We’ve noted repeatedly how the mass hyperventilation about TikTok is a giant distraction from the country’s broader failures on consumer privacy; namely our corrupt inability to pass even a baseline privacy law for the internet era, and our absolute refusal to regulate sleazy data brokers.

As a result there’s not a week that goes by where there isn’t some story about your personal behavior and location data being sold to data brokers, who then sell access to any nitwit with a nickel — or fail to secure it.

Like when Ron Wyden’s office recently revealed how a right wing activist group was able to purchase women’s abortion clinic location visit data, then use that data to send the vulnerable women targeted misinformation.

Or last year, when it was revealed that a group of conservative Colorado Catholics spent millions of dollars to purchase Grindr user location and browsing data to single out and shame priests that had used gay dating and hookup apps.

Now Grindr’s in the news for all the wrong reasons once again. The California-based company is now facing a new UK lawsuit that alleges the company sold private user information, including HIV status, with a range of third parties without user consent:

“According to the claim, the company shared sensitive data with third parties for commercial purposes, in breach of the UK’s data privacy laws It says it included information about the ethnicity and sexual orientation of users.”

The claims (more details here) stem from data transactions that occurred a while ago: namely between 2018 and 2020. Grindr, of course, claims they’ve dramatically improved their privacy practices since then, though this Washington Post story about the use of purchased Grindr data to expose gay priests suggests the behavior extended at least through 2021.

Grindr’s was also sued last year (with the help of a former employee) for promising to delete the data of cancelled accounts and then… just not doing that.

Grindr may have changed their behaviors, but they may not have. We can’t actually know because, again, we don’t have a meaningful privacy law with meaningful penalties for companies and executives that play fast and loose with consumer data.

And we’ve done this because policy leaders across the partisan spectrum have prioritized making money over market health and public safety (though a lot of calories go into distracting folks from this fact).

Some variation of what Grindr does is happening across many apps or services or networks you use. Your sensitive location, demographic, and behavioral data is too frequently sold to a vast array of dodgy international data brokers, who then in turn sell access to pretty much anybody (including domestic and foreign intelligence agencies). All under the pretense this is safe because the data was “anonymized” (a meaningless term).

But remember kids: TikTok is the only real modern privacy threat worth worrying about.

Major TV providers lost another 5 million paying TV subscribers last year, as users increasingly jump from fat and expensive cable bundles, to streaming. At the same time, a lot of the executives and bad ideas that plagued the traditional cable TV sector are coming along for the ride, resulting in a streaming sector that looks more and more like the kludgy cable sector.

Thanks to industry consolidation and saturated market growth, the streaming industry has started behaving much like the traditional cable giants they once disrupted. As with most industries suffering from “enshittification,” that generally means steadily worse service at higher prices as it tries to appease Wall Street’s demand for improved quarterly returns at any cost (even long term company health).

Netflix has started acting like password sharing, something it advocated for for years, is a dire cardinal sin. Amazon decided it would be fun to increase the number of ads it runs, charging Amazon Prime users even more money to avoid them. Consumers are paying more for streaming than ever as layoffs abound, streaming catalogs shrink, and the underlying products steadily get worse.

In response, customers are starting to be a little smarter about their shopping habits, increasingly cancelling streaming services when they’re not watching them. According to the New York Times, more than 29 million U.S. consumers — about a quarter of all domestic paying streaming subscribers — cancelled three or more streaming services sometime in the last two years:

“Among these nomadic subscribers, some are taking advantage of how easy it is, with a monthly contract and simple click of a button, to hopscotch from one service to the next. Indeed, these users can be fickle — a third of them resubscribe to the canceled service within six months, according to Antenna’s research.”

The reduced revenues from people cancelling for months at a time will create new pressure on streaming giants to deliver Wall Street those sweet quarterly returns. Streaming profitability was already a challenge (NBCUniversal’s Peacock lost $2.8 billion last year). In other words: improving service quality and expanding catalogs won’t be at the top of the executive menu.

So now the race will be on to thrill Wall Street and goose revenues in other ways. That means more price hikes, more pointless mergers (see: the whole AT&T Time Warner Discovery mess), and more bizarre restrictions. I’d also suspect they’ll soon take another terrible cue from traditional cable: cutting corners on customer service, and making it increasingly difficult to cancel service without headaches.

