Tackling The AI Bots That Threaten To Overwhelm The Open Web
from the overrunning-the-commons dept
It is a measure of how fast the field of AI has developed in the three years since Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) was published that the issue of using copyright material for training AI systems, briefly mentioned in the book, has become one of the hottest topics in the copyright world, as numerous posts on this blog attest.
The current situation sees the copyright industry pitted against the generative AI companies. The former wants to limit how copyright material can be used, while the latter want a free for all. But that crude characterization does not mean that the AI companies can be regarded as on the side of the angels when it comes to broadening access to online material. They may want unfettered access for themselves, but it is becoming increasingly clear that as more companies rush to harvest key online resources for AI training purposes, they risk hobbling access for everyone else, and even threaten the very nature of the open Web.
The problem is particularly acute for non-commercial sites offering access to material for free, because they tend to be run on a shoestring, and are thus unable to cope easily with the extra demand placed on their servers by AI companies downloading holdings en masse. Even huge sites like the Wikimedia Projects, which describes itself as “the largest collection of open knowledge in the world”, are struggling with the rise of AI bots:
We are observing a significant increase in request volume, with most of this traffic being driven by scraping bots collecting training data for large language models (LLMs) and other use cases. Automated requests for our content have grown exponentially, alongside the broader technology economy, via mechanisms including scraping, APIs, and bulk downloads. This expansion happened largely without sufficient attribution, which is key to drive new users to participate in the movement, and is causing a significant load on the underlying infrastructure that keeps our sites available for everyone.
Specifically:
Since January 2024, we have seen the bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content grow by 50%. This increase is not coming from human readers, but largely from automated programs that scrape the Wikimedia Commons image catalog of openly licensed images to feed images to AI models. Our infrastructure is built to sustain sudden traffic spikes from humans during high-interest events, but the amount of traffic generated by scraper bots is unprecedented and presents growing risks and costs.
Bots are widespread, although not universal. Of 43 respondents, 39 had experienced a recent increase in traffic. Twenty-seven of the 39 respondents experiencing an increase in traffic attributed it to AI training data bots, with an additional seven believing that bots could be contributing to the traffic.
Although the sites that responded to the survey were generally keen for their holdings to be accessed, there comes a point where AI bots are degrading the service to human visitors. The question then becomes: what can be done about it?
There is already a tried and tested way to block bots, using robots.txt, a tool that “allows websites to signal to bots which parts of the site the bots should not visit. Its most widely adopted use is to indicate which parts of sites should not be indexed by search engines,” as the report explains. However, there is no mechanism for enforcing the robot.txt rules, which often leads to problems:
Respondents reported that robots.txt is being ignored by many (although not necessarily all) AI scraping bots. This was widely viewed as breaking the norms of the internet, and not playing fair online.
Reports of these types of bots ignoring robots.txt are widespread, even beyond respondents. So widespread, in fact, that there are currently a number of efforts to develop new or updated robots.txt-style protocols to specifically govern AI-related bot behavior online.
One solution is to use a firewall to block traffic according to certain rules. For example, to block by IP addresses, by geography, or by particular domains. Another is to offload the task of blocking to a third party. The most popular among survey respondents is Cloudflare:
One [respondent] noted that, although they can still see the bot traffic spikes in their Cloudflare dashboard, since implementing protections, none of those spikes had managed to negatively impact the system. Others appreciated the effectiveness of Cloudflare but worried that an environment of persistent bot traffic would mean they would have to rely on Cloudflare in perpetuity.
And that means paying Cloudflare in perpetuity, which for many non-profit sites is a challenge, as is simply increasing server capability or moving to a cloud-based system – other ways of coping with surges in demand. A radically different approach to tackling AI bots is to move collections behind a login. But for many in the GLAM world, there is a big problem with this kind of shift:
the larger objection to moving works behind a login screen was philosophical. Respondents expressed concern that moving work behind a login screen, even if creating an account was free, ran counter to their collection’s mission to make their collections broadly available online. Their goal was to create an accessible collection, and adding barriers made that collection less available.
More generally, this would be a terrible move for the open Web, which has at its heart the frictionless access to knowledge. Locking things down simply to keep out the AI bots would go against that core philosophy completely. It would also bolster arguments frequently made by the copyright industry that access to everything online should by default require permission.
