right sits, the “epistemic closure” of right-wing media and rhetoric in which assumptions are often unquestioned and unchallenged. If every observer you track agrees with you about an issue and every source of information you consume is in consensus, anyone who disagrees must somehow have fallen victim to some liberal Svengali. Like a professor, say.

The other reason DeSantis is targeting higher education is that college education often serves as a proxy for being in the “elite,” a member of the nebulously bounded class of Americans that is viewed with disdain (or worse) by the political right. That’s particularly true of those who attended schools such as Harvard, a school whose name is functionally synonymous with elitism. House Republicans brought Ivy League presidents to answer questions about antisemitism in part because of reported incidents on their campuses and in part because they are ready-made punching bags for the Republican base.

There is something sad–tragic, actually–about people who are threatened by science, by empiricism, by the very process of intellectual inquiry. Worse still, those threatened people actively resent anyone who is engaged in that inquiry–but they especially resent those who excel in it.

Their motto might as well be “We real Americans don’t need no smarty-pants!”

The cult that was once a political party doesn’t just want to replace democracy with a theocratic autocracy. It wants to take humanity back to the Dark Ages, where the GOP base will feel comfortable.

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Very Good Questions

I’m not a huge fan of Maureen Dowd, the columnist for the New York Times. I probably agree with her more than I disagree, but I’ve been put off at times by what comes across as cattiness, or perhaps just a “too cute” writing style.

That said, she ended last Sunday’s column with a very important set of questions.

The column was about the hugely controversial testimony of three college presidents over anti-semitism on their (very elite) campuses. My own reaction parallels that of another Times columnist, David French. French is a former litigator who spent a considerable portion of his legal career battling censorship on college campuses. He wrote that what struck him about the presidents’ answers wasn’t legal insufficiency “but rather their stunning hypocrisy.”

As French accurately notes, private universities are not bound by the First Amendment, although academic freedom principles–which they do follow– are modeled after the Free Speech provisions of that Amendment. If those schools hewed more closely to First Amendment analysis, the “context matters” responses would have been largely correct.

So if the university presidents were largely (though clumsily) correct about the legal balance, why the outrage? To quote the presidents back to themselves, context matters. For decades now, we’ve watched as campus administrators from coast to coast have constructed a comprehensive web of policies and practices intended to suppress so-called hate speech and to support students who find themselves distressed by speech they find offensive.

The result has been a network of speech codes, bias response teams, safe spaces and glossaries of microaggressions that are all designed to protect students from alleged emotional harm. But not all students.

French is absolutely correct that “the rule cannot be that Jews must endure free speech at its most painful while favored campus constituencies enjoy the warmth of college administrators and the protection of campus speech codes.”

Dowd similarly alluded to the hypocrisy of the testimony. She quoted Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League, who criticized “the inability of these individuals to articulate a simple, straightforward answer to what should have been the easiest question in the world… These presidents are not committed to free speech. They’re committed to favored speech. They selectively enforce the codes of conduct when it works for them or their friends in the faculty lounge.”

When it comes to the current war in the Middle East, Dowd points out what every sentient person knows about the conflict: there are no good guys.

Netanyahu isn’t just personally despicable, he and his supporters have done enormous damage to Israel both domestically and internationally, and there is simply no justification for the way Israel has treated the Palestinians over the past twenty plus years. But as Dowd says, that’s no excuse for what Hamas did on October 7th. Hamas is a terrorist organization intent upon wiping Israel and all Jews off the face of the globe. But again, that undeniable fact does not justify the indiscriminate killing of innocent Palestinian civilians.

As Dowd writes, these things should be self-evident. But then, so much of our current political turmoil is the result of refusal to accept facts that should be self-evident.

Dowd writes:

I think this is still America. But I don’t understand why I have to keep making the case on matters that should be self-evident.

Why should I have to make the case that a man who tried to overthrow the government should not be president again?

Why should I have to make the case that we can’t abandon Ukraine to the evil Vladimir Putin?

Why should I have to make the case that a young woman — whose life and future ability to bear children are at risk — should not be getting persecuted about an abortion by a shady Texas attorney general?

Why should I have to make the case that antisemitism is abhorrent?

To which I will add another: why should we have to make the case that criticizing Israel is not antisemitic, but blaming all Jews for decisions made by the Israeli government (or for whatever is going wrong in someone’s life) is?