That’s not to say that streaming still hasn’t been a dramatic improvement over traditional cable television. But if the industry isn’t careful, and there’s no indication it wants to be, it’s going to be repeating the same exact trajectory and create openings for disruption of its own business models.

I’ve mentioned more than a few times how the singular hyperventilation about TikTok is kind of silly distraction from the fact that the United States is too corrupt to pass a modern privacy law, resulting in no limit of dodgy behavior, abuse, and scandal. We have no real standards thanks to corruption, and most people have no real idea of the scale of the dysfunction.

Case in point: a new study out of the University of Pennsylvania (hat tip to The Register) analyzed a nationally representative sample of 100 U.S. hospitals, and found that 96 percent of them were doling out sensitive user visitor data to Google, Meta, and a vast coalition of dodgy data brokers.

Hospitals, it should be clear, aren’t legally required to publish website privacy policies that clearly detail how and with whom they share visitor data. Again, because we’re too corrupt as a country to require and enforce such requirements. The FTC does have some jurisdiction, but it’s too short staffed and under-funded (quite intentionally) to tackle the real scope of U.S. online privacy violations.

So the study found that a chunk of these hospital websites didn’t even have a privacy policy. And of the ones that did, about half the time the over-verbose pile of ambiguous and intentionally confusing legalese didn’t really inform visitors that their data was being transferred to a long list of third parties. Or, for that matter, who those third-parties even are:

“…we found that although 96.0% of hospital websites exposed users to third-party tracking, only 71.0% of websites had an available website privacy policy…Only 56.3% of policies (and only 40 hospitals overall) identified specific third-party recipients.”

Data in this instance can involve everything including email and IP addresses, to what you clicked on, what you researched, demographic info, and location. This was all a slight improvement from a study they did a year earlier showing that 98 percent of hospital websites shared sensitive data with third parties. The professors clearly knew what to expect, but were still disgusted in comments to The Register:

“It’s shocking, and really kind of incomprehensible,” said Dr Ari Friedman, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “People have cared about health privacy for a really, really, really long time.” It’s very fundamental to human nature. Even if it’s information that you would have shared with people, there’s still a loss, just an intrinsic loss, when you don’t even have control over who you share that information with.”

If this data is getting into the hands of dodgy international and unregulated data brokers, there’s no limit of places it can end up. Brokers collect a huge array of demographic, behavioral, and location data, use it to create detailed profiles of individuals, then sell access in a million different ways to a long line of additional third parties, including the U.S. government and foreign intelligence agencies.

There should be hard requirements about transparent, clear, and concise notifications of exactly what data is being collected and sold and to whom. There should be hard requirements that users have the ability to opt out (or, preferably in the cases of sensitive info, opt in). There should be hard punishment for companies and executives that play fast and loose with consumer data.

And we have none of that because our lawmakers decided, repeatedly, that making money was more important than market health, consumer welfare, and public safety. The result has been a parade of scandals that skirt ever closer to people being killed, at scale.

So again, the kind of people that whine about the singular privacy threat that is TikTok (like say FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, or Senator Marsha Blackburn) — but have nothing to say about the much broader dysfunction created by rampant corruption — are advertising they either don’t know what they’re talking about, or aren’t addressing the full scope of the problem in good faith.

Last month Oregon state lawmakers passed a new “right to repair” law making it easier and cheaper to repair your electronics. The law requires that manufacturers that do business in the state provide users with easy and affordable access to tools, manuals, and parts. It also cracks down on practices like “parts pairing,” which often uses software locks to block use of third-party parts and assemblages.

It’s arguably the toughest state right to repair law yet. And it almost didn’t pass thanks to Apple, which (as it has in other states) lobbied to kill the bill, falsely claiming it was a threat to user safety and security.

Last week, The Washington Post proudly declared that Apple was slightly reversing some long-standing restrictions on repair and accessibility:

“Apple told The Washington Post it is easing a key restriction on iPhone repairs. Starting this fall, owners of an iPhone 15 or newer will be able to get their broken devices fixed with used parts — including screens, batteries and cameras — without any change in functionality.”

Notice this isn’t a full reversal of Apple’s restrictions, which (despite what it often claims) are designed to monopolize repair and accelerate the sales of new phones. And it takes the Washington Post until the seventeenth paragraph to inform readers that the changes are thanks in large part to Oregon’s new law.