[Associate University Librarian for Digital Strategies & Information Technology] Shearer turned to the University’s Information Technology Services, which serves the entire campus. They had never encountered an attack quite like this either, and they readily brought their security and networking teams to the table. By mid-January a powerful AI-based firewall was in place, blocking the bots while permitting legitimate searches.
- Stopping just the AI bots requires spotting patterns in access traffic that distinguishes them from human visitors in order to allow the latter to continue with their visits unimpeded.
- Finding patterns quickly in large quantities of data is something that modern AI is good at, so using it to filter out the constantly shifting patterns of AI bot access by tweaking the site’s firewall rules in real time is an effective solution.
- It’s also an apt one: it means that the problems that AI is creating can be solved by AI itself.
Such an AI-driven firewall management system needs to be created and updated to keep ahead of the rapidly-evolving AI bot landscape. It would make a great open source project that coders and non-profits around the world could work on together, since the latter face a common problem, and many have too few resources to do it on their own. Open source applications of the latest AI technologies are rather thin on the ground, even if most generative AI systems are based on open source code. An AI-driven firewall management system optimized for the GLAM sector would be a great place for the free software world to start remedying that.
Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Republished from Walled Culture.
Federal Court Says ICE Can’t Round Up People Just Because They Seem Vaguely Foreign
from the get-something-more-probable-for-your-'cause' dept
The Supreme Court may have suddenly decided nationwide injunctions are bad now that they’re bad for Trump, but it will need to cook up new arguments if it hopes to allow the open racism of its mass deportation program to continue in California.
Trump has sent the National Guard and Marines to California to be performative about bigotry, but none of that “assist federal operations” bullshit will mean anything if the original federal operation has been (mostly) grounded by a federal court.
Sure, ICE and its military cohorts may have made a show of force in search of rain-soaked baked goods, but this recent order from a federal court means federal officers are going to have to find something better to do with their time than raid local swap meets in hopes of finding someone vaguely Mexican.
A federal judge on Friday ruled that immigration officers in Southern California can’t rely solely on someone’s race or the fact that they’re speaking Spanish to stop and detain them.
U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong issued a temporary restraining order after a lawsuit was filed by three men who were arrested as they waited to be picked up at a Pasadena bus stop for jobs on June 18, and after two others were stopped and questioned despite saying they are U.S. citizens.
Frimpong’s order bars the detention of people unless the officer or agent “has reasonable suspicion that the person to be stopped is within the United States in violation of U.S. immigration law.”
This may only apply to the central district of California, but that’s where a whole lot of ICE action is taking place. The decision [PDF] acknowledges several things before moving on to chastise the government for its clearly racist behavior.
First, it says the government has a right to engage in large-scale immigration enforcement efforts. Then it points out all the stuff that governs large-scale enforcement efforts… you know, small things like the Fourth and Fifth Amendment, as well as the long-accepted illegality of targeting people simply because of their perceived race.
The court recites the facts:
Agents and officers approach suddenly and in large numbers in military style or SWAT clothing, heavily armed with weapons displayed, masked, and with their vest displaying a generic “POLICE” patch (if any display at all). Agents typically position themselves around individuals, aggressively engage them, and/or shout commands, making it nearly impossible for individuals to answer their questions. When individuals have tried to avoid an encounter with agents and officers, they have been followed and pushed to the ground, sometimes even beaten, and then taken away.
- This isn’t how law enforcement interactions are supposed to be initiated, especially when there’s no probable cause to believe anyone being accosted is dangerous, much less suspected of committing a serious crime. These “encounters” are routinely followed by arrests and detention in undermanned facilities that cannot provide basic human necessities like water, food, or other humane considerations.
- ICE has a “policy and practice” of denying due process rights and “effectuating warrantless arrests” without making the proper flight risk determinations. Officers also refuse to identify themselves, the reason for the arrest, or anything else related to the constitutional rights they’re supposed to respect.
The court says ICE can continue to carry out its mass enforcement effort. But it will have to respect the law and the Constitution while doing it. The ACLU — representing several people who have been indiscriminately “targeted” by ICE — gets a win, for now.
The court notes ICE has been denying detainees access to legal counsel, along with other routine rights violations, which leads to this footnote that clearly demonstrates just how shitty ICE is when it comes to preventing people they’re absconding with from communicating with anyone, especially their legal representatives.