I see an eerie parallel between the current eruption of anti-Jewish hatred sparked by the events in the Middle East, and the explosion of anti-Black bigotry that followed the election of Barack Obama. Obviously, ancient tribal hatreds had been there all along–simmering, barely suppressed bigotries just waiting for an excuse to emerge.

The most poignant “why” question of all has to be: why are we humans so tribal? Why do we insist on seeing people who differ from us in some way as a monolithic “them” rather than the discrete individuals they are?

In the immortal words of Rodney King, why can’t we all just get along?

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A Global Phenomenon

 A few days ago, a reader of this blog asked me to address the global growth of populism. 

It’s a question I’ve had as well; as regular readers know, one of my sons lives in Amsterdam, and in the recent election in the Netherlands, he and I were both appalled when a far-Right figure won the majority of votes cast. (That “majority” was 24%, and it looks like he’ll be unable to form a government without substantially modifying his agenda–there are virtues to parliamentary systems. But still…) 

An article about the Netherland’s election attributed the rise of populism there to the country’s growing urban/rural divide, and when I did some research, I found a number of scholarly papers supporting that thesis.

One paper advancing the argument that the urban/rural divide is what is powering populism was titled “Europe’s widening rural–urban divide may make space for far right.” That researcher argued that the divide between rural and urban areas has threatened the political trust and social cohesion necessary to stable governance, and that far-right political movements are “taking advantage of rural discontent to win seats in parliaments.”

Over the past decade, incomes have been consistently higher in urban areas than in rural areas. In fact, between 2012 and 2021, the rural–urban gap in incomes increased by almost 20%. This is not surprising when we consider that employment rates have also been consistently higher in urban areas than in rural areas (this is another widening gap, albeit not as dramatic)….

This growing rural–urban divide is not likely to reverse anytime soon, in part because the rural population is falling behind in the attainment of education and skills. Tertiary educational attainment is higher in cities, and the gap with rural areas has widened over the past decade. Residents of cities are also more likely to have digital skills than their rural counterparts. Because levels of education and skills are higher in cities, urban areas are better equipped to reap the advantages of globalisation and technological change.

Another academic paper examining populism in Europe reported that in a number of Western European elections, support for far-right populist parties has been significantly higher in non-urban areas than in urban areas. The paper examined whether the urban/rural divide could be explained by differences in education, income and other individual characteristics of voters, or by variations in immigration. Researchers also examined whether variations in public service supply might explain at least some of the difference between urban and rural areas’ support for far-right populism.

The results in this paper suggest that voter characteristics and immigration explain a substantial part of the urban–rural divide. However, the propensity to vote for a far-right populist party is still higher in regions with lower population growth even when controlling for individual characteristics and immigration…. The propensity to vote for a far-right party decreases with higher public service supply and higher share of immigrants. The findings in this paper thereby support the hypothesis that individuals in shrinking areas with lower access to public services are likely to respond to the deterioration of their location by casting a vote on the far-right (i.e., protest voting).

A very similar phenomenon can be seen in the United States. Pew researchers have examined the urban/rural divide, noting that it has gotten steadily worse. For most of American history (actually, as recently as the early 1990s) both major political parties included both rural and urban constituencies. Since then, America has become deeply divided geographically, with rural areas increasingly Republican and urban places increasingly Democratic.

Needless to say, the growth of the rural-urban divide has fostered polarization and what researchers call “democratic vulnerability.”

The Brookings Institution has also studied the phenomenon, and cautions against a media framing that has all of urban America diverse, educated, and economically productive and all of rural America White, dependent on dying industries, and characterized by stagnation, decline, and despair.

It is–as always–much more complicated than that, and Brookings points out that “dividing the nation into such a binary has immediate, lived consequences for people living in all corners of America.” The extreme binary  narrative can be harmful in four ways: by  prioritizing the political concerns of an imagined, White rural monolith (and erasing the needs of rural people of color); by furthering misconceptions which devalue the role of rural places in American; by propagating “a myth of place-based poverty that erases people living in a range of high-poverty geographies, justifying oversimplified antipoverty policies;” and by obscuring effective policy solutions for rural economic development. 

Brookings’ caution has merit, especially as policymakers move to address–and ameliorate– the urban/rural divide. But the fact remains that–worldwide–that divide is a primary reason for the electoral victories of some very frightening political forces. 

