AT&T Appears Committed To Being Comically Hypocritical On Section 230

Say That Again

from the not-helping dept

Telecom giants like Comcast and AT&T have spent the last three or four years pushing (quite successfully) for massive deregulation of their own monopolies, while pushing for significant new regulation of the Silicon Valley giants, whose ad revenues they’ve coveted for decades. As such, it wasn’t surprising to see AT&T come out with an incredibly dumb blog post last August throwing its full support behind Trump’s legally dubious and hugely problematic executive order targeting social media giants and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law integral to protecting speech online.

In it AT&T, a company that just got done having a ten year long toddler moment about how the FCC’s attempt to apply some fairly modest oversight of telecom giants was “government run amok,” pivots to support having the FCC regulate social media — despite having no authority to actually do so. Again, AT&T isn’t operating in good faith here; the company is simply looking to make life more difficult for Silicon Valley competitors whose ad revenues the telecom giant has always had a weird obsession with. Mike did a an excellent post breaking down the particulars of AT&T’s inconsistent arguments.

Granted, AT&T’s dodgy arguments have been (not at all coincidentally) perfectly mirrored by the painfully inconsistent arguments of FCC Commissioners like Brendan Carr, who spent the entirety of of the Trump administration acting as an AT&T rubber stamp in human form. Not long ago, Carr tried to use AT&T’s bad faith commentary to suggest there was some “growing consensus” that 230 needs to be “reformed” (read: dismantled for no coherent reason):

But there was no consensus. In large part because most sensible people seem to realize the assault on 230 is being driven by a Trumpist GOP whose only real goal is to punish social media platforms for finally taking disinformation and hate speech (cornerstones of the Trump movement) seriously. With Trump’s election loss and a shift in makeup at the FCC, the plan to have Trump BFFs Carr and Simington attack Section 230 at the FCC is dead as a doornail. AT&T, however, continued to offer up its two cents at this week’s AT&T Policy forum, with CEO John Stankey often stumbling into what felt like satire:

Yes that’s AT&T, a company that routinely and repeatedly uses any dirty tactic it can find to disadvantage competitors, giving advice on how to avoid having companies disadvantage competitors. It should be fairly clear that AT&T’s motivations in supporting the attack on Section 230 aren’t being conducted in good faith. Especially after AT&T got caught using astroturf to try and generate bogus “support” for the effort. Again, what AT&T wants is the Congressional focus off of its broadband monopoly, and on competitors whose video ad revenues it wants to elbow in on. By any measure, it’s been a smashing success.

Granted Section 230 wasn’t the only subject tackled in bad faith at AT&T’s latest policy forum. The company, literally the week after it saw nationwide press attention because a 90 year old had to take out an $10,000 Wall Street Journal ad just to get his shitty AT&T DSL line upgraded, also threw out some platitudes about how its broadband ideologies are dedicated to the “social good”:

That’s probably going to be a surprise to the countless marginalized communities that have been complaining for years about how AT&T refuses to upgrade low-income and minority communities (aka “redlining”) to fiber. AT&T’s love of “social good” is also likely a surprise to California regulators, who just this week found the company has a 10 year history of neglecting its infrastructure while increasingly imposing ever skyward monopolistic rates.

There’s a lot of things AT&T could chime in on that it has ample expertise in. How to cozy up to law enforcement and intelligence agencies to dodge anything resembling accountability, for example. Or perhaps how to engage in sleazy astorturfing and the use of fake and dead people to generate bogus support for bad policy. Or perhaps some nice insight on how to crush competition, monopolize a US business sector, then lobby state and federal lawmakers into pretending that’s not happening? Or hey, maybe a panel on how to ghost write shitty, terrible state-level legislation?

But when it comes like stuff like healthy competition, level playing fields, integral laws like 230, or much of anything else, taking policy advice from AT&T is like turning to Jeffrey Dahmer for lessons in dinnertime etiquette.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, john stankey, section 230
Companies: at&t