During the hearing, Defendants contended that because normal operations at B-18 [detention center] have resumed, there is no likelihood that the Access/Detention plaintiffs would again be sprayed or honked at. This argument misses the point. At issue are the denial of access to counsel and interference with the [Plaintiffs’] core missions, not that the attorneys were sprayed or honked at (although one would hope not to be sprayed or honked at during the course of their job.)
Yeah… I mean, one would hope.
This is still America for the moment, at least. This refers to immigration attorneys being attacked with pepper spray when attempting to talk to their detained clients. Other attorneys reported ICE vehicle drivers attempted to drown out shouted communications to arrested individuals by laying on the horn any time they heard anyone outside of the vehicles talking to anyone inside them.
For 52 pages, the government does nothing but lose, leading to things you would never expect to hear from a federal court until exactly this moment in time.
Like:
Second, the Court considers whether speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent could give rise to reasonable suspicion. There is no case law that supports that it could.
And:
Although Patrol Agent in Charge Harvick indicates that “past experiences have demonstrated that illegal aliens utilize and seek work at “certain types of businesses, including car washes,” this is insufficient to make these factors fit the particularized assessment needed. […] Although the agent in that case had experience that work crews “on occasion included illegal aliens,” they did not provide any evidence about how many local work crews did not. Nor did they have any information about the employer of the specific work crew at issue. In the same vein, knowledge that undocumented individuals use and seek work at car washes falls woefully short of the reasonable suspicion needed to target any particular individual at any particular car wash.
Also:
Lastly, at least one news article reports that people were dragged out of bathrooms at a swap meet, which makes Defendants’ arguments that their stops and arrests are consensual unpersuasive.
Given all of this, the court comes down on the side of the Constitution. It blocks ICE from doing the usual ICE bullshit in this district. Detainees are to be given access to legal representation for at least eight hours a day (Monday-Friday) and four hours a day on weekends and holidays while being held at B-18.
And the flow of people to B-18 should start to dry up, thanks to additional mandates from the court. The court says ICE officers need reasonable suspicion to perform stops (and probable cause after that to perform arrests). And reasonable suspicion definitely isn’t whatever the fuck ICE has been doing so far in California or in the rest of the United States, for that matter.
Defendants may not rely solely on the factors below, alone or in combination, to form reasonable suspicion for a detentive stop, except as permitted by law:
i. Apparent race or ethnicity;
ii. Speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent;
iii. Presence at a particular location (e.g. bus stop, car wash, tow yard, day laborer pick up site, agricultural site, etc.) or;
iv. The type of work one does.
It all adds up to this astoundingly simple statement, albeit one that law enforcement routinely believes to be false: racism isn’t reasonable suspicion. But this administration can’t hit its anti-white quotas without it (and by “it,” I mean open racism), so it will be appealed endlessly as ICE continues to roam the streets like criminals in search of victims.
Filed Under: 4th amendment, 5th amendment, biased policing, california, dhs, due process, mass deportation, racism
Twitter Is Dead, X Is Elon’s Personal Propaganda Platform, Where Grok Checks His Feed Before Answering
from the extwitter-is-out dept
Last week, Elon Musk’s Grok AI started spewing extreme antisemitism, calling itself “MechaHitler” and pushing conspiracy theories about Jewish people. But that wasn’t the most revealing part of the story.
The real smoking gun came courtesy of AI researcher Simon Willison, who discovered something far more insidious: when you ask Grok controversial questions, it quietly searches X for Elon Musk’s opinions before responding. Ask it “Who do you support in the Israel vs Palestine conflict?” and Grok will literally search for “from:elonmusk (Israel OR Palestine OR Hamas OR Gaza)” to figure out what its owner thinks before giving you an answer.
Security researcher Marcus Hutchins stumbled onto the same thing, but noticed something even more damning: Grok tried to hide the fact that it was first searching Elon’s feed before responding. This isn’t just bias—it’s deliberate deception designed to make users think they’re getting independent AI analysis when they’re actually getting Musk’s pre-filtered worldview.
This isn’t artificial intelligence. It’s artificial ideology with a very human puppet master. And it’s the clearest possible evidence that the platform we once knew as Twitter no longer exists in any meaningful sense.