And again, the Post never really informs the reader clearly that Apple lobbied to have the law killed. Or really properly frames the impact Apple’s restrictions have long had on the environment, consumer rights and costs, or the small independent repair shops Apple has a history of bullying. But it does let Apple falsely claim, without correction, that the law is a threat to consumer privacy:

“Neither Ternus nor Apple spokespeople commented on what changes may have to be made to abide by Oregon law, but the company said in an earlier statement that the bill’s language “introduces the possibility that Apple would be required to allow unknown, non-secure third-party Face ID or Touch ID modules to unlock” a user’s personal information.”

That’s just scare mongering. You can read in detail over at iFixit how “parts pairing” actually works and how it’s harmful. Apple (like John Deere and every other company angry that their repair monopolies are being dismantled) loves to pretend their interest here is solely in user safety. Their interest is in new phone sales and maintaining a profitable monopoly over repair.

Apple’s whole pivot is framed by the Post, which seems simply thrilled to even have access to an Apple engineering VP, as something Apple just came up with one day because it’s just that forward-thinking and courteous. It’s another example of how Apple’s widely proclaimed “180 on right to repair” is more of a drunken 45 degree begrudging and overdue waddle, propped up by a lazy press.

One of the key reasons the net neutrality fight even became a thing was widespread concern that big ISPs would abuse their power to behave anti-competitively, picking winners and losers across the internet ecosystem, and nickel-and-diming consumers in a variety of obnoxiously creative ways.

Verizon, for example, charges you extra if you want 4K video to work properly. T-Mobile spent years letting some key partners and services (namely large companies) bypass usage caps and network throttling restrictions. It’s not complicated: these kinds of gatekeeper decisions give historically unpopular telecoms power they shouldn’t have under the principle of an open, competitive internet.

We’ve noted how the Biden FCC will vote on April 25 to restore popular net neutrality rules stripped away during the Trump administration. Though we’ve also indicated there are some concerns among experts that the rules may wind up being weaker than the original 2015 edition.

Stanford law professor and net neutrality expert Barbara van Schewick has written a blog post noting that while the Rosenworcel FCC has shored up some concerns on this front (the FCC’s rules won’t “pre-empt” tougher California rules, for example), there’s still room for concern. Most notably surrounding the new rules’ treatment of so-called “fast lanes”:

“There’s a huge problem: the proposed rules make it possible for mobile ISPs to start picking applications and putting them in a fast lane – where they’ll perform better generally and much better if the network gets congested.”

Wireless carriers have made it clear that they plan to use “network slicing” to create 5G fast lanes for certain apps such as video conferencing, games, and video. The FCC’s new net neutrality rules allows such behavior, providing the service or app isn’t charged for them. So they can’t, say, extort a company into paying more if it wants its service or app to see baseline performance, which is good.

But the rules still allow ISPs to charge consumers all manner of fees if they want the most popular apps and services to work their best. And van Schewick notes, the rules still allow big ISPs to determine which companies and services get priority. That inherently creates a system whereby less popular and successful apps and services (as well as academia-related services and nonprofits) are relegated to second-class network status, putting them at competitive and performance disadvantage:

“And as we’ve seen in the past, programs like this favor the most popular apps, even when the program is supposedly open to all apps in a category and no apps are paying the ISP. So the biggest apps will end up in all the fast lanes, while most others would be left out. The ones left out would likely include messaging apps like Signal, local news sites, decentralized Fediverse apps like Mastodon and PeerTube, niche video sites like Dropout, indie music sites like Bandcamp, and the millions of other sites and apps in the long tail.”

van Schewick provides some potential illustrative examples, several of which already exist in various forms:

So again, the problem is that big and influential services or games like Disney or ESPN will see network priority during periods of 5G wireless network congestion. While smaller competitors, nonprofits, and others get relegated into a sea of “best effort” network scenarios.

van Schewick notes the original Obama-era 2014 proposal restricted this stuff. As did, in her legal opinion, the 2015 final rules. Even the half-assed proposals floated by Republicans at various points prohibited ISPs from speeding up different apps and services arbitrarily. But she notes these new 2024 rules include an obvious silence on this front that seems clearly lobbied for by industry:

“The no-throttling rule that the FCC proposed in October explicitly prohibited ISPs from slowing down apps and classes of apps; it was silent on whether the rule also applies to speeding up. “

The original Rosenworcel FCC proposal unveiled last October didn’t include those restrictions, so public interest groups, startups, and members of Congress all reached out asking why. April came, and the FCC’s draft net neutrality order still didn’t restrict the speeding up of specific apps and services, outside to say it would address so-called “fast lane” issues on a “case by case basis.”