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Oh Texas….

I know that Florida, under Ron DeSantis, deserves all the shade being thrown at it. But Florida–and that ubiquitous “Florida man”– is facing a strong challenge from Texas.

Most recently, of course, we’ve been treated to the spectacle of Ken Paxton’s willingness to cause the death of a pregnant woman–a mother of two–who obtained a court ruling permitting her to abort her current pregnancy. That decision was based on testimony that her fetus had been found to have a condition that would prevent its survival, and that continuation of the pregnancy would endanger the woman’s life–or at the very least, her ability to have future, healthy pregnancies.

As I noted a couple of days ago, Paxton appealed that court decision and the Texas Supreme court overruled it.

A federal court  has ordered Texas Governor Abbott to remove the lethal barriers he had placed in the Rio Grande, after a lengthy battle during which Abbott defended placement of the impediments, which had caused the deaths of at least two people.

In case there is any confusion, these examples confirm the accuracy of accusations that these Texan staunchly “pro life” Republicans have very selective definitions of “life.”

And then there’s the refusal of the Texas GOP to distance the party from Nazism.

The leadership body for the Republican Party of Texas this week voted down a measure to block members from associating with people and organizations “known to espouse or tolerate antisemitism, pro-Nazi sympathies or Holocaust denial.” This came just weeks after neo-Nazi extremist Nick Fuentes was photographed meeting with a high-profile conservative political operative whose “Defend Texas Liberty” PAC has helped elect Republicans statewide.

The clause, part of a broader resolution in support of Israel, was voted down 32-29 by the Texas GOP’s Executive Committee on Saturday, according to The Texas Tribune. Moreover, “roughly half of the board also tried to prevent a record of their vote from being kept,” in a move that “stunned some members,” the paper reported. Speaking during Saturday’s vote, Texas GOP chair Matt Rinaldi claimed that he didn’t see “any antisemitic, pro-Nazi or Holocaust denial movement on the right that has any significant traction whatsoever.” Rinaldi was also reportedly present in the offices for conservative consulting firm White Horse Strategies, owned by Defend Texas Liberty leader Jonathan Stickland, at the same time as Fuentes last October. He has claimed he was not part of Fuentes’ meeting there, and was unaware of Fuentes’ presence.

If the Texas GOP chair can’t see any “traction” of anti-semitism from the right, I wonder what he can see. From the “very fine people” who chanted “Jews shall not replace us” in Charlottesville to the mounting number of attacks on synagogues and individual Jews, most Americans of good will can see quite a lot of “traction.”

Texas’ current government is dominated by MAGA Republicans determined to keep power by limiting the right of Democratic -leaning constituencies to vote. Scholars at the Brennan Center have described the background of that organization’s current challenge to a measure passed by the Republican-dominated legislature. They allege that Texas has enacted

onerous new rules for voting by mail and curbs voter outreach activities. It also hinders voting assistance for people with language barriers or disabilities and restricts election officials’ and judges’ ability to protect voters from harassment by poll watchers. Like the dozens of restrictive state voting laws that have been enacted nationwide in the last three years, S.B. 1’s proponents claim that it is intended to fight voter fraud. Indeed, its myriad provisions appear to respond directly to baseless claims peddled by Donald Trump and his fellow election deniers about the security of mail-in voting and election administration.

Yet Texas has never found evidence of widespread fraud — and not for lack of trying. Without the pretext of making elections more secure, S.B. 1 is simply an unconstitutional effort to suppress eligible voters in marginalized communities. It seems no coincidence that after people of color surged in turnout in Texas’s 2018 and 2020 elections, the legislature passed a law that restricts methods of voting favored by Black and Latino voters and impairs voter assistance to those with limited English proficiency or limited literacy.

it isn’t only their appalling public behavior. Texas Republicans like Paxton are demonstrably personally corrupt, and that corruption was given a pass by the state’s GOP-dominated legislature. Paxton was acquitted on 16 articles of impeachment, a proceeding triggered by accusations from lawyers on his own staff and buttressed by significant evidence that he had abused the powers of his office to help an Austin real estate investor who was under federal investigation.

The Texas GOP is a cesspool–even more venal and vile than the GOP of DeSantis’ Florida.

I guess everything is bigger in Texas.

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