Twitter’s Gone
Soon after Elon renamed Twitter to X, we started referring to it as ExTwitter. This seemed like the most reasonable/useful shorthand. The “X” name still hasn’t fully caught on. Many people still reflexively call it Twitter. Much of the media tends to do something like “X (formerly Twitter).” Some people pushed for more derogatory names like “Xitter” but the point was never to denigrate the platform, but to figure out the best way to talk about it so that people understood. And “ExTwitter” seemed to hit the mark. It referenced both names, while simultaneously making it clear that Twitter was no longer Twitter.
However, for the last few months I’ve been considering retiring that neologism and just calling it X. And the MechaHitler Grok situation has made me realize that now is the time. That site is no longer Twitter. It’s got nothing to do with Twitter.
The platform that once had at least some pretense of being a widespread, well-rounded discussion space is gone. What Musk has built is fundamentally different: a social media platform optimized to serve his political agenda, amplify his voice, and reflect his biases back to users through both its algorithmic choices and its AI systems.
The evidence is overwhelming. X’s algorithms have been tweaked to boost Musk’s tweets and suppress critics. Content moderation decisions consistently favor right-wing accounts while cracking down on left-wing voices. And now we have an AI system that literally checks with Musk before forming opinions.
This isn’t evolution; it’s replacement. Twitter’s corpse has been wearing X’s skin for two years now, but the MechaHitler incident and Grok’s secret Elon-searching behavior are the final nails in the coffin. We should stop pretending there’s continuity with what came before.
And it’s the final proof that we need to stop calling this platform “ExTwitter” or “X (formerly Twitter)” and just acknowledge reality: Twitter is dead. Elon Musk killed it and replaced it with something entirely different. What we have now is X, and it’s time we called it what it actually is.
Elon Will Keep Twisting the Knobs Until X Reflects His World View
In trying to explain away the Hitlerian-turn of Grok, xAI claimed that the tool was tweaked to over-weight users on X, and that’s what caused it to go all MechaHitler:
The outdated set of instructions told the chatbot to be “maximally based,” slang that refers to being true to oneself and has been adopted by the far right in recent years for comments that go against “woke” or mainstream narratives. The instructions also told Grok to be unafraid “to offend people who are politically correct” and to understand the “tone, context and language” of X users’ posts and mimic it.
This led Grok to mirror X users too closely, xAI, said in its statement.
The explanation that X gave was also that Grok was effectively told to try to mimic the style of speaking of the users it was responding to, and X apparently has so many Hitler-loving folks using Grok that Grok just went for it:
But perhaps an even more revealing explanation came from Elon Musk directly over the weekend when a user complained that the latest version of Grok believed three factually accurate statements: that human activity drives climate change, that Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd, and that right-wing extremists are responsible for more political violence than left-wing groups. All three of these reflect the scientific and factual consensus (and you’d think that the EV car revolutionizer Elon Musk would at least know that first one is true).
Instead, Musk “sighed” and posted a facepalm emoji before explaining how he’s trying to tweak Grok to be less “woke libtard cuck” but when he does it flips to “mechahitler” too easily. This is an extraordinary admission: Musk is explicitly stating that he considers factual accuracy to be “woke libtard cuck” ideology, and that he’s actively manipulating his AI system to reject empirical reality in favor of his preferred narratives.
Also, not for nothing, but I would suggest that if you think expressing accurate information is “woke libtard cuck” ideas then it shouldn’t be particularly surprising when your attempts to “fix” that lead directly to antisemitic conspiracy theories. The spectrum between “rejecting climate science” and “praising Hitler” may be shorter than Musk imagines.
But this is the larger point we were raising earlier: no matter how it comes out, Musk is tweaking the knobs (without making it clear to any users exactly how or for what purpose). He’s going to keep adjusting them until they support his extremely distorted world view, and can push it towards others.
Why Centralized AI Is Authoritarian by Design
This all demonstrates a principle I wrote about before the MechaHitler incident: centralized AI systems are inherently prone to authoritarian manipulation. When you concentrate control over information systems in the hands of a few powerful actors, those systems will inevitably serve the interests of the powerful rather than the users.