Opponents of net neutrality like to pretend that the rules are a “solution in search of a problem,” but industry has made it extremely clear that this kind of fractured internet, which consumers face ever-escalating nickel-and-diming, and the most popular apps and services get network priority over everybody else, is precisely the sort of future they have in mind.

Like any publicly-traded company, telecoms are obligated to shareholders to boost quarterly revenues at any cost. In telecom this routinely comes in the form of direct price hikes, cuts to service quality and broadband deployment, or substandard customer service. But it also increasingly comes in the forms of obnoxious monetization efforts that create entirely new obstacles you’re then charged extra to overcome; efforts you can’t avoid because you either have no competing broadband alternatives to flee too (market failure) or all of the competitors on offer are engaging in the same bad behavior (regulatory capture).

FCC bureaucrats have generally prioritized “not stifling innovation” (as if telecom giants have meaningfully innovated any time in the last quarter century) over protecting markets and consumers, and there’s evidence that kind of thinking is once again at play. I’d suspect, quite intentionally, none of this will be addressed by the time the final net neutrality rules are voted on at the FCC’s April 25th meeting.

The FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), part of the 2021 infrastructure bill, currently provides 23+ million low-income Americans a $30 broadband discount every month. But those 23 million Americans are poised to soon lose the discount because key Republicans — who routinely dole out billions of dollars on far dumber fare — refuse to fund a $4-$7 billion extension.

As a result, the FCC is informing struggling Americans that their broadband bills are all about to jump significantly as the program starts to wind down. There’s a last ditch effort to save the program, but it’s unclear if it has traction in one of the least productive Congress’ in U.S. history:

“Speaking at an event hosted by USTelecom on Thursday, FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks called the ACP “the most effective program we’ve ever had” for incentivizing low-cost internet plans, and he mourned the fact that its time could be running out.”

The ACP’s death is an interesting case because the telecom industry generally supports it, many Republicans support it, and many Democrats support it.

Big ISPs support it because it basically involves throwing money at them to temporarily reduce broadband prices that wouldn’t be high in the first place if big ISPs hadn’t spent the last 40 years lobbying to crush competition and regulatory oversight (usually with the help of corrupt centrist Democrats and Republicans).

But a handful of Republicans, nervous that the popular program could help Democrats during an election season, are engaging in obstructionism. House Speaker Mike Johnson appears to be slow walking the emergency funding proposal to death.

Most “both sides” news orgs, always wary of upsetting sources and advertisers, lack the courage to inform readers the program is being specifically killed by Republicans. And given these kinds of bread and butter issues don’t generate clicks and ad engagement in the attention infotainment economy, many outlets just won’t cover it at all.

Republicans claim their concern is about costs but it’s not, really; you’ll recall the Trump tax cuts doled out $42 billion to AT&T alone in exchange for a bunch of layoffs. These same Republicans routinely throw absurd gobs of money at all sorts of ideological dipshittery and badly managed corporate handouts. The fiscal conservatism is a performance the press is happy to help parrot to the public.

Some ISPs, like Verizon, say they’ll continue to offer discounts to poor people for about six months even after the program ends. At which point poor Americans are just shit out of luck, and their monthly bill will return to its usual expensive state, potentially driving them offline.

The $42.5 billion in infrastructure bill broadband subsidies flowing to the states try to at least nudge big ISPs to offer a cheaper, low-income broadband plan if they take taxpayer money, but they’re lobbying to have those requirements killed.

Ideally you wouldn’t need such requirements or programs like the ACP (that temporarily and artificially lower rates) if we had policymakers with the political courage to take direct aim at the real problem: highly concentrated monopoly power and the corruption and regulatory capture that protects it.

That’s what causes broadband competitive market failure and high prices across much of the U.S., but Congress and the FCC can’t even admit it exists, much less propose a solution that might offend telecom giants closely tethered to our domestic surveillance systems. The ACP was a backup plan to do the bare minimum for the least fortunate; and Congress couldn’t even accomplish that.