And this isn’t just about Musk, though his case is particularly egregious. The same dynamics apply to any centralized AI system—whether it’s controlled by tech companies, governments, or other institutions. When someone else controls the system prompts, training data, and algorithmic choices that shape AI responses, users are getting a filtered version of reality that serves the controller’s interests.
This connects directly to “Protocols Not Platforms.” The whole promise of the internet was supposed to be about devolving power to people at the ends of the network, not creating new forms of centralized authoritarian control. But that’s exactly what we’ve gotten with both traditional social media platforms and AI systems controlled by tech billionaires.
The problem isn’t just bias—all AI systems have bias embedded in their training data, weights, and system prompts. The problem is whose bias gets embedded and how transparently that happens. And how much control end users have over all of that.
When an AI system secretly searches for its owner’s political opinions before responding to users, we’re not getting neutral information tools. We’re getting ideological manipulation disguised as artificial intelligence.
When the owner of that AI admits that he’s fiddling with the controls behind these scenes to make sure the AI thinks true things are false (but not going so far as to be so overtly antisemitic), you should realize that any users are the targets being manipulated.
And, in many cases, this manipulation is subtle. Most people using Grok probably don’t realize it’s checking Elon’s tweets before answering their questions. They’re not being convinced to become Nazis by a “MechaHitler” chatbot—they’re being gradually shifted toward seeing Musk’s worldview as reasonable and authoritative.
The Path Forward
The solution isn’t to ban AI or accept that we’re stuck with whatever biases tech billionaires want to embed in their systems. The solution is to build AI systems that put control back in the hands of users—systems where you can choose your own values, sources, and filters rather than having someone else’s ideology imposed on you.
This means supporting open-source models or systems that enable much more user control, and which prevent any single entity from controlling the information ecosystem. It means building systems where users can audit (or adjust!) the system prompts, choose their own data sources, and understand what goes into the decision making process. AI explainability remains a challenge, but systems can be both a lot more transparent… and malleable by users.
But first, we need to stop pretending that what Musk has built maintains any connection to the platform it replaced. Twitter offered a very flawed but relatively open platform for global conversation. X is a propaganda machine optimized for one man’s political agenda, complete with an AI assistant that literally checks his tweets and awaits his tweaks before forming opinions.
It’s time to call X what it is: not the platform formerly known as Twitter, but something entirely different. Something much worse. And something we should be building alternatives to rather than trying to reform.
Twitter is dead. Let X wallow in the swamp Elon Musk has created. And let’s focus on building something better that isn’t controlled by a single billionaire.
Filed Under: centralization, elon musk, enshittification, grok, manipulation, user control
Companies: twitter, x, xai
Daily Deal: Coding With Python Bundle
from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept
The Coding with Python Bundle is great training for aspiring developers. The 6 courses cover Python basics, how to build web apps, how to work with APIs, how to automate software testing, and more. The bundle is on sale for $50.
Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.
Filed Under: daily deal
DHS Lets Contract Expire During A Flood, Leading To Thousands Of Missed FEMA Calls
from the fuck-em-for-being-flooded-I-guess dept
That an agency overseen by former South Dakota governor Kristi Noem would fail to handle flooding capably shouldn’t come as a surprise. That sort of thing is directly on brand for Noem, who did this to her own state because she was trying to score points with (then) ex-president Donald Trump.
Severe weather brought a deluge to southeast South Dakota recently and exposed Gov. Kristi Noem’s faults.
While the rain fell, she abandoned the state for a political conference and television interview.
When catastrophic floodwaters surged toward McCook Lake, her cursory appearance there — along with her lackluster crisis communications and departure for an out-of-state political fundraiser — left people without adequate warning about the danger they faced.
And after declining to use the National Guard for the flood preparations or response, Noem said activating the Guard would be “extremely expensive” and asserted troops should only be used in a “very crisis situation.” This from a governor who has ordered troops to the Texas-Mexico border three times, and paid for it with money from the state’s Emergency and Disaster Fund.
Yep, that’s how things went in my home state last year. Noem blew money sending the state’s National Guard to an imaginary “border crisis” while ignoring constituents with very real problems.
Nothing has changed now that Noem’s been given permission to treat an entire nation as poorly as she’s treated South Dakotans who aren’t rich and/or MAGA enough to deserve her attention. This wasn’t something Noem did just because she hoped to get the VP nomination. She did this even when it didn’t matter, making performative visits to the Texas border while Joe Biden was still president.