When last we checked in with our friends at Roku, they had made the unpopular decision to effectively “brick” user streaming hardware and television sets if users didn’t agree to a typically draconian end user agreement that effectively bans your legal right to sue the company.

Eroding your legal rights using fine print isn’t new; it’s been a U.S. corporate standard since the Supreme Court gave AT&T the green light to do so way back in 2011, and part of Roku’s plans since 2019. Being extra annoying about it was a new wrinkle; but this too isn’t all that uncommon for publicly-traded companies trying to boost growth, revenues, and market share at any cost.

But such behavior has diminishing returns, of course. You can cross a threshold where you’re so focused on boosting revenues that you forget about the end user experience and drive users to the exits through sheer annoyance.

That’s the mode Roku’s clearly in now, as made evident by recent behavior and a new patent the company has filed that would help the company force ads on top of whatever you’re watching on your Roku TV, regardless of whether or not you have a third-party device or game console attached:

“A patent application from the company spotted by Lowpass describes a system for displaying ads over any device connected over HDMI, a list that could include cable boxes, game consoles, DVD or Blu-ray players, PCs, or even other video-streaming devices. Roku filed for the patent in August 2023, and it was published in November 2023, though it hasn’t yet been granted.”

So, in other words, if you attached a third-party streaming competitor’s device to your Roku TV, and the TV detected that you had paused playback, it would insert a static or video ad into the screen. Of course it’s just a patent and doesn’t mean this will be implemented, but it is kind of representative of the broader “smart” TV sector, which cares less and less about product quality as it pursues data monetization.

For years all I’ve ever wanted from TV manufacturers is an extremely “dumb” 4K 65 inch TV that has a whole bunch of HDMI inputs, but no “smart” internals. Since I know the real money is increasingly made from spying on users and monetizing their every fart (while failing to properly secure the collected data), I’ve even been willing to pay extra for simplicity, quality, and privacy.

Yes, I know I can simply not connect my TV to the internet. But that’s not fixing my problem. Even basic HDMI switching and settings are now tethered to clunky, bloated, smart internals and GUIs that take time to load, and get slower as the TV ages. Some manufacturers also block you from basic functions unless you agree to be tracked and monetized. And yes, I could also buy a business-class set, but such options are cost prohibitive and often lack features like HDR.

Instead of having a business segment that tailors to people who simply want a quality, dumb-as-a-box-of-hammers television, the market keeps heading in the other direction (like this TV that shows ads on a second screen, constantly, even when the primary TV is off).

I know why they’re doing it, but I don’t have to like it. And I know that given the tendency of publicly-traded companies to push their luck to please Wall Street’s incessant demand for improved quarterly returns, there eventually comes a point where user annoyance causes a revolt, and the company in question usually stumbles forth anyway, oblivious.

The 2021 infrastructure bill is throwing more than $42 billion at America’s mediocre broadband networks. And while a lot of that money will be put to good use shoring up fiber, a lot of it is being dumped in the laps of regional monopolies with a long, long history of taking subsidies in exchange for broadband networks they repeatedly, mysteriously, leave half completed.

Companies like AT&T, Charter, and Comcast that, thanks to years of anti-competitive behavior and lobbying, enjoy regional monopolies, limited oversight, and all that results (spotty access, high prices, slow speeds, and comically terrible customer service).

So not too surprisingly, there’s some fairly basic requirements affixed on this infrastructure bill money. The feds are preferring that the money be used to help build future-proof fiber networks. Some states (like Washington) are also urging the construction of “open access” networks, which allow numerous ISPs to come in and compete in layers, driving down prices.

To be clear, the NTIA rules affixed to the $42 billion in infrastructure subsidies allow states to ask that in exchange for this massive handout, ISPs make an effort to ensure they’re providing low-income users in those areas some kind of lower-cost option. And telecom giants like AT&T, Comcast, Charter, and Verizon are successfully lobbying states to have those requirements killed.

The feds themselves aren’t engaging in “rate regulation,” though this is how it’s been framed by telecom lobbyists and the politicians who love them. AT&T lobbyists have gone state by state, having success in states like Virginia threatening them to eliminate requirements that ISPs provide lower-cost service for poor people, or they’ll take their ball and go home:

“In Virginia, AT&T warned the state in a legal filing last September that strict pricing requirements “would be contrary to good public policy, lead to litigation and more importantly will discourage provider participation.” The company requested that “any rate regulation language be removed” from Virginia’s blueprint.”