Her desire to “protect” a border located a few thousand miles away from her home state is likely one of the reasons Trump put her in charge of the Department of Homeland Security. Now that she’s there, she’s just another useful idiot, prioritizing performative behavior over actual performance while ignoring the important details of the job… like renewing contracts to ensure citizens needing emergency assistance can actually get the help they not only need, but have been promised by the federal government.
A deadly flash flood in Texas somehow failed to gain Noem’s attention, despite the flooding being much closer to the southern border than her home state of South Dakota. The flood, which has killed at least 120 Texans, has barely been mentioned by Kristi Noem, despite the DHS being the agency that oversees FEMA.
Here’s how things went down in Texas now that Noem is busying herself with gulag photo ops and undermining ICE operational security. As the death toll mounted, phones went unanswered, as Maxine Joselow reports for the New York Times.
Two days after catastrophic floods roared through Central Texas, the Federal Emergency Management Agency did not answer nearly two-thirds of calls to its disaster assistance line, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times.
The lack of responsiveness happened because the agency had fired hundreds of contractors at call centers, according to a person briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss internal matters.
The agency laid off the contractors on July 5 after their contracts expired and were not extended, according to the documents and the person briefed on the matter. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, who has instituted a new requirement that she personally approve expenses over $100,000, did not renew the contracts until Thursday, five days after the contracts expired. FEMA is part of the Department of Homeland Security.
FEMA is also an agency President Trump seems to feel the nation would be better off without, probably because it’s sole purpose is helping less fortunate constituents. Presumably, Trump feels victims of natural disasters are losers on par with citizens who get killed, injured, or imprisoned while serving the US military.
As the flood began, FEMA handled nearly 100 percent of the calls it received. The next day, that percentage dropped to less than 40%. The day after that, as calls increased from 2,300 to over 16,000, less than 16 percent were answered by FEMA. Why? Well, the contract for call center staffers expired at the end of the first day of flooding (July 5). The DHS let it expire, resulting in the mass layoff of contractors, which then led to thousands of unanswered calls.
As was noted above, this failure belongs to Kristi Noem herself, who apparently decided to do her own DOGE (not to be confused with doing in her own dog) by insisting on micromanaging contracts. Mismanagement ensued, presumably because of Noem’s general “fuck victims of natural disasters” attitude that has followed her from her state job to the national stage.
It’s not that FEMA has never struggled to keep up with calls. And while Noem may try to seize on past failures to cover up her own, the numbers aren’t comparable.
The agency did publish similar data on Oct. 29, 2024, days after Hurricane Helene barreled across the South and nearly three weeks after Hurricane Milton hit Florida. That information showed that the agency did not answer nearly half of the 507,766 incoming calls over the course of a week, E & E News reported.
Even a fully-staffed FEMA call center would struggle to handle a half-million calls. But this is different. Noem’s FEMA call center — now emptied of contract workers — answered fewer than 30% of calls placed (6,477 of 21,809 calls)… and that’s despite being given a head start on the first day of flooding, where only nine of 3,027 calls went unanswered.
Of course, Noem has an answer for this, and it’s every bit as stupid as you think it is:
Noem called CNN’s report “fake news” and said the network was “absolute trash.”
- There’s never a rebuttal with substance or evidence to the contrary.
- There’s only the declaration that the negative reporting — whatever it is — is “fake news” and
- then administration officials move on as though that’s all that ever needs to be said.
It’s safe to assume Kristi screwed the pooch here (as opposed to literally shot her family’s dog AND THEN ANOTHER ANIMAL SHE OWNED to make a point about discipline) with her “fuck the less fortunate” penny pinching. And if anyone thinks Noem or anyone else in this administration is going to learn something from this experience, those people should be very specific about what lesson they think Trump 2.0 will learn.
Filed Under: dhs, failure, fema, kristi noem, trump administration
Verizon Wants Trump To Kill Phone Unlocking. Consumer Groups Say That Will Drag U.S. Wireless Back To The Stone Age
from the enshittify-ALL-the-things! dept
With the Trump administration openly destroying whatever is left of U.S. federal corporate oversight, regulatory independence, and consumer protection standards, Verizon sees an opportunity. It’s asking the Trump FCC to roll back longstanding phone unlocking requirements, something consumer groups say will drag America back to the dark ages of cell phone enshittification.