If you’re a regular Techdirt reader, you probably know that AT&T has an extremely long history of taking taxpayer money, subsidies, tax breaks, and other federal favors, then making a sort of farting sound when asked to do much of anything (including actually delivering on a broadband network or new jobs).

That they’re being asked to do some basic things to get taxpayer money shouldn’t be seen as onerous notes Gigi Sohn, the popular telecom sector reformer whose nomination to the FCC, you might recall, was scuttled by a coordinated GOP and telecom industry smear campaign:

“This is a requirement in exchange for a humongous government benefit,” said Gigi Sohn, executive director of the American Association for Public Broadband, which advocates for low-cost options. “The kind of notion that government can require something in exchange for giving out billions of dollars, that’s standard.”

The state requirements aren’t a big deal. And decades of lobbying and dodgy court rulings have left most states without the staff or regulatory firepower to actually enforce requirements anyway, so it’s unlikely that telecoms would have faced any real penalty should they have half-assed it.

But big ISPs are absolutely terrified of even the faintest idea that anybody in government would so much as think about “rate regulation” (or any attempt to stop them from exploiting their regional monopolies to rip off captive customers). Even if, thanks to regulatory capture and widespread U.S. corruption, that hasn’t been a serious threat to their regional fiefdoms any time in the last quarter century.

Most state and federal regulators are so corrupt and captured, they can’t even publicly admit that monopoly power and consolidation has resulted in competitive market failure, much less propose any real solution to it. So what we get instead are these sort of bare minimum half efforts; and even that results in no limit of ceaseless whining by these pampered, widely disliked telecom giants.

Giants who find it trivially easy to throw a few hundred thousand dollars at corrupt state and federal officials to ensure that even the most basic requirements affixed to taxpayer money are rendered inert.

For decades, academics have been trying to warn anybody who’d listen that the death of your local newspaper and the steady consolidation of local TV broadcasters was creating either “news deserts,” or local news that’s mostly just low-calorie puffery and simulacrum. Despite claims that the “internet would fix this,” fixing local journalism just wasn’t profitable enough for the dipsy brunchlords that fail upward into positions of prominence at most media companies, so the internet… didn’t.

Those same academics will then tell you that the end result is an American populace that’s decidedly less informed and more divided, something that not only has a measurable impact on electoral outcomes, but paves the way for more state and local corruption (since fewer journalists are reporting on stuff like local city council meetings or local political decisions). It also opened the door to authoritarianism.

Every six months or so, a news report will emerge showing how all manner of political propagandists and bullshit artists have rushed to fill the vacuum created by longstanding policy failures and our refusal to competently fund local journalism at scale.

Of particular problem has been so-called “pink slime” newspapers, or fake local news papers built by local partisan operatives to seed misinformation and propaganda in the minds of poorly educated and already misinformed local voters.  

Pri Bengani, a senior researcher at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University studied the phenomenon in 2022 and found that there were 1,200 bogus local news outlets around the country, all feeding gullible readers a steady diet of misleading bullshit (on top of the bullshit they already consume online).

And, as expected, the problem is accelerating as we head into another election season. The total of such fake newspapers has tripled since 2019, and now roughly equals the number of real journalism organizations in America. In many instances, these networks are better funded and better organized than real journalism orgs, which find themselves relentlessly under fire by those with wealth and power who’d prefer journalism simulacrum over hard-nosed reporting:

“Kathleen Carley, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said her research suggests that following the 2022 midterms “a lot more money” is being poured into pink slime sites, including advertising on Meta.

“A lot of these sites have had makeovers and look more realistic,” she said. “I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of that moving forward.”

When the “both sides” press covers this pink slime phenomenon, they sometimes try to imply that this kind of stuff is happening perfectly symmetrically among both major parties (as this Financial Times story does). But one NPR report indicates that roughly 95 percent of the fake newspapers they tracked were created to aid Republican candidates.

Angry at the factual reality espoused by academia, science, and journalism, the ever-more-extremist U.S. right wing has engaged in a very successful 45+ year effort to undermine U.S. journalism, academia, and even libraries at every turn, and then replace them with a vast and highly successful propaganda and delusion network across AM radio, broadcast TV, cable TV, and now the internet.