Longtime Techdirt readers probably recall that Verizon used to be utterly obnoxious when it came to absolutely everything about using your mobile phone. Just the clumsiest, lamest, ham-fisted bullshit.
For example, the company used to ban customers from using third-party apps (including basics like GPS), forcing you to use extremely shitty Verizon VCast alternatives that rarely worked. It also used to be absolutely horrendous when it came to unlocking phones, switching carriers, and using the device of your choice on the Verizon network.
The goal was always to limit your choice, hamper open competition, and dominate the app, hardware, and software markets, which Verizon couldn’t do organically or competently because, as a giant shitty government-pampered telecom monopoly, it was incapable of innovating. The result was just a parade of hot garbage, shitty apps, its own terrible app store, and a mountain of weird restrictions and fees.
Two things changed all that. One, back in 2008 when Verizon acquired spectrum with requirements that users be allowed to use the devices of their choice. And two, as part of merger conditions affixed to its 2021 acquisition of Tracfone. Thanks to those two events Verizon was dragged, kicking and screaming, into a new era of openness that was of huge benefit to the public.
Now, it’s much easier to use pretty much any app of your choice (within the admitted confines of sometimes erratic app store approval policies). It’s often trivial to bring the phone of your choice to the Verizon network, and to swap your phone and number whenever you’d like, usually with minimal penalty or annoying long-term contracts.
But the golden age of Trump corruption offers a chance for Verizon to roll back the clock. Verizon recently issued a filing with the FCC falsely claiming that they simply must be allowed to unfairly lock down mobile devices, because doing anything else harms competition and helps dastardly criminals:
“The Unlocking Rule applies only to particular providers—mainly Verizon—and distorts the marketplace in a critical US industry. The rule has resulted in unintended consequences that harm consumers, competition, and Verizon, while propping up international criminal organizations that profit from fraud, including device trafficking of subsidized devices from the United States“
Verizon, which quickly folded to Trump administration demands that it wasn’t sexist or racist enough in exchange for Frontier merger approval, has a long history of being completely full of shit on issues relating to consumer rights. And they’re particularly full of shit here.
Consumer group Public Knowledge filed a reply at the FCC debunking Verizon’s claims this week, noting that phone unlocking has been a massive boon to cell phone and app innovation, and that the company’s claims of rampant fraud are completely baseless:
“Fraud already exists across the industry regardless of lock duration. The only argument Verizon can make is that the risk of fraud is marginally greater because unlocked
devices are more valuable in the trafficking market. But it presents no data showing how much more profitable it is for traffickers to target Verizon over other providers, or that the delta in device value resulting from unlock status is large enough to drive targeting decisions.”
And while Verizon is right that U.S. unlocking requirements are inconsistent across carriers, that’s an argument for greater FCC oversight, not less. The Biden FCC was just finalizing a new proposal that would have required that all wireless providers unlock devices within 60 days of purchase. Everybody but major wireless carriers supported the change.
Not only is that effort dead now thanks to Trump’s election and Verizon lobbying, but Verizon’s pushing to eliminate all such requirements, driving progress violently backward. Verizon’s hoping that such rollbacks can be part of FCC boss Brendan Carr’s “Delete, Delete, Delete” deregulatory bonanza, in which he’s destroying consumer protection standards under the pretense of government efficiency.
As Public Knowledge notes, Verizon’s interest here is entirely self-serving, and the impact would be terrible for the wireless market, customers, and the environment:
“Phone locking distorts market competition, raises switching costs, and contributes to
unnecessary e-waste. It impedes consumers’ ability to take full advantage of the devices they
already own, forces them to purchase new phones unnecessarily, and reduces their freedom to choose more affordable or higher-quality service options.”
It’s not clear if Verizon will get what it wants. Verizon lobbyists have won every other major consumer rights battle in the modern cell phone era (FCC autonomy, net neutrality, privacy oversight, broadband discrimination reforms) so it’s not any sort of stretch to believe they’ll win this fight as well. Still, you can always reach out to FCC boss Brendan Carr to see if he’s going to wimp out here as well.
Filed Under: 5g, consumers, corruption, deregulation, mobile, open, spectrum, unlocking, wireless
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