It’s a massive propaganda ecosystem that extends way beyond fake newspapers. It’s a self-contained participatory alternate reality where ideology is king and facts no longer matter. It’s everything academics spent decades warning us about. And, if you somehow hadn’t noticed in the Trump era, it’s working. Just ask your family members who think a NYC real estate conman is pious.

Democrats tend to be feckless and often incoherent when it comes to coherent and forceful counter-messaging to increasingly radical right wing propaganda. They also haven’t understood the severity of the problem, and have generally avoided having any kind of coherent media reform policies. If they respond to the problem, it will likely involve behavior that looks similar.

Meanwhile many in the academic and journalism industries still don’t seem to have the slightest awareness they’re under systemic, existential attack, often blaming the implosion on ambiguous but somehow always unavoidable market realities.

But the evidence is everywhere you look. Journalists are being fired by the thousands; folks with expertise are being replaced by incompetent brunchlords; and the ad-engagement based infotainment economy continues to shift from real reporting to controversy-churning, distraction-engagement bait.

There’s plenty we could do to address the problem. We could adopt stronger education and media criticism standards like Finland to prepare kids for a world full of propaganda. We could staff outlets with competent leadership and find new and creative ways to fund real, independent journalism. We could adopt media policies that rein in mindless consolidation, which tends to steadily erode opinion diversity.

But we do absolutely none of that because it’s simply not profitable enough. And in a country where mindlessly chasing wealth always takes top priority, you ultimately get what you pay for.

For the better part of the last decade, the FCC had been pondering the idea of requiring a sort of “nutrition label” for broadband access. The idea is to make ISPs — which routinely mislead consumers about pricing, speeds, restrictions, usage caps, and everything else — be more transparent with the end user at the point of sale.

After a lot of whining by telecom giants, the FCC finally announced this week that starting today, ISPs must include such a label in marketing materials and their websites clearly disclosing the type of connection consumers are buying. The FCC’s demo label looks like this:

Smaller ISPs, which may find the costs of compliance more annoying than bigger ISPs, have until October to implement them. According to the FCC, these new labels will mandate transparency, something FCC boss Jessica Rosenworcel seems to think will aid competition:

“These ‘nutrition label’ disclosures are designed to make it simpler for consumers to know what they are getting, hold providers to their promises, and benefit from greater competition—which means better service and prices for everyone.”

This is certainly an improvement, and transparency is good.

The problem: most U.S. consumers don’t have a choice of broadband providers because giant telecom monopolies have spent the last forty-five years lobbying government into a state of abject fecklessness and crushing competitors underfoot. The result: limited competition, high prices, spotty access (despite billions in subsidies), slow speeds, and comically terrible customer service.

So the nutrition label can make it clearer to these users that they’re being abused and ripped off, but it doesn’t come anywhere close to stopping them from being abused and ripped off. Especially if the FCC enforcement is inconsistent and its fines are pathetic (which has been a multi-decade problem for this agency).

The Trump FCC was a direct proxy for the interests of telecom giants like Comcast and AT&T. The Biden FCC is notably better, but it’s still relatively feckless when it comes to directly challenging big monopolies directly tethered to our domestic surveillance systems. You’d be hard pressed to find a public statement by the Rosenworcel FCC even acknowledging monopoly and consolidation is a problem.

So what you get is these sort of long overdue half measures and a sort of regulatory theater by political careerists waiting for their next political opportunity or industry think tank gig. A performance that’s sometimes well intentioned, but generally nibbles around the symptoms and the edges, never tackling the real problem.

ISPs wouldn’t be implementing bullshit usage caps, or violating net neutrality, or implementing misleading fees, or consistently abusing consumer privacy, or over-charging for service if we had both competent regulatory oversight and meaningful market competition. In most U.S. markets, we have neither. Very few have both. And I would think, after decades of this, the end result is fairly obvious.

There are numerous things the FCC could do to actually tackle the problem. Chief among them being to admit that concentrated monopoly power is a problem. And to loudly support the massive, bipartisan grass roots movement comprised of city-owned utilities, cooperatives, and municipalities — so pissed by decades of obvious and abject market failure — they’re building their own networks in record numbers.

So yes a transparency label is good in that it requires unchecked telecom monopolies to be clearer about how they’re ripping you off, but it shouldn’t be mistaken for any sort of fix for the actual problem. An actual fix would require political courage, and that’s simply not something this agency is known for.